Today is National Coming Out Day. If Ray were still alive, it would also be the day we’d be celebrating the twenty-second anniversary of our commitment ceremony (he promised to stay with me for the rest of his life, and he did).
Since I am still occasionally surprised to learn that someone I know or work with hasn’t figured out that I’m gay: my husband (Michael) and I are both men, and we’re very much in love with each other and happy together.
My husband and I.
But while I’m (re-)stating what I think ought to be obvious, I would like to announce that I am a card-carrying liberal gay man who thinks:
Black kitten with white paws plays on a hay bale near a jack o lantern for HalloweenOctober is one of my favorite months of the year, and has been since long before it became LGBT History Month. Or because it includes National Coming Out Day. Or even Spirit Day.
By this point you’re probably expecting me to start going on about Halloween. Don’t get me wrong, I love Halloween. I love handing out candy. I love seeing other people all dressed up. I like dressing up, but have never been as good at it as I wish I was, so I have kind of a love-ambivalent relationship with that.
No, the real reason I love October is related to the fact that it is Halloween, but not because of Halloween per se. The real reason is because October is the beginning of Decorating Season!!!
I start decorating the house for Halloween in October. Once Halloween is over, I switch to Harvest/Thanksgiving Decorations, which is just a prelude to the big event: Christmas! We put up a tree with way more lights than you would believe will fit on one tree. We put lights in the windows. I make wreaths (plural) for the front door, and so on, and so on.
FunCatPictures.ComWhen I set my goals for this year, I pledged to continue the things I thought worked last year and added some new things. One of the things that I think helped me achieve those goals was writing a monthly report on the blog on my progess. It’s yet again a new month, so here’s the next report!
One side of the table during my birthday get-together at AFK Tavern.This year my age is equally divisible by 5, so it feels like a milestone birthday—even if only a middling one. I took the day itself off rather than do my usual work-from-home day, and I was mildly lazy. I drove my hubby in to work as I usually do on a work from home day, but when I got home instead of going inside to log into the work network, I just sat down on the porch steps with my travel mug full of coffee and let the drizzle come down on me.
I love overcast days with light rain. It’s my very favorite weather, so it was like nature was giving me a birthday present. I posted to twitter and got caught up on personal email until I was out of coffee. But the weather was so nice that after I unlocked the door and refilled my coffee, I grabbed one of our cloth folding/picnic chairs and my iPad and went back onto the porch. I sat there, reading, visiting with a neighbor, watching three bluebirds have a fight, and so forth for for a few hours…Continue reading Birthday not very quizzacious→
I had a topic queued up for this week’s Throwback Thursday/More of why I love sf/f post, but then I remembered that it’s Bisexual Awareness Week, which is an expansion of Bisexual Visibility Day, and I thought, maybe I should write about some of the sci fi stories that I remember reading in my late teens/early twenties that nudged me into thinking maybe I was bi rather than gay.
As I tracked those stories down over the last few days, I realized something: none of the characters in those books actually identified as bisexual. The characters talk about bisexuality as an abstract, in exactly the way a closeted queer person might with their friends as a means of tentatively sounding out the friend to see if said friend would accept them if you came out as gay or bi.
And then there was no actual coming out. No romance other than opposite-sex couples, et cetera. It was a little irritating. Especially since one of the rules I adopted about my “more of why I love sf/f” posts is that I want to talk about books, stories, authors, movies, et al from the genre that I love rather than focus on critique or griping. So I couldn’t write about those stories that I had misremembered as having bisexual characters without it turning into a big gripe session.
So I’m not going to write about them tomorrow. And other than that explanation, I’m not going to write anything more about them, today, either. Because today is Bisexual Awareness Day, and it’s is supposed to be a celebration of and for bisexual people, not a time for a old white gay guy to gripe about related issues. So I encourage you, if you don’t know why Bisexual Visibility Day exists, and is different that National Coming Out Day and why it’s needed, to read this: Bisexual Visibility Day: Why being a bisexual is not easy.
As I mentioned earlier in the week, I’m not bisexual myself, but I happen to be married to someone who is, as well as having several other important people in my life who are bi. So I have at least an empathetic understanding of their struggles, and how some of those overlap with mine, while many are different.
Remember, love is love; shout it for the world to hear.
I get so tired of reading the melodramatic laments for the good old days. You know what? It was only peaceful and happy if you lived in the right neighborhoods, had the right skin color, went to socially approved churches, hid away your true self for fear of being beaten to death for being gay (for instance). And also, if you weren’t a man, it was only peaceful and happy so long as you had the protection of a man who wasn’t a wife-beater, et cetera.
The funny thing is, despite what these people have been led to believe, crime rates of all kinds in the U.S. are lower than they have been for more than 150 years. So, maybe these folks need to stop watching Fox News and reading and believing every email from their friends about the latest outrage against “real americans.”
Also, if god didn’t “withdraw his protection” from the U.S. over incidents like intentionally infecting Native American women and children with small pox (which was not the most horrible thing we did to Native Americans), then he sure as heck isn’t going to do so now simply because we’re going to give a few more people equal rights.
I love my country. I literally get tears in my eyes when I play songs such as the old Kate Smith recording of “God Bless America.” I will go on and on about why Thomas Jefferson is my favorite Founding Father (with very specific examples), or why James Madison is my second favorite. I support liberal politicians because I am patriotic and I want my country to live up to the ideals expressed in those founding documents about liberty and justice. We aren’t there yet, by a long shot. But we keep getting closer. We keep getting better.
And at every step along the way, we have gotten better over the objections of people who claimed that the Bible forbids women to have equal rights; or the bible says slaves should be happy to be owned, used, and abused like cattle; or the bible says that the races should be kept separate; or the bible says that gay people are abominations. The bible doesn’t quite say most of those things, but it most definitely says that left-handed people are abominations (mentioned 25 separate times, as opposed to the 3 mentions of same sex activities, and the 4 other mentions of things we aren’t quite sure what the original writer meant but in very modern translations have been twisted to be about homosexuality). Funny, no one is calling for us to pray for god’s forgiveness that we don’t criminalize the left-handed.
I’m not saying you don’t have a right to your beliefs. I am also well aware that there are many christians who don’t feel that invoking the bible should give them a free pass to oppress, discriminate against, and vilify whole swaths of the population.
I am saying that, if you feel the need to constantly decry and lament the fact that I now have the legal right to marry my husband, or campaign against my legal right not to get fired just for being gay, or my legal right to buy things at stores open to the public without being refused just because I’m gay, then you are not my friend. This isn’t about me rejecting you, it is a statement of fact. You are actively engaged in trying to take away my rights. You are actively engaged in trying to hurt me.
Friends don’t do that.
And if you feel the need to consistently insist that god is going to punish this land for no other reason than the civil laws have finally started to recognize gay people as actual people who have the same rights as everyone else, you are also not my friend. Again, this isn’t about me rejecting you. You are saying that me living my life as a productive member of society—not hurting anyone else, just refusing to hide who I love—is somehow so terrible that it justifies the creator of the entire universe ignoring everything else happening on trillions of planets circling billions of stars in the millions and millions of galaxies in the known universe and wipe out a country? My existence is so awful, that the creator of the entire universe is going to punish everyone (including babies and animals and other living things that have done nothing wrong) by wiping us out? If you think my existence is that terrible, that is neither love or respect. And again, friends don’t think that way about people they actually love and respect.
Keep posting those hurtful, hateful things. I’m not going to stop you or call you names. But I’m also not going to sit here and keep reading rants that say these horrible things about me and people like me. I’m not going to silently let you salve your conscience with the occasional assurance that you still love me, sandwiched between your posts about what an abomination I am. Or what heroes people who discriminate against people like me are.
That isn’t love.
And you don’t get to say those kinds of things and still call yourself my friend.
FunCatPictures.ComWhen I set my goals for this year, I pledged to continue the things I thought worked last year and added some new things. One of the things that I think helped me achieve those goals was writing a monthly report on the blog on my progess. It’s yet again a new month, so here’s the next report!
A lot of my life has involved the struggle not to be defined by the assumptions of bigots. Whether it was being called sissy, faggot, or worse while being bullied as a kid, or being called depraved, hell-bound, or worse while being denied legal equality as an adult.
As irritated as I get when someone tells me that I could stop being gay if I really wanted to, or that if I just met the right woman I would feel differently, or if I read the Bible and prayed hard enough it would all go away, you would think that I would never, ever say or imply that someone else is “really” something other than they claim, particularly in the area of sexual orientation.
You might think.
I have been called (somewhat angrily) a hypocrite for not believing at least one person who claimed to be ex-gay…
*sniffle*The pollen count has not been high this week. In fact, because we got so much rain over the weekend, the pollen count is forecast to be extremely low today. But my hay fever is not always strongly correlated with the pollen count. I generally assume that’s because I also react to molds and spores that are not always captured in that count.
I haven’t had horrible hay fever symptoms most of the week. Itchy eyes and mild congestion on a couple of days. But when the weather started changing (the first real rain in months hit Friday night, there were drizzles in the early morning, but the rain didn’t come until quite late), my sinus congestion got worse and a headache slowly built up. I tried a couple different combinations of medicine on it over the weekend, but they didn’t help much.
It was bad enough that I pulled out the bottle of prescription strength nasal spray. I don’t like resorting to it because one of its side effects is having really intense disturbing dreams. Because it contains a steroid, it suppresses immune response in the sinus membranes, so I often wind up with a sinus infection after using it. But the headache was really getting to me, so I decided late Saturday night to give it a try.
Except I noticed that the expiration date on the label was a while ago. I have used it a couple of times since the expiration date, but I didn’t know what the risks were after the expiration date, and it was the wee small hours of the morning, so I didn’t really feel up to researching the issue on line. I grabbed an ice pack to put on my head, instead. And I was able to get back to sleep. The pharmacist got a good laugh when I stopped in on Sunday and put in the request to ping my doctor for a refill. I last filled the prescription a whopping five years ago.
We had a few other misadventures over the weekend, though nothing as bad as some of our friends. Event though the high temperatures during the day outside were in the mid- to upper sixties, I couldn’t got the house below 80 until quite late Saturday night. We had all the windows and the front door open, with fans placed strategically around the house to try to create a flow that would push the cool air from outside through everywhere. It’s one of the downsides of a brick house. Those bricks hold heat for an awful long time.
It was bad enough Friday night that the combination of the heat (and to be fair, we turned off the air conditioning because it was below 70 outside by sundown, so we had ourselves to blame a bit) and my sinus headache, I kept waking up getting no more than an hour’s sleep at a time. I felt as if I was waking up my hubby every time I woke up and tossed and turned, so I moved down to the living room in the recliner at about 5:00 am and aimed two small fans at me. Then I finally slept for four hours straight.
Along with the even heavier rain we got Saturday came a lot of wind. Trees were blown down all over the region, knocking out power lines everywhere. More than one of our friends was without electricity for over 24 hours. We wound up with a few of them over at our place Sunday afternoon, recharging all of their devices and just hanging out to visit.
There was also, Saturday morning, the incident of the overflowing toilet. Still not sure what caused that. But it was followed up Sunday with me not being able to get the bathroom sink faucet to turn off. We finally figured out I was being mildly dyslexic and turning the cold off while turning the hot on, then reversing the other way. In my defense, Michael couldn’t figure out what was happening at first, either. After he shut things off under the sink, he experimented a bit. Because of the low-flow fixture, there were no discernable difference in the flow of water between barely turned on at the faucet, cranked halfway, or cranked all the way to full. So you can’t really tell whether you’re turning one side (say the cold) down if the hot is on even a little bit.
We’ve now got the under-the-sink valves turned back to about a third pressure (they were turned on full force before), and now you can tell the difference as you adjust the faucets.
He did ask me if my horoscope for the weekend had said anything about trouble with water, since I seemed to have several incidents.
Since I virtually never look at such things, I couldn’t say. But I think it’s more likely that the sinus headache and the interference with my sleep pattern are more likely culprits.
When I set my goals for this year, I pledged to continue the things I thought worked last year and added some new things. One of the things that I think helped me achieve those goals was writing a monthly report on the blog on my progess. It’s a new month, so here’s the next report!
Today is National Coming Out Day. If Ray were still alive, it would also be the day we’d be celebrating the twenty-second anniversary of our commitment ceremony (he promised to stay with me for the rest of his life, and he did).
Font Folly 