"Jim the Musician" and "Mentor" reported recently on the Matureman2 E-mail List about current progress in Canada and California toward eliminating legislative bias against the homosexual population.

Jim wrote that a Canadian government bill granting survivor benefits to gay and lesbian partners of federal employees passed easily. Mentor noted that the California State Senate has passed a bill to grant same-sex partner benefits and that the State Assembly is expected to pass a similar bill which the Governor will probably sign.

These are steps are in keeping with an article by Deb Price, a same-sex-partnered syndicated columnist for GNS Features who specializes in reportage on gay and lesbian matters. The column is headlined, "There Are Good Signs That Anti-Gay Discrimination Laws Are On The Way Out."

Price tells us that the female governor of New Hampshire has signed legislation overturning the state's 1987 ban on gay foster and adoptive parents. It was passed on the first try. Every member of the legislature's Republican leadership supported the repeal. The same legislature has passed a hate-crimes law against anti-gay violence, a law protecting gay people from bias in employment, housing and public accommodations, and has even appointed a panel to study a plan to help negotiate break-ups between same-sex couples.

Price posits that the "repeal effort's success shows that we must not become resigned to the existence of anti-gay laws. All of them can and will be erased" and reminds us also that Florida is now the only state which outlaws gay adoptions.

Price has also written of late about the recent increase in efforts to counsel gay youth in a society which "mindlessly perpetuates the myth that all young people are heterosexual."

She contrasts the "heterosexual classmates of gay youth" who "steadily learn to express their feelings and to share personal information as their sexuality develops. They build relationships and communication skills as they talk about their latest crush or tell a pal what happened on a date.

Gay youths, meanwhile, may teach themselves to hide, to lie and deceive or to repress their feelings -- survival tactics that often do lasting damage."

In the paragraph above, Price strikes a chord which resounds louder in the Silverfoxes Syndrome than in the standard gay or bisexual world. Intergenerational love among men such as ourselves lies in the substratum of gay culture and leads far too many of us to develop "survival tactics" among those who may be gay like us, but who travel the one-way street of younger-for-younger and ridicule, despise or otherwise condemn our orientation.

Each of us, young or old, involved in a figurative dad-and-son or other intergenerational relationship should take it upon himself to consciously overcome any schooled repression of feelings or other "survival tactic" nurtured in us by a hostile and misunderstanding society.

This comprises an important step in keeping our relationship on track toward the goal not only of staying together, but also of making it an investment of mutual benefit while the relationship matures and changes along the way which -- as decreed by human nature -- it most certainly will.

The return on that investment is love.

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