What am I?

I've gotten a whole bunch of emails lately that read like the following (with various combinations of gender/orientation/activity):

"Hi Holly, 

I'm a man who considers himself straight, but sometimes I imagine being tied up and sucking other men's dicks.  I don't want to date them or have sex with them; I just want to get tied up and suck dick and that's all.  Does this make me gay? Does it make me bi?  Does it make me kinky? Does it make me submissive?

Help me, Holly: what am I?"

So I'm going to answer these questions in one fell swoop here:
You are what you are.

You're a straight man who fantasizes about being tied up and sucking men's dicks.  What else is there to say?  What would a label add, what would it clarify?  Whether you'd like this in reality or leave it in the realm of fantasy, or whether you'd like to do other things with men or with BDSM, can't be answered with a label.

I'm not just telling you that I can't extrapolate from a letter.  (Although, seriously, I can't.)  I'm telling you that most likely you can't extrapolate.  Sexuality isn't symptoms that give you clues to your syndrome; sexuality is the symptoms.

I don't think words like "straight" and "gay" and such are completely useless.  But they're only descriptions.  If you're a man and everyone you've felt attracted to has been female, eh, you might as well call yourself "straight"?  But that doesn't "make" you straight.  It doesn't tell you anything about which women you'll be attracted to, or give you a guarantee you'll never be attracted to any men, and it sure as hell doesn't mean that you "should" be attracted to women.

The people who write me these letters seem very aware of what their fantasies, desires, and actions actually are--much more acutely aware, it seems, than most people who simply have a label.  Frankly, I'd hate to see them trade in this awareness for "I'm a kinky bi man."

---

I don't mean to just give this as advice from on high; it's something I'm wrestling with myself right now.  I've been trying very hard lately to hold the lines of:

-I play because I want to, and this makes me kinky; I don't make myself play because "I'm supposed to be kinky, better live up to it."

-I play with people besides Rowdy sometimes, and this makes me non-monogamous; I don't make myself play with other people because "what kind of crappy non-monogamist am I if I don't fuck this dude?"

Both of these have been struggles. Once you establish the persona as this kinky poly super sexy sex person, it's hard as hell to violate that and say "you know what, I'm just not feelin' it."  The pressure to live up to your labels is both internal and external.  There are times when I really want to relabel myself "kinkyfluid" and "polyfluid" or something, just to emphasize that these are things I do sometimes in some ways; they're not things I've made some sort of commitment to doing.

Fixing the label isn't the real solution, though.  The real solution is to fix the expectation that the label can ever speak for me.



I'm a person who sometimes likes some kinds of kinky play (list available on request) and sometimes likes to play with certain people who aren't my boyfriend (now accepting applications).  That's what I am, and trying to figure out what that "makes me" isn't a recipe for happiness; it's a tragic oversimplification.

How a sex blog becomes a sexual justice blog.

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Internalization.

This weekend, I walked in the Boston Dyke March as an ally. It was a wonderful, powerful atmosphere. And one, literally, of pride; of thousands of people being able to go out and say "no, I'm not ashamed to be a lesbian, and why the hell should I be?" Women held hands and kissed in public, because people are allowed to hold hands and kiss in public.

I had no trouble supporting this in public, because I feel like it's a totally legitimate and worthy cause; there's no doubt in my mind that women who have relationships with other women are doing something that's Okay, that's Allowed, and I wish the world at large would acknowledge this.

But when it comes to my own relationship--to polyamory, specifically--I am ashamed. I'm fine talking about it on the Internet or in Kinkland, but when it comes to real life and hostile places, to family and coworkers and society at large, I can't say "I'm here, I'm dating a dude who's dating another chick but it's not like cheating it's actually cool with everyone, get over it." Except for my parents and one coworker I trust, I'm closeted. And when I have come out to people who weren't "cool," I wasn't a warrior. I was embarrassed, even apologetic. Explaining my relationship to, for example, my doctor didn't make me feel like I was spreading awareness. It made me feel like I was disclosing a secret disgusting perversion, a naughty peccadillo, a dirty and decadent habit.

The problem is that on some level, I don't feel like my own relationship is Okay and Allowed. I feel as if it's a thing we're getting away with, not a thing we damn well should get away with. Some part of me has internalized the belief that polyamory is a shameful sexual habit, rather than a completely legitimate relationship style. Or I feel like it's not important, not a Real Big Deal, not worth getting all mouthy about, even though it actually has a huge impact on my life.

I don't want to draw too much of an equivalence with the Dyke March, because I can be happy in a monogamous relationship, and many of the people at the Dyke March couldn't be happy in a heterosexual one. And poly people may be underground but we don't face violence and discrimination on anywhere near the level gay people do. Nonetheless, I do think that the model of going from shame to pride, of changing people's perspective from "that's a perversion" to "that's a relationship" could be a valuable one for polyamory. And not just for outsiders. For poly people ourselves.

I hope someday polyamory can come more into the light, that it will become understood as a legitimate lifestyle, just another way for people to love each other. I suspect the poly community couldn't field as many people as a the gay one, but I hope someday those people who are with us won't be afraid or ashamed to admit it. I hope someday I can say "my boyfriend's other girlfriend" outside kink circles and not only will other people be comfortable with it, I'll be comfortable with it.

From this month's "Glamour."

I don't buy Glamour, okay? I buy Cosmo and that's bad enough. But whoever sits at my desk on the day shift always leaves copies of Glamour and Weight Watchers Magazine. (The Weight Watchers stuff is also really scary in its relentless push of "don't eat better, eat less!" There's no "have a salad, because it's nutritious and delicious"--it's all about "have a salad, because otherwise you're going to stuff yourself with bacon-wrapped twinkies like we know you really want to do." Diet tips based on the doctrine of Total Depravity. Yum.)

Anyway, this jumped out at me:

Q: My boyfriend confessed he's experimented sexually with guys. Could he be gay?
A: Make sure you're having safe sex. [...]

Ouch.

While good general advice for anyone who isn't in a "definitely exclusive since last STI test" relationship, I don't think it was meant that way. There's a reason it was this and not "and remember to always wear a seatbelt!" And there's a reason that women who write in about "my boyfriend slept with another woman" usually don't get this advice, at least not as a first line. (Note that the letter writer doesn't say this experimentation took place during their relationship, and now consider the likelihood that any woman saying "my boyfriend slept with another woman, at some point in his life" would get this advice.)

It is, in a strange way, the same reasoning as the Weight Watchers tips. It's the reasoning "if you can't call it immoral, call it unhealthy." If you can't say sex between men is bad or wrong, say it's dangerous.

"I don't disapprove, I'm just concerned" is friendlier than "I hate gay people and oh God I don't even know why," but I'm pretty sure it means the exact same thing.



I had a horrible anti-gay anti-sex roommate in college who told me that "there have been 36 new STDs since all this started." Leaving aside that "all this," whatever you might mean by that, has been going on for quite a few thousand years... that's a hell of a thing to come from someone who didn't believe in evolution.

You all get screwed equally!

Insurance company rep: "We recognize gay marriage in this state, so male or female, doesn't matter, your spouse is covered. Because of this, we don't cover unmarried domestic partners of any kind. Male or female."

Even though they end up insuring far fewer people in the end, I still can't help but feel a little heartwarmed.



(The question of polyamorous marriage kinda runs into a hitch here. Asking an insurance company to cover my husband or wife shouldn't matter to them [actually, women have higher healthcare costs, but as long as the overall population is still 50-50 it doesn't matter who's paired with whom], but asking them to cover my husband and wife would be a different thing. Maybe they'd just have to say "okay, but we're gonna charge you for it" and come up with a new "Family Plus" rate category.)

How to discuss gay rights like a reasonable adult.

Argument from Personal Responsibility
"If you choose to act in a certain way, you have to accept the consequences. For example, if you go walking and a bunch of thugs beat you up and steal your wallet, that's just the natural consequence of you going walking, so stop whining."

Argument from Lack Of Variety In My Entertainment
"Why do the gays have to keep bringing this up all the time?"

Argument from We Gave You The Vote And Everything
"Gay people are allowed out in public and we don't even lynch them that much anymore, and now they want more?"

Argument from Anal Sex
"I'm sorry, but I refuse to tolerate a group of people who get their kicks by grasping each other in a harsh, brutal kiss that turns suddenly tender, falling together into bed with their hands stroking all over each other's muscular, sweat-glistened bodies and working their way slowly, teasingly to each other's cocks, caressing each other to a state of delicious anticipation before one of these disgusting perverts gently slides first his lubricated fingers and then his huge rock-hard beautiful cock into the soft warm anus of the other."

Argument from Children Starving In India, New Millenium Edition
"Why are we even arguing about this when our economy is in the state it's in?"

Argument from Gays Starving In India
"Why are you worrying about some poorly chosen words when gay people still get beaten in other places?"

Argument from Blind Faith
"The number one, most important tenet of Christianity is to hate gay people. It's the entire foundation of my faith. Look at the first page of the Bible: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, and don't be a faggot."

Argument from Blind Smugness
"Look at these stupid christians (yes I spelled that lower-case, take note) who don't know that their entire religion is a scam lie for idiots and that Richard Dawkins has the real truth about your magical sky wizard. Try reading the Origin of Species morons!"

Argument from I Confused Myself With Wikipedia
"I don't want to pass judgement on anyone, so it's important that we keep a neutral point of view and respect everyone's opinion equally. You want to ostracize and persecute gay people, and he doesn't, and I think you both have valid points on this complex issue."

Argument from I Confused Myself With The United States Congress
"I don't think it's right to tell other people what to believe, so if someone believes that homosexuals should all be sent to re-education camps in Siberia, that's their First Amendment right."

Argument from I Won't Tolerate Your Intolerance Of My Intolerance
"For a bunch of people arguing for tolerance, you sure aren't very tolerant of my opinion that homosexuals are pervert scum."

Argument from Can I Interest You In Our Line Of Deluxe Closets
"Look, I don't care what someone does in their bedroom, but why do they have to go around announcing it to the world? My wife totally agrees with my opinion here, as do my mom and dad."

Argument from La La La Can't Hear You
"It doesn't matter what you say, this is just what I believe."

Argument from La La La Nobody Can Hear Anybody
"Well, that's just your opinion. Everyone has their own opinion."

Argument from I Walked To School In The Snow
"These whiners need to realize that life is tough for everyone. I got bullied in school too! Just man up and deal!"

Argument from Hate The Sin, Condescend To The Sinner
"I have nothing but love and respect for homosexual people, but I cannot approve of homosexual behavior."

Argument from The Children
"It's one thing if people want to be homosexuals, but I draw the line at exposing children to that kind of thing."

Argument from My Right To Be A Jerk Is Really Really Important
"We've had enough of this 'political correctness.' It's just one '-American' after another. First they told me to stop using racial slurs and now they're taking away my homophobic slurs? WHERE DOES IT END?"

Argument from It's Hard To Be White, Middle-Class, and Male, Yo
"The real victims here are the straight white male Christians that everyone demonizes and discriminates against!"

Argument from You're Already Allowed To Marry A Woman
"Why should gays get all these special privileges that normal people don't, like being allowed to marry and being allowed to serve in the military?"

Argument from Look Mom I'm Using Naughty Words
"Who gives a shit about some fucking faggot shitpackers and ugly bulldykes?"

Argument from What If We Gave Everyone Rights, What Then
"Next thing you know they'll be allowing polygamy because they are all 'consenting adults' too, right?"

Argument from Guh?
"Being gay is a choice, therefore it's wrong."

Argument from I'm So Fucking Funny
"Be careful not to drop the soap, or there'll be a whole Pride Parade swishing their limp wrists at you and calling you 'thexy!' "

Argument from Discrimination Justifies Discrimination
"If being gay is so great, why is it illegal for them to get married? You know homosexuality is harmful from how many gay youth are depressed or suicidal!"

Argument from Opposite Day
"If these heterophobes get their way, normal heterosexual marriage will be illegal and we'll all have to participate in their debauched lifestyle!"

Argument from Undertrained Gag Reflex
"I just don't want their deviant lifestyle shoved down my throat!"



Did I miss any?

The sad thing is I probably did.

Slactivism.

I'm wearing a purple ribbon today. (I didn't own any purple clothing.) I'm wearing it for Tyler Clementi, Asher Brown, Seth Walsh, Justin Aaberg, Raymond Chase, Billy Lucas, Cody J. Barker, for kids who didn't make the news but suffered just as much. I'm wearing it because I pass for straight and could get away with silence but I don't want to. I'm wearing it because It Gets Better, but there's no excuse for it being so bad in the first place. I'm wearing it because JESUS FUCKING CHRIST PEOPLE, IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LOVING A MAN AND LOVING A WOMAN WORTH FUCKING HOUNDING SOMEONE TO DEATH OVER SERIOUSLY WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?

I'm wearing it because I'm pissed off and a little scared. After a few small steps toward equality, it seems like "Gay people: are we just going to let them get away with that?" articles and debates are becoming more prevalent in the media than they were last election cycle.

I'm also wearing it because the degree of cost, effort, and risk rounds down to just about zero. "Hooray," queer and gender-nonconformist youth around the world will exclaim, "some doofus put on a ribbon."

But so often the flip side of slactivism isn't activism but helplessness. I'm wearing a ribbon; I'm doing something. I'm reminding myself to donate to pro-equality causes. I'm reminding myself that tolerating and participating in casual homophobia and "that's so gay" and "I've got this ribbon but I want you all to know that I'm normal" are actions with consequences. I'm reminding myself that thinking good thoughts isn't much use unless you do something.

More than anything, I'm wearing a ribbon today because thousands of other people are wearing ribbons today, and every one of us is on the same side. One person with a ribbon is a slacktivist; thousands are a protest.

Umfriend.

Dear nurse:

The gentleman sitting with our patient, holding his hand and comforting him for hours in the middle of the night as he goes through a frightening and disabling illness, is not his "um, friend." He is his husband. Are you twelve years old, or what?

Next time we have a heterosexual couple in I'm going to smirk and blush and giggle and refer to them as "um, friends." Because I know we have policies to be polite about that sort of thing, but that kind of person puts penises in vaginas, and here they are just flaunting that.

The Invisible Person.

Happy National Coming Out Day! I'm poly, bisexual, and kinky. You already knew that. My roommate, coworkers, and family still don't. Mostly because I feel like that if I told them, all they'd hear is "I'm a filthy horny freak and for some reason I'm sharing that, ewww." Which, well, it's partly true? And partly not.

In New York, we met up with a couple of Rowdy's family members. Sprite and I were his "friends," and while I appreciate that he didn't snub one of us by introducing us as "my girlfriend and my friend," it was rather awkward. (Moreso when they asked us where we were going afterwards, and because the real answer was "a fetish club," we panicked and lied and then they went "oh, we're going that way, wonderful, we'll walk together!" and our attempts to politely extricate ourselves reached teen-sex-comedy levels of awkwardness.)

It made me reflect on one of the real reasons it's important that people be able to come out, one of the reasons why "don't ask, don't tell" and "why can't you just keep your private life private" and "but why do you have to flaunt it" are bullshit. It's not just about sex and it's not even just about love. It's about the fact that being closeted requires you to hide an entire person--either completely, or at least in what they mean to you.

When Joe says "I'm gay, and Bob is my boyfriend," it may feel uncomfortable to people who prefer there be only one kind of relationship in the world, but the alternative is that Bob becomes invisible. Joe can't bring him along to social and family events, or if he does he can't talk to and touch him in their natural affectionate way. When everyone else at work is talking about their partners' weird habits, Joe can't chip in that Bob pulls all the cheese off pizza and eats it separately. When Joe is showing off his vacation photos, he has to edit out the ones where he's hugging Bob, if he was able to take any such photos in public in the first place.

Joe and Bob are going to feel like shit not because they can't talk about their sexual desires, but because they can't talk about each other.

And it's untenable. When people pry, lies of omission begin to require real lies, which when stacked up become impossible to maintain. Joe isn't just pretending to be "not gay" or "not anyone's business"; he's forced into actively pretending to be straight and single. (Unless he has a girlfriend who lives in Canada, in which case God help him.) Unless he excludes himself entirely from a huge number of innocent everyday small-talk conversations, Joe has to construct an entire mythical life just to not come out. It's a taxing, ridiculous, and precarious situation.

The problem with closeting isn't that LGBTQAetc folks can't talk about sex. (Actually, that's also a problem, but let's move on.) It's that they can't talk about people.

Grouchy Post, back by popular demand.

(I always forget about those sneaky bastards with RSS readers whenever I try to un-say something. Oh well. Cats and bags.)




Sometimes I wish I lived in the alternate universe where men were "socially bi," in the sense that any guy who could possibly stand to choke down a cock was pressured to do so to be sexy. And not with guys he was attracted to, but with the ones his female friends shoved him at. Don't worry, he loves it, it's a total party atmosphere and dudes kissing dudes is just good clean fun. I think dudes naturally tend to be more bisexual anyway. And naturally more inclined to put on little shows for women's entertainment with no thought of reciprocation. Anyway no one's being forced into it, it's just something guys have to do to get female attention and fit in as a sexual outlaw and not be treated a Little Mister Buzzkill.

I want to go to more parties where someone yells "hey, there's two dudes makin' out in the kitchen!" and everyone comes running to gawk and hoot and whoop like they're at a football game. Then the guys don't have to worry about getting female attention for the rest if the night, although depending on the party they might end up in a threesome and the girl is probably gonna want to see some buttfucking at that point. You're not comfortable with that? Well, you really ought to TRY it, or just let him do you at least. I'm sure we can get you used to it.

The funny thing is that I do like chicks sometimes. But when I'm actually attracted to a woman, I want to impress and get attention from HER, you know? (Making out with a dude in front of her never seems to do the trick.) My first sexual urge with her is definitely not going to be "we should totally do some dude together!", either.

Acknowledging gender.

(Wow. Apparently shit is going down in Crazytown.)

Here's a question that's currently bothering me: how do you acknowledge people with nonstandard gender expressions, without legitimizing a narrow view of gender?

That is, my friend Joe Pseudonym likes to wear a dress sometimes because it makes him feel like a woman. At the time he told me this, I--a woman--was wearing pants. But I wasn't wearing them to feel like a man, I was wearing them because women are allowed to wear pants gosh darn it.

Part of me wants to respect Joe's gender expression and the fact that he enjoys getting a feeling of femininity by dressing up. But the other part of me wants Joe to be able to go out in jeans and a t-shirt and be a woman, rather than linking the symbols inextricably to the gender.

I guess the easy way out is to say that a dress is not necessarily female, but it is feminine. In other words, a vagina doesn't make you a dress-wearer, but being womanly does. Still, this answer doesn't totally satisfy me. It makes femininity into this pre-fixed thing that's taken for granted, as if it was declared in firely letters on Mount Sinai that dresses are for girls and any girl not in a dress is less of a girl.

(I'm using "dress" here, obviously, as a symbol for all gender indicators, from eyeshadow to the tendency to let people open doors for you.)

It also bothers me that not all gender indicators are value-neutral. A dress isn't exactly as good as pants and a shirt; it's a lot more impractical for physical work or exercise, it's somewhat more sexually exposing, and it makes you more vulnerable in violent situations. Plus you have to be all careful how you sit down. It can sometimes be more comfortable or more attractive, but I would say that all things being equal, a dress is a worse garment than pants and a shirt.

I therefore feel like someone who's following all the traditionally accepted indicators of femininity is, in some way, putting themselves at a disadvantage--not just against masculinity but against practicality in general. Knowing how to fix your car is "masculine," but men's and women's cars break just as often.

I want to be okay with Joe being a lady sometimes, but it bothers me that Joe thinks certain impractical (and in my mind undignified) things make him a lady. I guess cross-dressing into cargo pants and flannel wouldn't have that same thrill for him, and I respect that, it's just... it's weird for me.

This isn't going to be one of those entries that ends with a strong conclusion and call to action, because I really haven't resolved my thoughts on this. I feel like a willfully dense and vaguely transphobic (is that the right word when someone's not exactly trans? gender-bigoted, anyway) jerk telling Joe "You shouldn't go by Jane when you're dressed, because Joe is a perfectly good name for a woman!", but that's what I tend to think.



Incidentally I have no goddamn idea about my own gender. I mean, I'm a cis woman, because I'm okay with being called a woman and having a woman name and body and even acting feminine in some ways--for all my ranting, I'm wearing a skirt right now--but I always feel more "eh, I'll play the hand I was dealt" about this than truly identifying with it. Like if my same personality had been born with a penis and raised as a boy, there's no way I'd see myself as a woman.

I hesitate to identify myself as androgynous, because I'm a woman, but only because it's convenient--I used to have very short hair and dress androgynously and very few people found it attractive--and it doesn't bother me. But I'm not really wild about being a woman. It's more "easy and acceptable, and I don't feel that strongly about it" than "really me."

My mom's gay daughter.

post temporarily locked, sorry

Gaaaaay.

I'm queer.

Wait, what? I'm all about the dudes. I flirt with dudes, I date dudes, I get obsessed with dudes, I love Bruce Campbell and Kurt Russell and Nathan Fillion, I look at porn of dudes and I fucking love fucking dudes. Sure, I like the ladies too, but my lady-tastes are much narrower and pickier and much more rarely indulged. And frankly a lot of the time there's a dude involved too, or I go for particularly dudely ladies. On the ol' Kinsey scale of 0 is all straight and 6 is all gay, I'm, like, a 1.5.

I support LGBT activism, but my involvement has always been in the role of "straight ally." In a weird way, I feel like it would be presumptuous to identify myself as LGBT, since I'm just your garden-variety socially-acceptable "bicurious" chick and it's not right for me to take the same label as people who face real challenges because of their sexuality. It would be like crashing an NAACP meeting to tell them that I got a real dark tan once. When I hear about queer people being beaten up or harassed or denied jobs or military service or the right to marry--I think "that's terrible," but I don't think "that means me." And coming out to family and friends? That's not liberation, that's just TMI.

There's no question that porn has had an influence on my sexual identity; in porn sex between men is gay, but sex between women is "girl-girl." And girl-girl is a very different thing than lesbian. (Weirdly, two straight women doing "girl-girl" is considered less hardcore than a woman with a man. I guess it's less challenging for a straight male viewer, or something, but jeez.) So I often don't see myself as bisexual but as a girl-girler.

(Tangent: I've heard people suggest that BDSM should be considered "queer," but I don't agree and think it can get a bit wanky when straight people try to pretend they have a full stake in the Oppression Olympics because they like to get spanked. BDSM absolutely doesn't get a fair shake from the mainstream, and there are some scary cases of people's lives getting screwed over when they were "outed," but I don't think it's nearly the same thing as being queer.)

But the fact remains: I've done some things with women, and want to do more, that are queer. And my gender expression is not 100% feminine standard. I may have landed on the "eh, that's just hot" side of homophobia and the "but I'm basically a straight girl" side of self-image, but I'm queer. That's important not because it makes me somehow special, but because it makes me vulnerable. That when people discriminate against queer people, I'm not offended because I'm a magnanimous benefactor of the downtrodden, but because that's my neck out there too. I don't expect to be entirely part of the queer community or even to totally understand the queer community, but... well, I kiss girls. I don't get a giant rainbow award for that but I don't get to ignore that and clothe myself in "don't worry, I'm normal" either.

Finally, something I think is important whether you're queer or not, that I've been trying to do: when someone tries to insult me by accusing me of being a dyke, I don't say "no I'm not" and I don't say "it's none of your business, but anyway I'm not." A plain old "it's none of your business" settles the matter just fine.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

It goes without saying what I think of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, right? So instead I'll just tell you what LabRat thinks of it, since she phrased it rather well:


When I’ve seen people speaking out against repealing DADT- or advocating for a return flat-out to a total ban on gay soldiers- they are almost always men, and they very frequently cite some variant on a common theme. Apparently, it would be just horrible if they had to think about other men being attracted to them, and worry about being ogled, and maybe even worry about being raped, because there’s always the one creepy guy that’s willing to cross that line, and we just can’t do that to our soldiers. (Lesbians, as usual, are never mentioned, either because what the wimmens do is boring, or because that’s kind of hot and therefore okay.)

To these men, I have the following reply: welcome to what every single human female on the fucking planet deals with from puberty onward. You don’t like the idea that some man you’re not attracted to might be fantasizing about having sex with you, might be eyeing your fun bits, that there’s even a remote but existing chance he might rape you? Harden. The fuck. Up. Fifty percent of the population has to cope with this every day as a fact of life, and we’re called paranoid deranged feminazi man-haters if we even bring it up outside a feminist consciousness-raising session.


And I'll tell you a personal story: back when I worked 24-hour shifts, I shared a very small quarters with three people who were attracted to my gender. We slept together, shared a bathroom, and frequently changed clothes in front of each other. If I didn't want to sleep next to someone whose orientation made them potentially aroused by my gender, I'd have to sleep out in the truck.

But of course I didn't do that, and not just because I didn't want to freeze to death while being robbed and contracting MRSA. I was fine sharing a bunkroom with straight men, because they didn't give me any trouble. Maybe they were faithful to their wives and girlfriends; maybe they feared legal and career consequences; maybe they were attracted to some women but not to me specifically; and maybe they just had a smidge of maturity and human decency. I can't be sure no one ever looked at me in some unsavory way, but as no one ever spoke to or touched me in any inappropriate manner, I could care less about Schroedinger's Ogle.

Of course some female EMTs do face abuse. What if they had harassed me? Then the problem would be the harassment. "He was all heterosexual at me" isn't a complaint; it's "he was all disrespectful and abusive at me." It'd be nice to ban abusers from service but unfortunately we rarely ask and they never tell.

One of my political principles is that when you believe "X might lead to Y, and Y is bad," that gives you no justification to ban X. Just stringently enforce a ban on Y and deal with it at that level. Pot might lead to heroin? Ban heroin. Guns might lead to murder? Ban murder. Gays in the military might lead to harassment? Ban harassment!

(Or, following the logic often used to exclude women, ban heterosexuals. They're the ones with the problem, right? Some hetero gets his boxers in a twist and files a frivolous complaint and your whole career goes down the tubes, I tell ya.)

Anyway, none of this affects the actual presence of gays in the military, which has been going on for only about ten thousand years with no collapse of civilization so far. It's only whether people are allowed to admit they're gay. (And getting "caught" with a partner, even in an entirely appropriate and decorous relationship, is tantamount to an admission.) I'm having trouble picturing some sort of trouble that gay soldiers would cause that closeted gay soldiers wouldn't. I guess it might attract enemy attention if a Pride Parade breaks out in a combat zone.


(Side note: Have you ever noticed that the use of "homosexual" as a noun is almost entirely restricted to homophobes? It's gone from being a relatively objective term to a de facto slur. Then again, so is "don't ask, don't tell." I've heard a whole lot of Neanderthal types react to a guy's failure to conform to strict male roles with "I'm not asking, Rob, so don't you tell me, hurrr hurr hurrr.")

Sameophobia.

What really gets me about the whole "gay marriage" debate, besides, you know, everything, is that it seems to be based ultimately in the idea that men and women are importantly and irreconcilably different. If a marriage between two men is less legitimate than a marriage between a man and a woman, it follows that men and women must play different roles in a marriage. The genders aren't interchangeable because they're not equal.

In other words, the problem really is "which one of y'all does the dishes?"

(Actually, that's probably only about half of it. The other half is believing that gay doesn't mean "attracted to the same gender," it's an entire "lifestyle" of which same-sex attraction is only one symptom and the others are all different manifestations of hedonism and debasement.)



Something I don't have time to fully pontificate on right now because I have work in like ten minutes: the difference between feminism that describes womanhood as unique and special, and feminism that says women are equal to men because they're basically the same. I tend to fall on the side of equality, because "women's culture is secret and beautiful" sounds a little too much like "ladies have their own role to play" to me. That culture and that role's the fucking kitchen, man. I don't want to be special, I want to have a life.



(Barely related comment: I hate it when people say "if gays can get married, what about polygamy?", not just because it's a dumb slippery slope, but because in my sheltered little way I really want to just say "what about it?" Sometimes a mommy and a daddy and another mommy love each other very much...)

Lifestyle choice.

Man, not only did I not choose to be attracted to both men and women, I don't even get to choose which ones.

Whoo.

R-71 passes. (By a narrow margin with not all votes entered, so I shouldn't count my chickens, but oh my how many chickens I have!) Washington can continue to have gay not-marriage, and The Children will just have to cope somehow.

Yay. I'll commence fornicating in the streets immediately.

Okay, "continue."

Radio Ad.

Someone is putting way too much money into opposing R-71 (domestic partnerships), and I really wonder what they possibly have to gain by it. "Ewwww, queers" is one thing, but who has thousands of dollars to spend on that sentiment?

Anyway, here's the radio ad that just drove me insane:

*kindergarten class noises*
TEACHER: Okay, kids, put away your instruments. Music time is over and now we're going to hear a story. This is a very special story. Instead of a mommy and a daddy, this story has two daddies.
KIDS: *Gaaaaasp.*

And then the ad just sort of ends and a narrator says "Vote against R-71."

What's supposed to be the problem here? Does it somehow go without saying that this would be a terrible thing? These ads are apparently targeted at people who think "well, if they want to get married that's one thing, but telling kids about it, that's crossing the line." I guess the idea is that being gay is explicitly sexual, and somehow there's no way to say that Billy loves Robbie without bringing buttsex into it? That's my best guess here. Either that or being gay is really shameful and harmful, like being an alcoholic, it's the sort of thing that happens and you don't hate alcoholics, but kids shouldn't be told it's normal to drink Thunderbird at 9 AM.

Shit, there might be a kid in that class who has two daddies. He better not tell anyone, that would be totally inappropriate.

Straight Pride World Wide!

Shorter Atomic_Fungus: "Straight pride is no better or worse than gay pride... EXCEPT IT'S WAY BETTER BECAUSE GAYS ARE DISEASED PEDO PERVS."

(I wrote quite a screed of a comment, which I'll repost here if they delete it there.)


EDIT: His head a splode.

"No, you see gay people really are DIRTY DISGUSTING MOLESTING PERVERTS... but I'm very tolerant of them, so what are you even complaining about?"

Straight Pride.

I saw a little girl today wearing a "Straight Pride" sweatshirt. She was maybe 10 or 11. Shit, you don't even know if you're straight at that age. I hate to think of how Mom and Dad explained it to her and convinced her to wear it in public. I kind of wanted to confront the family, but shit, what do you say? They'd write me off as a crazy dyke and consider their worldview confirmed. Sigh.


(I support straight pride in the strictly literal sense that I think you should take pride in whoever you are. But I don't think it was intended as a statement of joy and inclusivity.)



EDIT: Rrrgh. The more I think about it, the angrier I get. Not just at the whole homophobia thing, but the superiority thing, and the impossibility of talking to someone with an "us vs. the world" mindset, knowing that there's literally nothing you can say--they'll only class you as part of the debauched world that they're better than.