In what appears to be the first ruling of its kind, a New York judge will allow a lesbian couple who married in Canada to sue for divorce.
Though New York does not allow same-sex marriages, a state trial court judge refused to dismiss a divorce and child custody suit brought by a woman, identified only as Beth R., against her former partner Donna M.
Donna M. had argued that her 2004 marriage should be invalid in New York because the state doesn’t allow same-sex marriage, but Supreme Court Justice Laura Drager found that the out-of-state marriage could still be recognized under New York law. Her ruling appears to be the first divorce case in New York from a same-sex marriage.
“What we’re seeing now is a judicial battle that’s going to be waged in [the] next few months,” said Arthur Leonard, who teaches a class on sexual orientation and the law at New York Law School. “People sometimes forget that divorce is part of marriage. People need a judicial process to untangle a relationship.”
The cynical part of me says that of course they’d grant a divorce; anything to get around allowing a gay marriage to be legally recognized in the United States. It doesn’t have to be recognized if it no longer exists, right? So hey, let’s eradicate it any way we can!
Hello, paranoid-cynical hogwash. While the thought is amusing to entertain…I don’t think so.
Back on planet earth, the reality is that while it may seem to place a negative spotlight on gay marriage to make a gay divorce so public, the ruling is actually a positive sign. Sometimes the avalanche towards equality starts with a single pebble, and often begins where we’d least expect it. Maybe we’ve got to reverse engineer this one: work backwards, starting with equality in ending a marriage instituted elsewhere, before working our way back towards finally finding equality in beginning that marriage to start with.
I don’t really have a way to close this, other than to make an announcement: I’m on hiatus until March 10th. I know that’s going to lose me some readers; some people will lose interest and never come back. That’s okay. It’s still something I need to do; I’m still dealing with balancing the job issues, and until I get rid of the Old, Horrible, Pain-in-the-Arse job and I’m no longer working full-time double duty with several part-time contracts on the side, I just can’t handle the time and effort involved in DR. It’s the one contract job I have that takes up the most of my time for the least returns, so when I start getting stressed from the workload, it’s the one that has to fall by the wayside temporarily.
In case you can’t tell, my heart hasn’t really been in it lately anyway. Too busy, distracted, and tired. I will try to do a comic for this coming Monday (March 3rd, why did I put the 7th before?), so that will continue to update as usual - and I’ll ask around the network to see if anyone wants to guest blog in my absence. Other than that, though…March 10th, once old-crappy-job is gone and I’m just handling new-shiny-writing-job and the side contracts. I’ll be back. I hope you will be, too.
Sorry I’m late today, guys. Conference calls are the bane of my existence; conference calls that demand voluntary agreement to an illegal invasion of privacy and sacrifice of confidential personal information just leave me steaming and ready to tear someone’s head off. But since I can’t talk about that here because 1. it’s not topical, 2. it would violate confidentiality, and 3. I have to hurry and go finish some work for my new job (which is creating its own difficulties that I can’t discuss due to being gagged by an NDA), instead we’re going to indulge in a little frivolity with the end goal of inviting you to participate (you people have been way too quiet lately) and distracting me from shanking a b*tch.
I’ve mentioned before that I probably identify as a Kinsey 5, meaning it would take a female version of Vin Diesel to turn my head towards the fairer sex. People jokingly ask who straight people would go gay for all the time, though, so I have to wonder: if you’re gay, who would you go straight for? (Or if you’re straight, the age-old question of who you’d go gay for. If you’re bi, just pick the three people you’d like to get the horizontal monkey on with the most.)
My top three women:
1. Michelle Rodriguez.
She’s tough, she’s fierce, she’s tight, and she’s gorgeous. She plays hard, gritty characters rather well, with a bit of a wild side and definite hard-as-nails core. I have no idea what she’s like outside of the characters she’s often typecast as in various action flicks (The Fast and the Furious, Resident Evil, the atrocity of Bloodrayne that not even she could salvage with that horribly faked accent)…but that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy looking.
2. Milla Jovovich.
I’m not sure what it is about Milla that gets me. Maybe it’s because she has the same air that Michelle Rodriguez does, only packed into a more graceful, elegant package: that mixture of ferocity and delicacy with a sharp dash of playfulness. (It probably helps that she looks like a young man sometimes and I love androgyny, although I find her beautiful in a way that transcends gender. Oddly, I didn’t like her when I saw her as Leeloo in The Fifth Element (I was paying more attention to Bruce Willis anyway), but after the Resident Evil films and a few others, I’d gladly switch teams if Milla offered - even if her eyes creep me out a little.
Not…that she’d even give me a second glance. But a boy can dream, can’t he?
3. Lucy…no…um…Drew…no…er…oh, damn. I really don’t have a third; I guess those two ladies are it for me. Anyone got any suggestions for a third?
This is what we’re up against, people. This is what we face if we don’t keep fighting not to let people impose their phobias and their bigotries on the important aspects of our lives. Pond had to spend those long hours before death without her family; her partner and her children were deprived of the time needed to say goodbye and let go.
I don’t want that to be me one day. I don’t want it to be my friends, or my partner. I don’t want it to be you. I don’t want it to be anyone, suffering that in an environment that’s supposed to be a place to nurture and heal - where if the body can’t be healed, one at least tries to ease the pain of those dealing with the loss.
(Knoxville, Tennessee) A Tennessee man who once was a Big Brother contestant is seeking $4-million in damages after his young daughter opened a mailing containing gay pornography.
Kent Blackwelder, who appeared in Big Brother 2″ in 2001 and now runs a sandwich shop, has filed a federal lawsuit against Delaware-based Specialty Publications which promotes adult gay material.
The lawsuit claims that the mailing was “unsolicited” and that his 12-year old daughter opened the envelope that said on the outside “free DVD” thinking it was from the Disney Corp.
Instead, the envelope contained the DVD “Titan Men’s Farm Fresh,” and promotional material for a gay adult magazine. “[His daughter], being a curious child and thinking the free DVD offer was for a Disney movie, opened the envelope at which time she was horribly shocked to see numerous sexually explicit photographs of completely nude males,” the lawsuit claims.
“She ran to her father to show him what she had found, and he likewise was shocked, disgusted and enraged.”
The lawsuit accuses Specialty Publications of inflicting extreme emotional distress on both the 12-year old and Blackwelder.
The suit alleges the company flagrantly violated federal law governing the mailing of sexually oriented advertisements.
“As a result of the negligence of Specialty Publications, the [Blackwelders] have sustained great pain of body and mind and emotional stress, including shock, horror, humiliation and embarrassment as well as anxiety,” according to the lawsuit.
Oh, please. Pain of body and mind? Emotional distress?
I’ve got a news flash for you, buddy. Your daughter has probably already seen gay porn. Your daughter, if she’s anything like most of the pre-teen girls I know (admittedly few at this point, would be a little odd for a man my age…), avidly hunts for gay porn, discusses it with her friends, maybe even writes or draws a little of it herself. In fact, young girls of this generation seem to be practically obsessed with gay porn, to levels I don’t quite understand. They imagine pairings in every TV show they watch, get starry-eyed over the cute gay boys at their schools, and could probably teach you a few words in Japanese whose meanings would absolutely horrify you.
You apparently haven’t learned something about kids: Kids are horny little monsters, and even when they’re too young for that, they’re horribly curious about the birds and the bees just because you deny them knowledge and treat them as if they’ll be sullied by simple biological facts regarding Tab A, Slot B, and alternate insertions in Slot C. The more taboo you make sex of any kind, gay or straight, seem…the more they’re going to want to know about it, and the more they’ll giggle about it behind their hands.
So trust me, I doubt your daughter suffered $4,000,000 worth of trauma. She was probably surprised, maybe even a little curious, but a startled reaction of “oh my god, Daddy, those men are boinking!” doesn’t constitute emotional distress. Stop misusing terms like emotional distress, shock, or horror just to make yourself or your kid sound like a delicate, special little flower, wilting and fragile. Emotional distress is what Vietnam vets suffer. Shock is what ensues after severe injury causes temporary cognitive shutdown while the body deals with the pain. Horror is what happens when a pissed-off fag sick of idiotic lawsuits comes after you with a chainsaw and you narrowly escape with four of your fingers intact - and not the collective four you’ll need to wank off to your own glorious pity party, either. You want emotional distress? I’ve got your emotional distress right here, buddy.
Or maybe you’re suing not for your daughter’s emotional distress, but your own wounded ego. Maybe you’re a typical insecure straight man who flips the second anyone questions his sexuality. Oh dear; now the neighbors might think you’re gay. Now your daughter might think you’re gay! Swing those balls around like a sledgehammer, Mr. Man, and assert your heterosexuality! How much is enough to make people believe you’re straight? Not nearly as much as it would cost to literally make you straight, I think. You know what Hooper X said; “Deny, deny, deny…”
Maybe you ordered that little sampler for yourself. Wouldn’t that be amusing. Either way, it’s pretty obvious that this is the story of a washed-up starlet wannabe hoping to make another grab for the limelight, and pocket a little cash while he’s at it.
Jesus flippin’ Christ doing the Charleston on a trampoline.
Gather now, unbelievers, for I shall tell you a tale of a power older than the deepest roots of human culture, a force of nature born of the beasts that we claim to have risen above - an instinct so primal, so raw, that it overpowers all else and summons the very earth to quiver before its almighty and terrifying grace.
Homosexuality.
You think you know divinity? You think you know truth? Blasphemers. Weak pawns following a false god. Hearken, then to the truth that even heathens feel burning in the very core of their damned souls: the truth subscribed to by men of all faith, men of Christian and Muslim roots and more, men of all walks of life united, despite their differences, in this belief.
Today is a day for humor, sweetnesses. Adri has had a bad few days and is not in the mood to rant, rave, spout doom and gloom, and otherwise froth over the ills of society, culture, politics, and the pathetic farce that is our upcoming presidential election. So today, kids, we are going to talk about a little Texas TMI that will probably make every woman, gay or straight, and quite a few gay guys breathe a heavy sigh of relief.
You see, my little petroleum-based lubrication products of love, up until very recently it has been illegal to sell sex toys in the state of Texas. It has also been illegal to carry more than six on your person, as carrying more than six is considered intent to distribute. Should the police raid the bamboo storage cube in my bedroom, they would likely find enough evidence to have me carted off to jail and then dealt a hefty fine probably worth ten times the value of the items confiscated as exhibits A through Z.
Now that you know a little too much about me, though, perhaps you wonder: how do people in the state of Texas obtain sex toys? One way is to order online. Another is to visit a variety of “education” shops, as the lovely Dildo Diaries so wonderfully demonstrate:
If you’re done giggling yourself silly, you may be asking yourself, “Where’s he going with this? Oh, sure, it’s a little bit of amusing trivia about the state that, not surprisingly, spawned George W. Bush, but where’s the news? What’s his point?”
(Mount Laurel, New Jersey) A commission established to study same-sex civil unions in New Jersey has found in its first report that civil unions create a “second-class status” for gay couples, rather than giving them equality.
The report stops short of recommending that the state allow gay marriage. But it does find that gay couples in Massachusetts, the only state that now allows same-sex marriage, do not experience some of the legal complications that those in New Jersey do.
The Associated Press obtained a copy of the initial report, which was scheduled to be made public Tuesday, the first anniversary of the state’s first civil unions.
State lawmakers made New Jersey the third state to offer civil unions with a law adopted in 2006 in reaction to a state Supreme Court ruling that year that found gay couples were entitled to the same legal protections as married couples.
The civil union law sought to give gay couples those benefits, but not the title of marriage. As a part of the same law, the review commission was created to look into whether it was working.
Let’s see. Create a hastily-patched together substitute law that is supposed to act as a panacea - or at least a pacifier - so that you can try to look proactive, all the while waving in front of gay couples, “Nah-nah, we still found away around letting you get married, so even if we’ve given you almost everything you want, we’re still better!”…
…and then you’re surprised that it fails?
Next, you’re going to tell me that water is wet.
No, really?
One, any legislation made in such haste, especially one meant to affect so many areas of life, is going to have a few little problems…and some major screwups. Complications? In the United States legal system? Why, fiddle-dee-dee, said Scarlett!
Two, separate-but-equal does not work. It has never worked. It didn’t work in the days of segregation, and it doesn’t work now. Creating a separation based on human characteristics then and there invalidates the idea of equality, because if things were truly equal then the distinction would be unnecessary.
Either drop the farce and make separation of church and state a reality by making marriage a solely religious institution - and a matter of choice - while enforcing civil unions for all, or allow fully legalized gay marriage and recognize the equality of gay citizens. Don’t try to pull that “separate but equal” BS. You’re not fooling anyone, not even yourselves. So stop wasting taxpayer money to pat yourselves on the back for being “proactive”. You’re not.
Oh, and here’s a cluebat: if you need a commission in order to tell you if something is working or not, it’s not working.
Stereotypes, prejudices, and assumptions are a dime a dozen - but in cases like that of Lawrence King, they can be quite costly. King, aged 15, was shot Tuesday by one of his classmates while at school in Southern California. His shooter, aged 14, has been charged with a hate crime for undisclosed reasons - but other students say that King was rumored to be gay, and there was bad blood between the two students.
Prosecutors on Thursday charged a 14-year-old boy with attempted murder and said he committed a hate crime in the classroom shooting of an eighth-grader who was declared brain dead.
Prosecutors would not say why they filed a hate-crime enhancement with the attempted murder count, but [...] ”It is inevitable that this is going to become a murder case,” Ventura County prosecutor Maeve Fox said.
King was shot in the head Tuesday morning during a class at E.O. Green Junior High in Oxnard, police said. More than 20 other students were in the room at the time. [...] Oxnard police have not specified a motive but said there appeared to be a personal dispute between the two.
King sometimes came to school wearing makeup and high heels, eighth-grader Nicholas Cortez, 14, told The Associated Press.
Another eighth-grader, Michael Sweeney, said King’s appearance was ”freaking the guys out,” the Los Angeles Times reported Thursday.
”He would come to school in high-heeled boots, makeup, jewelry and painted nails — the whole thing,” Sweeney told the Times.
King was pronounced brain dead at St. John’s Regional Medical Center on Wednesday, said Craig Stevens, senior deputy medical examiner in Ventura County. Doctors planned to remove some of his organs for donation Thursday, Stevens said.
[...]Lawrence King had been under the care of the county foster care system and lived at Casa Pacifica, a nearby center for abused and neglected children, said Steve Elson, the facility’s chief executive.
What I see, when I look beyond the obvious issue implied by the hate crime and the students’ accounts of King’s behavior, is a troubled young boy whose cry for attention got him the wrong kind of attention. Even if his family is in charge of the disposition of his vegetative body…they obviously weren’t providing the home environment he needed, if he was living in a foster care center for abused and neglected children. King’s extravagant behavior likely wasn’t a sign of gay pride, but a desperate need to make someone pay attention to him, realize something was wrong, and offer the nurturing he needed and wasn’t getting. He may not even have been gay, though I won’t rule out the possibility that he was; if he wasn’t, he wouldn’t be the first child to claim to be gay just to feel as if they were somehow special, set apart, and different from the people who made their lives miserable.
One can’t expect other children to possess the insight or maturity to recognize such behavior for what it is - but children are among the cruelest perpetrators of stereotypes at all, and claims that King was “freaking the guys out” likely led to this tragic event. Children see only that someone is behaving in a way different from the status quo, and don’t possess the impulse control to restrain their reactions.
However, fourteen is definitely old enough to know that violence, especially fatal violence, is not the appropriate way to express one’s prejudices. Prejudices may be a dime a dozen, but lives aren’t. There are over six billion lives on this planet, and yet every last one has invaluable worth to at least one person, even if it’s only the person in possession of it. King’s assailant can never repay the life that was lost; a young life wasted serving a sentence in jail for murder will not bring back the dead.
I’ve never cared much for Valentine’s Day. It’s a day of obligations and expectations; a day that destroys more relationships than it heals. It’s pretentious, it’s pointless, it’s capitalist, and the only time it’s ever held any charm was during childhood, when it was a novel day of sweethearts and construction paper cutouts that only resembled hearts in the furthest stretch of the innocent imagination. Valentine’s Day is a morass of stereotypes, one made even more uncomfortable by the fact that many gay people don’t know where we fit in the typical heterosexual stereotype of romance promoted on this day of Romeos and Juliets and sprays of already-wilting roses.
It’s a day of loneliness, too, a reminder to singles that we are alone, and should somehow feel inadequate for it no matter how content we are with our single state on every other day of the year. It’s no different for gay singles; perhaps even sharper, for it’s that much harder for us to find a match in such a limited and secretive dating pool, that much harder to find another wooden man or woman to stand in the right spot and take up space just to say there’s someone on our arms. Our love lives are rarely simple, and I for one have never appreciated a reminder of that.
Nor have I ever enjoyed a Valentine’s Day, even when in a committed relationship.
Perhaps it was just bad luck, perhaps it was bad men. Perhaps it was my own fault, for so cynically and openly denouncing the day while secretly wishing that for once, someone would lighten my jaded bitterness with just a touch of romance, a touch of sweetness. A reason to think that perhaps the day wasn’t such a waste, a little flutter to the heart and hitch to the breath to remind me that I still know how to fall in love, still know how to feel that rush of warmth that only that special someone can inspire.
I never thought I’d get that feeling not from a lover, but from a friend.
I’ve never met him, although I’ve promised him a coffee date when I finally make the move to Chicago. I recognize his face only from photographs, and yet I know his voice better than I know my own. I can tell when he’s smiling just from a change in inflection, tell when he’s sad from a moment’s hesitant pause; he follows the shifts in my moods and often knows what I’m thinking before I can even find words to articulate it. I finish his sentences, and he finishes mine. He makes me laugh until I lose my voice and can’t choke out a single sound more, then turns around and engages my intellect in hours of debate. I tell him I hate him. He knows I don’t mean it.
And he knows, somehow, all the right things to do to make me smile and forget just how much I hate Valentine’s Day.
My cameraphone can’t really do them justice; I’m likely lucky the camera wasn’t trained on me and capturing my blushing, embarrassingly excited reaction when I answered the door to a man with a delivery box full of flowers. I think my heart skipped a few beats when I opened the box, and I spent long minutes carefully unwrapping them, settling them in the vase, and arranging them with the most idiotic grin on my face. Even now, looking up and seeing them standing alone atop my newly-cleared dresser, I can’t stop smiling. It’s not the sort of thing I’d have expected from a friend I’ve never met and never would have met if not for this blog, when men that I’ve had intimate physical and emotional relationships with would never bother.
It’s made even sweeter by the fact that he wants nothing more in exchange save for my company and conversation. He did it just because he could, just because he wanted to, and just because underneath that bastardly veneer, he’s terribly, tooth-rottingly sweet.
Thank you, Hikaru, for reminding me that there are still normal, decent guys out there, even if you pretend to be otherwise. Thank you for reminding me that Valentine’s Day isn’t all so bad…
…and thank you for being my friend.
Happy Valentine’s Day.
Now let’s just hope you don’t turn out to be a creepy axe murderer.
Okay, I’ve been saving this for a day when I was too brain-dead to write anything substantive, and today definitely fits that bill. You don’t want to know how late I was up last night working, but the timestamps on the cracked-out commentfest to yesterday’s post should give you an idea. A while ago Sandra over at Globally Green Living tagged me with a meme (aren’t we just the little scions of journalistic integrity?), something about posting seven fascinating things you may or may not know about me.
Er. I’m not good at being fascinating, but here’s me being a good little memesheep and posting seven things anyway.
1. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a neurologist. No, seriously. I was fascinated by the human brain, loved the term medulla oblongata, and thought I’d spend the rest of my life researching synaptic behavior. That was before I got sidetracked by a passion for jet propulsion and weeks spent studying breakdowns of jet engine parts and the progression of jet engine technology over decades. What? I was a dorky kid.
2. It’s not unlikely to find me talking to myself like a crazy street corner prophet while in the grocery store, walking down the street, or even cleaning the kitchen. This includes heated back-and-forth conversations muttered under my breath. It’s not as crazy as it sounds, and it generally only happens when I’m in the middle of working on a story. I often work out dialogue as I’m doing other things away from the computer, and I tend to mutter the speech of the various characters in a conversation to myself while working out natural-sounding dialogue…complete with mimicking their accents. (Sihaya, stop imagining me doing Sujit’s voice.)
3. I refuse to eat anything that comes from a pig. …except bacon and pepperoni. No idea why; I just hate pork and all pork-related products. ~shudders~ Ham makes me gag.
4. I can curse in fourteen different languages. Don’t ask for a demonstration. Cyrillic characters don’t carry over well in browsers anyway, and you can be damned sure I’d pick Russian; the curses are always strange, creative, and the language just sounds so deliciously vulgar. (Although Greek isn’t much better; the weird things they come up with as insults…)
5. Even though I’m almost 28 years old, I cannot sleep at night if I watch a scary movie just before bed. Which is disgusting, considering that in my cynicism I don’t believe in ghost, monsters, spooks, and various other things supernatural. It doesn’t change that I have a hyperactive imagination and just the right sort of battiness, peculiar to writers, that enables me to convince myself that yes, that lump under the covers really is the creepy chick from The Grudge rather than just my cat. Or my feet. I know, I need to grow the hell up and stop pulling the “I’m a speshul writerly snowflake with a speshul imagination!” card. Laurell K. Hamilton, I am not. (Gods, I hope I don’t write that badly.)
6. Despite the vituperative way that I express myself, my overall jaded nature, and a heaping ton of bitterness, I’m actually a much happier person than most people think. I may have certain stark beliefs and a rather coldly pragmatic outlook on life, and have no qualms about deadpanning a scathing retort to someone’s overly-chirpy syrupyness…but on a day-to-day basis, I’m generally cheerful, silly, playful, prone to laughing easily and smiling often. I still don’t talk much out loud if I can get away with it (shut up Hikaru, I know we’re over 9,000 minutes), but even when worked to the bone I’m too busy slogging towards the finish to let myself be unhappy. I’m still a grouch, but I’m a happy grouch. Hush. It works, somehow.
7. And, just to be a little vulgar…I am terrified of black men’s cocks. No, it’s not the purported size; nor is it a race thing. It had better not be; I’m part African-American (wholly, if you listen to the state of Louisiana and the idiotic Napoleonic code), and there are plenty of black men that I find unbearably attractive (Will Smith, Taye Diggs, one of my ex-boyfriends, this boy Jason Thomas that I had a completely lovelorn crush on in high school, Usher as long as he’s dancing and not trying to act)…as long as they keep their jockeys on. It’s the color. The penis is not a particularly attractively-hued thing no matter the ethnicity/skin tone of the male mammalian sporting it; I’m not even pretending that mine is the prettiest thing out there. But that dark, purple-brown, muddied slickness of African-American cock just frightens me silly, and I refuse to touch it unless the lights are out or my eyes are closed.
That’s it. I’m supposed to tag seven more people (half of whom have probably done this already), so I tag…um…
And…um…um…oh, to hell with it. I’m tagging all of you. Post your seven things in the comments, tagging optional (who are you going to tag around here, anyway?). I’m going to take a nap, then get back to work.
First they call us a threat to peace. Then they call us plague rats. Now we have devolved into something more simple, and yet so much more evocative; now we are the most base and vile thing of all, an essence, an embodiment, a raw and filthy thing that resides at humanity’s core.
We are evil, and so is any gay couple who wishes to raise a child.
A proponent of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage in Iowa says legalizing same-sex unions here would be “evil.” Iowa Family Policy Center president Chuck Hurley says children will suffer if gay couples are allowed to marry.
“From our perspective, it is evil to intentionally create a home where a child would be deprived of a mother or of a father. That is an evil act,” Hurley says. “That is a self-centered act that we already know…on average that child is going to do worse than if he or she had a mom and a dad.”
Hurley points to a study published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1993 that found children from broken homes fare far worse in life than those who came from a two-parent home. “I think it’s evil to experiment on children and intentionally…by law create households that don’t have a father or that don’t have a mother,” Hurley says. “Yes, I do believe this is a battle between good and evil.”
So now we are evil and a home without a binary-gender parental system is now a broken one - even if there are two nurturing parents, even if the opposite-sex parent would have been unfit, abusive, and/or dismissive. I don’t think this idiot quite understands the definition of a broken home. I come from a broken home, one that was never whole to begin with. My life began broken, and I bloody well fixed it with little to no help from dysfunctional and somewhat mental parents. A home with two loving, stable parents, regardless of their gender, is not broken - and it is certainly not evil.
I’m going to tell you a story. I’m going to tell you the story of a little boy, and the young man that he called “Daddy” long before he called him “big brother.”
In late 2002, I walked out of my mother’s house and out of her life, after a stormy altercation that had been building in the brief two months after college while I looked for a job in Louisiana’s sinkhole of a job market. Just as well, since she kicked me out. It was like a bad breakup; we both claim that we dumped the other. Either way, I said the most satisfying words of my life to her for the first time ever, packed up as many of my things as I could, and stood out in the driveway until well after dark until my father could find a free moment to drive the forty-odd miles between my mother’s house and his.
That day began the only period in my life when I’ve ever lived with my father, or even spent more than twenty-four hours under the same roof as him. I wasn’t looking forward to it. My stepmother and I don’t get along; I think she’s a batty, brain-dead twat with a mean streak that makes me look as sugary-sweet as Strawberry frickin’ Shortcake. But there was one bright point: I’d get to spend more than a day or two at a time with my little brother.
That was the only thing that made the next six months worth it.
Our father was constantly busy, struggling to support his family while my stepmother sat on her ever-widening arse and surfed the home shopping channel while making cooing, syrupy baby-talk that made me want to rip my hair out. She didn’t look after my little brother, and our father couldn’t when he was worn ragged and barely able to manage the time needed after work to show my brother some affection and a little discipline. The boy ran wild, wouldn’t do a thing his mother said, talked back to both his parents, and lived like a little Bohemian monkey. He was four years old when I moved in, and he couldn’t even say his alphabet - something that utterly appalled me, especially since I’d taught myself to read by age two and a half. The Pokey Little Puppy; I still know the words by heart.
So that’s where we started.
And for six months, I became my brother’s other parent. Not his mother; not the woman in the traditional relationship of husband and wife. Me. A man. A gay man.
For six months, my little brother had two fathers.
And in that six months, he learned to mind his manners. He learned, after long conversations with me about responsibility and the value of the things our father bought for him, why he needed to clean his room and take care of his video games and toys. He learned his alphabet and his numbers, and soon he was reading The Pokey Little Puppy to me. He said please, and thank you. If I asked him to do something, he did it - and if he did something wrong, he apologized for it. Never once did I have to yell at him, nor did I tolerate his mother’s screaming fits or the hand she occasionally raised to hit him. Never once did I have to do anything other than express disappointment and calmly, quietly explain to him why what he did was wrong; he quickly scrambled to mend his ways and do whatever it took to please me.
Every night I’d put him to bed and read him a story; every night I’d leave my bedroom door unlatched, because I knew within thirty minutes he’d come creeping in to snuggle up next to me, twine his fingers in the long braid of my hair, and fall asleep. He’d murmur “goodnight, Daddy.” Our father was Papa, to both of us. I was Daddy, for a very long time.
His mother he called by name, and never with an ounce of respect. She’d done nothing to earn it, not when it took an interloper in the household to undo the damage that her negligence had done to that child.
Was I a perfect parent to my little brother? No. Not even close. There were times when he frustrated me; there were times when I just had to tell him to go away and leave me alone for a little while. I don’t like children; I do like my alone time. There were days when I couldn’t stand always having him clinging to me; there were also days when he just couldn’t grasp something and it made me snarl in irritation before I bit my tongue and calmed down. I even cursed in front of him a few times; I have a foul mouth, and things slip out in casual conversation without the slightest hint of venom behind them. But was anything that I did evil?
No. And I refuse to listen to anyone who says that it was.
You can’t call a child raised by two men or two women a child from a broken home. You can’t call any nurturing environment a broken home, and you cannot automatically assign labels of “good” and “evil” simply by making them synonymous with “traditional” and “nontraditional”.
And you cannot use children to support your bigotry.
Call me evil. Tell me that I bear the mark of the devil, and then praise that woman who would dare to lay a hand on my flesh and blood in anger. Tell me that I am filthy, unclean and corrupt, for protecting and nurturing that child, for balancing my father’s workload and assisting as a second parent, for filling the role that my stepmother would not. Tell me that hell will open its gates before me and welcome me with relish for those quiet, stolen moments in which that boy felt happiness and peace, curled trustingly in his brother’s arms.
Tell me that the devil will take me for teaching a boy to behave like a human being, and offering him shelter that otherwise would have been denied.
I’ll only smile. Let hell take me. Even if I seem to have misplaced my 666, let the devil have his way with me, and let your god condemn me as evil. Call down your angels, and speak your verses from your sacred book. Exorcise me. Banish me. Damn me, in your ignorance.
It won’t change that for those six months when I was known as “Daddy”, I gave a child the love and care that he needed, and helped build the foundations for him to grow.
If that is evil…then forgive me not, my Father, for proudly have I sinned.
Last night, while finishing out a shift on Old!Job, my friend and coworker Tere (she of the vulgar humor and strange euphemisms for the vahooter) sent me a pretty nifty link running on Colorado’s Channel 9 News. The story is about a 3rd-grader who just may be the youngest known transgender that…well, that I can think of off the top of my head. The boy has recently announced that he - now she - will be returning her home school not as a boy, but as a girl. She will wear dresses rather than pants, and ask to be called by a female name and use female pronouns.
Tere was a little concerned, which is understandable; she has a newborn and a two-year-old, and was looking at it from the perspective of a mother trying to explain to her children why one of their classmates might choose to follow such a path at an age when they may be too young to comprehend it. She even said she was worried that her own children might be prompted to follow their classmate’s example, were they old enough to attend school with her.
I found it hard to share her concerns, because I think it’s fuckin’ awesome.
In all truth, I think the child’s decision is a phase. He/she is too young to really be sure and it’s hard to make a decision like that until the hormones start to froth, seethe, and do all those other nifty little things that turn you into a sea of sex-driven stupidity for the rest of your life. What I think is fuckin’ awesome is the reaction of the school district, teachers, the child’s parents, and the parents of the other students. For them to be so openly accepting, accommodating, and willing to educate themselves and each other is absolutely amazing, and it ended my night with a smile.
It’s about damned time we saw something a little uplifting on the GBLTQ front.
It’s been a while since newsmongers have knocked on the Matos-McGreevey doorstep, but it looks like Dinah’s at it again; she’s now demanding that the gay partner of former husband (and former New Jersey governor) disclose his assets as well, as part of their divorce settlement. I suppose now she expects a man who’s wholly unrelated to her to help her “live a lifestyle closer to that of New Jersey’s first lady”. (…I still can’t believe the pretentious snit said that.) Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, indeed. It seems she’s determined to drag down everyone she can in connection to this, and make sure that both men pay for one man’s mistake.
The last time I caught them in the news, I actually ended up in a rather long phone conversation with my mother about this; I was still outraged that Matos-McGreevey was more interested in attaining revenge through a smear campaign while using the judicial system to take McGreevey for all he was worth than she was in safeguarding the health and well-being of their daughter, Josephine. What McGreevey did was hurtful, yes, and if he knew he was gay he never should have married her. There’s no question that he was in the wrong there, but it was an unfortunate situation for both of them (and I can’t blame McGreevey for the fact that social stigma made him feel as if he couldn’t be openly gay while running for office) and in the end she could have handled the situation with more class, kept their private business private , and done her best to look after their daughter rather than vindicate herself.
My mother surprised me after that spiel by saying that in that situation, she would do the exact same thing.
She then went on a scornful tirade about men in general before starting on gay men in specific; I’m not going to detail it, as my mother is of the erroneous camp who think “feminist” equates with “ball-crusher” and the only thing more offensive to her than a chauvinistic straight man is a gay man who dares not to validate her through attraction to her overwhelming aura of femininity. Suffice to say apparently McGreevey threatened Matos-McGreevey’s womanhood, and that is a crime deserving of any punishment that woman, the state, and the gods may mete out.
Am I just not getting this? I don’t think I’m particularly more civilized than either Matos-McGreevey or my mother; in fact, I’m a rude, caustic, shameless, utterly Bohemian savage, and yet I’m still better-behaved in such situations than they seem to be.
If I had a long-term partner or husband who suddenly announced that he was straight and was leaving me for a woman, I’d be upset, yes. I’d be angry. I’d likely throw things at his head. But I’d do it all in private, and if there was a divorce, I’d just want to make sure that our individual assets were properly separated before letting him go on his merry way while I focused not on destroying his life, but on putting mine back together and making sure it continued smoothly in his absence. No man should ever be so crucial to your life that his departure shatters it to the point where you have to gouge him mercilessly to try to fill in the gaps.
Had we adopted a child (me? As a father? I’d scar the poor thing for life) and the judge granted me custody, you can be damned sure I’d make sure that my former partner had at least partial custody; he signed the adoption papers, too, and would have just as much of a right to see our child. Yes, I would want child support - but only equal to half the amount required to look after the child, and not the amount required to look after me. That would mean half the child’s food, clothing, medical expenses, crucial necessities, college tuition - and only a quarter the monthly rent/mortgage/whatever. Half the living space would be for me, and therefore my responsibility. Half would be for the child, and split between the two parents.
To me that’s just a sensible approach. Relationships combust all the time, whether there’s a wedding ring involved or not. One partner’s confessed sexuality is just another of a long list of reasons that cause explosive separations: infidelity, drug abuse, spousal abuse, alcoholism, the list goes on. Whatever damage was done in that time, whether emotional or physical…money won’t heal it; revenge will only leave the wounds to fester without closing. All of the ugliness that goes into that does more harm to the bitter party than to their target, and when it’s over, will leave them distinctly unsatisfied.
I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: have a little class, Dinah. Choose to be the better person and behave that way, rather than loudly proclaiming why your ex-husband is worse.
This morning I read an article in the Windy City Times that starts off asking: why not a gay president? Rather than explore the issue further, though, it only uses the question to segue into a “been there, done that” discussion of the many theories that President Lincoln was gay, as well as mentioning possibilities of a few other prominent political figures who buried their sexuality under the Oval Office’s horridly-patterned rug.
What’s past is past, though, and I’d like to ask: why not an openly gay president, right here, right now?
It may surprise you to find out that I’m not exactly in favor of a gay president. I might be in twenty years, depending on the political and social climate of the United States, but at this point in time it would be a complete and total disaster. Assuming the man or woman even managed to make it through the election, the very fact of their sexuality would divide the country more thoroughly than the nastiness that followed the Bush/Gore fiasco in Florida. Angry anti-gay proponents would erupt into a violent uproar - and that violent uproar might even translate into real violence towards local gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgenders. The scrutiny that we already receive for trying to live as equals would redouble, along with the hostility involved. Even if he (or she) never focused on gay rights, there would be constant accusations from conservatives of “pushing the gay agenda”.
And, unfortunately, they might be right. Depending on if they were fair and balanced or not, a gay president might just ignore other, more pressing issues to try to force gay rights issues through Congress. We need a good bootheel shoving some things in there, but there are problems in this country more pressing than whether or not we get our tax breaks for being married. Drugs, gang violence, political corruption, that pesky little war over across the sea… I would honestly worry that those issues would be ignored in favor of granting sweeping protections to the GBLTQ community. If I had to choose being able to marry and ending the war in Iraq…which do you think I’d pick?
The problem is that a gay president wouldn’t be able to please anyone, no matter what he/she did. (Not that that’s much different from a straight president, but still…) Focus on gay rights, and the conservative half of the country will accuse him/her of ignoring crucial issues to push an “immoral” homosexual agenda. Ignore gay rights for the sake of diplomacy, and the GBLTQ community and our supporters will accuse him/her of being a traitor or worse. Try to find a fair and even balance between both, and everyone will call the improbable gay president a floundering buffoon who can’t focus on a single issue.
The truth is that we as a nation aren’t ready for a gay president, although at some point in the near future we need one. We are and always will be a nation divided; that’s part of the foundation of this country, that people of such diverse beliefs can coexist under a single unified government. But our government is losing its ability to act in coalition with itself, our politics foster prejudice, and our policies are self-destructive. Right now anything that further fosters the divisions between the various factions of our populace would be disastrous.
The very fact that it would never happen in this day and age is proof enough that we aren’t ready. For a gay candidate to win, he or she would have to be so stunningly perfect in every way that people would adore him or her, sexuality notwithstanding. I’d like to see that happen, but it won’t. We aren’t a people who will let a politician’s personal life rest while considering their politics.
The day that an openly gay candidate actually has a chance at winning is the day that we know we’ve progressed.
Not updating today, kids. Sorry. I still adore you; you’re still my candy-coated 9-volt vibrators of love. (…wait, candy-coated, maybe that shouldn’t be…wouldn’t that cause…ew, nevermind.) You’re going to have to be patient with me until about March 10th or so; right now I’m working double-duty on crap for Old!Job and writing/editing for New!Job, along with this job and a few others. 60-70 hour work weeks are not fun and make for a pissy, snarly Adri. I will be updating every weekday from this point out, but I can’t promise it’ll be in the mornings as I’ll have to write when I have time and when I can think of something to say.
Right now, honestly, I can’t think of anything to say. I wanted to talk about the fact that a monument is finally being built to honor gays who suffered under the Nazi regime, and kept trying to work up a decent post…but I’m a little too scatterbrained trying to get my sh*t together for New!Job and work out how I’m going to handle this to even think of anything to say. We can count today as a day off…or even as a moment of silence for those honored for their suffering.
…stop looking at me like that. I’m going grey, I tell you, grey!
