Making Up The Rules

I've been confused lately about what it is I actually want. And I mean in the way of my life and how I live it. I'm not really sure how I would categorize my lifestyle. I tend to shy away from anything too personal on this blog. I'm pretty selective about my online presence (No FB, remember, and a big yeah, right to tweets), out of fear that I'll look back on it and regret divulging intimate details and feelings I had. I consider myself a private person. I suddenly feel the need to get a bit personal, though. I don't know why. Maybe because I've been wrestling with these questions and conflicting feelings lately.

When I first came out -- not the arduous process of self-acceptance that took years to gain, but the point at which I was comfortable to tell people close to me -- I had this ideal of eventually finding the right guy to have a big gay wedding with, legal or not, and that would be that. I would be settled and happy. Of course, over time I got jaded, and my experiences and attempts at finding this chipped away at the ideal, even to the point that I stopped believing in romantic love. I still don't to a certain extent. But, lately for some reason, I'm starting to gain back this vision for my life, though not with the same naivete as a teenager, and I wouldn't call it an ideal anymore, but more like opening myself up to the possibility of settling down and sharing a life with someone. Companionship.

This troubles me. I can't help but feel like one big sell out for it. I believe gay marriage will eventually be legalized on a national level in my lifetime, at least I hope. It won't happen overnight or without activists willing to take a stand. Strides are being made. DADT was repealed, and Obama states the Justice Department will no longer defend DOMA. But then, people like John Boehner plan on digging their claws in the traditionalist dirt to counteract and spend huge amounts of money in a shitty economy in the process. It could be in a year, or it could be in another ten to twenty. Who knows? But as progress on marriage equality continues to slowly advance, I ask myself, even if it were legal, would I even want to get married? My go to answer is no, absolutely not. But as I stated in the preceding paragraph, my beliefs for my future are eroding somewhat. Some may claim this is typical of most people in my generation -- sowing their wild oats in their early twenties and then reforming later and getting married with white picket fences and little ones to pass on your own emotional issues to. Some may tell me, it's called growing up and being responsible. Thanks for the condescension, and for the gross generalizing. The issue I'm dealing with seems to be what many LGBT people are questioning now I imagine: Is getting gay married conforming to the heteronormative power structure that's disgustingly oppressive or does it subvert it?

My answer is that it's most likely a little bit of both. But, I'm here to tell you my experience as a gay man who is denied the option to get married on a federal level gives me a perspective on how deeply flawed the institution of marriage is in general. Don't get me wrong, I've encountered many lovely married couples. I'm not criticizing anyone who is married or who wants to get married on any personal level. I just take issue with the massive importance that's placed on it. I never understood why Christianist right wingers claim gay marriage will destroy the institution. If anything, wouldn't allowing more types of people to enter into it fortify it? Logic would dictate people like me would be the "crusaders who are going to tear marriage apart." Of course, this isn't the case. I don't care if people want to get married, I just question whether or not it's for me. I'll give my opinion of what I would like to see our country do with marriage. To me, marriage is a religious institution that should be separate from the government. Civil unions between consenting adults with equal benefits for all under the government would be my ideal. It goes without saying that there wouldn't be restrictions based on gender, race, religion, etc. Churches could deny same sex couples marriage within them, bigoted as they are, because they are separate from the state. Those who are religious would be married in their church, and then their partnership would be recognized on a federal level as a civil union, along with all other partnerships under the government. Fat chance at this ever happening though. Whatever way it eventually happens, I can't stress how important it is that gay unions be on a federal level. Marriages that occur in the six states, while they are wonderful in the course of gay rights, are not equal. All federal benefits are still denied (which I won't explicate on here).

Maybe this re-evaluation and consideration of eventual marriage for myself could be from all the political debate on the issue or maybe it's part of living where I do. Kentucky is traditionalist central, among the others. Louisville isn't too much of an exception. People always say Louisville is where people grow up, move, and then come back to raise their families. I'm definitely generalizing, but people here tend to hold fairly traditional values. A woman in my office this week told me that I need to have kids soon, like within the next year, so my parents can enjoy grand kids. I mean, really? Why are marriage and kids the end all and be all? I've thought maybe I would get married eventually only if it was on a federal level, but then I recently read this, which re-affirmed my former skepticism. I like the point that, of course, marriage equality for same sex couples needs to happen, but for me, it's mainly because of the principle, the way it's discrimination, not necessarily because I plan on marrying. I've imagined what it would be like if I got married. It would be even more conflicting. What kind of a relationship would I want? Certainly not an imitation of straight couples. The main problem I have, among the others, but the one that really gives me an uneasy feeling is the implicit shackles of ownership of another person. I don't want to be owned, and I would never want to own anyone else. But then alternately, I know I wouldn't want something like an open relationship. Not because of morality, but because I know I wouldn't be able to handle it emotionally. Many straight couples getting married have relationships that defy and challenge former traditions, especially with gender roles. Gay couples similarly forge new values and ways of living, but to me, more obstacles abound, because more is at stake. Straight couples don't deal with the hurdles of prejudice or a political lens, and different gender boundaries are crossed. As a gay man, I've always felt I walk between two worlds of what's masculine and what's feminine. I identify with the boys' club and groups of females while also being excluded from both, and really not fitting in to either. That issue would be a whole other post, but the point I'm trying to make is that self-identified LGBT people have more gender issues to contend with that resonate in the relationship. Whichever I decide, and I'm currently waiting on this Puritanical country to even give me the choice, I'm ready to make up my own rules and values as I go along.

The homophobia I'm increasingly surrounded with doesn't help too much. It can get pretty disheartening and spirit breaking. The little slights and comments that don't seemingly mean much act as the subtext for greater issues. Like when someone tells me my opinion as a man on something as frivolous as Sex and the City or buffalo wings doesn't matter because I'm not a hetero man or when someone makes a cheesy one-liner directed at me when the concept of flame wars or hot dogs come up in conversation or when a grown man still uses one of those infantile phrases in which "gay" means "stupid" or "lame." The prejudice I notice is becoming less and less subtle. I think there are more people like this lovely gentleman out there than some realize:

Out of the Bubble

For the past year I've been in a book club. In fact, I'm the founder and coordinator of it. Many of my literary friends would find this hilarious; I find it hilarious given the amount of times book clubs were the source of jokes for me and these friends in my college days. The idea invokes a group of people sitting around in a touchy-feely circle talking about surface topics like what characters they liked or didn't, how certain parts made them feel, or whether they like the book or not with no solid justification one way or the other, and very little, if any, discussion about topics of importance like structure of form, character complexity, narrative causality, sources of conflict, subtext, or line-by-line linguistic analysis of style to name a few. You know, topics with real literary significance. Is this snobbery? Yes, very much so. Am I a book snob? Again, yes, very much so. I started this club reluctantly at the proposal of a few friends, and as the only former English major in the mix, I was the logical choice for the role of organizer. Over the past year, my attitude has changed a bit. It's been refreshing to speak in a setting about a book openly with no pressure or grade at stake. Most importantly, I've enjoyed the opportunity to read books I wouldn't have chosen for myself otherwise. Of course, I've liked some more than others.

The last meeting we had was this Monday. We read War Dances by Sherman Alexie, a collection of short stories and poems. As a whole, I admire Alexie's blend of traditional structural form with experimentation, especially in a current literary community where everyone is pegged with being in either one camp or the other. As a lover of fiction, I was most eager for the short stories, and I want to comment on one specifically, "The Senator's Son." This one resonated with me the most. Book clubbers -- at least my stereotypical perception of them referenced in the previous paragraph -- tend to hate a book if they hate the characters. In this story, I hated all three central characters: a conservative senator vying for future presidency, his priveleged son, William, and William's former best friend, Jeremy, a gay republican. While I know if these characters were real I most likely wouldn't be able to stand them, I found this story, and them, powerful, because Alexie provides insight into perhaps why they are the way they are. Spoiler alert. William gay bashes Jeremy years after the latter came out to the former, which had dissolved their friendship. In a surprising reversal, I felt like William, the first person POV character, was more redeemable than Jeremy, who is essentially homophobic himself, maybe even more than William. Jeremy readily forgives William with no questions, claiming gay rights don't matter, because far more pressing issues and problems exist in the world than who he has sex with. In the end, I realize he refuses to support his own rights, the ones that are the most immediate to him, because he is a man who has become so disillusioned and beaten down -- both figuratively and literally in the case with William and also growing up with his father -- by the homophobia in the world that his only defense mechanism is to comply to it by not standing up for himself. William ponders whether Jeremy's act of forgiveness is an act of cowardice. I can't help but agree, and I was taken aback that I felt this way -- that forgiveness isn't necessarily redemptive; it can be spineless.

This story is apt for what I've been rolling around in my head the past week given all the media coverage of the suicides caused by bullying. I'm shocked at how homophobic our society is. Sure, I've known it is. I'm not naive. I've experienced it first hand since quite a young age by enduring harassment similar to what these kids faced. Maybe the extent of our culture's prejudice mind-set is becoming more real for me in these past two years out of college -- a place where my sexuality was a non-issue with the people I surrounded myself with, especially being steeped in a creative writing program. Now that I'm out of the bubble, I notice just how latent our homophobia is. I've had people telling me these suicides in the news aren't issues with being gay but are about bullying. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't almost every instance in the news over the past month a bully who is making derogatory remarks and harassing a kid because he or she was gay, or was perceived as being gay, or didn't fit into any type of gender role deemed "normal"? People who make claims like these aren't looking at the root cause of why their peers are bullying these kids in the first place. And, I wonder why now of all times the media decides to focus on these tradgedies, because they happen much more than the national news stations usually covered before. The suicide rate of gay teens far exceeds the number of straight teens. Maybe now that more people are paying attention to how harmful homophobia is, attitudes will change. In the past week, I've found the media covering more instances of violence, discrimination, and narrow-mindedness:

-The Bronx gay bashing
- A student-teacher fired for answering a student's question about his marital status
- Another suicide, provoked not by harassment at school, but by awful comments made at a community's city council meeting
- More bullying, and physical assault in school
- And, I would be remiss leaving out Carl Paladino

I could list more, but this is sufficient enough to give you an idea. Then again, I wouldn't hold my breath that exposure will make a difference. These attitudes are pretty heavily engrained culturally. Over the past year, since integrating back into Louisville, I've been surprised at certain encounters I've had. Like certain "friends" making comments to me like, "Wow, do you have any masculinity left in you at all?" because I was holding a red drink I suppose this person deemed "girly," or slights like, "It looks like we've got four women here," even though there were three, and then continuing with, "and I'm including Michael." I'm not trying to use this post to play the victim or to even insinuate at all that these encounters are on any level with the suicides, discrimination, or bashing I've cited above. I'm simply pointing to them as examples of how mannerisms and outlooks regarding sexual orientation and gender are so embedded in how people interact with one another that they become second nature, and by extention, these small, subtle attitudes yield the larger more horrific forms of violence and blatant prejudice. Despite the media coverage, I don't see immediate change occurring any time soon. So, I can definitely understand Jeremy in that Sherman Alexie story. It would be easy to forgive people who are the cause of such direct violence and hatred, if that's what would save yourself from it all.