A Little Holiday Contentment

It's the story we tell our generations to corroborate the belief that we are a country based in virtue, generosity, and courage; and if you grew up in the United States public school system you know it well. On September 6, 1620 a group of puritans fleeing religious persecution set sail on a boat called the Mayflower and 65 days later they settled in a town called Plymouth. In that brutal winter, many of the aforementioned Pilgrims lost their lives to the seasonal conditions and when it was time for the harvest, the surrounding Wampanoag Indians aided the colonizing Pilgrims in their new world duties, thus ensuring the Puritans a successful and prosperous autumn. A celebratory dinner was thrown; American Indians and Pilgrims sat together, offering us the perfect portrait of respect and harmony between two divergent cultures.

I am not going to bash Thanksgiving. I am not going to comment on the many ironies that surround this historic holiday. I admire the fact that we, as a country, strive to value gratitude for the things present in our lives; in fact, Thanksgiving is, and always has been, my favorite holiday. In days that are filled with bank statements and war stories, it is more than refreshing to spend a little time accounting for what we have to be thankful for. Even if this holiday has become more about football and retail sales and avoiding family fights, it's grounded in integrity (much thanks to Lincoln) and good will, which is what the holiday season is all about.

This is my first holiday season since coming out to my family; it is also my first holiday season since separating myself from all things religion. Ninety-five percent of my holiday memories are explicitly tied to church and lately I've been feeling a little lost without being able to take part in any of those traditions. (In full disclosure: even if I still wanted to participate in those traditions, I wasn't invited to over half of them.) I wish that I could say that I'm going to embrace the meanings behind the traditions; that I'm going to live out this holiday season with the values of Christmas, even though I'm leaving the sacraments of it behind, but I'm just not strong enough...yet. In all honesty, negativity is quickly making its way into my holiday season and I'm having a hard time enjoying myself.

So... rather than a new years resolution, I am making a holiday season resolution. This holiday season I am not going to dwell on the things that I don't have: traditions, a job, or a girlfriend. I am not going to worry about the things I don't have control over: party invitations, the economy, or what my family members think about my life. I am not going ignore that it's the holiday season, merely because I'm having a hard time mustering up enough strength to enjoy it. I have a lot to be thankful for so I'm going to extend myself contentment this holiday season...and perhaps I'll liquor up my coffee.

P.S. I read the most exceptionally moving book this weekend called, "Are There Closets in Heaven?", which is a beautifully written story about the relationship between a lesbian daughter and her Catholic father. It's unlike any gay memoir I've read and I highly recommend it...oh, and clear some time in your calender to go see "Milk", it's fantastic.

Blind Eye for the Queer Guys

I am not a crier. Not because I don't have a soul or because I don't care; I just don't cry. I have shed more tears in the last few weeks than, perhaps, I have in my entire lifetime and all because I don't understand. I don't understand how someone can think that my desires are disgusting, when my desire to love a woman is the purest desire that I possess; I don't understand how someone can think that I am incapable of being a loving mother only because I am incapable of loving a man; I don't understand how someone can think that a person as sweet and as honorable as I am could destroy a blessed union; and I don't understand why someone thinks that I am unworthy of whatever it is we are fighting over.

I strive, diligently, to live my life with empathy; to see things from different perspectives; to appreciate where other people are coming from. I can often find some way to succeed at the task, but the last few weeks have been different. No matter how hard I try to provide understanding and compassion towards the anti-gay rights movement, I am having an unfathomable time finding the means to do so. I don't understand their point of view and I don't feel compassionate to where they're coming from. If I am honest with myself I feel marginalized, fearful, annoyed, repulsive, patronized, and most of all I feel invisible.

I am not an idea or a notion of what homosexuality is; I am a homosexual. I am not a painting of two fat girls naked in a castle hallway or an eXplicit movie of two skinny girls faking it in a bed; I am an actual lesbian that has sex with other lesbians. (OK, they're not all lesbians, but you get my point.) I am a real live lesbian. If you supported the passing of proposition eight, then you supported the marginalization of my real life. It's not just a conception that, out there in the world, two girls could possibly fall in love, want to get married, and potentially start a family; it's exactly what I want my life to look like.

The people that I personally interact with that disagree with my "lifestyle choice" all deal with my homosexuality in the same way; they avoid that it is an actual part of who I am. They make an active effort to separate their generalized views of homosexuality from their intimate relationship with me. I doubt that the people who voted to limit the rights of homosexuals on November 4th were thinking about a person that they knew when they filled out that bubble or pulled that lever. I doubt that the people who donated thousands upon millions of dollars to "protect the institution" were thinking about what that money could do for a third world country or an abused woman's shelter. I think that if we were to personalize the fight for same-sex rights, make the fight more about the person who is a homosexual than the idea of homosexuality, people would have a much harder time voting the way that they did.

I refuse to believe that we live in a world where we intentionally limit the people around us. Perhaps I place too much faith in humanity, but I believe that no matter how scared someone might feel, we care about one another. I don't believe that what people are scared of... is me. I think that if we were to remove the idealistic blindfold, the obstruction that is making this fight more about an idea than a person, we'd have the footing to create change. Homosexuality isn't an idea and it's about time that we removed the blinders that say that it is.

P.S. Did you know that in the 4th century Christians practiced the union of "adelphopoiesis", which literally translates into "brother-making", and was the tradition of religiously uniting two people of the same-sex?

Cum-passion

(There are a lot of other funny cartoons about this topic here.)

Gay marriage, or the lack there of, is on the mind of every lesbian blogger this week, so I thought I would follow suit and share my thoughts. Let me start with a disclaimer. I am 23 and not currently in love; nor have I ever fallen in love with someone I wanted to share the rest of my life with. I spent the first 21.5 years of my life imbibed in the world of conservative Christianity and "traditionalistic" values and where every thought I had was filtered through a machine of scripture, status quo, and religious domination. I am not naive to the fact that I come to this topic without an intimate understanding of what it feels like to want to commit your life to someone else and that I haven't thoroughly broken all the ties to my religious thought process. I, without hesitation, confess that my thoughts on this issue are undeveloped and fragmentary, but I'm going to throw my lesbian blog into the gay marriage ring anyways. ("Gay Marriage Ring"... that would be a fantastic before and after puzzle on Wheel of Fortune.)

I am currently studying journalism and I constantly have my head in a book, which means that the majority of my life revolves around words. I love words. (That's an awkward statement, but it's true.) Words are reliable, they’re personal, they have history, and they have a lot of power. Words can be goofy, words can offend, words can uplift, words can turn people on; and the same word can evoke all of those emotions, plus many more. The one thing that I have learned about words is that words have very little to do with the definition that has been attached to them. I am always shocked when I open a thesaurus* and see that so many words, for all intensive purposes, mean the exact same thing. Why so many words? It is because words have two parts. There is the definition part of a word. This is the way a word functions in a sentence; the definitive … you know, that's how we get the word "definition" … the definitive properties of a word give it meaning.

However; far more important than the definition of a word is the connotation that any word brings along with it. The idea of a word, what a word represents, is considerably more influential than its actual meaning. When you hear a word, you see a picture. That picture is not of a page in a dictionary; it is of a scenario or a feeling or an experience. This is what makes words so powerful. Everything that you have been through, everything that you have felt, everything that you have experienced is rooted inside of you and can be brought to the surface at any moment with any word. The power of a word lies not in it's definition, but in what that word represents.



The fight over same-sex rights, at this moment, revolves around a word and how that word is defined. Opponents to same-sex marriage believe that the word should be re-defined to specify that the union is between a man and a woman. Both sides of the issue have thrown the word "marriage" into the ring as our scapegoat, as a vehicle for contention, but I don't think that we are actually battling over a definition. The proponents of same-sex marriage aren't fighting over a word, we are fighting over what that word represents. Ultimately, if you believe that the union between a man and woman is different than the union between a woman and woman, then you believe that homosexual love is different than heterosexual love. That is the connotation that we are fighting against.

Here is the thing. Congress has control over words. Politicians and religious bodies have the definitive authority to define anything and everything. I say, let them fuck the shit out of definitions; until their toes curl, their checks turn rosy, and they're out of breath. Because nobody can define what you come home to everyday. Nobody can tell you what you have. If you love somebody with more love than you thought you had in you; if you come home to somebody that you have, in your heart, committed to spend the rest of your life to; if you have somebody that you fight with and laugh with and fuck with and sit with, then you have a marriage. You have all the connotations of marriage , even if you don't have that word...yet.

Because this fight over same-sex marriage revolves so much around fear, I don't particularly think that throwing our fists in the air and stomping our feet through the crowds is the way to bring about understanding. I think that there is room here for compassion; not much, but a little bit. I remember feeling scared when I went through the process of identifying my sexual feelings. There was a lot of fear in my life at that time and I got through it because I showed myself a little bit of compassion. Fear is fear; whether it's me being scared to admit that I wanted to fall in love with a girl or if it's a religious group in Idaho being scared of the change in status quo. I think that compassion is our road to progress because compassion brings about trust and trust reduces fear.

Compassion isn't easy in these times, so let me give you some advice. I recently read an article about the correlation between compassion and oxytocin. The research suggests that the more oxytocin your body naturally produces, the more compassionate you feel towards others. In case you didn't know, oxytocin is the hormone that is released during an orgasm. The more orgasms you have, the more compassionate you can be. So fuck away ladies! because if the road to gay marriage is compassion, one of the on-ramps includes gay sex. Now, that's something I can get down with.

P.S. Alternative titles to this blog included "Blind Eye for the Queer Guys" or "Fight...for Your Right...to Maaaaaarry (to the tune of the Beastie Boys)"

*I do not and can not in good conscious advise anyone to use a thesaurus. Stephen King once said, "Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule." and I agree with him.