Pride and Prom

I've got to say, this is adorable. Cute Nebraska couple wins a wedding package! And, of course, given the nature of this blog, they're both men. :)
It's been a big semester for me. I went to the DC Pride Parade a few weeks ago. What an amazing feeling. It put me in mind of that Glee song, because after all the people who hate on me, or my people, anyway, these people were literally, so I'm told, screaming our name. I couldn't hear them, but the adviser for our LGBT club could! They were cheering, slapping our hands, screaming for beads, which we ran out of long before we got to the end of the walk. And we each had three dozen. We had giant rainbow flags, which were fun to twirl, but heavy. Twice I shouted, "Do you love me?" to the crowd, and got cheers back!
Not one week later, I went to a GSA prom with a few (straight-ish) friends, hosted by their church. They are Unitarian Universalists. I asked one of them to define Unitarian Universalism.

"To understand Unitarian Universalists (UUs), it is necessary to understand the difference between a creed and a covenant. With most churches, there is a creed, a sacred doctrine that one must believe in order to consider oneself as part of that church. In Christianity, there is the bible, in Islam, the Koran. In creedal churches, one can strive to understand ones creed more thoroughly, but the same basic belief is always there. In UUism, there is no creed. Instead, the members of a UU congregation make an agreement, or covenant, with each other, based off of the seven UU principles. These principles are:

· The inherent worth and dignity of every person

· Justice, equity, and compassion in human relations

· Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations

· A free and responsible search for truth and meaning

· The right of conscience and use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large

· The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all

· Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part

Under those principles, each member of a congregation is free to worship whoever/whatever they believe in and search for what they find truly meaningful and divine to themselves. Many UUs believe in a god. Many do not. Others believe in multiple gods, spirits, divine energy, or the love of the universe. What is important in a UU congregation is acceptance and support to one another in ones search for ones own spirituality. When people come together in love and trust and a willingness to learn and be surprised by faith and joy, then one has a UU congregation."

It was from these people that I felt acceptance. It was here I could be flamboyant and flirtatious, around complete strangers, without fear. I went to prom in dress pants, a silk shirt, and a top hat, and, perhaps given my short hair, felt far more natural, debonair, and just plain good-looking than I ever do in a dress.
My church is Christian, and the root of our belief is love. So it's supposed to be. As I study history, I find myself wondering whether the Christian church doesn't need another Reformation. Where is the love I am promised? Why do I find it at my friends' church instead of my own? Why do I break down crying, for I can see that their church loves them, unconditionally, and me? They don't care that I am not one of them, much less that I am gay, and accept me completely.

Know Your Rights

My mother was shocked today to hear that workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and/or gender identity is not illegal.
In fact, there are a lot of states that don't have laws against it. We looked up a couple of states and their laws. HCR.org allows you to select your state and see whether it recognizes same-sex marriage, has anti-discrimination laws and/or anti-hate laws, whether it has protection in schools, etc. Try it.
So we moved to the worldview. The International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Intersex Organization posts one of these every year. Explore the worldview on subjects such as whether one can change one's gender on one's birth certificate, whether hate crime based on sexual orientation is considered an aggravating circumstance, and whether adoption by couples is legal.
This is ridiculous. There is no good argument for not having legal rights.

My story

I'm a fan of this page on Facebook called Love is Love. The more I read the posts on this page, the more I am educated. And the more I think even we, the people who have the most reason to be against prejudice, still have it. We want everyone, or at least everyone within a group, to be like us.
If I'm understanding the book I'm reading rightly, this isn't our fault. In literature, it's called postmodernism. The evil of our time is prejudice, but it's very difficult to be free of it in all forms. I have only met one person who I felt was completely free of it, and she happens to be the girl I'm in love with.
Many GLBT people complain about how everyone tells them it's a choice. But others have more interesting stories to tell. One believes he did choose to be straight. Another tells how he grew up feeling straight, and over the next several years simply started losing interest in the opposite sex.
Even in our community, people are different. So I thought I'd offer my view.
One person says that the majority of people are bisexual to one degree or another. I'd agree with this in terms of myself. I'm not going to say I've never looked at a guy and wanted to kiss him. I have. It's just never been to the forget-how-to-breathe intensity I've gotten with more than one girl, none of whom have ever been interested in me. I've never wanted a guy to anywhere near the extent I've wanted a girl. That's not to say I'd be completely repulsed by kissing a boy, or further. It's not to say that it's completely impossible that some day I'd find the 'right guy'. It's just really very unlikely. Not living in a community where no one would bat an eye no matter who I dated, or make assumptions about who I wanted to date, saying, "I'm gay" is the clearest way to explain to my friends that the likelihood of finding a man who was all that to me is so low that I'm not looking for it. If it finds me, great. But there are girls who I like now, girls who I could be happy with, girls who take my breath away. So that's where I'm looking. That's where I probably always will look. 'Cause I sit next to a sleeping girl in the car, and spend what feels like hours just concentrating on keeping my hands off her. I spend time with my first love, and find myself experiencing something similar to a two-hour adrenaline rush. I look at the girl of my dreams, and I want nothing more than to take her face in my hands and kiss her. But with a guy? Even the ones I crushed on didn't turn me on like that.
I'll call my first love Audacia. Because she is audacious. She is my wild child. When I was ten years old, I fell in love with her. I asked her to marry me, without blinking an eye. She loved me so much, as a friend, that she said yes, and we went through with it. I touch her and I feel an extension of my soul in her. We are the same person, two halves of one whole. I still see her, and I still want her, and part of me still loves her and always will.
Then I fell in love with the girl I'll call Allegra. Not the medication, the happy one, from allegre, from Maggie Grace's character in The Jane Austin Book Club. I came out to her yesterday, and she told me that although she's straight, she doesn't plan to stop hanging out with me. I fell in love with her three years ago, the nineteenth of April, at my birthday party. I've been spending the better part of that time going through a cycle something like this: try to get over her, almost get there, get so close, see her again, and fall right back to square one. I was raised to think for myself, and I try to. I question everything. Yes, my sexual orientation. Also my faith. My sanity. Whether it wouldn't be better if we just let humans kill each other off so that the world could reassert itself. I can think of nothing (except the realms of the absurd, such as penguins ruling the world) that I haven't questioned. But most of all my faith. Occasionally it falls out from under me, like losing the floor beneath my feet. And when that happens, I take a deep breath, and start over, beginning with my Allegra. Her I am sure of. She may not be everything to me, but she's right up there with food. I don't need her to be my girlfriend. I just need her to exist. There's one memory I have, and maybe I was just a fanciful kid, but this is how it seemed to me. I was lying on my bed, and I felt my love for her drain out of me. And I prayed, I prayed to have it back. I liked loving her. I wanted to be in love with her. And it came back. That's what I mean when I say maybe I did choose it. I chose her. But there was Audacia before that, all of this before I applied 'gay' to myself.
You know how that happened? The same year I fell in love with Allegra, I went to a friend's wedding. I came back and told my mother about how I was planning my wedding now. She said, "Who's the groom?"
"No groom," I replied uneasily. Something in me knew this was unusual. "Just [Allegra]."
She bought me a book a few days later. GLBTQ: The Survival Guide for Queer and Questioning Teens. I thought, Gay? Is that what I am? Huh.
It was never about being gay. It was about loving girls. It was my mother, society, who put the label on. Not that I blame her. Perhaps if I lived in a different community I'd cast it off and say, I date who I date, whoever may come along. Unfortunately, I'm part of a community where the possibility of dating the same gender, or a genderless person, doesn't even occur to anyone. Since I'm not dating anyone, allowing them to assume I'm straight, as I know they do, only makes me feel more isolated, because I believe they love me for who they think I am, not who I really am. So I take it. The label is for society. It files me away into a neat little pigeonhole, just like we've been doing for years. Slaves and free, black, white, Asian, Hispanic. Men and women. Gay and straight. And there is so much more between. People of mixed race, for so many generations that they can't claim one nationality. People without a fixed gender. And such fluid sexuality. People are people. Everything else has holes in it somewhere.

It Gets Better, In the Aftermath

Lately, what's been on in the car is the album For Your Entertainment by Adam Lambert. My favorite song on the album? Aftermath.
As soon as I read the lyrics to this song, I said to myself, "This is about coming out." It never says that explicitly, but if you're LGBTQ, you get it.
According to Wikipedia, Adam co-wrote the song (with whom it doesn't say). This makes sense. Adam is gay. If you were watching Glee tonight, you might have caught a glimpse of him in the latest It Gets Better video. Which is also an ad for Google Chrome. :) I chose to ignore that part.
Watching the video, you can see the titles of the various YouTube videos of the It Gets Better project. I am constantly amazed at the number of people who have put these videos up. Lady Gaga. President Obama. The people who work at Google and Facebook. And Adam. I must say I don't like his phrasing when he says "who I choose to sleep with". Of course, it's true. Who you sleep with is a choice. It just misleads what feels like most of the world into thinking that wanting it is a choice, that falling in love is a choice.
But back to Aftermath. Every word in it is about feeling overwhelmed, about feeling like the rest of the world sees only a mask, about moving forward, and mostly, not being alone. As far as I'm concerned, the very best cut is the version that you buy, but a not-half-bad YouTube of it is here. Or, if you prefer, a remix that won an O award.
"Don't be afraid of what's inside/ Wanna tell ya, you'll be all right/In the aftermath."
There are so many people out there just waiting to welcome you to the wonderful world of being LGBTQ. Just do a YouTube search on It Gets Better.

Born This Way

So, I'm going to be a fangirl or possibly just a flaming proud lezzie for a minute and tell you about Glee Tuesday night. It was called Born This Way and about loving yourself. They brought Kurt home to his old school (they just couldn't resist giving him more amazing outfits, I'm sure. At the other school, he had a uniform). Meanwhile, the closet lesbian, Santana, hooks up with the other gay guy, Dave, to pretend neither of them are. Kurt's prerequisite for coming home was that Dave would start a PFLAG (Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) group at school with him.
Everyone is told to make a shirt with a word or a phrase on it that sums up the part of them that they're most ashamed of, the thing that makes them different, and they'll sing/dance the title number by Lady Gaga. I've never listened to the original of this song before, only a different cover of it that has half the words removed. While most of the kids have shirts that say things like "Can't Sing" or "Brown Eyes" on them, the class idiot, Brittany, who's the only one who knows about Santana, gives her a shirt that says, "Lebanese". Santana says, "I'm Hispanic. Wait. Is this meant to say, 'Lesbian'?" Brittany replies, "Yeah. Isn't that what it says?" The funny thing about this is that Lebanese is mentioned in the song itself.
Kurt struts it on stage, singing the opening words in a shirt that says "Likes Boys" (I'd take a "Likes Girls"), the only shirt that's completely unashamed. Santana sits out, wearing her shirt
where no one can see her. The Trevor Project asked its Facebook fans whether they would buy or wear Kurt's shirt--I and 1,707 people 'liked' it.
And the song! It's amazing! I bought it and put it on single repeat. I'm up to a play count of 27 already. It's bouncy and it has a great message.
"A different lover is not a sin"
"No matter gay, straight, or bi/Lesbian, transgender life/I'm on the right
track, baby, I was born to survive"
"I'm beautiful in my way, 'cause God makes no mistakes"
"There's nothing wrong with loving who you are, she said, 'cause He made you
perfectly" (not in order)
A church near me holds a LGBT prom, which they've invited me to. If they play this song, I am so dancing on stage. I'm saying this out loud (well, you know what I mean) so that I can't chicken out.
Hey, look! Someone managed to post that scene. Watch! I'll admit Kurt looks a bit insane, and they cut my second quote above (it's in the version on iTunes, though) AND it's backwards and blurry, but it's worth it!

Related: I met a new friend on Facebook (become a fan) and started stalking her profile. Everything I read made me like her more. Now, her profile picture was Kurt and his boyfriend Blaine kissing.
Further down, I saw an event she attended that was about posting a same-sex kiss picture as your profile picture to protest one being marked as inappropriate content. I started looking at the pictures. My favorite? A picture that says at the top, "Jesus Loves You", and at the
bottom, pasted in, a picture of two guys kissing.
I cried. The next morning my glasses still had spots. It was captioned, "If you are a believer, I am not, but I leave this Christian image of a kiss and love." This has always been an issue for me, as I have always believed that I was, indeed, born this way.

Marriage

A recent poll says that just over half the population now supports gay marriage.
Make one more today. Support a person's right to the pursuit of happiness, living in a recognized life partnership with the person they love. Support our legal rights as committed partners, such as hospital visitation and federal benefits. And support our right to NOT be treated 'special', to dream of a wedding just like yours.
My church tells me that I can be gay, but not act on it. Why? Because it's the same as sex before marriage.
So give us marriage and a choice other than life celibacy or going against our church.

Ed and Derence

Watch here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=H8nTy0e8mj4