Category Archives: blogging

End of year one

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One year ago I started this blog to:

…see if having another place—a new place, without the history and other issues inherent to those other blogs—to do that personal kind of long-form blogging that I miss, whether I actually use it. And more importantly, does it do that vital de-cluttering.

I don’t know how much the mental de-cluttering has helped with my productivity in other writing pursuits, but I have definitely been blogging more, including finishing more of the essay-style postings.

I have made progress on my novels, and I have managed to finish a few old stories that have been languishing for years. So I’m going to declare that this has at least improved things. Now that I’ve finally realized the power of scheduled posts, the fact that I often have bursts of several topics occur to me at the same time is no longer an annoyance.

I still have a lot of essays in the half-finished stage, but more of them are getting finished, posted here, and cross-posted to my writing site.

I’m willing to declare this first year a success. Not a resounding one, but definitely a success.

Let’s see if I can do even better in year two!

Not all like that

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It happens any time I write (or link to someone else’s post or article) about certain groups of people opposing gay rights, or those people doing really awful things in the name of opposing gay rights, et cetera: a direct message, private email, or (rarely) a public comment from someone explaining that “not all of us are like that.”

Sometimes it’s nothing more than that simple statement: we’re not all like that. More often it is a bit defensive. “You really shouldn’t generalize, because you make those of us who aren’t like that look bad.” The phenomenon happens so often, that advice columnist & gay rights advocate Dan Savage has started referring to those people as NALTs, for “Not All Like That.”

The thing is, that “you make those of us who aren’t like that look bad” is utterly false.

I’m not the one making them look bad. If I post a link to a story about a study that shows that nearly 75% of those who describe themselves as Evangelical Christians oppose gay rights, it isn’t me who is making those Christians who don’t oppose gay rights look bad, it’s the other Christians who are making Christians look bad.

If someone posts a piece showing how an organization is cherry-picking facts from a study which actually proves that the denial of equal rights harms the health of gays and lesbians to support their lies that being gay is unhealthy, it isn’t us who is making Christians look like liars. It’s the liar who claims to be speaking for Christ who is making Christians look like liars. It’s also the Christians who disagree with him but who are too timid to confront him about his lies who are making Christians look like liars and bigots. And it is especially those Christians who are too timid to confront their co-religionists but never hesitate to scold someone like me because they’re “not all like that” who are making Christians look like liars and bigots.

And that means, instead of scolding me for posting it, or “correcting” anyone who posts these news tidbits, you need to go scold or correct your co-religionists. Tell them you disagree. Tell them that they are lying. Speak out in public forums when they lie, and tell them they don’t speak for you.

I mean, really, my major in college was Mathematics and I posted the article which said nearly 75% of Evangelical Christians oppose gay rights. I don’t need you to tell me that nearly 75% is less than 100%. I already know that not all are like that.

I understand why people may be reluctant to confront the liars and bigots in their group. Those bigots and liars are mean, and they don’t fight fair. I get it. Really, I do. But if you’re too timid to go take them on, then keep your mouth shut. Whispering to people like me that “we aren’t all like that” doesn’t help me, it doesn’t prevent any of the meanness, nor does it further the causes of truth or justice. The only thing it does is make you feel better about being too cowardly to actually do anything about the lies and the bigotry.

And I have exactly zero desire to enable that!

If you happen to be one of those who are not like that, and are looking for something more concrete to do than whisper to people like me that you exist, may I suggest you get involved in one of these fine organizations:

The Reconciling Ministries Network

Evangelicals Concerned

Integrity USA

Dignity USA

The Welcoming Congregation Program

The United Church of Christ LGBT Ministries

Queer Dharma

Awkward topics

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In fiction, I have a wide array of tools for addressing sensitive topics. Writing a double-wedding scene recently, where one couple was male-female, the other male-male, set in the 36th Century on a star ship during an interstellar war was easy. The plot of the story was about how people will find ways to make normalcy and community in any circumstances. The casualness of a pair of best friends one—who happens to be gay and one not—who want to have their weddings together is the point, not legalities or cultural expectations.

Or a series of gags I wrote in a fantasy novel that was centered around an impending apocalypse. I kept introducing weirder and weirder religious groups, all engaged in pilgrimages because of the impending doom. None of them were overtly based on any existing religious group. I wasn’t attacking any doctrine. Each group, instead, was a manifestation of the various ways that real people react to a looming danger, and how they organize themselves into social institutions. It helped that I was writing in a cartoony talking-animals universe, so some of the groups could have names such as “the Predation Congregation” or “The Omnivoral Free Fellowship.”

And clearly, since I have been willing to write in places like this blog about topics such as marriage equality or bullying in a non-fictional way, there are other ways to broach awkward topics.

But it is harder to write or talk about some topics without offending someone—and sometimes not the people you expect. For instance, an amazing number of people will nod along sympathetically while reading a gay person’s opinions on gay rights in the abstract, but get angry if that same person has the temerity to support a political candidate who actively supports gay rights (and not support the candidate who actively opposes those rights).

The worst case was a former friend who, it turned out, firmly believed that all gay people are fundamentally mentally and spiritually broken. Which was why she had voted in favor of an amendment to her state’s constitution defining marriage as between a man and a woman exclusively, had voted in favor of a ban an gay people adopting children, and had voted for a candidate who had openly talked about shipping gay people to camps (not prison camps, no, they were health camps! You can never leave, but it isn’t prison).

She didn’t understand how that made her not my friend (Hint: friends don’t vote for people who want to ship their friends off to concentration camps; that’s not a difference of opinion, that’s conspiracy to commit crimes against humanity). She was really upset, too, because she had been spouting her (always very polite) opinions on certain forums, and then when she was accused of being a bigot, mentioned me and a lesbian that she knew as friends to prove she wasn’t a bigot.

So, for instance, I get really, really tired of people referring to Barack Obama as liberal. He isn’t. His foreign policy is nearly identical to Bush’s. His health care reform was lifted almost in every detail from the 1996 Republican party platform (seriously!). He didn’t make a move to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell until after more than 70% of the general population thought gays should be able to openly serve in the military. I could to on and on, but the upshot is, he’s moderate, when compared to the population as a whole. On a few things he is slightly left of center, but on many he’s actually slightly conservative-leaning.

Bill Clinton was less liberal than Obama. He and is policies were all on the conservative side of centrist.

See, when a policy position is held by more than 50% of the population? That is the mainstream position, not liberal or conservative.

Polls say a majority oppose the health care reform law. Yet, in poll after poll, solid majorities approve of every single individual provision of the plan. Even the individual mandate, if the full description is given. Which means there’s a bunch of people who don’t know what the plan actually does, they’re just afraid of a vague charge of socialism. And none of them even understand what socialism actually is — remember the cries of “keep your government hands off my medicare?” Hint: Medicare is socialised health insurance for the elderly and disabled. Social security is socialized income for the elderly and disabled. Police, courts, and the jail system are socialised justice. The army, navy, air force, and marines are socialised national defense, for goodness sake!

My point, if you think Obama is liberal, and you think your positions are moderate or conservative in comparison to him? Well, since most of his positions are supported by between 60 – 70% of the population as a whole, that means that, at most, 20% of the population is more conservative. You’re somewhere over in the 15-20% of the population. Welcome to the extreme. And yes, I’m aware that the other guy got 47% of the vote, but please scroll back up at the paragraph about people saying they are against healthcare reform, yet they’re in favor of all its components. Same holds true for a lot of other things.

My other point: while Obama isn’t liberal. I am. My political opinions are to the left of his. If you’re the sort of person who thinks that Obama is left-wing and that left-wing is a bad thing? My positions are going to scare you spitless.

And I think I need to stop censoring myself for fear that awkward topics will scare people off.

Personal isn’t always private, part 2

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For a long time there was a forum on Reddit called “jailbait” whose purpose was for people to post pictures of underage girls they thought were hot, sexy, what have you. Most of the pictures posted there had been stolen from Facebook accounts or similar online forums, where the picture had originally been posted by the girl herself. The guys who frequented the jailbait forum and posted there rationalized their theft because “if the girls didn’t want people looking at those pictures, they shouldn’t have posted them.”

None put forward the argument more loudly or prolifically than the moderator, a guy who called himself Violentacrez (pronounced “violent acres”). Continue reading Personal isn’t always private, part 2 →

“Privacy is only a recent concept”

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A news story I read recently about proposed new rules about when law enforcement agenices need to obtain warrants (and when they don’t) quoted a government official making the claim, “Privacy is only a recent invention,” implying that it can’t be that important since much of human history has existed without the notion of legally enforced restrictions on what information about you is public, and what is not.

Someone in the crowd apparently shouted out,”So is sanitation!” Sanitation is clearly something most of us do not want to live without. In other words, going back to the old days isn’t always a good plan.

I have a problem with the original statement, however. I mean, at least one of the lessons to draw from the old testament story of David and Bathsheba (and Bathsheaba’s ill-fated husband, Uriah the Hittite) is that Kings should not go about peering into the bathing chambers of other men’s wives.

I know, that isn’t what the official quoted above meant, but in a more important sense it is. A great deal of how any society works is an implicit agreement between us all to look the other way about some aspects of each other’s lives. And when we can’t, to pretend we don’t know some things about each other. I’ve known more than one mother, for instance, who admonished their children, “There are some details a Mother has a right to be spared.” In other words, part of the process of becoming an independent, functional adult is to experiment, make some mistakes, and learn from them on your own. And Mom really doesn’t want to know how you figured out what your favorite way to kiss is, for instance.

I wound up thinking about this a lot this weekend beginning with a moment Saturday when Michael and I were still laying about in bed. We had a fairly small number of things to do, and have been feeling stressed and over-busy, so lazing much of the day away seemed a good idea.

So there we were, overhearing some conversations outside, and finding ourselves giggling at some things. Things that weren’t particularly private or personal, and probably not any topics that would have changed if we had walked outside. But we were trying not to giggle too loudly because it could be taken wrong. And it wasn’t about us.

That evening, one of our neighbors, a guy in his mid twenties whose studio is directly below our bedrooms, was playing his electric guitar. He does that a lot. He has asked us to let him know if it disturbs us. It never has (though when he’s trying to learn a new lick, I wind up grabbing my head phones because the repitition is a bit maddening). That night his playing was a louder than usual. And also a bit wilder. I think I even observed to Michael that it sounded angry.

Sunday, we found out his mother had died the previous morning. Even weirder, we found out that the odd lady who had recently moved in with another neighbor was the mother in question. This is the neighbor whose wife recently died. So we had had this rather odd situation of a woman moving in with the alcoholic neighbor of her son, just because he happened to be nearby, and because the neighbor was desperate for a roommate.

I have already shared more details than are mine to share. But that’s what we humans do. We learn things about each other and we share them, whether the people we share them with are involved or not. Sometimes we pretend we didn’t share them. Whether we admit we know some details or not, we also make decisions on how we interact with people based on those details. Even when we believe it was wrong for us to find out in the first place.

It’s one thing if we decide not to be as friendly with the neighbor we hear screaming obscenities at his housemates at odd hours of the night. It is another thing, entirely, if we make hiring and firing decisions based on things we learn while snooping around the pages of their facebook friends. Or if we make search, seizure, and arrest decisions based on searching text message streams for keywords. Or other details that technologies have made it a bit too easy to collect. And often much less accurately than we are led to believe.

In the end, it’s just gossip. And that has been around for as long as there has been language.

Testing the iOS app

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I’m testing the iOS app for updating on WordPress, so I have the option of updating this blog during my lunch breaks. I could probably do it nearly as easily through mobile Safari, but the app is free. And the interface is less cluttered than the web interface.
I may enjoy updating from the iPad a lot more than my computer!

 

I have too many hobbies

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Several friends have recently commented that they have too many hobbies, or that they don’t need another project, and I have nodded sagely. I, too, suffer from a surfeit of things I’ve been meaning to finish.

I have been especially bad at finishing writing projects. Other than a burst of productivity in November, my fiction writing has plodded along at a leaden pace for more than a year. My essay writing has been even more anemic. My personal blogging (other than Twitter, which isn’t really blogging) has dropped off precipitously.

When I was blogging regularly, I was also finishing more stories and essays. And I recently realized that in one sense this has always been true.

Before blogging, I was not the sort of person who kept a journal. But I wrote journal-like things. I had some friends with whom I regularly corresponded. We would write very long letters, discussing and discoursing on mutual writing and fan projects, updating each other on what was happening in our lives, and gossiping a bit. I was writing four or five such letters a week. As well as contributing regularly to a couple of writer/publisher-oriented APAs.

Before that, I had gigs on various student and semi-pro newspapers where I regularly had to produce op ed pieces and columns where there was an externally-imposed deadline. I ended up writing lots of not-quite-stream-of-conciousness stuff that never made it into those columns, and wasn’t part of any story or assignment. Thinking back, those things often took the form of a “letter to no one in particular, but someone who might know me” very much like a typical personal blog.

I think all of that extraneous writing, the correspondence, and the blogging performs a vital service in my head. It gets little things I’m thinking, worrying, wondering, grumping about out of my head. Because once it is written down, I don’t have to think about it until someone responds. With all the mental clutter gone, I could then focus on sorting out plot problems, writing new scenes, cleaning up dialog, and so on.

That’s my theory, anyway.

My other theory is that I am not using my existing Dreamwidth, LiveJournal, or Google+ blogs as much because each of them has become weighted down with various forms of disappointment and expectation.

So, I’m going to see if having another place—a new place, without the history and other issues inherent to those other blogs—to do that personal kind of long-form blogging that I miss, whether I actually use it. And more importantly, does it do that vital de-cluttering.

Wish me luck!