Kate Hunt

I'm having my ouzaki at an outdoor cafe on Aristotle Street. It's early evening and Thessaloniki is brimming over with life. I watch a continuous parade of people, most of them young men and girls, going about their business. I enjoy watching people going by and imagining their lives. A long time ago, in 1978, I published a short story called Centre Ville. Centre Ville is the pub in the centre of Dordrecht above which my maternal grandfather was born. It's about watching people going by and imagining their lives, it's about enjoying the beauty of young and graceful girls, it's about the melancholy that touches you when you see elderly people plodding on. It's about what you can't imagine to happen to you when you are gradually ageing yourself, though you will never admit you're anything older than twenty three. I was twenty seven when I wrote that story, beginning to feel old. At thirty I thought life was more or less over, until just before turning thirty six I met Stella which meant the beginning of the best part of my life. People in their sixties were still unimaginably old then, but years later, when Stella died of cancer at sixty one, I found that much and much too young. Time puts things in perspective. The younger you are, the heavier you feel the pressure of time.

I think of Kate Hunt, a girl in Florida that faces prison and who is in danger of having her whole life ruined for the crime of falling in love with another girl. A girl three years younger. Kate eighteen, her love fifteen. What on God's earth is wrong with two teens falling in love with each other, never mind whether they are of the same or different sex? What on God's earth can be wrong with an eighteen year old loving a fifteen year old and vice versa. It's all consensual I read about the case, but the parents of the fifteen year old have filed charges for sexual abuse and the raving idiots that run the high school Kate visited have even expelled her just before the final exams. It must be a frightful experience to fall in love in Florida and particularly when your love has such bigoted and vindictive parents. People ready for a good witch burning. The friend from whom I learned about Kate Hunt wrote on Facebook that the arrest was outrageous and indeed it is. Which law enforcement officer in his or her right mind could have Kate arrested for just following her heart? It is not as if a thirty year old starts an affair with a twelve year old, is it? The life of a young girl is purposely being destroyed because some parents hate gays. That is a most serious crime.

I think of the days in which I wrote Centre Ville. I was in a happy relationship with a girl of seventeen at the time. The first girl I had a serious relationship with was fifteen while I had just turned nineteen. Those were happy summer days on the Wirral, but we weren't gay and that was England, not the USA, home of that Lord who punishes down to the seventh generation, where carrying a gun on the streets is more acceptable than carrying a six-pack of beer, the blessed country that spreads more pornography on the internet than any other. I do hope they come to their senses in Florida. No more witch burnings!