Meant For Me

The first Postsecret this week says:

I never thought I'd be able to pin it down so precisely.

But I've realized today is the last day of my childhood.

Weekend Rundown

Spent this weekend visiting people and saying goodbye before my move to LA.

Nerd Fest ('09?') was a lot of fun.  Catherine worries far too much about making a good impression and making sure everyone has a good time.  Basically, the evening went really smoothly, and everyone who was in the mood to mesh had a decent time meshing together.  I played poker with a gaggle of straight men (who made me feel beyond nelly), did the vodka thing, talked to people about volunteer work, learned about others, told stories, heard an impassioned rant on healthcare advertising, delivered a misleading tweet, made Catie briefly paranoid about my enjoyment level, gave two back massages, and crashed on a couch two feet shorter than my 6.5 foot frame.  The next day, we had Chick-Fil-A.

Catie sent me to Rome with some Amish Friendship Bread for K'Fain.  This baggie of mush looks like your sending someone a yeast infection.  Apparently it's good though.

(Quick side note:  Apparently iTunes wants me to be sad right now.  We're rocking the Death Cab for Cutie and the Steeltrain.  Kathleen loaded me up with new music to shift the balance of my collection towards a more upbeat/higher bpm music.  Mostly, I'm pleased with her selections.)

Going up to Rome was weird.  I loved getting to just spend chill time with K'Fain and Chris.  I haven't gotten the chance to do that in months...when neither of us had stuff that we were supposed to be doing.  When nothing bad was happening.  When it was just chill.  The stress of school was lifted, and personal crises were being resolved left and right.  Problem solving.

On the Hill, I don't know what to say.  I'll miss Shorter, and I can easily see how I could go back for another year and meld it back into my life.  I fit there.  I could easily go back.  But, it's not a challenge anymore, so I guess that means that I need to move on.  I'm too young to plateau, as comfortable as that would be.

I move to LA in about 30 hours.  I can't sleep.  I feel like I want to throw up.  I'm super excited.  I'm nervous about my safety.  I'm worried about getting robbed.  I'm worried about money.  I'm worried that people will look down on me for my Southern roots and education.  I'm worried that I'll be behind the curve.  I'm worried that it's going to suck before it gets awesome.

But it's a challenge, and I don't back down from a challenge.

The Writing List

Sometimes, I don't really feel inspired to write whatever is in my head.  It doesn't make sense, and because their is no one expecting it, then it's much easier to procrastinate those tasks, even though Denise Austen once told me that "the only person you cheat by procrastination is yourself."  So, I end up writing on commission most of the time.  Truth be told, I enjoy it a lot better because it usually makes me focus on something that I didn't know.  But, when I decide to write a lot of short articles on commission in one day, the subjects get a little crazy.  Here's a list of my topics from today:

-Michelle Obama's short shorts
-Paypal's pricing policy
-Parking lot stripes
-Female hair loss
-Air Force Cyber Command
-Motion comics
-Flickr and the iPhone
-Andalusian Stitch
-Anal Probes

See, the joke about that list is that it isn't a joke.  So, now for a day when I barely left the house, I actually became a lot better informed about the world and what's going on.  Sure, some of its stupid and I'll never use again (Cyber Command is in San Antonio; the Andalusian Stitch is knit and purl alternating rows).  Other knowledge, though...well, at least I can bring it up in conversation if things go south.  Because who doesn't love a good chat about anal probes?  What if I meet those Shop Erotica women in LA?  I want to be on their conversational level.  So, thank you random writing assignments for that chance.

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By the way, this might be tomorrow's blog post, but a march means nothing if you don't have a purpose.  Dissatisfaction isn't enough.  What is your goal?  Here's a hint for those working on the essay question:  for full credit, answers are more tangible than "change" or "hope."

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In other news, nothing else is really going on.  I'm worrying about my friends a lot today as they go back to school, finish up the quarter, or embark upon their real lives for the first time that they don't have to go back to school.  I move in seven days.  Bizarre. Absolutely bizarre.

Quick Update

I'm moving to Los Angeles on August 26^th. I know that I've said this before, but it still doesn't feel real. I have no concept of what my life is going to be like once I make it out there. But, hopefully it will be fantastic. There's no sense in worrying about the things that I can't affect change in. It's amazing how Zen things feel a lot like emotional laziness.

A few quick things:

-There is no healthcare reform without a public option. Anyone who says otherwise isn't looking at the Census Bureau statistics.

-One of the only reasons I keep my Netflix is so that I can rewatch Margaret Cho comedy specials all the time.

-I have written over 120 short freelance articles in the last month.

-I am traveling to Rome on Saturday to see people. I can't f'ing wait.

More To It Than That

I was asked the question about nine months ago. It's not the first time that I've ever been asked it, but for some reason, that time, it stuck with me. Maybe its because there was no malice in the question that time. Someone was just genuinely curious. I had the answer, but nothing more. No reasons. No examples. Nothing to back up what I knew instinctively was true.

The question is: “Is there more to being gay than sleeping with other dudes?”

And I instinctively knew that the answer was “yes.” I knew that there was more to being gay than the literal definition. I felt that there was something else to be said, but I didn't know what it was. But then, it finally hit me.

In an ideal world, there's nothing more to being gay than your sexual preference. In a vacuum, there's nothing else to it. When there is no stigma attached to a label, then you don't make a culture out of it. There's no glasses culture. There is no Methodist culture. There is no red-head culture. Because these things don't exclude people from the normal at-large society that we all belong to.

But, at any time, someone could say “You don't belong here” as has so long been said in the subtext of American society. And so what literally means “sleeping with the same gender” suddenly comes to mean so much more. So, yes, there is a lot more to being gay. Because we've had to fight for a long time to be who we are.

For the longest time, I used to say that I didn't ever want to be a banner-waving queen. I took it as a badge of honor that I didn't read “queer.” And then, I ran across a quote from someone (can't remember right now who said it), and it said “Whenever you rail against those that are too 'feminine' and 'swishy,' think about where we would all be without them.” Where would we be?

Fucking nowhere, that's where.

Once upon a time, a brave man dared us to push ourselves. He dared us to come out, because the community would stand with us. And we did. We came out so much that a bad coming out story is becoming less and less common. We're coming out at such a rate that a 15 year old can come out in small town south Georgia and not have a word said to him. Sure, it was the talk of the school and church for a few months, but people (well, most people) got past it. And as we came out, we got to have a good look at ourselves and we realized something: We were not the same as everyone else. But then, we encountered a problem: We are not all the same.

We run the gamut from gym bunnies to politiqueers, from DILFs to gerds. Every aspect of society can be found in the queer community. There's nothing to unify us. There's nothing that ostensibly binds us together. After all, just because you share a common trait doesn't mean that you have to have the same agenda or even similar characteristics.

But through it all, gay culture has come into its own. There are some things that bind us together as a gay culture. First off, we all have a coming out story. At some point, we all had to tell the world that we weren't quite so heteronormative. I don't know if its universal, but I love hearing people's coming out stories. I love reading strangers' stories. I love watching it in movies. I think it becomes such a common motif within gay culture for two reasons. First, its something that we all have a common, so easily becomes common ground among an incredibly diverse group of people. Second, this is one of the hardest things that many people ever have to do. Thus, it obviously has an effect on people. And hard stories are interesting stories.

Another thing that binds the gay community together is the stigma that comes with being gay. I don't care if you've never had a negative personal experience, the illwill generated by those opposed to the homosexual community is palpable to us all. For every person that is totally fine with us, there are more that give lip services and vote against us, rejecting hate crimes legislation, marriage equality, and equal rights for military service. For every person that is not us but that stands with us, there are those people who choose any place that cameras show up to protest our very existence.

This hatred of us isn't rejected to any religion, creed, race, or class of people. There reasons are varied, but their goal is not: the eradication of the homosexual community. And yet these same people have the audacity to ask us why we reject their culture. Why we make our own. Why it becomes so dreadfully important for us to have an identity all our own. If these people want nothing to do with us, then we want nothing to do with them. And as such, we must create a culture and a life that allows us to live without them.

For some unknown reason (call it the collective unconscious), gays have gravitated towards certain people. We fall in love with stage divas. We love Margaret Cho and Kathy Griffin. We will be there for every Cher come back tour. We unabashedly own copies of Spice World. And for all of our trashiness, we also as a culture support the arts. We feature a huge number of writers and artists in all mediums. We love a good wine tasting (and a good vodka tasting...and a good rum tasting). But none of these single things bind us together because they aren't complete characteristics, so we start to squabble. Is it okay to be effeminate? What's the best way to look? What's the place of bears in all of this? Is there a place for the stupid? The intelligent? The blue-collar? As a culture, how do we all fit together and how do we make a stand? Shit, if we can't even agree about what rights we want, then how the hell are we ever going to make any headway?

I don't have the answers. But every time that I think that I can make rules for the world, I have to take a step back and realize what an idiot I'm being. We're all obviously not going to agree. Our diversity makes us stronger as a culture. And we're allowed to have disagreements. But, sometimes we have to look at the bigger picture.

A friend of mine recently made the point that we have a history that includes some incredibly illustrious individuals and that so many of our people have no idea about their history. It blows my mind that I have gay friends who didn't know the story of Harvey Milk until the Gus Van Sant film. It worries me that they don't know about Stonewall. It worries me that they don't realize how tenuous the rights struggle has been in this country or how capricious the courts of the US have been in granting our rights. It worries me that they don't know me and it angers me that they don't care.

If we as a culture decide that we would rather be left alone than confront things that make us uncomfortable, if we decide that it's simpler to live our lives in our tiny worlds rather than exploding out and demanding our rightful place, then we fail. We allow all of the ignorant assholes to believe what they want and we damn another generation to the hell of growing up gay.

Yeah, it's hard to fight. You're not going to convince them with your fists or your knives. No bombshell or hail of legislation will swing public opinion, though these things are not entirely to be discounted. A few more celebrities coming out is going to change society. No, the force of change is you and me. Its in our faces. Its in our lives. Our smiles. Our culture. Our history. That is where our strength comes from, because many people have stood up in the past and said, “I'm not going to fucking take this anymore.”

So, if you're completely happy with the state of the American homosexual, I commend you. But I'm not. Sure, we've come along way. We made it to the top of a hill. Now, though, I can see the road ahead for the next little bit. And its important that we keep walking.

Until I was 15, the most important thing that I had ever done was to come out of the closet. I have a feeling, though, that that's where many of us stop. We just barely make it out of the closet. Instead of just creeping out, though, we should set fire to the door so that we can never go back. And don't stop walking when you hit the bedroom. Go out of the door and into the streets. Confront the world with who you are. Don't take their shit. Don't make them force you back into your house. Stand and march. Where once it was said that we would stand with you, I hope we enter a new generation. I hope now that we march together, literally and figuratively, until we get to wherever it was decide we want to go. Together. All of us.

I didn't start this to be a rant at the gay community. And you are more than welcome to disagree. But that brings me back to my larger point: so long as their stigma attached to homosexuality, than American culture forces us to adopt our own culture.

This is the birth of any sort of group counterculture. If you willfully exclude someone from being a full member of your society, you beg them to create a counterculture to subvert yours. The disparity of racial culture in the United States is one major example of this. “Why can't they be normal?” I ask you, why can't you be more accepting?

Acceptance is uncomfortable. Acceptance means that you take all of us. No exceptions. You don't get a chance to say you don't like bull-dykes or swishy queens. You don't get a chance to say that bear culture freaks you out. You take people as they are. That's acceptance. Only then will we become part of your culture. Part of your world. Once upon a time, tolerance was simply enough. But I reject that defeatist philosophy. We're here. It's your move. Until then, though, there's going to be a lot more to being gay than just being gay.

"Normal" Gay?

My friend, Jason Styres, recently posted a note on Facebook with a quote from Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart. This play was one of the first dramatizations of the AIDS crisis and the effect it was having on the LGBT community. One of the characters makes a speech about the importance of the queer community uniting as a community that has to claim its right to exist because we have a history made up of people who were not invisible.

It makes me question all of the times in my life that I've ever said that I didn't want to be a "banner waving queen." All the times that I've ever looked down my nose at someone I thought was too swishy. Doesn't make me feel too great. I don't know if this is an internalized bit of homophobia or whatever...that doesn't actually matter. I don't actually dislike these people, but for some reason, I don't want to be identified with them. Which is stupid, because I readily would jump to their...our...defense were it ever needed. But, they are people who are different from me. And I don't know how to interact with the community as a whole.

I have a hard time getting worked up about the injustices being done to the LGBT community. And I think that the reason is because nothing audacious has happened that directly effects me. I'm just barely an adult...I'll turn 21 in three weeks. And in my life, nothing bad has ever happened to me as a gay man. Sure, I came out in south Georgia in conservative surroundings, but I pulled a wild card in how well it turned out. I was never accosted in high school. I was called a fag three times in college. That's it. That's everything bad that's ever happened to me. And so I don't know how to relate to a world that seems dangerous, reactionary, and unfair when I read about it but not when I live it.

I have no plans to get married anytime in the discernible future (for that, you'd have to date...), so gay marriage isn't an imminent concern. I've never been the victim of harassment or a hate crime, so the Matthew Sheppard Bill doesn't effect my gut.

It's a little known fact about me, but I briefly planned on going into the military in 2005 once I graduated from college and serving a basic stint before moving on with my life. It's just something that I privately thought was important--I think that it's every person's responsibility to serve their country and their neighbors if there is a need that you can fulfill. But, with Don't Ask, Don't Tell, fulfilling this goal wasn't worth nailing back up the door that I'd already kicked in. So, I joined AmeriCorps instead, beating a sword into a plowshare.

I intellectually understand that these are the issues facing my community, but I don't know what I can do. It feels like nothing. And if there's nothing I can do, then it feels like fate. And I'm no Lachesis.

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When I went to college, I went to find myself. And every summer from 2006 to 2008 I considered my summer in the Booley House, referring to my favorite book, Leon Uris's Trinity. In this section of the novel, the two main characters spend the summer tending herds in a booley house. While there, they learn who they are and how to be men.

I feel like I've become more who I am than I ever have been. At the same time, though, I don't know how I feel about so much of the world. Years ago, opinions were simple. But I've been dragged to see the middle ground and to occasionally walk that path. I've been forced to concede that the lines are moveable and that black and white are just extreme shades of gray. Maybe one day I'll be set in my ways...right now, that feels like the opposite of my constant confusion.

Consternation and the Flu

Okay, first off I want to say that right now, at the beginning of August in anno domini 2009, I have the flu.  My head is all congested, I could barely speak yesterday, and I feel weak.  I can't focus long enough to read a single page of a book, leaving me to "rest" by mindlessly staring at the TV.

Anyway, I don't want to talk about being sick.  I'm not interesting enough sick to turn it into an article (no Tay-Sachs, no glittery skin...).

For those of you who don't know, I started writing for the online market on a freelance basis.  Doesn't allow me to get all of my sarcastic kinks out, but that's where I've been for the last month...trust me, I've turned out about 30,000 words in the past months an articles for hire.  I'm making okay money doing it, and I have reviewed almost every mobile phone known to man...and if I haven't done it yet, I'm sure it's on my "to write" list.

But something is bothering me:  am I really as bad as all of these people?  Now that I've joined some websites that easily host writing, I take some time to give back to the community and read some of the writing posted.  And it makes me crazy.  Articles usually are only about 400 words and they express none of the detail or style that makes me want to read.  This enabling of the entire populace with a keyboard makes me want to pull my eyelashes out.  Articles about scamming hypnotist fathers should at least pique my interest, but alas, all is for naught.  And then, I did something stupid.

I searched Twilight.

Here's my opinion:  Stephanie Meyer did a good job of writing for her audience.  I thought Twilight (the first book, not the series) was long and boring with too little action to justify its page length.  I think Bella is a character too intensely flawed to be likable while Edward is too perfect to be attracted to Bella.  I can't even remember what happened in the third book.  I liked Jacob, but then, in Breaking Dawn, he imprinted on a child, giving his relationship a pederastical quality that I wasn't quite a fan of.  That, mixed with vampire baby, vampire sex, and the great foreplay-but-no-intercourse that is the "battle" sequence at the end of the novel make the series fall apart.

Do I understand why people like it?  Sure, it gives you an escape from reality.  I just happen to find real people, who have both flaws and redeeming characteristics more palatable.  Plus, the movie's acting and color scheme made me wretch.

But, there are tons of articles, blog posts, and whatnot detailing every minutiae of this series.  If you don't have anything new to say, put up and shut up.  And if what you have to say is bizarre, then say it well.  If you're going to make an argument for whether Wicked or Twilight is going to send you to hell faster, than I insist it have paragraph breaks.

If you're going to scream about a novel, then at least italicize the title.

If you're going to suggest a summer reading list, then I insist no more than half the list be made up of classics, books that have recently become movies, or popular series that have already been read.  Make your suggestions mean something.

Give me some detail that I didn't know before.  Force me to consider things from a new perspective.  Otherwise, shut the hell up.

And if you catch me not following my own advice, let me know, and I'll fix it.

(By the way, for those of you looking for a great article about Twilight and what it's doing to relationship expectations, check out this piece that recently was placed in Slate)