American Gay

In case you haven't seen it, Dan Savage's It Gets Better project is just awesome. In light of the recent, tragic suicides by gay teens who obviously had no support in the various shitty places they lived, Dan set up a YouTube channel for people to send in their own videos telling how things got much better once they became adults and moved on with their own lives.

It really is an awful situation: you're gay, lesbian, bi, or hell anything other than straight, skinny, and white, and you live in Bumfuck, Tennessee, and if you so much as part your hair the wrong way someone will call you a fag and kick your teeth in. A lot of people understand being bullied; it happens to many kids, true. However most people who are bullied go home to a supportive family that will pat them on the back and tell them they love them.

It's different to be bullied for the very essence of who you are, and then have that bullying come from the adults around you too. As Sarah Silverman succinctly puts it:

"...don't be fucking shocked and wonder where all these bullies are coming from that are torturing kids and driving them to kill themselves because they're different---they learned it from watching you."

I guess it's something that I'm destined never to understand---why it is that people go apeshit when someone is different. And when people start matter-of-factly explaining to me that the bible (or what about the Koran?) clearly lays out what is expected from the sexes---besides the obvious ridiculousness of people holding up a haphazard collection of thousand-year-old letters as instructions for life---my brain can't figure out whether to kill that person or die laughing.

Here's how I feel about it: men and women come in various, ever changing forms that run a broad spectrum and often bleed into each other. Not only does society constantly re-evaluate what it means to be a "man" and a "woman", but the very traits we deem masculine or feminine shift camps constantly. Androgyny is more common than people realize. Hermaphrodites and even newer combinations of sex do occur. Whatever a person's physical sex is, they can be attracted to any or all or combinations of any sex; their preferences may be fixed, or may change over time. I think all of this is a good thing, and just makes for more interestingness. If someone wears something that's odd, it makes my day interesting----what it doesn't do is invoke fear or rage, which seems to be exactly how people who oppose gay rights feel after seeing a gay person.

If a guy wants to wear women's clothes and fuck dudes, that's cool. If a guy wants to wear women's clothes and fuck women, that's cool too. If a girl is a totally girly-girl to the point that she just loves eating pussy, that is awesome. If a man feels he was born into the wrong body, and pursues treatment to alter his physical sex, I wish him the best in finding his true self. And if regular old straight people want to fuck each other however they want to, that's cool too. Because I don't believe in interfering in the sex lives of consenting adults. How is this hard to understand? Why do people get fixated on the "grossness" of what other people who are enjoying what they are doing are doing?

But mostly, it's very irritating that gay people don't have full rights, when the only opposition comes from religion, and our government is supposed to be secular---not imposing one group's religious beliefs on the rest of the nation. So someone doesn't like the clothes that someone wears and who they're in love with, so they get to deprive them of basic civil rights? What century is this? As it's been said, it's no wonder that gay teens with no support system feel lost to the point of no return.