Wednesday, May 01, 2013

OK so you're gay

I'm not sure what we're supposed to do.  Used to be the love that dare not speak its name but as someone once said now it's the love that won't shut up.  Yeah I'm talking about 34-year old Nets pro-basketball player Jason Collins coming out in a big new writeup in SI, gotta love identity politics.  So he likes creme de l'cock, again I'm not sure what we're supposed to do.  The Rev. Fred Phelps's group can boycott his funeral when he reaches 85 or so and passes away if they're still around by then but as for the rest of us should we send him a nice little Hallmark card or simply ignore it?  He's also a very presentable African-American gentlemen so here you have your classic 2-fer, a pcer's dreamboat with a cherry on top so I guess if you make even a mild joke at his expense that makes you into a racist homophobe.  Look I'm tired of being forced into the TMI Zone over and over again most commonly at the checkout line at the supermarket and I don't care if it's the hetero or homo news of the day and now you got the image floating around in your noggin' of some young sculpted gay ebony men well-oiled in a classic Greco-Roman sense bucking each other, Django Uncorked and now they say this is only the Tip of the penile iceberg, they say more star athletes are readying themselves for their respective outings getting ready to take that call from the President (start writing Mr. Obama).  Any Yankees or is all that going out with different women starlets simply a ruse, fronting?  What's next the Gay Olympics?  Even some of Jason Collins' most ardent team supporters have expressed some Twitter-reservations about the whole male shower scene, I mean he is 34 and all not nearing 50 like me and at that prime age the thing has a mind of its own.  Actually I'm only blogging about it today because it's a fun topic:)

19 comments:

  1. You can do like I do and say "Jason Collins who?"

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  2. Truman Capote was gay but as I recall he mainly talked about his writing.

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  3. "I'm not sure what we're supposed to do."
    Me neither. The few that I know are not 'in your face' types and it
    is that attitude that detracts from the issue (although 'in your face' seems to be the preferred method for any interest group anymore..)

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  4. Do we remember Truman Capote as that gay writer or as that great writer who happened to be gay? Of course that's old school so Jason Collins will probably forever be remembered as that gay bastketball player.

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  5. First off I don't follow basketball either way.

    I guess it's significant in the same way that the color barrier was broken in sports. At least gay kids will have someone they can look to as a role model, and I think I can understand wanting to be who you are and not have to hide it.

    I think a lot more things mean a lot more to other people, maybe, than they do to me. I know a large segment of the population capitalizes the words White and Black when referring to race... I never have just because it doesn't occur to me to do so, it's just another adjective to me. I don't think a lot about race. Maybe that's a byproduct of white privelege or maybe it's just because I go through life generally oblivious. I sort of feel the same way about people being gay. I think maybe it's a lot more important to them than it is to me (I am far more concerned with whether you can play basketball or whatever sport it is you're wanting to be playing) but okay, maybe that's heterosexual privelege? I think that maybe is a real thing, as real as white privelege, an unspoken norm or whatever, and maybe I'm oblivious because I don't have to be otherwise. I don't know.

    I do know that there are lots of people who have lots of issues with things like people's race or ethnicity or gayness or lack thereof. I guess to them it's more important than it is to me.

    I think the goal is that someday it won't be important to anyone, it will just be what it is, nothing will have to be hidden and we can all just be who we are without fear of stigma or prejudice or having your house acid bombed (see pagans living in Florida). I think I do feel the effects of some stigma in different areas, I tend to be very quiet about religious things in many ways because I'm surrounded by Christians who all happen to be very aggressive about their faith and very vocal in their predictions about where I'm going to end up. And the stigma about mental illness is huge and very real for me. Do you know how many people use the word 'bipolar' as a generalized insult? About as many as used to use the word 'retarded' when I was a kid. It bothers me, but it bothers Scott more: he will confront people about it, but I won't. I hope someday I can feel free enough to do that, but I'm nowhere near there yet.

    Anyway. So much babble. I shall now recommence the knitting.

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  6. That's a pretty good explanation of where people like Collins are coming from. Trouble is I still see it as identity politics like if Denzel Washington in interviews always stressed his race first instead of being a good actor, I mean would that help or hinder the whole cause of race? Perhaps a cleverer way of Collins doing it would have been if he just casually slipped in "that time my boyfriend and I were in Aruba" but I think your obliviousness is the best policy. I'll get a young gay couple as customers every now and then and then ten minutes later I totally forget about it but I think if they emphasized it it'd rub people the wrong way. I think in Collins' case though it'd be wise at this point to deemphasize it and get back to the Game.

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  7. So I was considering this today.

    An amazing number of people have some amazing misconceptions about people with mental illnesses: In the specific case of bipolar disorder, that moods change in seconds, that the person is dangerously unpredictable at all times, that they will necessarily at some point become violent, that all bipolar persons should be kept in hospitals or other restricted/confined areas, that they should not be allowed to take care of children or be responsible for the wellbeing of others and in some extreme cases, people believe that the mentally ill should not be allowed to reproduce (this belief resulted in thousands of forced sterilizations in decades past) or to hold jobs or to be anything but on the very fringes of society. On the other side are people who believe that mental illness is a quackery, a fake, that people who claim to be mentally ill are just malingerers who want drugs, or that pharmaceutical companies have 'created' these illnesses to make money. All of these beliefs are wrong to one degree or another.

    In the same way it occurs to me that there are equally as many false beliefs about the gay folk: that it's a 'choice', that it's 'curable' (which recently resulted in some deaths at a 'man camp' in South Africa; apparently an attempt to 'beat the gay' out of some teens), that if your kids hang around with gay folk they'll 'catch' it as if it were a disease; that gay folk are all pedophiles or promiscuous, and for the tinfoil crowd, that there is a Gay Conspiracy lying in wait to 'recruit' and 'convert' children and then overtake the government to make being heterosexual a crime, or something.

    So here's all this huge misinformation going on, preying on fears and reinforcing inaccurate stereotypes, and this is the status quo. So people in this situation (for this discussion, the gay or the mentally ill) pretty much have two choices. One, you can be quiet and pretend to fit in, which means you have to essentially lie about who/what you are for fear of the reactions that will come... or you can attempt to change the status quo by intervening, by education, by showing people what the reality is. Now that's necessarily an in your face kind of approach, but I'm not sure there's another way to do it. Like Jackie Robinson. No one believed that a black player could play in major league baseball until he did it. So these people, these pioneers if you want to call them that, these people who put themselves out there to change the status quo, they take huge risks; emotionally they face possibly losing friends, relationships, or social castigation, being ostracized, or even in some cases financial risks when jobs are lost or something like that. But these people start the process, they take these risks so that the work of changing the status quo can begin, and because of what these people do the process of acceptance and assimilation can begin, even if it takes years or generations.

    I think I understand Collins better now.

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  8. I'm repeating myself but with the history of my bowels I don't know how they do it day in and day out. God bless 'em!!

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  9. What makes you think gay people have sex every single day?

    Ask around your married friends (or those in long term relationships) and see how often they're getting any.

    I'd be willing to bet you that married (or committed in long term relationships) gay folk aren't getting laid any more than the rest of us. That's one of those myths.

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  10. Look once-a-week anal would be brutal enough. Now let's see with my personal colonorectal history I can count on one hand the times when this is even remotely feasible let alone doable. The moon has to be right, there has to be an occultation of Mars on Jupiter, Orion has to have the right declination in the sky, the Cicadas and their 17-year larval/adult lifecycle may even enter the picture......maybe in my next life:)

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  11. All right, that made me laugh...

    Plenty of straight folk have plenty of anal sex though.. don't forget that.

    There's an entire INDUSTRY built around stuff to make it easier and more fun.

    In the end: where there's a will....

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  12. Don't get me wrong, my libertarian bent has me say none of this stuff should be subject to legislation and let the folks do what they may. Sure there are some straight folks who are into it and experiment but I'd say they're a distinct maybe strong minority but not the majority. If most straights were regularly doing the anal the abortion rate wouldn't be as consistently high as it is. We had this discussion remember? - Stop Abortion Go Anal:)

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  13. Changing the status quo, thought occured what IF the status quo doesn't want to be changed? I mean he can spread his ass cheeks on the next magazine cover and all but pretty much when it comes to some of these things folks' minds are pretty much made up. Look you will ALWAYS have some residual distaste for the gay thing, a kind of sexual acid-reflux if you will so do you keep getting in people's faces until you even change those residuals?

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  14. The status quo doesn't have to want to be changed. In most cases the status quo DOESNT want to be changed. We need look no further than the racial issue to prove this. Over 100 years since the civil war and there are still places right here locally where I (white girl) don't belong, or where being seen holding hands with a black guy could get me in trouble, or where the cops are small town and not too worried about showing up on CNN for picking and choosing who they pick on.

    So what the status quo thinks it wants doesn't figure into it. It is going to be changed despite itself. It's like evolution, it moves in fits and spasms (punctuated equilibrium) and it takes a terribly long time to have a complete turn around. Sometimes you just have to wait until all the adherents of one belief were dead, and hope they didn't teach the same shit to their kids. This is how we see generational differences in social conservatism.

    Anyway, the point I'm making is that the status quo will be challenged despite itself, yes, until the tide shifts. There will always be enclaves of ignorance, but at some moment a critical mass will be reached and those enclaves will move into a socially-disapproved-of minority.

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  15. I will say this though, the Irish strike me as being sexually uptight.

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  16. It's more a Catholic thing than an Irish thing imo.

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  17. Dunno, many Latins are Catholic but they strike me as warm-blooded.

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  18. That's a good point. But then again, Catholicism adapts itself to different cultures pretty well. Maybe it's all that cold weather and rain in Ireland. Though I'd think that would send them under the covers.

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  19. The Irish will do things every now and then but as soon as they let loose they pull back. Whatever they did comes back fraught with guilt and echoes of eternal damnation. Some are conflicted, they'll go into a jiggly joint with friends but then they'll lecture the stripper. It's a Gaelic thing, you wouldn't understand.

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