Culture: June 2004 Archives

I came across a blog the other day, and I've been reading through it with mixed fascination and horror. The writer is a woman who claims to have some sort of environmental illness or chemical sensitivity, but who lacks the understanding to see that her self-diagnosis is a load of crap. Example: she claims to have a lot of allergies to mold. Fine and well, and some people do. But she also claims to love being in tropical rainforests, that somehow the air there is better for her than "inside" air. I can't think of a better place to find naturally occurring toxic mold than a tropical rainforest.

Anyway, apart from the total bullshit self-diagnosis, she also spends a lot of time trying to blame other people for being "toxic" or "unsupportive." Roommates, friends, lovers: they all take the blame for not supporting her and not adhering to her picky rules about how space around her has to be managed (because of her Great Illness). Lately, she has been talking about getting a job, but apparently she's backing out of that, as well, on account of her health and how she's not sure that the job will take her in the right direction (except, of course, that it will give her money to live off of).

I have little patience for people who are willing to blame anybody but themselves for where they are right now. And when they add to that using a bogus illness to try to force people to do what they want... that's about as disgusting as you can get, in my book. I'd rather deal with somebody who is imperfect and admits to being imperfect as a part of being human. Somebody who presents themself as the eternal victim, pure of heart and spirit, beset by the demon of ill health, is just going to make me want to get away as fast as possible.

Speaking of blaming everybody but yourself, I'm anxious to get the papers from the San Francisco sheriff, showing that our former landlady has been served with notice of the small claims court date. I wish I could have paid an extra $20 to have the event videotaped a la COPS, but apparently they don't offer that service.

I've been doing my best to stay out of politics, but this news story really takes the cake:

The Schwarzenegger administration said repealing the Hayden Act could save local governments up to $14 million. As proposed, shelters would be allowed to kill dogs and cats after holding them just 72 hours, regardless of whether the shelters are open to the public during those three days.

...

Schwarzenegger has proposed a change in the law to allow birds, hamsters, potbellied pigs, rabbits, snakes, turtles and other animals that are not cats and dogs to be put to death immediately after capture if the shelter favors that approach, animal rights groups said. Currently, a minimum six-day window covers all animals, but the protections for everything but cats and dogs would be eliminated under the changes.

Schwarzenegger also would eliminate a requirement that people convicted of animal cruelty be prohibited from owning a pet for three years and be forced to pay for medical care for the animals they have mistreated.

Shelters no longer would be required to search for owners who have embedded microchips in their pets that store addresses and phone numbers.

This is not going to go over well. People put those microchips in so they can get their pets back. If the governor decides that shelters can just ignore the chips and kill or adopt out the animal, will he also change the rules about how to handle other kinds of "found" property? If I find a Hummer on the street outside the capitol, can I just take it, because clearly the owner doesn't care and doesn't want it?

There is one reassuring sign in the article:

There are signs that Schwarzenegger has a growing understanding of how volatile the issue of animal protection can be.

Um, yeah. No shit. People love their pets. They love them more than they love their kids (probably because the pets love them back more than their kids love them back).

It seems that Christian ministers can't figure out why their parishioners are not all fired up about gay marriage. Somehow, the intense outrage and protests against the immanent threat to heterosexual marriage as we know it has not quite materialized. Some of them are blaming the war for distracting people's attention, but others note that:

Pew Research Center pollster Michael Dimock said it is clear from the surveys that gay marriage is an issue of great intensity to a small number of people, mainly opponents. But, he said, "I have a sneaking suspicion that this is not an issue many people want to stay worked up about. ... You don't hear Bush talking about it very often. He talks about it once every few months, then drops it. ... ."

Basically, most people don't care about gay marriage as long as they don't have to hear about it all the time.

I was browsing around reading blogs about preparations for Pride marches around the country, and I came across this post. When I read this passage:

Kids learn quickly that the "ultimate" insult is to call someone a "fag" or that if something they do is deemed "gay", it should be stopped.

...it reminded me of an incident from when I was in summer camp as a kid.

A bunch of the kids were doing that old, stupid kid joke:

Q: Are you a homo?

A: NO!

Q: You mean you're not a homo sapiens?

A: OK, then I am a homo.

Q: You mean you're a homosexual! Ha ha ha!

And so on. So I went to my parents' big dictionary and looked up "homosexual," in part because I was not sure what it meant (I didn't grow up in one of those households where people talked about the sex lives of their neighbors). I discovered that it was the opposite of "heterosexual" (in my inability to fully grasp pronounciation back then, I thought it was het-ree-oh-sexual).

The next day at camp, I went up to those kids and asked:

Ayse: Are you a heterosexual?

Answer: No way!

Ayse: Then you must be a homosexual! Ha ha ha ha!

Then the other kid ran to the camp counsellor and told her I'd said a dirty word. Bullies are like that. But I digress.

One thing that never really made sense to me, from the first time I read it, was the definition of "homosexual" and "heterosexual." It seemed to imply a duality, that you were either one or the other. But I never was able to form a preference for boys or girls in particular. At first I figured it was because I was a kid, and that it would change when I grew up. But it never seemed to change, even as I matured. I'd get a crush on a girl and think, "This is it; I know who I am. Finally!" and then I'd find myself very attracted to a boy.

It wasn't until after college that I was able to deal with the fact that I just don't care one way or another about the sex of the person I'm attracted to. It's not one of the things that matters to me. On the other hand, if a person doesn't smile with their eyes, I can't imagine wanting to sleep with them.

There are a lot of misconceptions about bisexuality. The most common of those is that if you don't have both a male and a female partner, you would feel that you are "stifling" your sexuality, or living in the closet. I don't feel that way. I think I have a tendancy towards monogamy now that my life is so full. I have dated more than one person at once, and it's just too damned much work. I like having one partner and having free time to use for art projects, school, and The House. I'm sure there are some naturally polyamourous people out there who would feel that their sexuality was being stifled if they had to choose only one partner, but I'm guessing a lot of them are heterosexual.

Another misconception about bisexuality is that if you are bisexual, you can live as a heterosexual if you want. I didn't get to choose the sex of the person I fell in love with; that was not the way it happened. If Noel had been female, I would still be with him (um... her), as we would still have had a wedding. We'd quite possibly be packing up to move to Massachusetts right now.

Not only that, but even though I'm married, I'm still bisexual. Any time I mention that, you'd think I'd said I was intending to kill Noel and dump his body in the Berkeley marina. Nobody would think it was polite to imply that a heterosexual married person would eventually regret tying him- or herself down with only one partner for life, but people say things like that about bisexuals all the time: "Aren't you afraid she's going to want to have sex with women again someday?" That sort of thing. Good lord. I think I understood what I was saying when I made a vow of monogamy.

Being married to a man, I find myself in the unique position of being a stealth queer. Most people just assume I'm heterosexual -- which is fine; I understand the default is heterosexual and I don't think people should be required to consider all possible sexualities all the time. But because people assume I'm heterosexual, I get to hear things they say when they think they're with people just like them. It means that more often than most gay people, I have to speak up and address bigoted statements that were made to me with the assumption that I was a "safe" person to say such things to. It means that I can't let my appearance come out for me; I have to do it verbally, and I have to do it every time I feel that my silence implies consent or agreement. It's not easy to be bisexual and ethical.

That said, being bisexual has not been a huge problem for me. My family doesn't talk about sexuality, so we're cool there. I'm not flamboyantly one thing or another, so people tend to be able to ignore my sexuality, which is what I think most people want to do, anyway. I don't care who my neighbors, classmates, or coworkers like to have sex with as long as I don't have to see or hear them doing it. (I've never really gotten over this guy I worked with who was possibly one of the ugliest people I've ever met, and referred to sex with his girlfriend as "bumping uglies"; I always imagined the two of them bumping their faces together.)

I realize that I'm incredibly lucky. I live in a very tolerant part of the world. I have a partner who is supportive of my sexuality. I don't have to fear for my life or safety on a regular basis. And I'm free to be proud of who I am, without major repercussions. Happy Pride Month.

We took our houseguests down to the Monterey Bay Aquarium on Sunday, and I took a bunch of pictures, mostly of jellyfish. Here are some of them; the rest are on Life Through a Viewfinder.

I believe very strongly in the value of lasting marriage to society. So much so that I would not have considered marrrying somebody, even somebody I loved, without having that be a shared value. So it makes me unendlingly angry that people like Rush Limbaugh can say that gay marriage is destroying the meaning of marriage, then just decide one day that it's too hard to stay married
, and they need to divorce.

There are plenty of things that hurt marriage in today's society, but allowing more people to marry and making that more attractive than living together without marriage is not one of them.

I think I've decided why it is that I read the blogs of so many gay men I don't know. It's that they are about to speak about the world in a way that is similar to the way I think. Being gay gives a man an instant, credible sympathy with the way women are treated, because he's forced to deal with being feminized, and having a part of his personality devalued because it's not "masculine" enough.

It's hard to imagine most straight men I know writing something like this post by Hot Toddy:

If I actually could control my dreams, I would have more dreams about flying. I love when I can fly in my dreams.

The non-geeky straight guys I know would never be caught dead being so whimsical. The geeks would be so obsessed with whatever they geek out about (computers, cars, genetics, politics, you name it) that something so undirected would never occur to them. Not to mention that for most of them, it would simply never occur to them to sit around and talk about what they would dream about if they could dream about anything. And if they did, it would mostly be about who they would dream about having sex with.

This ability to be whimsical is one of the things I find entrancing about Noel. It's one of the reasons I think of him as the other half of my brain (the half that can play the piano without sounding like a murder is being committed). We can have the stupidest conversations on Earth without being embarassed about having a stupid conversation. If I could wish for anything for the world, it would be that there were more stupid conversations. And fewer people were ashamed of being silly.

Today while we were having our end-of-class potluck (this seems to be very popular in community college) for my speech class, one of my classmates asked me whether I was a Democrat or a Republican. I asked said I was neither, and then she asked me what political party I believed in. I told her none, and she seemed unable to grasp the concept.

I don't know why it seemed to bizarre to her that somebody would be reluctant to simply accept the policies of any one political party as gospel, without applying critical thinking to the process. But it was. In fact, it was so befuddling that we attracted quite a bit of attention, and soon I was surrounded by people asking me questions like, "How do you decide who to vote for?" or "How do you choose between two politicians?" These are all people who vote -- they all said they do, anyway. I don't know why it was so amazing that I choose my candidates and issues by reading the voting materials and researching the issues on the Internet. I mean, it doesn't seem like a lot of work to me, and it's all a lot easier now that I don't have to spend a couple nights at the library before the election.

When I explained that I felt that working that hard to be sure I really believed in my vote was my duty as a citizen, she said, as if she'd figured it out at last, "You don't have any children, do you?"

I'm still puzzling over that one.

Anyway, the class is over, I believe I got an A (apparently I was one of only 3 people in the class to get a perfect score on the OPEN BOOK test on Friday), and I've put in my transcript request so that the transcript will be sent off to Calpoly when grades come in next week. Now I have a few days off before the rest of my summer classes start (accounting, law, and economics).