Syndicate and Hague

Despite the fact that I dislike Valentine’s day on principle (I find it obnoxious to have a holiday that seems to have the express purpose of making single people feel like crap), I couldn’t help but give Megan a present (a simple Wordpress and theme installation for her cooking blog). She, in return, made brownies.

I’ve had a hard time writing lately. I’d say that it’s due to writing fatigue from school or politics fatigue post-election, but neither really seems correct. It’s more like I’m in a thought-induced writing hibernation.

It’s been a fed up kind of winter. And I’ve been struggling with answers for why things are, in actuality, so different from my perception of them. Much of this is about the fault lines a truly serious relationship has exposed.

When you’re gay, in between the time you first come out and decide someone is going to last long enough/is important enough that you want them to know your family (for better or worse) there are months or years in which people can pretend you’re not gay. They get kind of used to this.

As we know, a lot of us move away from our original homes during those years. We, as Dan Savage said in his podcast today, “find a better family” and create the world that “home” doesn’t necessarily provide. This doesn’t mean we don’t like our families or have relationships with them, but almost every gay person experiences some level of lasting isolation after they come out.

Straight people don’t get it. Even the lefty ones don’t get it completely, and I’m not criticizing you for it. It’s really impossible for someone who is not a part of a marginalized group to know every aspect of what kinds of daily abuses, large and small, we endure. This is true of white people and race, rich people and class, etc. It’s not your fault you can’t know everything, but it’s your responsibility to listen.

And I think it’s our responsibility to speak. Even though it sucks.

I don’t have the kind of relationship with my family to have shared much of my personal life. I forged my own life, with its accompanying confidantes and emotional support structures, so if a girl broke my heart it wasn’t something my family knew…just like they didn’t know about friendships gained and lost, the nitty gritty of emotional struggles. It wasn’t their role. It was the role of my family of choice.

Is, then, my impatience with them fair? Over a decade of being out but the strain of education is upon me yet again. Instead of suggesting I wasn’t finding a job right away out of grad school because people saw some glbt involvement on my resume, it’s that I should also edit my girlfriend out of her role around my grandma. It’s really the same thing - no matter how accepting things look on the surface (and I can’t complain about that, because it is), there’s this lingering concept that this is shameful, this is something that should be hidden at times.

Being who I am, I have no tolerance for that. If a straight person doesn’t have to edit themselves, I sure as hell don’t.

However, it’s not really this simple. Not in practice. Because we can steamroll things, we can say we won’t cooperate, but the fact of the request remains.

It’s not just me, of course. My experience is hardly traumatic compared to others I know. But all the abuses share the same traits. We are embarrassments to our parents. They interpret our status as gay as a testament to their failure. It’s in all the trite comments people hear: why do you have to flaunt it? why are you doing this to me? don’t tell your grandparents. is this because I had a bad relationship with my mother/father? — It’s all about them.

I’m honestly rather excited by the renewed energy the glbt community is showing. I think this could be a good year, though a hard year. I like the fact that we’re collectively losing our patience with the crap that has been foisted on us all these years.

So, what’s in a new year? Endurance, I hope. The willingness to be hurt by people we thought were on our sides and endure, endure, endure without becoming doormats. Enduring means pressing the issue, pushing it, forcing people to confront the homophobia they thought they didn’t have or to question the homophobia they feel justified in. Enduring doesn’t mean infinite patience, it means patience through struggle, and necessitates a core of positivity. We have to feel that we will change the world. Be positive and endure.

Other than that, I end yet another year grateful for my family of choice and the ever-growing constellation of people I’m lucky to call friends. And I am lucky, so ridiculously lucky, to have the love of the most perfect-for-me girl on this planet. Sigh.

Megan and I went to see Milk yesterday. Aside from being a terrific movie in general–moving and sad, of course, but also something of a rallying cry–it’s coalesced what I’ve been pondering lately. Things came together for me.

I’m angry, sad, hopeful, and determined, and I don’t quite know what those things look like together yet.

Those people who thought that Prop 8 would pass and us gay folks would roll over and take it? Please. They obviously don’t know history. I plead with all you straight folks that I know–go watch Milk. Pay special attention to the opening. The old black and white tapes from when the police would go into gay bars and round up the gay men to arrest them because they were congregating in one place (there were points in time when it was illegal for us just to be around each other). Look at the misery–them turning their faces from the cameras, holding their hands in front of their eyes. Their quiet and horrific way the presence of police is hardly unusual. That punishment for their existence is a matter of course. That pain defined many lives.

It is never the “right time” for change. It is easy to remain the oppressor–either because you sincerely believe that being a part of the majority grants you special rights or because you don’t know or acknowledge your own privilege. It is easy to say this is not your battle when it’s not about your own survival.

And this is about survival.

Any time you take a group, marginalize them, and mark parameters around their humanity, you quite literally kill members of that group. Whether that means people kill themselves rather than live in a hostile society or that means people kill members of the marginalized group for whatever reason, it doesn’t really matter.

Being gay is a somewhat unique marginalization. We come from everywhere, so there is no cultural, economic, ethnic, racial, gender experience that ties us together as a whole. That also means we have no inherent support structure. We have what we have built. We have the communities we have built. And the fact that so many of us flee the places we were raised to come to a place where we feel safer is a testament to the success of some of these structures.

We are imperfect and imbued with all the issues that affect the world. People with significant power in the gay community are often white, male, and wealthy. This reflects the world in which we live–where people with significant power are often white, male, and wealthy. This also means that the people with power are scared of change.

I’m not.

And I’m not with my radical friends in saying that marriage is unimportant, and maybe not a priority. I get where they’re coming from, but this is where the coalescing happened.

Without respect for our basic humanity, we have nothing. No rights. If we are second-class citizens, anything we’ve gained can be taken away. Without marriage, we’re second-class. Our relationships are second-class. Our lives are second-class.

By rejecting something the dominant society doesn’t want us to have, we are being neither radical nor activist. We are finding ways to justify capitulating. We are finding ways to reject society before society can reject us.

I’ve been out for 12 years. I come out to people as quickly as possible after I meet them. It’s actually quite easy to do without making a big deal of it. It’s as simple as saying “Oh, you have a cat? My girlfriend and I have two cats. They’re so sweet.” Sometimes it takes more effort. “Oh man, I totally had an ex-girlfriend who was like that.” I make sure people know.

Why? Gay people know why. The more people find gay people unexceptional, the easier our lives are. I worry about holding Megan’s hand the further we get from the city. And I don’t worry what people think. I worry that someone will hurt us or do something to my car or whatever. I worry about violence.

I should not have to worry about violence for holding someone’s hand. But this is a simple fact of life.

Similarly, I should be able to expect–after 12 years of being out myself–that whoever I choose to be with (Megan) is acknowledged fully and unequivocally as my…girlfriend?partner?significantother?lifepartner?domesticpartner?…language is an enemy here. And yet, my mother has a hard time calling her anything other than my “friend,” though she damn well knows who Megan is and invites her to family gatherings. I chastise her fairly substantially every time she does it, but she still hasn’t worked it out yet.

I feel like gay people are often patient to a fault here.

When mom offered that maybe Megan would like to go up to the Range to visit my grandma with me, I was actually a bit surprised. It threw me off so that her following sentence knocked me off my feet. “Now, if she comes, you have to say she’s your roommate.”

I said “I am hanging up the phone now,” set the phone down, and heaved.

And so here is the thing. No straight member of my family would be asked to do that with someone they’d been dating for even the briefest amount of time. And so, yet again, I am reminded of my status as second class. I’ve been asked to pretend that Megan is nothing more than someone I share the bills with. Nevermind that no one drags a roommate several hundred miles to meet a grandmother.

Whether or not we got married, if gay marriage was legal and normal, it becomes that much harder for people to try to force you into a closet, it becomes that much harder for them to try to force your second-class status.

I have paperwork that OutFront was handing out at Pride this year. It’s living will paperwork. I’ve put it off, it’s hard to think about death and what I would want done if I were seriously injured. I also felt like I could put it off, that my parents understood that Megan would get to make decisions for me.

I don’t actually believe that now.

I had become complacent. A lot of us have become complacent. Things now are not so bad as they once were. We know that. And so maybe this was as good as anything was going to get.

But what on earth is that? Gay people still get killed for being gay. The decisions of our “partners” could be overturned with the commitment of litigious parents. “Faggot” and “gay” are still popular insults.

I like that I won’t get fired for being gay. But that’s not enough for me anymore. That shouldn’t be enough for any of us anymore. Full equality. Nothing more, nothing less.

Straight people, I am recruiting you. If you think we deserve rights, get some education and talk about it. I will use every bullhorn I can, but I don’t think we’ll be successful without straight compatriots who aren’t afraid to talk about gay people when talking about gay rights.

Apparently, that girl reverts to all her obsessive behaviors. Worked all night, save the time I was on the phone with Megan. Installed the new WP and plotted future improvements to the site. Read and plotted grant applications for my real job. Tried to break away from the computer. Failed. Wondered if I wanted to incorporate Twitter in my blog.

I was also reading a bunch about salary negotiation/feminist finance type stuff and feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of saving for a down payment on a house. I know everyone says “do it now! it’s so cheap!” but those were the same lines I was being fed two years ago - “do it now! interest rates are so low!” And then everyone on the planet got foreclosed on. Hyperbolic, I know, but there are dozens and dozens of foreclosed/foreclosing homes in my neighborhood and you can feel the stress of it when you walk down the street.

Something I don’t really advise at night, now.

To those of you who read here, I know you’re not much of a commenting crowd. You often respond on Twitter or in person, depending, but what improvements do you want on the site? I could thread the comments, but won’t if people still don’t care to comment. I could pull in a twitter feed to keep some kind of content fresh.

I can anticipate topic areas this fall. Let’s have a preview, shall we? (Oh humor me, Megan will be back tomorrow and I won’t need you to put me to sleep at night again for a while. Let’s just talk a little longer.)

Things that will likely come up beginning in September:

• ruminations on technology in education
• bitching about how much I dislike the statistics class I just spent a billion dollars on books for
• thinking about the role of race in researchers and, by extension, the role of researchers in developing race
• election ‘08
• the old standbys of feminism, racism, and cool technology things and promoting my friends’ activities because they are awesome
• and of course - how googley-eyed I am over Megan

Yup. I think getting off teh interwebs is a good idea…

We’re coming up here on one year. And by “we” and “one year,” I mean Megan and I are coming up on our one year anniversary.

It’s a big deal for me. Maintaining relationships has never been one of my greatest skills. I am, at my core, a frenetic girl. Warp speed brain, distracted, self-involved. As one of my friends (who I won’t name because he’s all “I want my privacy”) and I have discussed in the past, dating is hard for creative types like the two of us because the blank slate is all possibility and we can write such interesting tragedies.

And, c’mon, who doesn’t like a good passionate tragedy?

It has struck me over the last few months that movies/stories I once identified with (oddly enough, these stories are passionately tragic…) seem, well, kind of boring.

This kind of sustainable, non-tragic love has been good for me. I’ve mellowed a bit. Yeah, I’m still a ball of mental energy, but it’s not quite the same.

And so this is a public thank you to Megan:

• for humoring my need for text exhibitionism via Twitter et al and the blog and for the fact that she inevitably winds up with a presence there as well
• for being the ideal counterbalance to my spaced out, distracted mind
• for watching Countdown and appreciating Wonkette and introducing me to fantastic feminist blogs and consuming information and news at the same kind of rate that I do
• for being independent and stubborn and seemingly incapable of being steamrolled by my personality (no small feat, people)
• for understanding that anything I don’t know I must find out immediately, even if it means dragging my computer into bed to look up something on Wikipedia
• for being beautiful
• for making me a better person
• for all the things I can’t/don’t want to share on my little blog

This has been a year of being the happiest ever.

Back in the day when I had a black and white screen computer and a 2400 baud modem … you know, like 1997 … I really had no idea things would be the way they are right now. The ways in which our lives are publicly consumable–sometimes intentionally, sometimes not so–is a little strange.

I noticed this weird trend after the 10 year high school reunion I had no desire or reason to attend. It was 2005 and suddenly all these people I went to high school with were looking at my Friendster account. I’ll interject here that it’s not like I disliked any of them, nor do I harbor real resentment against the vast, vast majority of people I spent my childhood/teenage years with. I knew a lot of decent people, and a number of people who I really enjoyed spending my time with.

The thing is, as an adult, I’ve made very conscious choices about who my friends are and should be. I’ve little curiosity about what my former classmates are up to–excluding those whose friendships were important to me or the few who continue to be my good friends. I’ll admit, when I was living in New York, my friend Megan and I decided to create rumors about ourselves and see if they spread and it’s entirely possible the rumors that she was a stripper with implants and I was a dominatrix actually made their way into conversation…but I’d kind of forgotten we did that until I saw all those pictures of the folks I went to school with.

I was listening to RadioLab with Megan (not the Megan from the above paragraph, my wonderful girlfriend Megan) and it was about deception. A part of the hour was about this guy who decided to stop lying. He recounted a story about an evening he spent with people he didn’t really care for and then was invited out again–but didn’t want to go. He said he couldn’t make it (which was true that time), but when they asked what date was good for him, he said something to the extent of: I don’t have time for the friends I have…and this isn’t worth it.

Heh. Harsh, I suppose, but also true. I’ve used that in the past with people I’ve dated. You can call it mean, but it’s true–I have a lot of friends. People I don’t get to see nearly enough, and the only way I can really maintain new friendships is to be able to bring people together–which means there needs to be some hope that someone I see as a potential new friend would have good group interaction with the people I already love and make time for.

I was thinking about this quite explicitly last week, too, after my women and money class (yes, I am feeling rather empowered). The woman leading the class was talking about making time and financial decisions, specifically about how when she had four young children they were late to everything and she was always crabby. She decided she couldn’t do everything they’d been doing and had to make some decisions about that. People were upset with her because she wasn’t as available as she had been–one woman in class asked if her friends/others ever got over it. She said: they had to.

With the changes that have happened in my life this year, and with the changes that will start in the fall, I’m in one of those places. I’ve been on my own for so long, and completely uncommitted to anyone’s needs but my own, that people have gotten used to me being almost immediately available if something fun comes along. That’s just not the case anymore and it’s an adjustment for all involved. This isn’t to say that I’ve become some sort of homebody or anything, but that my life is structured differently. I’m really, really enjoying the difference and the way my life is changing and I know that in the end people will get used to scheduling things with me differently and I’ll somehow find time to hone the balance of work+relationship+school+friends as well as any human can.

I guess this has been a digression from the original paragraph, but it’s all tied together somehow. I guess I don’t really understand this need to reconnect with people I hardly know. I’m not adamantly against it or anything, I just don’t know how anyone has time for it. And I guess I feel differently about people I was friends with in college or graduate school. Those were years when I chose my environment… Maybe I’m just kind of a jerk. I can live with that too.

Working full-time + one graduate class + planning a conference + my women and money class + social life = a sadly lagging blog.

I’m not going to go off on any current events right now–there are oh so many, from the stupid sex thing in the Times about McCain to Bill-O’s “lynch” comment about Michelle Obama–I promise that I will soon, but I’m just plain tired.

Right now I just want to say that I’m coming to New York in early June with Megan and I’m so excited for my NY people to meet her because she’s just so very lovely and you’re going to adore her. Yay New York! I’ve missed you, you drunken, dirty city, you.

I promise to come back soon with snark…

So this sort of amuses me. From the US News & World Report via Jezebel:

Not only do you have to worry about your heart while making dates online, but now your wallet is at risk, too. The Better Business Bureau reports today that complaints about online dating services are on the rise.

The most common gripe? Poor matches. Consumers said they were set up with people who did not meet their criteria, including some who were already married or who smoked despite their request for a nonsmoker.

And the bad dates came at a hefty price, with many services costing upwards of $50 a month.

To protect your money (and heart), the BBB recommends that you be skeptical of advertising for online dating, do a Web search before signing up to see if others have complained about the company, and stand strong against high-pressure sales tactics and automatic contract renewals. (And remember, you can always dispute unfair charges with your credit card company.)

Wow, $50/month?!

Crazy what people will pay when you have free things advertising your single/dating status like, oh, Myspace or OK Cupid or Friendster or Facebook…

Well, I’m going to assume that the dating “services” that are so spendy are catering to a different segment of the population….

Because, you know, as for bad matches…I’ve gotten myself enough IRL bad matches or blind date set-ups to take the online snorers or weirdos in stride. Expecting some online test to perfectly pair you with your dream-person is just dumb. It’s just as dumb as assuming the really hot person you spot from across the room is your dream-person before she opens her mouth. Dumb.

I’m just going to, for a moment, cheerlead and say that my experiences with online dating weren’t any worse than my non-online dating experiences…and that I met the girl I’m blindingly, completely, giddily in love with on OK Cupid and despite our shared interests, values, etc…I’m not sure when we would have ever met in person. I have friends who are friends with her friends, but I can’t think of a social situation where we would have been put together. Nor do I think anyone would have set us up…yet I’ve never met anyone more perfect for me.

Thank you, Internet. I heart you.