My Story (The Gay Years), Part 5

So I had a newly-acknowledged personal facet (yeah, try saying that five times fast). So what? It didn't matter unless I did something with it, right? And I'm not referring here to going out to buy rainbow stickers or finding a parade to march in. I mean to say SEX.

I was absolutely sure that I couldn't find anyone in my town, or even in the tri-city area. So, as I'd done before that week of university, I turned to the 'net. It seemed clear to me that even if I searched online, I'd only find horny old men, and that was certainly not what I wanted. So I lied, and said I was from Phoenix; when guys would message me for a while, I'd tell them the truth. I don't remember how many guys I talked to back then, but only one of them ever came to anything.

Call him Cowboy, because the first picture of him had him dressed up as such. The Goblet of Fire movie had just come out, and I thought that he looked a bit like Robert Pattinson (pre-Twilight sparkling douchebaggery). I was picture-smitten, and then we started calling each other in the dead of night, when my family was asleep and I could pace around downstairs, talking in a low voice. No, we didn't have phone sex. Yes, we did plan to see each other. I wasn't willing to drive down to meet him, but he was a routine camper who drove north every few weeks, and on his next drive he arranged to see me.

There was no pretending that both of us weren't thinking sex, even if the conversations were polite and open. I told him, honest and straight-up, that I had never orgasmed, and he made it his goal to coax it from me my first time.

Let's talk about the big O, shall we? I was afraid of it. You might attribute it to Catholic school and Catholic sex education, but I don't think that was it. For one, I can't remember the priests or nuns ever referring to masturbation or anything as "bad," although they did tell us we shouldn't have sex, like, ever. But I definitely had wet dreams, all through high school, and I was ashamed of them afterwards. I was afraid that I was wetting the bed, and that some part of me was reverting, de-aging, losing its discipline. I didn't make the connection, until I was in college, that I was having those dreams because I wasn't masturbating, and that my body needed what I wasn't giving it. But, just to clarify: By the age of eighteen, I had never brought myself a conscious orgasm. Why would I? What would I have thought of?

But now I was determined to make it happen. I brought the Cowboy to my house one rare day when I didn't have work or school, but when all of my family was gone (I think I was already on Christmas break, but my brothers weren't). We got naked fairly quickly, and the first time he tried to kiss me, I was afraid I'd made a terrible mistake. I grew up around horses, see, and I knew what they smelled like, especially their breath. He had been camping for a day already, and I gave him that inch, but I was too unsure of myself to offer him a toothbrush or even a mint. Perhaps I should've been more forthright; perhaps I would've enjoyed myself more.

I took him to my bed. He gave me a massage; we cuddled; we spooned. He was determined to make me orgasm, and to show me everything he could, so he did. Then, finally, he begged me to fuck him. As overweight as I felt I was back then, he was bigger; the "sex," as such it was, was awkward. He didn't give me an orgasm, and as I watched him, in a look of supposed ecstasy, I almost sighed: Maybe I had experience now, but this wasn't what I wanted or thought of when I thought "sex."

I drove him back to his car. We parted amicably, but I knew I wouldn't see him again. I didn't, but I'd accomplished my goal of starting my résumé. Had I been looking for love? Did I, at eighteen, believe that I could find it then and there? I don't know. I would like to say no, to spare you my naivete, but maybe I did. I say "résumé" now, but I wouldn't have slept with him without feeling that there would be feeling. There wasn't. I shouldn't have. I did.

The Cure, now with More Science™

At least, I'll try to add some more science.

The dangers of, if not a "potential" pill that could repress homosexuality, but a theoretical one, are twofold, the way I see it.

One, lack of understanding - i.e., "being gay is a choice" versus "being gay is genetic."
Two, genetic modification, Aryan-ism, and augmentation.

One, then.
The major trouble here is that homosexuality is still, I believe, not well understood. Too many people are too content to simply say, "Well, the Christian Bible declares it a sinful abomination. People keep themselves from murdering, don't they? Murder is an abomination, too. Why can't people keep from being gay?"
There are probably millions of counterarguments out there for this one, and it isn't my main point, so let me just say that that's a completely bogus way of looking at things, end.
To those people, though - not necessarily Christians, let me make plain, but anyone for whom being gay is supposedly a choice - the possibility of a pill to cure homosexuality is a viable thing. Well, why not? Many people still think, despite what the APA has ruled, that homosexuality is a disease; this itself is a belief system which has no merit or verifiable fact, but still it exists. Then again, the United States isn't necessarily known for its smooth logic - just look at Creationists. I refuse to even write "the Creation vs. Evolution debate" because there is no debate, in my mind, there's only ignorance versus fact. Similarly, I grant the belief that gaiety is a disorder no credence, but that way of thinking need to be mentioned because for such people there is something to be cured, and so a cure is viable. Too bad medicine, science, and fact get in the way, eh? So, my first point: There can be no cure because, medically, there is nothing to cure.

Two.
Suppose medicine were to discover whatever gene sequence(s) separate homosexual and heterosexual humans. What would you do with that?
On the one hand, how much could you get into debating the Hippocratic Oath? Isn't it definitively harmful to change a person so completely? There are a couple of different ways to look at this, too:
*Personal choice. If you, as an accountable adult for whatever reason, didn't want to be gay, and could go to your doctor (well, a specialist, anyway) and say, switch it off, that would be viable. I would find it fairly repugnant, but it could happen.
*Parents' choice. Suppose such a genetic sequence could be detected in utero. If parents didn't want their child to be gay, they could tell their doctors to simply modify the child. This is a frightening option for me because who knows how that would turn out? See, my parents are lovely liberal people who have known plenty of gay folks, but suppose they thought they would be doing me a favor by deactivating the gay sequence before I was born?
Simply put, I would not exist.
Someone else would, and I suppose this then become more of a hindsight problem because I would never know the me that I am, and likewise I would never know the straight version of me. Still, it's a rather scary thing to think about, because where does it stop? Theoretically, if your parents could manipulate the genes for sexuality, what else could they do? How far do we get into petri dish babies? Oh, I want a blond boy; oh, I don't want the kid to be as black as your father; oh, I would like to have a straight child. Dangerous territory. This, I think, is where the Hippocratic Oath should come in, even though I can see plenty of arguments against it.
*Someone else's choice. The largest possibility I see here is in ex-gay camps, which could profess to be completely ex-gay, were this gene sequence discovered. On the one hand, this could also fall under personal choice, but imagine a teenager who's been sent off to a real ex-gay camp. Surprise, now you're definitively straight! That, my friends, is a frightening idea.

Any way you look at it, it's a scary thing. I would like to end here with "and if they are looking for it, let the doctors spend their time searching for a cure to AIDS or something!" But I know that people who search for such disease cures and for gene sequences are very different types of scientists, so so much for that.

Kurt Vonnegut or Margaret Atwood or god-knows-who would probably have a field day with this idea, in fictional form. But, truly? The idea of being able to screw around with who you are, who you have been, or who you could become, at least on a genetic level, should remain firmly in the realm of fiction.

Once Upon a Time, in a Little Valley

AKA reports from my life. If you just want to hear me opine and rant and whatnot, skip.

My first week of doing out-and-out medical studies (or so I define them, anyway). Here's a nice, vaguely bulleted overview:

I learned how to titrate. What's this, you ask? Essentially, it's adding a solution drop by drop to another solution until you reach a desirable endpoint. In this case, I added hydrochloric acid to two dyed solutions (water and a buffer) to try to restore clarity and see which would absorb more. The buffer did, as expected.

What's a buffer, you ask? Well, consider this (paraphrased explanation): Soda is acidic, yes? So when you drink a soda, why doesn't your body's pH change palpably change (and why don't you die)? The answer's in the buffer - in the case of the body, bicarbonate ions, which bind with the hydrogen ions present in acids like soda to form carbonic acid, which can then be converted to water and carbon dioxide, which the body is quite adept at dealing with. Similarly, when the body takes in too much base, hydrogen ions are removed from the blood, so the body responds by dissociating carbonic acid (which, again, just comes from water and carbon dioxide) into hydrogen and bicarbonate ions. Cool, yeah? Nothing tells the body to do this, it just happens. The body: the best machine on the planet.

(Incidentally, if that explanation is too paraphrased or anything, correct me.)

Chemistry is a science and vocabulary unto itself. Example: significant figures. Sig figs are apparently also shared by physics, but this is the first time I've run into them. I understand them on a basic level, but they make no sense to me logically. This is where it gets me: Say you have two substances, 6.4 grams and 6.7 grams, and you want to multiply them together. The answer should be 42.88 grams, right? But according to the rules of significant figures, the answer should be 43 grams (or maybe 42.9, generously, and I'm still not sure), because 6.4 and 6.7 g each only have two significant figures. Being less accurate makes no logical sense to me, and even less so when you consider this: multiply 14.0 by 3 with the rules of significant figures. The answer? 40, because, it only has one significant figure (and the zero isn't, because it's trailing and uncertain). Lord, just let me report that damn decimals. Amen.

For all the latent Animorphs fans out there, my lab partner in biology is a black woman named Cassie, and I sat next to a tall, handsome guy named Jake my first day in chemistry. I'm taking this as a smiling sign, by the way. Would definitely like to talk to him again, incidentally. I also asked a cute guy, on my first day, how to use the sinks in the library bathroom (hey, it was counter-intuitive, all right, you had to physically push the faucet spigot up into itself. And if that sounds confusing, you should've seen the sink). I don't think I came off too intelligently. Then it turns out he's in my chemistry lecture, recitation, and lab.... He's also one of those guys with an utterly perpetual sneer, compounded by the fact that he's an utterly perfect physical specimen. Be still, my heaving and somewhat downtrodden chest.

I also had a pretty awesome Friday-night adventure with Michael that involved the best bar in town, drinking margaritas, buying underwear, singing along to the Chicago soundtrack, and breaking down in his car several miles from anywhere in the middle of the night, and hiking back singing Christmas carols. We are awesome.

I'm all for joining the tri-city area's GSA (see previous posts), and they're going to move meeting times to a "week 1 Tuesday, week 2 Thursday, week 3 Tuesday, week 4 Thursday" schedule, which means I can go half the time (my recitation/lab for chemistry is Tuesday night). The guy who runs it, Joey, is studying to be a space physicist; he's a smart guy, nice, accommodating. And he wears tight Star Trek t-shirts. It remains to be seen if he sings Christmas carols while hiking, though.

Such is the summary for now. Expect more as it unfolds.

My Story (The Gay Years), Part 4

I knew. Wasn't it time someone else did?

But it was a pretty precarious time. All my long-term friends - Rachel, Michael, other people I haven't pseudonymed yet - had left for college. I was left with a single friend, Jennie, a mediocre job, and a half-time school schedule. I was close to being fully depressed; I wore the same shirt every day, and only about two different pairs of pants; I would bring a pizza home from work and eat the entire thing myself. It was ... well, it was bad. Yet there were a couple of good things, things that made it redeemable.

The classes I signed up for were, for the most part, nothing too spectacular - Introductory Anthropology, Introductory Sociology - but I also enrolled in a class I knew I had to take: Dream Interpretation. Long story short, it got me through that first term. We had normal class activities - I learned more about Freud and Jung in that class than I did in a year of university psychology - but it was honestly more like a group therapy session every week, and that's just what I needed. The class was about what you'd expect from the community college crowd: there were a couple of folks my age; a couple of new moms who were just going back to school; a mother-daughter duo who were likewise heading back; a couple of older folks who thought the class looked interesting. It was a safe place, and that's what I needed then. My town is conservative in the way of retired WASPs, so to find such a safe space was almost miraculous.

It's important to establish that I had such a place, because work definitely wasn't. I'd thought, when I started, that a "wine café" was necessarily cosmopolitan and liberal. I was wrong. It was owned by an old couple from California. Well, ostensibly owned - he cooked, and she did all the owning, and let me just say that the term "battle-ax" was invented to describe this woman. She was not just aggressive, she wouldn't rest until you agreed with her, so there was really no choice but to nod and smile. She would not only defeat you when you disagreed, she would deny that you could disagree. Following any disagreement, she would steal your firstborn children, burn your buildings, and sow ash over your empty fields. Most importantly, she wouldn't even refer to gay people as "gay"; she called us "weirdos." Not that she knew I was gay, at least not until later.

Jennie and I were the only hosts who worked at the restaurant, and as it was open 11-10, we were there pretty much all the time. As far as coming out goes, I'd decided by October or so that Jennie was the logical first choice. I remember the night, too; I invited her over to watch a movie, and after my family had gone to bed, I told her that I was gay. Her reaction was a loud "Really?" It was a good thing, though, because she ... well, she hadn't been waiting for it, exactly, but her secondary reaction was "Oh, well, that makes sense," which I heard a lot of during subsequent comings-out. Of course, then came all the questions about what I had done (nothing), who I crushed on (specifically, our co-workers), and so forth. Even though my experience was nonexistent, I was happy. Someone knew.

But, now, who else? I needed more. I needed a net. I mentioned my gaiety in passing in my Dream Interpretation class, but no one really made a big thing of it. Why should they? People routinely had much stranger dreams; at least one person started crying every week. I was gay, that was a part of me, and while I can appreciate that now, it made me impatient back then. I needed people to ask me and make a big deal of it, not treat it was just a normal thing. So, I poked around at work.

The other restaurant workers were a notably more liberal bunch than the owner. There was short little Rose, the physicist (well, physics student), who was also from Colorado and knew my old town. I grew close to her slowly, and ended up going to see The Devil Wears Prada with her that spring, which I think is as close as I ever got to talking with her about it. There was Julian, called Jule at the restaurant but who I knew as Jules because he'd dated Rachel. I approved of him, mainly because he was a nice, good-looking guy. Gay, I'd've thought, if I didn't know his history with Rachel. Then there was Aaron, a rather built guy who had a soft voice and a definite swish to his step, who I was determined to find out was gay even if he was in the Air Force. It didn't happen.

Finally, there was Nicole. She was the epitome of who I wanted to trust: She was a traveling actress, she'd lived in both London and New York, she had appeared in off-Broadway plays, she had an agent who sent her lists of roles every week. It was after lunch one day in the spring when I told her. We were sitting in the back, and she was paging through that week's list of roles. One of them was for a guest spot on Smallville, and we started talking about that. I never watched it, but I knew (who didn't?) of Tom Welling. I said something about finding him attractive, and that was it. She didn't make a big deal about it. Like with my class, it just was. And I'd been open about it with myself for long enough to realize that maybe that's all it needed to be. I didn't need to make being gay a big deal. Here was a friend who'd lived all over the world, who certainly had met gay people before, and she wasn't jumping up like I was a "weirdo" or like I'd just won some big prize. I was gay, and that was all; it was no different than if I'd taken out my contacts and shown her that I really had brown eyes.

I needed that, then. I needed normalcy, not an extreme reaction. I received it, and as much as I thought I wanted extravagance, I realized that I needed understatement more.

Disturbing Trends

According to About.com, only about 18 to 49% of gay men disclose their sexual orientation to their health care provider. When I saw that statistic initially, I didn't have much of a problem with it. After all, for the majority of gay men, I suspected that sexuality does not play a huge role in their health. Now, though, I'm not so sure.

For one thing, nondisclosure can have an impact on how HCPs are trained. I can't give any first-hand feedback on this yet, but it makes sense that if, say 18% of gay men disclose their sexuality to their HCP, that's only about 1/5 of a minority. Would that be worth additional training of HCPs in specific counseling or concerns? Objectively, I'd have to say no. But, even if there are, what would such things boil down to? My first (and possibly impulsive) answer has to do with HIV/AIDS and other STDs. This, at least, comes from personal experience; when I had the coming out talk with my parents (keeping following the "my gay story" posts), my dad, who's an HCP himself, really only asked if I was having safe sex. But I've started to learn that there are many more medical concerns for gay men.

According to the American Cancer Society, "[s]ome men who have sex with men may be at special risk for a delayed diagnosis of cancer because they may less often take part in screening programs for cancer." Now, why? The ACS offers several possibilities, including past experiences with homophobic HCPs or medicine, general fear of discrimination, lack of a support system, and, most importantly in my mind, "lack of information about health needs of men who are intimate with other men." Because, really, where's it supposed to come from? Are HCPs supposed to start briefing every man with a higher voice or a limper wrist about MSM health risks?

The ACS offers more: "There are special health guidelines for men who have sex with men, so you should seek care from doctors and nurses who are sensitive to your social situation and respect your privacy. They should also be aware of the extra care you may need. If you are in a relationship, you will want to find health care providers who understand and encourage your partner to be involved in your health care." Which sounds brilliant, really, but also a tad utopian for what usually isn't perfect.

But, really, this is one of the reasons I'm pursuing medicine. There's enough ignorance and misinformation among gay health concerns without homophobic HCPs, am I right?

The Cure

No, not the band.

What if there was a cure? Here, I don't mean "cure" in the sense of a relief of disease or symptoms, but in the sense of being able to repress gaiety. The Heterosexualizer, let's say.
When I think of such things, I remember a scene in X-Men 3 (those movies are really just euphemisms for being gay, anyway):
ANNA PAQUIN: Is it true? Can they cure us?
PATRICK STEWART: Yes, Rogue. It appears to be true.
HALLE BERRY: No, Professor. They can't cure us. You want to know why? Because there's nothing to cure. Nothing's wrong with you. Or any of us, for that matter.

Admirable sentiments, Halle, but I would disagree re:your hair.

The movie raises some fairly interesting questions as far as the us versus them debate it presents. On the one side, you have Anna Paquin's character, who's actually a physical threat to other people if she just touches them (it flies directly in the face of the "mutant powers are cool!" deal). On the other side, you have Halle Berry - "there's nothing wrong with us, we're normal, just not the majority." Of course, she can also fly around creating ass-kicking hurricanes, so the euphemism isn't quite on the level I really want.

Comics and movies aside now. If there were a quantifiable way to not only suppress homosexuality but encourage heterosexuality, would I partake? No. Because at this point, when I'm 22, it would not only be carving out a part of my personality, it would result in an utter vivisection of self. Yeah, overwrought, but I said it. But, really, I would compare such a change to being amnesiac and retaining only a few key components of yourself. Suppose your brain was simply Wited-Out at random; suppose you remembered your dad but not your mom; suppose you remembered that you liked Corn Chex better than Wheat or rice; but you have no memory of elementary school. To me, that's what repressing my gaiety would represent.

There's a quote from JFK that got splashed on me a few weeks ago but that I've taken to heart:
"We choose to do these things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." Audio here.
Yeah, he's talking about going to the moon, but I take the quote for my own.

Homosexuality is not personally experienced by the majority. By that, I mean that even if gay marriage is a hot-button issue, even if "Prop 8" is the new Yahoo! top search, it doesn't mean anything in terms of understanding. People may see gay characters on TV, in the movies, in books; people may hear about gay rights and gay bashings on the news; people may have gay uncles and gay friends and gay children; but at the end of the day, the only way to understand is to experience. There is no "being gay" on command, like a show horse. Gaiety extends far beyond the object of love, lust, or desire, and much farther than any stereotype.

I had a friend once, a writer, who brought up the idea of writing what you know. She was a straight female, and she unabashedly said that she would take on writing any character, regardless of religion or gender or skin color or sexuality or whatever. Could she pull it off? Maybe. She asked me to read one of her stories, a story with a straight sex scene. The scene was told from the man's point of view, and it wasn't bad or unrealistic. Maybe she got into the man's skin, or maybe she just knew sex. Could she do the same for a gay person? It's certainly possible that she could write a mind-blowing scene of gay sex, even if the sex itself wasn't good. But I contend that if she did write believable gay characters, it would only be through the degrees of separation of her gay friends, and the filters of her own experience.

I don't want to homogenize every experience; there are as many ways of being gay as there are gay people. But there is an inherent understanding, I think, some kind of almost basic, instinctual thing, that connects gay people on some kind of weird experiential gestalt.

...Then again, maybe I'm full of shit. The next time I meet a guy, I'm going to start up a conversation about experiential gestalts and see if his Jung backflips (education rulez, motherlovers).

Damn. Maybe a more medical look at this next time. Long story short, would you take such a heterosexualizer, and if you would, under what circumstances?

My Story (The Gay Years), Part 3

Thankfully, after high school comes a wonderful experience called "college."

The promise of such a place was palpably exciting. I may have had to spend a summer alone, but this summer, I was determined not to waste my time. If I was going to be gay, then by god, I was going to be gay. How did such gaiety manifest itself? Well, I was going away to the city for college, so I headed right on over to gay.com and created a personal profile. I talked to some older college kids who fascinated me, but they were mostly in other awkward boats - one only liked men twenty or so years older, while another - call him 27, because that was part of his screen-name - was intriguing, friendly, helpful, but balked immediately when I suggested we meet when I got down there.

I wanted to know why, of course. 27 told me that he was a grad student, very close to graduating, and that he worked in the university's registration office and they were looking to hire him after he graduated. He couldn't let them know he was gay, or he'd be putting his "certain" position in jeopardy. He couldn't meet me, he couldn't see me, he couldn't do anything but chat online.

Was he feeding me bullshit? It's possible. Meeting strangers off the 'net can turn skeazy, or so the media tells me, but I was honest and so I believed him. Besides, he had no reason to lie, and he'd picked the perfect lie if he was: I was absolutely ready to believe that his office wouldn't hire him back if they knew he was gay. I talked to him a few more times, then I moved down there.

I knew right away that the school wasn't for me. My roommate was a hobbit-lookalike basketball player from New York who was nice enough but who had impromptu parties in our tiny room way too often. One of the girls who showed up at a couple of those parties, Daphne, was absolutely beautiful and ran with the track team; she actually initiated conversations with me and was in one of my classes. One of the few things I regret about leaving was not seeing more of her, because I think we would've become good friends and she's the kind of friend I would've needed back then. With Daphne, I could have admitted that I was gay, and she wouldn't have had years of recorded high school memories to compare me with. She was having trouble with the transition, too; she was typically pretty in the Southern California way, and while she was radiant, she was perhaps worse off than I was as the ugly kid, because people expected frumpiness and average things from me. Daphne was assumed, at least by me, to be too pretty to be afraid. When I saw her in class, and she confessed how nervous she was, I saw another side of her. I saw myself mirrored in her, really, although my uncertainty probably didn't come from the same source.

Once I decided that I was leaving that school, I spent a lot of time wandering around, giving myself a tour (I told myself), looking for something (I told my friends, though no one ever heard what). I ended up, most days, on the top floor of the library, surrounded by huge glass windows. One day, I was there during a general class block, quite alone. I sat up there for a long time, writing out diaries to myself, trying to figure out how I'd made such a big mistake, what I was going to do next, what I should/could/would do. I wish I had the diary, but after writing for hours (that were probably only minutes), the class period ended and the walkway five stories below was filled with a the post-summer throngs. There I wrote the turning point: "There are a lot of gorgeous guys here."

It didn't make me want to stay, but I cried a bit over that page. Here, at last, inescapable truth! I knew that I was gay! I had written proof! I was admissible in a court of law! It was beautiful and terrible at the same time, but I'd learned what I needed to learn, and I left the library. I spent my remaining few days with my friend Kelly and my old friend Riley. Remember him? He must've been going through a transformation, too, even if neither of us talked about it then; we just rode our bikes around downtown a lot, he looking for natural food stores and whatnot, me just content to follow.

I returned home that weekend and enrolled in the community college. I got a job hosting at the hot new restaurant downtown, thanks to my friend Jennie. But, while things didn't seem quite so rosy as they had during the summer - I wasn't going to live in the big city, I wasn't going to find a lot of gay men - I had taken a very important step: I had told myself that I was gay. I hadn't changed, but I had.

The Amendment

Ah, well. I said I wasn't going to get into it.

George W. Bush. 43rd president of the United States. The Dollyrots said it best: "We were watching the 2000 presidential election results, and at four o'clock in the morning, when we found out that George W. Bush had won, [we] were like, 'The world's probably gonna end anyway,' so we thought, 'Let's just do the band.'"

Perceptive guys. No, the world didn't end. At least, the apocalypse didn't come. But when the president of your country, supposedly (or so it's propagandaed) the most powerful man in the world, gets up on his pulpit and instead of discussing - take your pick - the current war, any security threats, education, health care, immigration ... he takes a potshot at you. You, personally. And not just you, but the people like you. He uses you as a diversion, really, to avoid talking about any of those other things. But what a diversion! He takes your opined moral bankruptcy to the next level: He tries to outlaw you constitutionally.

I remember where I was, the first time I heard about The Amendment. The "Federal Marriage Amendment," as it's technically called. I was in high school, my junior year (the year of silence, if you've been following my story). It was in my history class, and it was a special day; we were taking a field trip to go downtown and compare architecture styles to classical buildings or some such. My class and another were squeezed into our room for fifteen minutes before we headed off. But instead of going over the rules or the procedures, my teacher just looks at us and says, "So. The Amendment."

I don't remember exactly what was said, except that I was beginning to vaguely realize that I'd have a lot vested in such things in the future. What I do remember was what one girl said. She was a cheerleader, as Aryan and WASPy and rich as you care to get, the kind of girl who, if you saw her in a sitcom or a teen drama, you'd say, "No way. No way people like that exist. She has to be a stereotype." Conservative, it goes without saying. And she said, in a very clear voice:

"It's not right. They [read: gays] are people, too. I mean, if your, uh, partner, or whatever, was in the hospital, and you couldn't see him because you weren't married? Because they wouldn't let you? That's not right."

Bitch knew what she was talking about.

Anyway. Despite my earlier claim, I'm sure I'll get into the health care debate at some point, but I just really liked that sticker. It is interesting, isn't it, how we United Statesians move from political fad to political fad. The same folks who clamored for the sanctity and protection of marriage are now rallying against health care reform, I'll be bound. Things will swing back around, I'm sure. Gay marriage will happen. Can't stop the signal, folks.

"I ♥ My"

Two stories. One mine, one not. The not first.

From The Smoking Gun:

MARCH 16--A Florida man wearing an "I ♥ My Marriage" t-shirt was arrested last night for allegedly choking his wife during an argument in their Tampa-area home. Bradley Gellert, a 32-year-old financial consultant, was busted by Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office deputies and booked into jail on a felony domestic battery by strangulation charge. According to a police report, Gellert, pictured in the below mug shot, got into an argument with his wife and "screamed at the victim and threw numerous items." He then allegedly "grabbed the victim's neck and strangled her," which "prevented the victim from breathing normally." Gellert's wife subsequently fled the couple's Apollo Beach home and went to a nearby sheriff's office to report the incident. Investigators noted that the woman had been "taken to the ground by the arrestee and suffered an abrasion to her knee and red marks on her neck." The "I ♥ My Marriage" shirt was a promotional item tied to the 2008 movie "Fireproof," a Christian-themed film starring Kirk Cameron. The movie, a hit in evangelical circles, centers on a fireman's religious awakening and his simultaneous effort to save a failing marriage.

Hypocrisy is a universal constant. But it leads nicely into my story, which also involves an "I ♥ My."

The other day, I was fortunate to see a bumper sticker that I'd never before come across. It said, simply, "I ♥ My Straight Child," against a patriotic flag background.

I was a bit more distraught by such than I thought I'd be. Yes, I live in a conservative place, but it just seemed so harshly reactionary. Would that same parent have put a "I ♥ My Conservative Child" sticker on his or her bumper? Or an "I ♥ My Christian Child"? Yes, I'm making wild assumptions based upon my location, but I would also be willing to bet that, if both those things held true, that the parent in question would invest in those bumper stickers. So, why "My Straight Child"? The thing is, I read that bumper sticker less as a statement of the parents' pride in their child's sexuality, and more of an underhanded message celebrating that their child isn't gay.

Why is it necessary? Why is it necessary to celebrate something your child isn't? Or, rather, why make a point of including your majority? Imagine the annoyance (and, I'd hope, uproar) if a couple of white parents drove around with an "I ♥ My White Child" bumper sticker in a WASPy neighborhood. Then again, perhaps there wouldn't be any annoyance? Because it's easy to discriminate against a minority when you have the tradition of ignorance on your side. Bullies come in all sizes.

We've all seen bumper sticker wars get out of control: The Christian fish turns into a Darwinian sea creature, which is then eaten by a larger Christian fish, which are then caught by evolved humans.... I'm not going to combat this with a flurry of bumper rainbows, or a surprise stocking stuffer for my parents of "I ♥ My Gay Child" bumper stickers. Rather, I would like us - all of us, straight-hearters and gay-hearters - to look at this and say, “Okay, love your straight child, but don’t use any aspect of him or her as a tool for you to express your opinions.”

Amen.

Here I Stand

You'd think that I'd be in the thick of things right now, what with a blog devoted to medicine and gaiety.

Well, maybe.

Health care reform. If health care changes, if health care stays the same, am I going to want to be a doctor any less? No.
Gay marriage. If gay marriage is allowed, if gay marriage is denied, am I going to stop being gay? No.

Sure I have opinions. Sure, when I feel strongly about something, or want to communicate something, I'll post it. But too much of the debates I've seen, on the "news" and online, are centered around minutiae or misunderstandings. The Christian Bible does not say that marriage is between a man and a woman. The health care reform is not a system bent on euthanizing old people. No, I'm sorry, there are no bases for those arguments, and so I won't acknowledge them.

Maybe that makes me sound weaker. Maybe I should be shouting back at stupid people. But I think if I approach things logically and emotionally, that's the best way to get anything done.

Thanks, Married to the Sea.

My Story (The Gay Years), Part 2

Here's part two of my gay story. Look for the tag "my gay story" if you want to read more.

I remember the first time I actually associated myself with the word "gay." It was my senior year of high school, and I was driving to school. Now, mind, I live five miles from the very edge of town, which means that it was a good half-hour drive from my house to the high school (and that's without heavy traffic). So, I had a good deal of time to think about heavy things, especially since ... well, I get ahead of myself. Let's go back a little bit further.

I enjoyed my freshman year, I think. My family moved from Colorado to Arizona when I was about a month into eighth grade, and I went from a Catholic school class of twenty to a public school eighth grade of five hundred. I'd never used a locker; I hadn't picked out anything but a uniform to wear to school for years; I came from a house in the country where phone lines just weren't something we had and usage of the Internet was a birthday and Christmas treat. My assimilation into the new city took the entire year, though I never really enjoyed it; my algebra teacher, on the very last day of school, told me that even though I'd only come a month into the year, I'd always felt like the new kid to her. Gee, thanks.

Freshman year, then, was a welcome change for me. All the middle schools in town were funneled into the single public high school, so my eighth grade class tripled in size and everyone started over. During my freshmen year, I explored a lot - I took drama, I took video productions, I took computer-drawing architecture class, I took geography and biology and gym and geometry and I felt well-rounded. I had a few obsessions with boys in my classes, mostly in my gym class, but like with Wil Wheaton I didn't really want to kiss them or have sex with them or anything, I just wanted to (1) be them or, failing that, (2) be friends with them. Hopefully, best friends. But I was smart, and I was slightly naive, so I made a lot of friends, especially with sophomores in my biology and geometry classes.

No, I'm not leading into some sordid affair with an older boy. High school was an asexual time, but I think the ring affair was a turning point. It wasn't enough to send me into a full-strength sexuality witch hunt, but it was also more than enough to let me know that if I kept operating as if things were "normal," it wouldn't turn out well for me. How exactly I knew this, I don't know, but I knew inherently and obviously that dating girls (or, at least, admiring them) was a prerequisite for normal behavior, and it wasn't something I was going to do because I couldn't. I wasn't gay by association, either; you'll remember that I started the movie club, and it attracted something like an 80% female population, and no gay men. I was surrounded by girls all the time, and I spent my after-schools and weekends with them. No one questioned me.

During my freshman year, I had two great male friends, Mark and Riley. Mark I met in gym class, but sat next to in a couple of other classes, and he was the closest thing I had to a best friend during those first two years. We'd hang out, outside of school, even though we lived across the county; he'd sleep at my house, we'd play video games at his. Normal things, boy things, but I noticed his smile in a way that none of our other male friends did. He drifted, after freshman year, into a group of boys who were mostly good-looking but who, maybe more importantly, wouldn't keep him up all night during sleepovers talking about their hopes and fears. I didn't drift with him.

Riley, on the other hand, ended up in a co-ed group I was minimally a part of. The group kind of self-destructed after high school and Riley turned out to be bisexual himself, but in high school he was the poster boy for alternative sports - he was the undisputed champion rock climber, hiker, biker, you name it. He was more fun to be around than Mark, but again I lost him to the evolution of cliques; in the group he became a part of, webs of crushes, dates, relationships, and sex were the norm. I had (what I wouldn't admit were) crushes on some of the boys, including Riley, but I didn't want to date the girls and so I didn't become a part of that group either. I lost both of them, sadly, and I don't blame that entirely on being gay. Well, not in so many words.

Around my junior year, I stopped talking in class. I hated the way my voice sounded, see, and I thought that I didn't have anything to offer, anyway, so I just stopped speaking up. At the same time, I think I was getting close to depressed, and I ballooned to almost 200 pounds by my senior year. Maybe that doesn't sound like a lot, since I'm six feet tall, but I'd been the fastest kid for several years growing up; I had a lot of track ribbons; I'd played soccer and baseball. I wasn't a fat kid, even if I wasn't on any of the sports teams, but hating one part of yourself doesn't seem to stop at that one part. Yeah, I hated my voice, but I also came to hate my fat (which, of course, flourished in that hatred); I hated my skin, which I deemed too white; I hated my eyes, and invested in violet contacts because I wanted to show that I was different, outwardly, even if there wasn't any name for the specific species of difference that I felt. I was the smart boy who had friends in different groups, who was in that club and somehow always surrounded by girls, who hung out with the anime girls at lunch. I was an oddity, but I was a nonthreatening oddity.

And then senior year, and for the first time I thought, well, could I be gay? It's important, I think, that no matter how much I hated my voice or whatever else about my body, I was not opposed to the idea of being gay. Honestly, it was almost kind of a relief, because it explained why I didn't like girls, and it gave me permission to go on not liking them. The only problem, then, was that I had no idea how to be gay. I was rapidly approaching the blimp version of me, and the only gay males in my life (and not even really in my life) were two theater boys that Rachel knew.

The first, Hugh, was a skinny kid with a rat's face who didn't look like he'd yet passed puberty. He had braces with rainbow bands, if that gives you any idea. He didn't so much walk as he sauntered. He wore white capris with startling regularity, and gaudy sunglasses. He received notes calling him faggot and cocksucker in his locker (that last according to Rachel). I was confused: I didn't want to be gay like that. I didn't even like capris.

The second guy, Bobby, was less obvious, but only just. He wore tight jeans and gelled his hair to perfection. He wore glasses for no reason other than he thought that they filled out his face. His favorite shirt was luridly pink, quite tight, and said "I'm SO over him!" He had money, too; one of my friends asked him to the prom our junior year, and while he went with her, he was annoyed that she'd only asked him three weeks in advance, because that was apparently not enough time to fly out to Rodeo Drive and try and find a nice suit. He seemed a bit more normal, in an eccentric rich kid way, but I still didn't really know. I wasn't like Hugh or Bobby, really, but I still liked guys. I didn't like them, though, so where did that leave me? They were gay; I didn't like them; so I couldn't be gay.

Then, graduation. I would be walking with Rachel, of course, and the day of graduation, I met her at her house to get ready. Her other best friend, Dani, was also there, also getting ready, and Dani had invited her walking partner over to get ready with us. His name was Shawn, and apparently he was good friends with Dani and so an ostensible friend of Rachel's, but I'd never met him. I ... well, the first time, I saw him, I didn't know what to say. He was gorgeous. If I didn't believe in love at first sight, it was only because I hadn't seen him before. Cheesy, yeah, but you have to realize that I'd started to admit to myself that I was gay, but that I had no idea what to do next because a few crushes-not-crushes and two flamers made me think I didn't have much of a future as a gay man.

Later that day, Rachel's dad drove me and Rachel to meet up with Dani and Shawn before the ceremony. Rachel took it upon herself to explain Shawn to me, since I seemed to be interested in him. She didn't pick up on romantic interest, certainly; Rachel wouldn't know I was gay for another year or so. But the conversation went a little something like this:
RACHEL: So, Shawn. You know he's gay?
ME: What? No. I didn't pick up on it.
RACHEL'S DAD: Oh, Rach, he can't know that yet. He's too young.
RACHEL: Dad, it's his life! Of course he does.
RACHEL'S DAD: He can't know yet.

Paraphrased, but it definitely stuck in my mind. If Shawn couldn't know that he was gay, and he was so beautiful and had had, as Rachel later told me, some actual boyfriends, how was I supposed to know? I was smart, I was overweight, I had braces, and I didn't like Will & Grace. I couldn't be gay. It just wouldn't be allowed. I knew enough about gay men to understand that certain things were acceptable, and certain things weren't. Maybe you could grow up to be Nathan Lane in The Birdcage, but you couldn't be fat without being entertaining, just like TV had taught me that you couldn't be an overweight black woman without being sassy. I didn't fit into the stereotype, so I didn't know where I did fit.

I escaped high school with my diploma and the honor cords and pins of more honor societies than anyone else in my class. I'd've forked them all over in a moment for five minutes with a good telepath.

Age Ranges

This is inspired by a rebuttal I was reading by George Lucas that responded to Jar Jar Binks (back when Episode I came out, of course). Mr. Lucas said that, yes, Jar Jar was a comedic character in there "for the children" because Star Wars is really a series "for children."

Excuse me? A series for children? Okay, then quite apart from having an all-adult cast (minus the shitty Episode I), would George care to explain some other stuff to me? The various love stories, perhaps? Or how about Leia's get-up in the third (uhm, sixth) movie? ...A series for children. A series for children. Give me a break.

It also got me thinking about some other stuff that's a bit more recent. I fully admit to being a Potterhead, but with good reason - the first book came out in 1997 or 1998, when I was 10 or 11. I identified, as I'm sure many, many, many kids did at the time, with Harry, if not with living with the Wormwood-esque family, then in being selected to enter a magical world. True, J.K. Rowling couldn't write a new book every year, and the movies certainly wouldn't be released every year. The result? I was 21 when the final book came out, and I'll be 24 for the final movie. Apparently, this makes me a very hot commodity as far as marketing execs are concerned.

Consider the Twilight series. Let me be honest here: I think they're utter garbage, poorly written, full of clichés and stereotypes, and all about a "strong female character" who's willing to give up all personal independence at the first sign of a long-term relationship. Also, "vampire baseball" is the most frightening phrase since "watermelon-flavored spray cheese (that doubles as adhesive!)," but never mind that.

Twilight was, I believe, initially aimed at the tween/teen crowd, and on that level it makes sense - the emotions are simplified; the writing, while it's pretty bad, does its job; the book does communicate attraction without going straight for overt sex. (And I'm trying very, very hard here to come up with these pros. Cookie, please. ) The problem is, it's supposed to be the next Harry Potter. Even as I admit I'm a Potterhead, I also admit that I've read a lot of books about same-aged characters that are a lot better - Catcher in the Rye, A Separate Peace - and even ones with the magical elements, like His Dark Materials. But even as Potter is no certain masterpiece, Twilight is like reading Cliffnotes for Dummies!, as translated by someone who has only a minimal grasp of the English language.

But here's where it comes back to the age range thing. Twilight, as I said, was initially marketed as the next Potter - while my age group (kids who were in their tweens and teens in the late nineties and early 2000s) had gotten older, Twilight was supposed to be for the kids who were in their tweens and teens in the mid-to-late 2000s. Here's the rub: My generation apparently didn't know what to do after Harry Potter. In my opinion, Potter should've led into things like Catcher in the Rye and A Separate Peace. Instead, marketers got their hands on us and decided that "next Harry Potter" meant the next thing for US to read. So, instead of moving up, we moved down. Whereas Harry Potter was our interesting, well-traveled old grandpa with lots of stories that seemed to go on forever but all connected in the end, Twilight was our learning-impaired virgin uncle who dreams of re-living high school so he can finally ask the head cheerleader out.

I'll put forth a cross-sampling of five friends of mine. Of those six, I and one other both refuse to watch the movie or touch the books again. Two of them have read all the books and seen the movie, but profess to believe, wholeheartedly, that they are useless tripe with "a plot that sucks you in," and so explain it that way. The last two fully believe Twilight to be the best thing since Harry Potter (or perhaps even of all time), and absolutely refuse to hear a word against it. When I laughed at the trailer for the new movie, they wouldn't talk to me for a couple of days.

So, what? Half the time I just feel like a killjoy, trying to tell people that they shouldn't like something because I don't think it's good enough. But, then, I think specifically in terms of my friends above, and I realize, you know what? They're very intelligent people. If they were making any other decision I thought was poor or uninformed - taking a bad job, changing to an ill-suited major, moving to skeazy apartment - I'd tell them. I'd hope they'd WANT me to tell them. So why is this any different? I think they're making a choice that not only seriously undervalues them as a person, but also gives Stephanie Meyer millions of undeserved dollars and an undeserved reputation as a literary goddess. She writes what amounts to bad fanfiction, folks. You want to read your Twilight, fine, I recognize that I can only tell you that I don't like it. In the end, I don't, and I guess I can only hope that people will come to their senses, and that someone will get Buffy to stake those fucking Cullens.

My Story (the Gay Years), Part 1

Yep, here's my story. It's going to take quite a few entries, I think, but I hope I can cover the major points. If you want to find all the entries, the tag to search for is "my gay story." (I'm changing names, too, if you're curious.)

I'm not going to talk about elementary and middle school. Remember the Wil Wheaton story - yeah, I was different, but I didn't think "gay" until high school, so that's where this will start.

My dad has known this guy, Sam, since they went to nursing school together back in the 80s. They've been friends through all the years since, including both of their marriages. Sam's family has two kids - a daughter, Rachel, who's a year younger than me, and a son. For as long as I can remember, our families have been friends, no matter where we lived (and we moved around a lot). When we lived in Tucson, they'd visit; Rachel and I both remember watching the first season of ER at the respective ages of seven and six. When we lived in Colorado, our two families would go camping, and I remember when we were building our house in the country, when it was nothing but a tiered hole in the ground, Rachel and I and our brothers would have races up and down, up and down, a weird-ass little waterfall of kids

When we moved to this city, about the only good thing I could think of was that Rachel lived here. Not exactly "here," though, but about ten miles away - she would go to a different high school, at least until our sophomore year. Then, her parents decided, with help from Rachel, that her current high school really smelled too much like pot and teen mothers, and since my school had the better theater program (and she was so far into theater she came out the other side), she would transfer. She did. We ended up with first period English together, sitting one in front of the other. Well, it was a weird experience - your on-again, off-again friend-of-the-family is suddenly in school with you after close to fifteen years of knowing her, and ... well, it was weird. A nice weird, but still a bit strange.

We formed a movie club that year - the school had plenty of theater, but no on-camera stuff, so with me as the president and Rachel as the vice-president, we changed that. We were as close as we'd ever been and probably closer, thanks to seeing each other every day, and although there were places we didn't go together - I had advanced math and science, she had her advanced theater - we still had the measure of each other. And I knew one thing: My awkward elementary friend with the braces and chubby face was long past, and she'd become a bloomingly beautiful young woman.

That was a problem.

I didn't want Rachel to have a boyfriend. True, she'd had some her freshman year, and even the middle school emotional flings a couple of years before, but we were in high school. Things were getting serious. Nothing happened for the first semester of our sophomore year, but as Christmas got closer I decided I was pressing my time and my luck, and if I wanted Rachel to stay boyfriendless, I had to do something. I put together a list of what I wanted to buy my friends for Christmas, and Rachel got a special asterisk by her name, and no item. See, I already knew that the only thing that could even come close to sparing Rachel from male banality was a ring, gifted with pomp and circumstance by her best friend.

I went downtown and in and out, in and out, in and out of the cute little tourist shops. I forget exactly why I was looking for it, but I was determined that Rachel should have an opal ring. I think it was a pair of earrings that she said she liked, and I thought looked good on her.... Anyway, I found the perfect ring, and I made sure that the old lady running the store heard me say clearly that it was "for her." She heard, all right, and picked out the perfect (read: disgustingly obvious) heart-shaped pink box, wrapped the ring inside, and sealed the deal with some shiny silver ribbon.

I obsessed over giving Rachel the ring. Specifically, I wondered if it was good enough to just give it to her, and hope that she'd figure things out. Did I have to say anything at all? I thought about untying the ribbon and putting a note inside, but I decided against it. Why? I didn't really want Rachel, or anyone else, to be my girlfriend; I just wanted her to be unavailable to the licentious morons we went to school with. But I did want her to continue to be my close friend, and I was afraid that if she became someone else's girlfriend, that would change. But I didn't want to kiss her, and I didn't want to hold her hand. I wanted to go to the movies with her, yeah, but I already did that, and what if I was expected to hold her hand there? A girlfriend was just too much to take on, too much risk for too little return.

I gave her the ring the day before Christmas break, in our English class. Our friends assumed what I wanted them to assume - namely, that I was in love with Rachel. Hell, I didn't know what to think, or even if that was what I wanted them to think anymore, but there it was. She wore the ring, anyway, and that's what mattered to me. I don't know what happened to the heart-shaped box, but the idea that I might be gay (for anyone else) certainly didn't start there. Assumptions were made, I think, that Rachel and I tried dating/a relationship/what-have-you, but we were just too good of friends, or something. Her parents and I were left to shake our heads whenever our families would get together and the talk turned to social lives. I had lots of friends; Rachel had lots of friends. I had my school activities; Rachel had her school activities. There was a bit of overlap there, but when it came to significant others, well.... "My dad would love it if I dated you," she told me, once. But she had her boyfriends, and I had ... what? Nothing. No desire, even. And so I started to wonder.

Precog

I remember going to see Milk with my mom. ...Maybe "remember" isn't the right word, because it was only last spring, but stop quibbling. Anyway, I was mostly invested in enjoying it for showing me, again, that gay people exist and that they hadn't been a figment of my starved post-college imagination, but I also wondered what my mom was going to ask at the end. Did I find James Franco utterly, utterly sexy? Was I thinking about going to San Francisco? Where were all my gay friends, anyway? 'Course, now that I think about it, all of those things were on my mind, not hers, and her single question was considerably different.

There's a scene, at the very beginning of the movie, where Harvey Milk is coming up through a subway stairwell (I think) and he runs into James Franco's character, subtly hits on him, then flirts more audaciously, then invites him home. The only thing I really thought about that scene was how bold Mr. Milk had been, since ... well, James Franco can certainly look and act gay, but if I'd been in his place, I sure wouldn't have hit on some stranger on the subway. Then again, it was the city, and I've never even been on a subway; he was hitting on James Franco; he was nearly 40 and I was 21. Game, set, and match.

The scene stuck in my mom's head, though, and at the end she asked me, quite simply, how he could tell. This, in my mind, translated to "explain gaydar." Like I already said, the only way I'd known, in the context of the movie, that James Franco was gay was that I knew going in that he was supposed to play a gay character. Huxxah gaydar! I didn't know how to explain it, though - the majority experience I had with gay men were at my final university, and you didn't so much require gaydar to sense them as you, well, just had to kind of exist. Really, folks, Helen Keller could've told that these guys were gay from ten miles away. These were the types of guys who screamed for short-shorts, spent hours doing their makeup (and glitter) for a party attended only by their friends, and routinely dressed in drag when the conversation turned to anything boring. I'm not making this up: When my ex-friends and I would start talking about anything (mainly hip movies/music/whatnot, which bored me, too), they'd wend their way upstairs, snort some coke, and break out the heels.

This is only a slight exaggeration. A VERY slight exaggeration.

Maybe it makes for an amusing memory, but it didn't help me with identifying folks like James Franco. My mother wouldn't let it go, though - she wanted to know how Harvey had figured it out. I didn't have a good answer for her. What she might've been looking for, and what I've sort of embraced since, is that gay people should have some sort of precognitive ability that lets us recognize each other. Or maybe something similar; maybe we see the world in a slightly different way, and every other gay person has a cloudy little aura. It'd be neat, anyway, or at least a good conversation starter. "Your aura's looking a bit peppery today." "The tanning bed must have messed with it."

If one thing's for certain, this college life has seriously screwed my perceptions up. Take Eddie Izzard, who several of my friends and ex-friends were obsessed with; he's straight, or so I'm told, and he likes to cross-dress. Well, that's just not okay, is it? He should be gay, absolutely, according to my experience. Thank god I've learned to see past it, and through other things - books, memoirs, stories, movies, anecdotes - I've learned that the couple dozen queens I knew from university are not the be-all and end-all to being gay. It'd be worth finding out about James Franco, wouldn't it? I wouldn't mind running into him on a subway stairwell.

Now, to find a subway....

Gettin' Poli

"I know that GLMA members and LGBT physicians have been treated unfairly by the AMA in the past. There is simply no excuse for discriminatory actions or exclusions based on sexual orientation or gender identity -- none. First, GLMA has opened [the AMA's] eyes to the diverse needs of LGBT patients, and second -- and just as important -- GLMA has told patients that they have the right to expect a health care system filled with openness, fairness and equality."
– Dr. Edward Hill, MD, president American Medical Association

What's interesting about that quote is that it was the first verbal admission from any president of the AMA (which, I take it, is the USA's medical god-thing) that even acknowledged that the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association existed. And it's an apology. I suppose that's not too bad, but it does seem fairly Catholic-church-forgives-Galileo-centuries-after-he's-dead of them. "Whoops! Looks like the Earth does orbit the sun! Our bad, Leo."

The GLMA has apparently been around longer than I've been alive (since 1981), but would you care to take a guess at its total population? Just about 1000, as of mid-2008, which is also just about when that quote's from. And that tally is after it counts members in every single USA state and 12 countries! I mean, it's good that it exists, but doesn't it seem like its membership should be larger?

One of their stated goals also reads thus: "to promote quality health care for LGBT and HIV-positive people." Come again? I mean, it's great that HIV-positive folks have an organization advocating for them, but this seems way too close to equating gay people with people who have AIDS. We're past the 80s, aren't we? Also past the 90s? We know now that AIDS is not the gay disease. Straight people can contract AIDS, and of all types - men, women, teens, old folks, Catholics, Hindus, Muslims, atheists, politicians, sports stars, dishwashers, millionaires, models.... Who advocates for them? The same organization that would advocate for me if I were turned away from some type of care on the basis of being gay? Again, advocacy in any form is welcome, but this seems dangerously close to saying that being gay, like HIV/AIDS, is a chronic condition/disease.

The GLMA's big research project for the moment is ... (drum roll) ... (bated breath) ... (crickets chirp?) ... investigating meth use in gay men. Meth use. Gay men. All right, maybe I'm not from the city, but the answer seems fairly simple to me: Don't use meth. Period. The CDC does have this sheet, which says a bit about linking meth use and HIV/AIDS. Still, although the concept may seem hard to grasp at first, I'm fairly certain that once a lot of folks have it in their heads, money could be used a lot more efficiently to combat diseases and conditions that aren't idiot-pathic. Seriously.

Zombies walk the EARTH! Stay in school, kids.

Wil Wheaton

How do you figure out you're gay when you're only a kid, without the benefit of vocabulary and experience to describe what you're feeling? I've thought about it a lot, even if I've never been out-and-out asked, and there is more to it than "I just felt different." Of course you do, and of course I did! But how? It's hard to go back and quantify it once you're an adult, and can describe things in terms of gay and homosexual and whatnot. When you're a kid, pictures come easier than words. And, no, I'm not going to segue into saying I had a penis-drawing complex like Jonah Hill in Superbad ... but then again, see, I relate it in terms of adult ideas; I didn't think about the penis. But I'm getting dangerously close to digressing, so let me introduce you to the star of the hour: Wil Wheaton.



First: No, I don't think Wil Wheaton's gay, although those rumors did circle (from what I've read, anyway). No, I mean to go a bit further into Wil, here, and pull out who's perhaps the most reviled Star Trek character (or character, period) ever: Wesley Crusher.

I didn't hate him. I was born the year The Next Generation premiered, 1987, and my parents watched it religiously; at some points, Patrick Stewart felt like my second dad (even though my real dad looks a lot more like Jonathan Frakes). Anyway, at a time when the vast majority of the Trek audience was ripping Wesley Crusher apart for being Gene Roddenberry's fourteen-year-old Mary Sue, I didn't have a problem. I wanted to be smart like Wesley. I knew what it was like to have an awesome mom, like Wesley. I wanted to dress like Wesley. I wanted to look like Wesley. I wanted to be Wesley, if you haven't gotten that yet. It was ... well, I don't think there was anything wrong with it, and it was what it was: A slight obsession.




For my sixth Halloween, when I was in kindergarten, I decided that I was going to be Wesley Crusher. My mother found silver fabric that perfectly replicated his costume (don't ask me how), and I even had his communication badge: The toy line was in full swing by 1993, and I, of course, had a Wesley Crusher doll (action figure, of course, because he was posable and ostensibly for boys). He had a hole in his boot, which matched the raised bit on the communicator base; he could stand on his own! I didn't care so much about that, though, I cared more that his communicator said plainly WESLEY CRUSHER in the TNG font. My mother stitched it to the front of my costume, and there you go. I marched quite proudly in my school's Halloween parade, even if no one knew who I was (yeah, TNG was popular, but this was a little town in upstate New York).

I don't know what my parents thought about my Wesley Crusher obsession - probably that it would fade with time. I mean, I was obsessed with being a Tyrannosaurus after I saw Jurassic Park that same year, so what's the harm in pretending to be a space cadet?

Except it didn't fade. At least, not right away. No, I never made a shrine to him out of chewing gum in my closet, but for many years to come, he was my Buddha. I combed my hair like Wesley through many years of elementary school, and the part about wanting to be the smartest and best never went away. It was, without so many words, my first crush, even though I didn't understand it as such. I never wanted to kiss Wesley, I just wanted to be him.

I got older. It didn't go away. In fact, it started to separate from me, as I grew more into myself (though I don't know that I was ever comfortable with all of me, back then, but again, digression). I began to see Wil Wheaton as a person, not as a character; I began to see Wesley Crusher as a badly-written Mary Sue. Now, instead of wanting to be the actor or the character, I wanted to know him. I remember swimming one summer in a lake, I think probably the summer before I left New York, and bumping into an older boy who I thought looked vaguely like Wil Wheaton. He apologized, and I spent the next half hour trying to impress him. Not that I ever said so, of course, but when I dove, I would look, to see if he was looking.

I had two younger brothers, but what I really came to want was an older brother. More than that, though, I wanted one older brother in particular: Wil Wheaton. I worked it out in my head: If I was born in 1987, and he was in his early teens, how much of an age difference would there have to be? Could my parents even legally adopt him? I worried, several nights in a row, that they couldn't, and it would all come to nothing. It did, of course, but looking back on it now, I can see what I didn't have the ability to express back then.

It was love. It wasn't what I've read about in other gay men's memories, either, not the want to be the woman who was kissing the hunky lead, or a strange sexual feeling towards David Hasselhoff instead of Yasmine Bleeth. Mine was more of an obsession, and a powerful one, too, that lasted for a long time, probably until I started being able to put a name to it. But, there it is: My first love, and it wasn't a real love at all, not as I understood it for the majority of my life. Instead, I just wanted to be someone else, and when I grew past that, I wanted to spend all my time with him.

Sometimes I thought we could sit around in our underwear and talk, but that was all.

Who I am / Who am I

Last week, I went to a meeting of Prescott's GSA (which apparently stands for "Gender & Sexuality Alliance" and not "Gay-Straight Alliance." Who knew?). Since it's the summer, and the club is composed mostly of college kids, it was a small meeting - a girl, a guy, my friend, and me. It was fun, but the guy, who (ostensibly?) runs the thing, warned that next time we met, classes will've started and there'll be icebreakers. I was not so happy to hear that. He tried to reassure me, explain that we'd be sharing easy, useful things like favorites (movie, music, ...shoes?) and coming out stories.

It seems to me that it'd be easier to gag someone with a knife or fork; I don't understand where the adage comes from; I wanted to be gagged with a spoon.

But here I am now, trying to think of some more effective way of explaining myself. Let's start with what you can see: I'm writing, and my name is Tony, but you could've figured that much out alone. This blog is called "Into the Med Years," because that's what it's going to be chronicling. Let's take a trip to the department of backstory:

I graduated in December of 2008 with a bachelor's degree in English. It would make you think I like the subject, wouldn't it? Nope, hardly a bit. I can't stand literature classes, I hate talking about reading, and Shakespeare and I are more old nemeses than anything else. But I am an avid reader, and I write a lot, so it seemed like the logical thing to major in. I wanted to be a plain, straight-up professional writer, and I figured college was the way to accomplish that - get through undergrad, go to a good grad school, get an MFA, make some contacts, launch my stupendous career.

Well, it didn't happen that way.

I've spent the past year (and more) researching grad schools, getting my best work together, whoring myself out to teachers for letters of recommendation, and then the applying! Picking up the mail every day was pretty awful for a few winter-spring months, believe me. But when the spring was done, I thought I was set: I was going to Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, in its MFA Fiction Writing program. A coveted position, to me and a couple thousand other kids who'd applied, and one I had wanted more than ... well, friends, maybe, since I lost a few that spring.

And then I wondered why. Why I wanted it, I mean. It took months to remind myself that going to grad school for writing wasn't what I had to do, and if I wanted to do something else - and I was jonesing at that point - I could. I hadn't made any big mistakes yet, but I might, and soon.

So here I am. Many moons later, and I've given up my spot in Sarah Lawrence's coveted program. What am I doing instead? Well, that's taken a while to figure out, too, but I've always been interested in science. I thought for a while about being a paleontologist, which is what I wanted to be when I was a kid; I thought about being an astronomer, which was more of an adult interest; and I thought about medicine, which combines everything and has been omnipresent, though I only started seriously thinking about it as a career last summer, one term away from my degree.

So, yes, I have a degree in English, and while I may not like the subject much I'm still proud of it. In the mean time, I have to start again: My goal is to be a doctor, but I'll need at least two years of prerequisite studies before I'm even ready to think about medical school. I'm also thinking about becoming a nurse along the way, but this is only a start. There'll be much more to come.

One more thing: You've figured it out from the paragraphs above, but I'm a gay man. I've never worn a rainbow flag in my life, but I'm starting to realize that it isn't a part of me that I can relegate to masturbation and short stories. I may not be the next Milk, but I'll probably write about it a good deal here, along with medicine, and probably anything else that catches my interest. All in all, I don't know what to expect, and neither should you. But, hey, I'm reading Life of Pi, and I never expected a tiger in a lifeboat, so what the hell?

Prayer

This is a first post. Specifically, it looks like music that was composed by Japanese folks without lyrics, but now has lyrics (in Japanese) and ambient rain. I like it, and that's all.