That’s right, today marks one year that I’ve been writing for 451 Press - ever since this site was called “Pride and Opinions” (not my idea) until I said “oh hell no” and asked The Powers That Be at 451 Press to change the site name (even if they rather botched my intent, but no, we’re not going to go there…) It’s been fun, for the most part. Everything has its rocky points, and sometimes it was a pain in the arse, but I can’t ever really say it wasn’t worth it. Sure, it’s a lot of work for very little money, but I never did this for the money. I did this because I wanted to make a career out of something I love - writing - and I was happy to find even a small job that would let me do that. Since then I’ve moved on to much bigger things and become a full-time writer, but Darkside Rainbow is still something that I enjoy and that I’ll keep doing for as long as I can find something to say. In the past year the reader base here has grown; not by leaps and bounds, maybe, but by some pretty decent-sized bunny hops. Thanks to everyone who dropped by and decided to stick around.
Well. Sap out of the way, you’ll have to pardon that I didn’t bother hand-drawing this one. For some reason the computer is refusing to detect the pressure sensitivity on my old tablet (again, even after reinstalling the drivers and multiple reboots), and as far as the Cintiq…well, it’s currently a $1,000 paperweight sitting on the desk in my office while I wait for Wacom to “overnight” me a replacement converter box so we can test and see if that’s the faulty part. (They’ve been “overnighting” it since last bloody effin’ Tuesday, while I’ve been stuck waiting at home and unable to go to the library or bookstore to work - and although I keep asking them for the FedEx tracking number so I know what day it’ll come, they keep fencing around actually giving it to me. Adri is not happy.) Hopefully by next week the Cintiq will be working, and I’ll see about hand-drawing another comic.
…well, hand-drawing on screen.
Oh, you know what I mean.
Well, I’m out of things to say, so…see you tomorrow.
Out of necessity caused by the wife’s inability to conceive due to medical issues, the infant was conceived through artificial insemination and will be carried to term inside the husband’s womb.
I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that many of my fellow 451 Press-ers were shocked, disconcerted, or downright confused; one even said that the child should never know that her father gave birth to her that way, as it might confuse her - a stance I disagree with vehemently, although I respect the writer enough to know that she has valid reasons for that opinion, and respect her right to that opinion.
To me, this didn’t seem so odd - but then again, I’m biased. 60% of my extended circle of acquaintances and a couple of my closer friends are transmen or transwomen, so I’m quite used to the gender-bending oddities that happen when their gender identities clash with their birth anatomy. I’ve had to be the “wing man” escorting a transguy into the men’s bathroom for the first time so he wouldn’t get nervous and run, and to warn him if anyone came in who might notice that the feet associated with the tinkling in the stall were turned in the opposite direction. I even know a gay transman who stopped his hormones so he could conceive a child by his biologically male partner, so they could have a baby that was part of both of them. It didn’t phase me. Hell, I even sent him to a trans-friendly physician; my doctor works at the local GBLTQ clinic and is pretty open to most things, so I figured he wouldn’t have a problem with dealing with a pregnant transman. I was right. And my friend was lucky.
This young man and his wife, however, have had to deal with hell.
Doctors have discriminated against us, turning us away due to their religious beliefs. Health care professionals have refused to call me by a male pronoun or recognize Nancy as my wife. Receptionists have laughed at us. Friends and family have been unsupportive; most of Nancy’s family doesn’t even know I’m transgender.
This whole process, from trying to get pregnant to being pregnant, has been a challenge for us. The first doctor we approached was a reproductive endocrinologist. He was shocked by our situation and told me to shave my facial hair. After a $300 consultation, he reluctantly performed my initial checkups. He then required us to see the clinic’s psychologist to see if we were fit to bring a child into this world and consulted with the ethics board of his hospital. A few months and a couple thousand dollars later, he told us that he would no longer treat us, saying he and his staff felt uncomfortable working with “someone like me.”
“Someone like me.” And yet someone like him was perfectly good enough to take a few thousand dollars from while stringing them along, wasn’t he?
It’s amazing how cruel people can be out of ignorance and misunderstanding. I know it’s a struggle to deal with concepts like this; I was confused by it at first myself, and have only come to really understand through good friendships and years of exposure to the point where it’s quite commonplace. But I can’t believe that anyone would deny this couple the right to have a child that’s at least partly their own through the means they have available. It isn’t Thomas’s fault that he was born with a body unsuited to him, and had to take what measures he could to be comfortable in his skin. And it isn’t his fault that he and his wife took advantage of the resources they had available in order to build a family.
Transpeople, just like gay people, straight people, bisexual people…all have the right to build a family to nurture and love. I don’t know the words to explain how much it upsets me to see doctors letting their personal religious values obstruct their medical ethics and basic human compassion, denying Thomas and his wife that right to a family. They could adopt, yes - but why should they have to, when this alternative is available? If Thomas feels secure enough to do this, why do people scorn and deride him? Are traditional male/female values and perceptions so important to the root functions of society that people can’t put their preconceptions and stereotypes aside long enough to be happy for the couple that they even have the ability to do this?
I know, gender is defined by biology. A penis is a penis and a vagina is a vagina, and if you have one or the other then you can’t deny that it exists. It’s part of reproduction and it’s a hard fact that people, whether trans or not, have to live with. Transwomen can change their biology much more easily than transmen, due to modern surgical techniques; they can’t reproduce, but they can at least create functional, cosmetically acceptable sexual organs. Transmen aren’t so lucky. Modern surgery hasn’t caught up to them just yet, so while transwomen can work their way past the “gender defined by biology” thing, most transmen can’t. But they live as best they can, and do the most they can - and they can’t be blamed for that. All they can do is be happy with their efforts and hope for social acceptance, because it’s better than doing nothing at all and living miserably as someone they don’t want to be. For them gender isn’t just biology; it’s chemistry and psychology, part of the mental chemicals that define us, our personalities, as male, female, or other. Most people don’t understand that, and don’t understand that the limitations enforced on them don’t make them any less male.
It’s not just society in general, though. Even Thomas’s brother had something unpleasant to say about his first attempt at pregnancy:
When I finally got pregnant for the first time, I ended up having an ectopic pregnancy with triplets. It was a life-threatening event that required surgical intervention, resulting in the loss of all embryos and my right fallopian tube. When my brother found out about my loss, he said, “It’s a good thing that happened. Who knows what kind of monster it would have been.”
I’m no obstetrician, but I’ve done a little reading on ectopic pregnancies, trying to see if it was possible for a baby to be born deformed from one and thus validate his brother’s comments a little more beyond callous cruelty. Unfortunately…no. An ectopic pregnancy will either resolve itself and result in a healthy birth, or has to be ended via medicinal or surgical means. Either a healthy baby is born, or none at all.
So Thomas’s brother is just an asshole.
If no one else will say “good for you, Thomas and Nancy”, then I will. I think it’s goddamned amazing that the pair can do something like this, and no, I don’t think it invalidates Thomas’s masculinity in the slightest. Hell, he could be seen as being the typical man: Mr. Fix-It, using the tools he has available to fix a problem rather than bringing in outside help. They’re fighting to create a family. I think that’s pretty damned awesome.
I’m not even a family person. I recently just told my family to go to hell yet again because my mother wanted to bring me home and set up viewings for me like I was some kind of sideshow freak, with approved lists of people who were allowed in to see the gay in his cage. I don’t want a family of my own. No children, no husband, though I wouldn’t mind a serious significant other. Traditional family units make me twitch in distaste at the wholesomeness and leave a bit of the taste of old Malt-O-Meal fermenting in the back of my throat. But I’m pushing that aside to hope beyond hope that Thomas and Nancy can build a stable, normal family, raise their daughter happily, and just by achieving that, give the f*cking finger to everyone who laughed at them or held them back.
This post was again inspired by Anji and her LJ post; maybe she should take over this site. (Or maybe I should get my arse in gear and get caught up on work so I can think of post topics on my own.) Since so many people seem to think that gays have some terrible agenda, from secret conspiracies to undermine the Christian church to being the new threat to the free world (and let’s not forget ruining the traditional family and discriminating against straight people)…maybe it’s about time to show people what gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transfolk really think about when we’re plotting our day-to-day agenda. And hell, if you’re straight…what’s your agenda? Gay genocide? Conversion therapy? No? I didn’t think so.
My gay agenda:
Turn your children gay by age five. Become a published fiction author by the time I’m 30.
Destroy your faith in God. Make my move to Chicago (almost there, already booked the movers).
End you and all that you love, you filthy heteros. Continue to improve my writing skills.
Ruin good moral values by having lots and lots of unprotected sex. Keep myself healthy for as long as I can.
Crumble the foundations of families by getting married. Look after those that I care about.
Spread disease by fucking like a filthy little monkey with anything that moves. Make more time to read, as I don’t do it nearly enough lately.
Do a lot of drugs. And give them to your children. Learn to bellydance.
Take over Congress and make it illegal to be straight. …finish this frigging project that’s due by 1p CST today.
So that’s my agenda for the next few days, months, years…whatever. That’s what I think about when I think of things I plan to do. I suppose when you look at that as a gay agenda, we don’t seem like such terrible fiends (as long as you don’t read between certain lines and take a little tongue-in-cheek humor too seriously… >.>). Too bad we can’t get a few homophobes to understand that.
Yeah, I know I haven’t updated yet today. I spent yesterday struggling to get my Cintiq to work, only to find out after testing on three different computers and making three phone calls to Wacom (after which I was requested to send photos and video) that some component of the Cintiq is a dud. Needless to say that after wanting one of these for years and spending $1,000 for the damn thing, I was not only disappointed, but swimming in a frothing haze of my own pissed-mist. They’re overnighting me a new converter box so we can see if that’s the problem before we try swapping the tablet itself, but that doesn’t salvage all the time I spent yesterday fighting with the thing when I should have been working. I got behind on my new job and I’m spending today catching up.
What does that mean? I have no time for ranting about anything sensible, humorous, thought provoking, or just plain provocative. But I will give you a quick update on two things:
3,000 Comments Contest
We are currently at 2,650 cumulative comments, which means exactly 350 comments until someone wins a copy of Velvet Goldmine in the appropriate regional format and the media format (DVD or VHS) of their choice. Ooh. Aahh. Shiny. Yeah, I know. Might help if I said something worth commenting to. Life is hectic right now. Blogging is at the bottom of my list, unfortunately. Trying not to strangle a particular someone is at the top. [/cryptic]
Third Darkside Rainbow Live Webcast
Yeah, I’m finally going to do another webcast. We’ll shoot for Sunday, April 6th at 5:00p CST. In it you will get to listen to me bitch about being almost 30, and deal with a loooooooong tirade about my old job and some of the rather fun “quirks” that went with it, now that I’m no longer leashed and gagged by my employment with them and can publicly mock them without fearing loss of a job I gladly quit. I’m sure there’ll be something gay-themed in there. Somewhere. You know how I feel about making everything gay. My life is not painted rainbow or pink, thank you.
That’s all; I really need to get back to work now (sometimes the discipline involved in setting your own schedule kinda sucks). See you tomorrow, when hopefully I’ll be able to settle down and write a decent post during my usual breakfast stop at McDonald’s en route to the library.
Sorry, guys. Cintiq. Tech lust trumps updating obligations, hands down. Look at it as my version of the cliche of webcomic artists who vanish for a week when a new game comes out - only I’ll be back tomorrow.
~shifty eyes~
Maybe.
…what? Stop looking at me like that; it’s a Cintiq! ~flees to play with his new gadget~
Yyyyeah, um…if you don’t get one, this boy ain’t gonna be the one to explain that particular fact of life. Just walk on.
You have no idea how close I came to either saying “screw it, I’ll do the comic late” or just doing one of the text-on-a-black-field lazy comics. My Cintiq 12WX is arriving tomorrow, and it entirely galled me to think of doing another comic on my cruddy old Adesso CyberTablet 12000. I think the only thing that saved it was the fact that I wanted to experiment with doing the line art in another program. I just acquired a copy of Manga Studio EX 3.0, and I think I’m in love. Manga Studio beats Photoshop for freestyle drawing by a landslide. It’s so bloody responsive that I almost forgot the hand-eye disconnection that comes from drawing on the tablet while looking at the screen; the way the different brushes respond to the tilt and pressure of the pen make them feel just like real art pens, sumi brushes, and pencils. It almost hurt to move back to Photoshop to do the color; Photoshop tends to drag my computer even with a dual-core 2.75Ghz processor, 2GB of RAM, and a 250GB hard drive. Five quick strokes with the pressure sensitivity on and I have to stop and wait for Photoshop to catch up. To have Manga Studio be so light and clean, instantly responsive with no lag…holy hell. I can’t wait to see what I can do with it with the Cintiq, where I have a bit more fine control (but not necessarily more skill, there’s a limit to my talent).
Er…anyway. This isn’t a software review site (though amusingly, I reviewed two animation software packages for my other job over the weekend), so no more of that. But if you notice a subtle difference to the line art, that’s why. The ease of use even shaved an extra hour off my drawing time.
Moving on to something a bit more topical: I had a rather interesting experience in the store yesterday. I was in Wal-Mart picking up a DiGiorno for pizza night, and made the mistake of going at four in the afternoon on Easter Sunday. There I was stuck in the so-called “express” lane for 45 minutes, wanting nothing more than to pay for my beer and pizza and get out. (Yes, beer and pizza. Pick your jaw up off the floor. On the weekends I take my Captain Queer hat off and go about life as a normal guy. Now shhh, don’t give away my secret identity.) The checkout-rack tabloids and fashion magazines held my interest for roughly three milliseconds, if that, before I found myself people-watching. My eyes landed on a man one aisle over; he was about my age, maybe a few years older. I’d guess him to be six foot six or so, with somewhat swarthy skin that could have been Italian or Hispanic; the cast of his features made it hard to tell. He had long, dark brown hair, neatly pulled back in a tail; lovely dark eyes, and a handsome face that wore a beard well even though I normally don’t like facial hair. He was carrying a few extra pounds in the stomach, but he carried it well; he was casually dressed, but something about him, the cast of his features and his stance, caught my eye.
So I watched. I didn’t stare, but I did admire a little (Hikaru, get your hackles down, all I did was admire); I was bored, and not above surveying a little man-candy to pass the time. I didn’t think he noticed, since I looked away rather often or stared off elsewhere and zoned out. I figured from the Maxim he was reading that he wasn’t likely to take notice of another man paying undue attention to him, no matter how subtly (or unsubtly, as I soon found out).
He noticed.
We happened to leave our respective lines around the same time, and at the exit he ended up behind me in the interminable wait for one of the geriatric Wal-Mart greeters to check our receipts against the contents of our bags. By that point I’d stopped paying attention to him; I just wanted to get out the door and make the short walk home. So I wasn’t really expecting to hear a gritty, amused voice at my shoulder:
“You know, you might want to try being a bit more subtle about ogling a guy next time.”
I started in surprise and turned around to find him smiling at me rather dryly. I immediately blushed; I hadn’t thought I’d been that obvious, but several times I’d completely zoned out and might have done it while looking in his direction. “Sorry,” I said with a sheepish, apologetic smile. “It was either you or the irritated, bitter housewives. You were the better option.”
Despite answering with humor, I was expecting discomfort, scorn, any of the other typical reactions. Instead he laughed. “Well, just so you know, I’m straight. But I’m also flattered by the attention. Thank you.”
My jaw nearly unhinged. “Uh.” Ever so articulate, as always. I think I was red from my hairline to my collarbones. “You’re welcome,” I stammered, unable to help a rather stupid grin, mostly from raw surprise. He grinned back; then the greeter cleared her throat impatiently, so I let her check my receipt, walked out, and went home without looking back.
I’m so used to hearing snotty comments from straight people should any gay person dare to find them attractive or display passing, harmless interest that it really threw me to have someone be so casual about it, and handle the situation with such class. That’s the way it’s supposed to work. I wasn’t actually interested in flirting with him, but if I had been, it would have been a simple matter of “Thanks, but I’m straight” answered by an “Oh, no problem” without the slightest hint of conflict, nastiness, or resentment caused by crossed signals, misunderstanding, or prejudice.
I wish more people handled things with such aplomb - from our side of the spectrum, too, as we often react poorly to straight people flirting with us as well.
Maybe then we wouldn’t have to deal with attitudes like this guy.
It’s 11:34a, and I’m sitting in the food court of the Sharpstown Center a few blocks from the library. Today was my first day walking the nearly three miles from my apartment to the library; I thought, carrying the laptop bag, that it would take me about an hour and a half. It took me fifty minutes, and here I am killing time until the library opens at noon. My shoulders ache a little; the laptop’s heavy. My eyes sting from walking on a major street for almost an hour with dirty air blowing into my eyes and irritating my contact lenses. My hair is a mess, but this time I had the sense to use better gel. My nostrils are full of the scent of wild onion flowers, more potent than I’ve smelled since childhood summers playing in my grandmother’s backyard in Ponchatoula, Louisiana.
For some reason those years and that place were on my mind today - likely because as I walked, I passed dozens of children and teenagers. Everyone’s out on break and enjoying the sun paired with the cool spring wind; it’s a lovely day. Arrogant boys with that swagger that owns the world jerked their chins at me in passing on the sidewalk; harried mothers shepherded their children along and smiled in acknowledgment when I stepped onto the grass so they could pass without hindrance. Most of the children looked happy, chattering gaily with their friends. A few isolated themselves, held back from the others and keeping, for the most part, quiet. They didn’t seem miserable; just…separate, as if there was something that set them apart from their friends.
I want to say that I remember that feeling, but in truth, it’s barely a shadow of recollection, faded by time. I’ve said before that I didn’t even know what homosexuality was until my early teens; I had no idea what the word was for why I felt just a little different from my peers - why when one of my closest neighborhood friends started noticing girls, I subtly started noticing him. The thing was, I didn’t care. Although I have a bad history with my family, I didn’t have an unhappy childhood despite being poor. I wasn’t a miserable outcast, isolated at an early age by my sexuality; that didn’t come until my preteen years, and that was more caused by my surly attitude, smart mouth, and budding misanthropy. It wasn’t because of any inner knowledge of difference, isolation. Many people say they knew, from the moment they became self-aware. I didn’t. And I didn’t need to.
What I knew, as a child, was that I could catch dragonflies by the wings, holding them carefully until they got used to my touch and would settle on my finger without coercion, only to start and fly away if I moved too fast. I knew that pine trees were all wrong for tree houses, but for ground-level clubhouses it was always best to layer a thick sheaf of fresh green needles over the outside of the structure and stick it in place with the thick, resinous sap, so that water would sheet off and it would be safe to take shelter from the rain. I knew that if you plucked the stems of wild clover flowers and tied them around each other, you could make a necklace that would leave pollen all over your shirt and fill your nose with its sweet, musty scent all day. I knew the smell of thick swamp mud, the faint bubble that pops to the surface right before a mud turtle comes floating up to stumble into my grip, the wet squish of a crawfish’s mud cone as I kicked it over with my sneakers. I knew skinned knees and Sega on a rainy day at O’Neil’s house, and going home to the soft, homemade sugar cookies that my mother always baked no matter how tired or angry she was.
I knew all I needed to know, as a child. I didn’t know that I was gay, and I wouldn’t have wanted to - not in this world, in this time. I was a child for as long as I could be, blissfully unaware and wearing my heart on my sleeve, unaware of the hurt and the wonder, the struggle and the beauty, that could come from one single word that has, in many ways, shaped my life since then.
And no matter how many people proudly proclaim that they’ve known since they were toddlers…
I’m busy and working my head off, so you know what that means: it’s survey time again! Normally I do an “Ask Adri” when I’m busy or the news is slow, and gods know I’ve got a backlog of reader questions, but right now I’ve got work coming out the effin’ culo and don’t even have time for that. So…
We all know that I make no secret of the fact that I’m gay, even when it isn’t blatantly obvious. I don’t bring it up as a point of introduction (”Hi, I’m Adri, I’m cranky, and I’m gay!” …I think not) or walk around with a rainbow flag stuck in my hat, but if someone asks, I don’t try to hide it. Hell, I write this column under my real name, and on my public writing blog I make no secret of the fact that I’m a gay author who likes to focus on minorities (whether by sexuality or ethnicity) as protagonists. Sure, sometimes it gets negative reactions, but thankfully in my line of work I have the freedom not to worry about job security because I don’t have to deal with my employers face to face and they don’t care as long as I don’t make them look bad all over the internet - and as far as social situations, well, I don’t really want to be around anyone who’d have a problem with my sexuality anyway, so it works as a good screen-out factor to catch 50% of the human drek. When it comes to family…well, we just won’t go there. Suffice to say I stopped caring what my family thought of me a long time ago.
There is the fear factor, wondering if anyone would cause me bodily harm out of prejudice, but…screw fear. I just don’t care. I am who I am, and that’s the way it’s going to be, for better or for worse. But not everyone feels that way, and some people are less open than others. So survey says…
Gay, Bi, Lesbian, or Transgendered: How “out” are you?
(a) I’m so far in the closet I can’t even see the light.
(b) I’m out to a few close people, but no one else.
(c) I’m out to my friends, but not to my family or in the workplace.
(d) I’m out to friends and family, but not in the workplace.
(e) I’m all over the place, baby. Out and proud and just a little loud.
(f) I’m out, but not declaratively so; I make no efforts to hide it, but
don’t announce it, either.
(g) I’m straight. The only closet I worry about is the one with my
clothes in it.
(h) I’m straight, but closeted anyway because for some reason I
decided to pretend to be gay/bi/lesbian/trans/etc. (Hey, this
happens.)
(i) I’m asexual, you insensitive bastard.
(j) Other/will explain in comments.
My answer’s mostly F, but with a little of E when I start to get defiant about it. Although maybe I wouldn’t be so open if I ever had to fear ending up featured in a homophobic Polish political speech…
Erk, I’ve gotta run. ~flees~
P.S. Hikaru, I swear to gods if you respond to this before you’ve had at least eight hours of sleep, I’m flying out there to shiv you. Rest, you psycho.
Unsurprisingly, most of the limited circle of friends allowed past my cantankerous, defensive personal space barrier are gay, lesbian, bi, or trans. Well, perhaps that is a bit surprising, considering my criticisms of prevalent shallow, judgmental behavior in the gay community - but you tend to meet like minds in places like art school. In art school I met fun, relaxed, quirky people all across the GBLTQ spectrum, and held on to quite a few friends from those years. Through them I met others, and have built a close inner circle of people who avoid triggering my typical reaction of “Don’t make me stab you with my f&#$ing pencil” every time they open their mouths.
Because of that, though, I’m admittedly sheltered from straight people. Most of the straight people I know are via my LiveJournal friends list online, and I can’t really say I know them beyond what they choose to share of their lives in daily, weekly, or monthly posts. We have little in common, in truth. We have different interests, different perspectives, different approaches to life - but then, that’s what makes them interesting, and why I enjoy reading their posts. A recent kerfluffle over at LiveJournal (yes, another one, they just can’t stop) regarding censoring of interests brought up an interesting divide, though, one addressed by Anji (yes, our own raging lesbian Republican commenter) in her journal: more straight people are offended by the censoring of words like “gay” and “yaoi” among popular interests than gay people. Gay people just don’t care.
It startled me to realize that she’s right, at least in my case. I don’t care. I didn’t care about the fact that LiveJournal might be practicing homophobic censorship during the Harry Potter fanart / ponderosa121 / boldthrough / strikethrough / do-we-really-need-to-rehash-this incident beyond the fact that it was arbitrary censorship of art in general with flawed judgments of “artistic merit”, because as far as gay rights go, it’s just not an issue.
Another reader once brought up her view that straight people don’t go out of their way to support us; in fact, they do. Straight people will raven and rant over things that don’t even make us blink, and yet will shy away from the larger issues that require more work than loud protest and posting angry diatribes online. It’s not that they don’t mean well; they’re just misguided, and so eager to defend and be pro-gay that they miss out on the things that really matter, focusing so intently on single pixels that they miss the bigger picture. (Yeah, I know, that was lame.)
There’s a clear divide between the gay community’s idea of what matters to us, and the straight community’s idea of what matters to us. It’s unavoidable, considering that we approach issues of gay rights, freedom, and censorship from wholly different perspectives, pitting internal vs. external.
It’s not a universal problem, of course. There are plenty of straight advocates who don’t sweat the small things and labor right alongside the gay community in tackling those massive issues that will take years of work and struggle to unravel, and I think if we could educate more people in the straight community about key goals for gay rights before they toss on their boxing gloves and dive into the ring, then we might make more progress under more clearly focused efforts - because for the most part, the general population just doesn’t get it. That’s why gay news coverage in major media is so sensationalist and yet oddly spotty and dismissive; that’s why LiveJournal* explodes into a hotbed of “omg first amendment free speech” outrage the moment someone says “that could be construed as homophobic censorship oh noes!” To give people fair credit, maybe these issues matter to them. If they want to fight that hard, then I admire their passion.
But I can’t help but wonder why they fight in the name of people who don’t really give a damn about the things they’re so upset about. Fight in their own name, sure. Fight in the name of whatever personal issue makes these things important to them. Fight against censorship in general, because gods know that pisses me the hell off and if that’s all it’s about, then I’m right there with you. Fight against hate speech in general; don’t ignore widespread use of “n*gger” in high schools because it’s trendier to complain about kids saying “that’s so gay”. Don’t just flip over speculated homophobic behavior in popular television while dismissing misogyny and sexual objectification that abound much more freely. Don’t just rage over Christian conservatives seeking to ban gay books from libraries; look at all the books they seek to ban, all the information they seek to repress on history, other faiths, freedom, and culture. Hell, worry about Tibet; things are a bit chaotic over there right now. When it comes to the little things, look for the bigger picture, rather than focusing on one tiny quadrant and ignoring others. But as for fighting for us?
Thank you for the support and I wish you luck, but we’ve got bigger fish to fry.
*Granted, LiveJournal is a bad example of this. Most of the people on LiveJournal are fighting for their own right to be interested in these things, and to draw and write and express themselves in regards to whatever they want without censorship; it’s about protection of expression and not about gay rights. I just used LiveJournal as Anji’s post about the mess on LJ is what prompted this line of thought. But there are quite a few waving the gay rights flag in the dust-up, and there have been several widely-publicized media incidents in which straight advocates went psycho over one or two words and were righteously offended by things that…well…most people in the gay community just shrugged off.
It’s 8:52a and I’m sitting in a McDonald’s about a mile from my apartment, looking over printouts for today’s work, listening to godawful muzak, and nibbling on something that can’t exactly be called food but that silences the ravening of my belly. I’m waiting for the bookstore/cafe down the street to open so I can stake out a power plug, order coffee, and put in my 7-8 hours taking care of projects due today and tomorrow for my new job. It’s my first day working mobile, packing up the laptop and my Verizon wireless modem and just heading out to find somewhere to settle, people-watch, and enjoy having the entire city as my office. I’ve been dreaming about this for years, for even longer than the three years that I spent tethered within the confines of my home, chained to my home phone line by my old job.
I’ll admit it’s a daunting experience. I’d forgotten how isolated I’d become, how sheltered. I could go days without seeing another living being other than the cat; I left the apartment only to get the mail, run errands, and go to the grocery store at insane hours of the night. I’m not used to being around constant streams of other people in the usual volumes heralding daylight activity. I’m not used to quietly not-reacting to the presences of strangers; I’m not used to the quick, assessing glances in passing. I’m not used to that feeling that comes from instantly being recognized as gay, not by one random person in the grocery store but by someone here, another there, about every fifteen minutes a bored glance that passes, pauses, and lingers, questioning.
That look of recognition, at least, I know. I don’t know what it is about me that instantly identifies me; I’m not particularly flaming, flamboyant, stylish, or even the slightest bit swishy. Maybe it’s the big, waifish eyes that I curse every time I glimpse myself in the mirror. More likely it’s the rose sunglasses I wear to shelter my photosensitive eyes against bright artificial light - pink just because it amuses me. But regardless, as I sit here and type on my laptop and drink my coffee, I’m getting looks. Not from everyone, no. Just that old man with the forming liver spot on his balding head - a quick wrinkle of his nose, a grimace, “damn punks” written silently in every rigid line of his face. That woman with her toddler, moving to a seat two booths down from me, then casting me a wary look and shepherding her son further away. Another glance over her shoulder - disgust. A less hostile look from another man passing through, on his way out the door; I’m not sure what it is about him, but I can glance at him and know, too. He’s just a crisply dressed office worker, blouse and slacks and short, neat hair, but we exchange quick glances of acknowledgment, brief and uninterested, and he’s on his way.
Everyone else is content to ignore me. I ignore them. We all have our own business, our own lives, our own schedules to maintain. One fag sitting at a corner booth in McDonald’s isn’t important, or interesting. They’ll forget me with the first bite of their food; I’ll forget them by the time I finish this post. Some might not even be giving me those distasteful looks because I’m a little obviously gay; some might be because I’m young, dark-skinned, casually dressed, wild-haired, and sitting here tapping away on my laptop with my headphones in my ears and the little green light of my USB wireless modem blinking. Any one of those can be offensive to some. Sometimes it’s just enough that I’m a solitary male of unknown intentions. You never know what will set people off.
But it doesn’t change that now, suddenly, I’m aware of people looking at me in a way that I haven’t been for a long time. I’m aware of people taking me in, assessing me, judging me based on my clothing, my genetics, the way that I carry myself, the things I have with me. They’re forming a picture in their heads of who I am and what I do without ever meeting me. And some of them, statistically, are thinking “f*&!ing fag”.
Would anyone do anything about it? No. People with prejudices rarely make scenes in public places. They throw dirty looks, they keep their distance, sometimes they murmur to each other. But it’s not a pleasant experience to be the subject of such scrutiny, and I’d forgotten what it was like to deal with it every day. I’ll get used to it; I used to be completely impervious to it, although it’s natural that renewed exposure would bother me now that my skin’s thinned out a little. But there’s a reason that openly gay people often feel unwelcome in society in certain places, whether alone, in pairs, or in groups. That mute resentment, those hard glances…all are part of that. That knowledge that some day, somewhere, someone with a grudge might do something, and yet another of us will be making the headlines documenting another “tragic hate crime”.
Does that mean I’m afraid when I go out, now? No. I wasn’t afraid before, walking down the streets of Houston at 3a, arms laden with groceries and too encumbered to even defend myself should someone decide they want my wallet. There’s no reason to be afraid; even if I don’t live or travel in the best neighborhoods, there’s little likelihood of anything happening to me for whatever reason. Someone is attacked, injured, or killed in Houston almost every day, every night - but in a city this large, the odds are that it won’t be me.
But it has to be someone. And now that that awareness is awake again, that knowledge that people aren’t as oblivious and dismissive of me as I’d like them to be…I can’t help but wonder if one evening I’ll be walking home with my laptop on my back, only to stop at the sound of an angry voice.
Er. Remember when I said I’d never cut my hair again, down to the point of threatening Carlos with an electric purple weave if he came near me with a pair of scissors?
Yeah, well…”never” turned out to be “when I got so preoccupied that I let my hair go to hell and by the time it hit 18 inches long, 10 inches of it was a dry, broken, frizzy, dead mess that couldn’t be saved.”
So…yes. Rapunzel has been shorn. That’s not a good representation of it, but I’m still getting used to drawing it. It’s short, it’s punky, it’s sideswept, it sticks up everywhere, it saves me an hour a day, and I am discovering the wonders of gel (yes, I’ve become one of those guys). I don’t know if I’m going to keep it short or not; I like it more than I thought I would, but at the same time I keep having these moments in the mirror where I think “oh god, my hair!” and get all whimpery. It’s kind of pathetic. You should have seen me when I turned around in the stylist’s chair and just saw all these ropes of hair lying on the floor. She thought I was going to cry.
But it was worth it to see the looks on my friends’ faces. And it may be much easier to deal with after the Chicago move, as it’s much windier up there…so that’s incentive to keep it short.
I only wish I’d been able to give Carlos the pleasure of cutting it, as he’s been begging for a good two years now. But alas, Carlos has moved on to greener pastures in more upscale salons, and the rest of the people at that salon…well, they’re a bunch of rude, stuck up putas who get their ta-tas in a knot if you dare to call and ask when they might have an appointment open. So I had to call around, but eventually I found a place within walking distance, with reasonable prices and people experienced with dealing with highly mixed ethnic hair types, and got to spend two hours in a chair with a lovely woman named Freda. We alternated between comfortable silence while I worked (I brought my laptop and some writing assignments for New!Job, and had my mobile internet, thank you Verizon) and laughing our arses off while arguing over just how short it was going to be in the back (I was in a mood and wanted it gone so badly I would have let her shave it, but thankfully her cooler head prevailed and I’ve got layers anywhere from one to four inches long that I can spike all over the place). In the end she did a great job, and I’ll definitely be going back there until I move.
Aaaaanyway. That’s enough about my hair. I really don’t have much else to say; that’s been the most exciting thing in the past week, other than getting my first paycheck for my new job. Isn’t my life exhilarating?
Here. Have a practice sketch I did using a photo reference to try to work out how in hell I’ll be drawing my hair for the comics from now on.
See that? That is why I don’t post photos online; when I stop squinting and glaring at things, I look like a big-eyed waif-boy. And the short hair only makes it worse.
Oh, and sorry I half-assed the art on the comic. Busy weekend and I was in a bit of a rush. At the end of the month I’m finally buying my Cintiq as a birthday present to myself and to celebrate my one-year anniversary with 451, so the quality of the art should start improving on these things.
It’s turning out to be harder to get back into this than I thought. It’s funny how being away for a short time can completely throw off your flow; now that I’m back at DR, sometimes I find myself looking at this blog and thinking, “Okay, I’ve got it…now what do I do with it?” And yet I can’t abandon it; I know eventually I’ll find my stride again. The key is not quitting, or even taking too long of a break - because when you back away for a while, after a while you start telling yourself that you’ll go back soon…and yet you never return.
The same can be said of many things. I’ve been thinking of various aspects of my life where that happened; my old comic, for one, although part of that is because it’s not viable as-is. I would say my fiction writing, but I never leave that even if sometimes I bounce from story to story and feel as if I’m not getting anywhere. Even if I can only pick out one sentence a day or send out one query letter a week, I still hold tight to what is turning into one of the most important aspects of my life. What I can’t help remembering, though, is that I used to be a hospital volunteer and HIV/AIDS activist…and somehow, after I wandered away, I never wandered back.
For four years in high school I volunteered at one of the two major hospitals in my (at the time) home city; I worked the front desk, watched the gift shop, minded outpatient, even (on short-staffed nights in the emergency room and the maternity ward) helped set a few broken bones and assisted in a few live births that could probably get the hospital administration in a great deal of trouble if I ever revealed the name of the facility.
Outside of my usual four hours a night, though, I also participated in the hospital’s youth coalition, which was actually a branch of NOLAN - a New Orleans-based AIDS outreach program. We held weekly meetings, fundraisers, STD education seminars, condom distribution programs…the works. On the weekends we’d meet at a prearranged location to box up food bought with the fundraising money and, riding along with the organization’s adult mentors, bring the food to AIDS sufferers too bedridden to shop for themselves - people who had no one else. No family, no friends, no one who cared about them. Just us - bringing them food, picking up their prescription medications, taking them out for a day at the movies when they were feeling well enough for it, keeping them company with TV, books, and conversation when they weren’t.
Staying by their bedsides and helplessly watching them die, when the time came. It hurt. It hurt more than I care to remember, but it was better than letting them die alone.
All of that ended when I left for college in a different state. Suddenly I had homework, new friends, campus events, new hobbies, and yet more homework still - and I had no personal transportation or even public transportation (it was Alabama, what do you expect?) to really get anywhere. The local GBLTQ organizations were more social groups than anything else; any outreach programs were in the city, out of reach (no pun intended). My life went elsewhere. Later, after university and my move to Houston, I tried to get involved - but the GBLTQ organization that I found within reach was, again, just a social group. There are plenty of outreach groups here that I could have joined, but suddenly I found that work was in the way - work, life, and everything else. So any volunteer services that I might have gotten involved in just…faded.
And thinking about that makes me feel a little sad, a little guilty, and a little self-absorbed. I still don’t have time even now to get involved in gay rights movements, HIV/AIDS outreach programs, any of it. I’m hoping when I move to Chicago to find a more active local community (not to mention that Chicago public transportation is better, so I can get anywhere I need to go in 10-30 minutes rather than 2-3 hours), but right now I can’t help but look back on the past few years of my life and know that while it wasn’t my fault that everything else fell by the wayside while I struggled for stability, I still could have found ways to do more. What about you?
Are you involved in any aspect of the gay rights movement, or HIV/AIDS outreach and education?
(a) Yes; I do everything I can.
(b) Sometimes, when I have time.
(c) No, but I’d like to be.
(d) No, and I’m not really concerned about it.
(e) Other/will explain in comments.
Normally, when I think of conspiracy theorists, I think of complete mental cases with overdeveloped technical skills and underdeveloped senses of personal hygiene, crafting tinfoil hats in their mothers’ basements and swearing that the truth is out there because their X-files posters say so. What I don’t think of is Catholic bishops, although I will admit that Catholicism does have a strong track record of nutjobs - from psychotic evangelical leaders to monks raving in the belfries. So maybe it’s not so out of place when the Right Reverend Joseph Devine sounds like he’s just about ready to shave his head and start tilting at windmills when he claims that there’s a “huge and well-orchestrated conspiracy against Christian values”:
One of Scotland’s most senior Catholics has launched an attack on the “gay lobby” in Scotland, claiming there is a “huge and well-orchestrated conspiracy” against Christian values. The Rt Rev Joseph Devine, Bishop of Motherwell and president of the Catholic Education Commission, said gay rights organisations aligned themselves with minority groups, such as Holocaust survivors, to project an “image of a group of people under persecution”.
He warned that the gay lobby – which he labelled “the opposition” – had mounted “a giant conspiracy” to shape public policy.
[...]In the fourth of the Gonzaga Lectures held at St Aloysius’ College in Glasgow on Tuesday, Bishop Devine said: “The homosexual lobby has been extremely effective in aligning itself with minority groups.
“It is ever-present at the service each year for the Holocaust memorial, as if to create for themselves the image of a group of people under persecution. We neglect the gay movement at our peril.
“I want to ask you if you are able to see the giant conspiracy that’s taking place before our eyes, even if we didn’t see it at the time. I take it you’re beginning to see that there is a huge and well-orchestrated conspiracy taking place, which the Catholic community missed.”
He went on: “In this New Year’s honours list, I saw actor Ian McKellen being honoured for his work on behalf of homosexuals, when a century ago Oscar Wilde was locked up and put in jail. “It’s a very small group of people, but very active and organised – and extremely indulgent. The opposition know exactly what they’re doing. We don’t.”
Oh, yes. We’re quite organized. Little do you know that the conspiracy isn’t just in the UK; it’s worldwide. We have secret global bunkers where we hoard glitter, condoms, and Tori Amos albums. Fire Island is actually a militant training camp where we’re drilled in conversion techniques, subversion strategies, and the fifty ways to kill a man with a cardboard nail file. Not only that, but we have secret decoder rings that get us discounts on spiky, gelled androgynous haircuts (you know the cut - depending on the gender of the wearer, it’s either trendyfag or sportylez, but it’s the exact same cut) in every hair salon across the planet…and our uniforms are absolutely fabulous.
Done laughing yet?
Seriously, I’ll never understand conspiracy theorists. Yes, there have been some grand conspiracies throughout history, but for the most part they were only uncovered after the fact because part of what made them such successfully complex conspiracies was that they were almost entirely covert. Gay rights movements are quite out in the open, thank you, and aren’t even remotely organized enough to begin to shield a conspiracy - unless you want to believe that the disorganization and the multiple dismal failures that we’ve suffered are a deliberate attempt to hide what’s really going on.
Er. No. Frankly, I think the gay community overall is too self-centered (myself included) to mount a massive conspiracy to threaten anything, let alone Christian values. This is just one nutjob’s persecution complex (isn’t he accusing us of the same thing?); he needs to be right so much that he has to create a massive and faceless entity acting as a collective whole to actively and deliberately cause harm to his own personal beliefs. It’s rather like when people condemn “the liberal media’. There is no single-minded machine called “the liberal media”; there are multiple media entities made up of millions of people with varying motivations and directives, all bound by nationally mandated regulations that are constantly battled over by liberal and conservative entities.
The same goes for the gay rights movement; the label is just that, a label to collectively identify the one motive unifying diverse groups and individuals who cannot be collectively labeled as good or evil, and most certainly can’t be defined as promoting a conspiracy. Each person involved in the gay rights movement is concerned with their lives, their jobs, their homes, their families, just like anyone concerned with Christian values. Each person has their own individual problems, their individual successes, and their major motivating factors in life. The fact that they all happen to believe in gay equality isn’t a conspiracy. It is, as I’ve said a million times before, a basic human desire to be treated fairly.
Perhaps a few people are actively trying to undermine Christianity - but if they’re going to judge us by a minor percentage, then perhaps we should judge all Christians by Devine.
I’m a little amazed that so many readers came back so quickly after the end of my hiatus, if yesterday’s comments are any indication. It’s nice to see you guys again. What isn’t nice, however, is the following headline:
(AP) The Netherlands’ highest court rejected a gay Iranian asylum seeker’s last-ditch bid to avoid deportation to Britain, where he fears authorities will send him back to Tehran and possible execution.
In a ruling published on its Web site Tuesday, the Council of State said Britain is responsible for Mehdi Kazemi’s case, because it was there that the 19-year-old first applied for asylum.
Gay rights campaigner Rene van Soeren said Kazemi’s Dutch lawyer was considering an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. The lawyer, Borg Palm, did not immediately return calls seeking comment. Boris van der Ham, a lawmaker who has taken up Kazemi’s cause, has tabled questions in Parliament asking the junior minister for immigration, Nebahat Albayrak, to lobby British authorities on Kazemi’s behalf. Albayrak should either urge Britain not to send Kazemi back to Iran or offer him asylum in the Netherlands, Van der Ham said in a telephone interview.
“There should be some political leadership,” he said. “I hope in Britain they will do it and otherwise we should take the boy.”
Kazemi is not expected to be deported before Albayrak has answered Van der Ham’s questions.
[...]The Netherlands relaxes its tough asylum laws for Iranian gays - virtually guaranteeing asylum to any who apply here - because of persecution they face at home. Britain, on the other hand, rejected Kazemi’s original asylum request.
Kazemi, 19, says he traveled to London to study English in 2005 and applied for asylum in Britain after learning that his lover in Iran had been executed for sodomy.
After British authorities rejected Kazemi’s application, he fled to mainland Europe and applied for asylum in the Netherlands.
However, because Kazemi had already applied for asylum and been rejected in Britain, the Dutch government is refusing to consider his case and insists he must be sent back to Britain. It cites the European Union’s 2003 Dublin Regulation, which declares that the member state where an asylum seeker first enters the EU is responsible for processing that person’s claim.
Tuesday’s court ruling upheld the Dutch position.
Palm said last week that Kazemi was in such despair he was on suicide watch in a center for rejected asylum seekers in the port city of Rotterdam.
Can the bureaucracy; this is someone’s life on the line. I feel like I’m watching a teenager say “Dad, can I go to the movies?” “Didn’t your mother already tell you no?” Or at least, that seems to be just how lightly courts are treating this case. I don’t care if Britain already rejected Kazemi’s asylum plea; they’re notorious for that, because the Home Office “doesn’t believe there’s a serious problem of persecution in Iran” (paraphrasing another article I read earlier today, can’t for the life of me find it now).
Right. They must be reading the same book as Iran’s president, who is still convinced that they don’t even have gays in Iran.
So because Britain’s Home Office has a stick lodged up their arses and don’t appear to be enjoying it (not enough lube, maybe?), the Netherlands - normally so tolerant, offering shelter to almost anyone who applies for asylum - won’t even bother with Kazemi’s case.
I hate politics.
How can people so blandly dismiss a person’s life on the basis of technicalities? How can so many people say “sorry, my hands are tied because of this document here, so sorry about that death thing”? I don’t even understand how lawmakers could sleep at night if they ever stopped to consider the number of lives needlessly ended by snarls of red tape and ridiculous policies.
The only hope right now, unless someone pulls some major strings, lies in one vague statement by Britain’s Border and Immigration Agency: “We examine with great care each individual case before removal and we will not remove anyone who we believe is at risk on their return.”
We’ll see where that gets Kazemi. Hopefully farther than it got Hassan Parhizkar.
DarksideRainbow.net is 451 Press's look at the darker side of the
rainbow - where gay life takes a decided turn away from the happy, the
shiny, and the pink, complete with news, gossip, and a healthy dose of
caffeine-fueled cynicism from gay blogger Adrien-Luc Sanders. Check in
Monday through Friday for a decidedly tongue-in-cheek slant on current
events in the GLBTQ world, spiced with a few fun rants.
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That’s right, today marks one year that I’ve been writing for 451 Press - ever since this site was called “Pride and Opinions” (not my idea) until I said “oh hell no” and asked The Powers That Be at 451 Press to change the site name (even if they rather botched my intent, but no, we’re not going to go there…) It’s been fun, for the most part. Everything has its rocky points, and sometimes it was a pain in the arse, but I can’t ever really say it wasn’t worth it. Sure, it’s a lot of work for very little money, but I never did this for the money. I did this because I wanted to make a career out of something I love - writing - and I was happy to find even a small job that would let me do that. Since then I’ve moved on to much bigger things and become a full-time writer, but Darkside Rainbow is still something that I enjoy and that I’ll keep doing for as long as I can find something to say. In the past year the reader base here has grown; not by leaps and bounds, maybe, but by some pretty decent-sized bunny hops. Thanks to everyone who dropped by and decided to stick around.
If you start singing, I will shiv you.
