As we noted last week, Pat Boone has recently taken to trying to explain the dangers of the gay menace by comparing those activists who have been protesting the passage of Prop 8 in California to the terrorists who carried out the attacks of September 11th, as well as those responsible for the recent attack in Mumbai that killed nearly 200 people.
Today Boone is back in the pages of WorldNetDaily to defend himself and to clarify his views, proclaiming that he couldn’t be anti-gay because, you guessed it, some of his friends are gay:
I need to say right here, honestly and unashamedly – I love gays. I always have, always will. I have proved it, over and over.
I met my first homosexual friend while I was in high school. He was a Navy veteran who had come back to finish his schooling. He put his hand on my thigh while we were parked at a fast food drive in. I was a cow milker with a vise-like grip, and after I nearly squeezed his wrist off, letting him know he had the wrong guy, he said, "I guess you'll tell everybody, and I'll get kicked out of school." I assured him I wouldn't, and I told nobody. I really felt empathy for him, because he obviously was not a happy man.
I've been in the entertainment business for over 50 years now, and I've had many dear and close friends, guys (and some gals) I have loved who were practicing homosexuals. How could I not? We forged real friendships, never strained or awkward. We each knew the other's perspectives and respected them. Every one of them can tell you that I've never condemned or made them uncomfortable, in my home or theirs, though they knew I couldn't approve their sexual practices. So what? We were friends, and we could be honest with each other.
Of course, it turns out that the gays Boone seems to have befriended seem to be mostly of the “ex-gay” sort:
Later (you may be surprised to learn), I really went out on a limb and wrote two books, about and with homosexual friends. The first was "Joy: A Homosexual's Fulfillment," and the second "Coming Out: True Stories of the Gay Exodus." They were written with a longtime lesbian, a former very promiscuous male homosexual and with a transsexual man who had emasculated himself in an effort to be a woman. They'd been down the whole road and back again, and they told me their stories and how they'd each been able to leave the homosexual lifestyle. This was not expedient for me as an entertainer, but I did it out of real love for gays. I do care.
Plus, he was also close to Rock Hudson, thus proving once and for all that, while he may regularly compare them to terrorists, allegations that Boone is homophobic are “ridiculous” because, as he declares, “I love my homosexual friends.”
