Numb

What does a fag sound like? Flamboyant? Is there a certain cutoff for the level of exuberance of a voice of a straight man and that of a gay man? Does he excessively use words like ‘glitter’ and ‘fabulous’? Does he talk about Ke$ha and Britney Spears and Nicki Minaj?

What does a fag look like? How does he dress? In skinny jeans? V-neck shirts? How does he sit? With his legs crossed? What expression does he wear? One of glee? One of emptiness, eyes half open in a perpetual state of depression? Does he have scars on his wrists? Rope burns around his neck? Does he hold his books on one side of his chest? Is his hair in a fohawk, a mohawk, down to his shoulders? Does he have blond highlights? Does he use excessive hand gestures?

I can’t help but think about it and about the man who asked me if I was a “fag,” said I looked like one, said I sounded like one, said I sat like one, and said he didn’t like them, “fags.” I can’t stop thinking about it, not because it was horrible or because it affected me so drastically, but because it’s the first instance of a verbalized reception of my homosexuality by the general public, and I see it as only a hint of what I could potentially face any day I walk down the street after graduation in New York City.

What stands out most to me, however, is not the incident itself; it’s the reaction I got from others afterward. I never expected pity or sympathy; I expected disgust. And I did received it from several people. These people, however, with the exception of one friend, were between the ages of thirty and fifty-five. They stated that they “can’t stop thinking about what that guy said” and they “can’t believe it.” Our generation, in general, doesn’t seem to think anything of instances like this. “Shit happens,” we college students(yes, myself included) say while our parents’ generation is, from my experience, repeatedly appalled. I’ve been pondering over this for some time now and I’ve come to a few possible conclusions:

1.)    The generation before us thinks better of us and of this time of extreme national movement from traditional approach to marriage, family, and lifestyle than they should. They expect heterosexism(and racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination) to have lost its place in society with the more liberal and accepting education and upbringing we have experienced.

2.)    We’ve become numb to it; a teen suicide caused by anti-bullying has become as typical and disconcerting as a New York City mugging, and we simply accept that change is coming(as it very well is) without any concern about lingering opposition.

And:

3.)    Contrary to what most would have us believe, we’re becoming more accepting of it. We expect these things to be happening and, because of this, don’t feel there’s much we can do or need to be doing.

My best guess is that 2 is most responsible. We have become numb; I realized this the moment the man gave up trying to get a rise out of me at O'Hare and I continued reading without giving it another thought until hours later. If this holds true and if even allies feel that there isn't significant reason to outwardly advocate for an end to these acts of discrimination, the supposedly inevitable acceptance and equality of LGBT people in general and of other American minorities may not be quite as inevitable as we are led to believe.

Why I Take It Personally

In the Fall, I headed a "50 Shades of Gay" project on our campus. We found fifty LGBT celebrities and plastered their pictures across the campus in fifty different locations simply with their names and how they are known by the general population. Linked with these, we had "50 Shades of Kohawk," fifty more small posters each with a student's picture and/or statement about his/her sexuality. (Kohawk = "like a hawk" = school mascot) It was a Coming Out Week project, and fifty(well, fifty-three actually, due to the overwhelming amount of support) students were "coming out" as gay, straight, bisexual, pansexual, or simply as allies. These sometimes were placed just beside images of people such as Neil Patrick Harris, Ellen DeGeneres, Adam Lambert, Jason Collins, Frida Kahlo, and Whoopi Goldberg. It served as a mitigation of the "coming out" process in a way that was meant to show just how meaningless the words "I'm gay" or "I like girls the way I should like guys" are. Many student statements were posted anonymously, and as such showed just how far from complete LGBT support our campus appears to be, to some at least. I received personal messages from students and faculty alike stating how powerful they thought these messages were.

Within twelve hours, more than thirty had been torn down, many of which had been placed directly next to flyers from other organizations on campus. The message was received, however, and perhaps more effectively than if all 103 posters had remained where we posted them. Every student on campus saw at least a few of them. Most saw dozens in the span of a morning, and some remarked, mostly jokingly, that they were "everywhere" and that they "get it already." These comments made me question if we had gone too far, but I quickly realized that we hadn't. In fact, the amount of posters turned out to be approximately equal to the amount of LGBT people on our 1400-student campus - likely an underestimate. We were simply, for one week, as is the purpose of Coming Out Day/Week, making those numbers visible, showing how many of us there are.

I was told that many were torn down by someone who claimed that they felt uncomfortable by the images and by the statements. A few - which I know to have been personal first-time coming-out statements by students - were torn down by faculty who disapproved of their placement. One was mocked by a group of students right in front of me.

Some of it was ignorance. The member of the faculty who decided to tear down a freshman's image and statement that he was gay didn't move it to a better location. However, much of it was simply a lack of acceptance.

People told me, "Don't take it personally," and, for a time, I didn't. I realized what they were saying; it wasn't an attack on me or on anyone necessarily. It was just stupidity, ignorance, etc. Then, I realized that someone had to, and I still do today.

I take it personally for the same reason that I take it personally when I'm sitting at O'Hare reading a book and a man in his forties or fifties comes up to me and asks me, "are you gay?" and when I say "no" tells me, "You sit like a fag," and "You dress like a fag," and says to the man next to him, "He even sounds like a fag" and then he thanks me for not being a fag because he "hates fags." I take it personally for the same reason that I take it personally when I'm getting my hair cut a week later and the woman asks me if I've had many girlfriends and for the same reason that I take it personally when a close friend of mine tells me that I look "Barry Manilow gay" and that "I'm so much gayer than I used to be." And I take it personally for the same reason that I take it personally when I see a Salvation Army sign stating, IF YOU SUPPORT GAY RIGHTS, PLEASE DON'T DONATE, and when I read a story about another teen suicide caused by homophobic bullying, and when I see, read, and hear constantly about how someone can't wait to get married as though everyone can, and when I'm asked if a man's gay because, naturally, I must know, being a gay man myself.

I take it personally because, one day, I'm going to post on Facebook, In a relationship with _____ or I'm going to be getting married and these thoughts may be going through the minds of people reading my Facebook status or sitting in the audience watching my first kiss with my husband.
I take it personally, but I don't necessarily take offense. These are extremely personal actions and statements whether they are committed or stated maliciously, indifferently, or supportively. Therefore, I may take these words and action to heart without being offended just as someone can take a comment about the interior design of their home of ten years personally.

My Humanism

I'm a humanist... which, for me, means that I believe in the equality of all people no matter race, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexuality, religion, class, or age. This means, yes, I'm a feminist(a male one at that!) and an LGBT ally, but it includes so much more as well.

I've often been asked about why I don't call myself a feminist. Simply said: I am, so is it at all relevant whether I label myself one or not if I work and agree with feminists?

Labels such as "feminist" have extreme value, no doubt. They establish an undeniable connection and almost a vow that you are committed to a specific struggle, identity, or persona. My calling myself a feminist may indeed be a powerful statement to other feminists and, possibly even more so, to other men who aren't feminists.

As a gay man, I often have felt, in the past, that I am expected to identify with women and therefore identify as a feminist. Gay men and straight women share biological similarities(mostly in brain structure and use) just as gay women and straight men do. More than ninety percent of all my friends have always been women. (I've hear the words "period," "vagina," and "clitoris" more often than I can count in these past couple of years!) And... FACT #1: I am feminist. (Wait, didn't I already say that?)

I see exactly why this can be a simple assumption to make, but I relate to men equally if not more than to women, and I see the male perspective while also trying to see the female as much as possible as well. I sympathize with the fact that American men resort to suicide approximately four times as often as women, with the undeniable majority of rape victims that are women, with the estimation that ninety percent of prison inmates are men, with the favoritism given to men when allocating wages to nearly all employees in the country, and with all the other struggles faced by either gender. I sympathize, and, when possible, I do my best to make others aware of these facts in a minor effort to possibly help to change the national perspective of these issues.

And... FACT #2: I am a man. Until very recently, I used this as my primary reason to not label myself a feminist. I explained to others constantly that "feminist" gives an immediate implied preference to females. And, yes, this is a fact, and it is clearly due to the foundation of the feminist movement itself. There was little to no nationally recognized struggle faced by the general male population. The movement was meant to empower women to give them the right to vote, to hold a job, and to give the rights that men possessed to women as well. Feminism means the belief in equality between men and women in rights and opportunities. The definition implies no preference, but my experiences with the feminist movement show no sign that it fights to tear down the ideals of masculinity in the same way that it is working to fight for women's abilities to defy the traditional "stay-at-home mom" housewife mentality.

Therefore, despite the disjoint relationship that this may incite between me and other feminists, I see no problem with my reluctance to self-identify as a feminist. Neither do I see any problem with any other man, straight, gay, or otherwise, facing the same dilemma and settling on a label such as "humanist" or something else other than "feminist." Any label they find for themselves is entirely viable and worthy of support from the feminist movement and community as long as appropriate support for the equality between men and women is included.

If a man were to identify as a "masculist" for example and if the term were to spread into wide-spread use by other men, similar to the juxtaposition that "waiter" offers with "waitress," is there any reason to fret about the letters M-A-S-C if they support that same universal equality between men and women but simply don't discover themselves to fit in/relate with the feminist movement? Isn't their support for the battle against sexism the only quality that truly matters? I'd hope that, by this point, this reliance on labels seems as obvious and trivial as it does to me.

FACT #3: I'm a college student. (Again... nothing new, I know.) However, I think this fact often gets lost in the shuffle of Facebook debates and with face-to-face discussions. I see college as my four years to grow and build myself into the person that I want to be for the rest of my life, so... yes, I've made bad judgments in the past, as recent as this morning, about where my beliefs lie. However, I've decided that if, one moment, I say I'm not a "feminist" because of the letters F-E-M, and the next I realize that my self-identification as a "humanist" has little to do with that in reality, instead of being stubborn about my stance, I can simply move on and develop a new explanation(...and why is that explanation so important in the first place?). I don't expect to be held to my initial statement just like I don't hold you to the statement you said in fourth grade that you wanted to be a firefighter, an astronaut, a rock star, or whatever other dream career you came up with.

My being a "humanist" was indeed founded in my reluctance to accept the prefix fem-, much like the feminist movement was initialized by the necessity for women's empowerment and equality, but it has since become a way in which I can incorporate and remind myself of the importance for the equality of people of all gender, sex, sexuality, race, class, etc., as the feminist movement could very well imply the same adjustment for other men, women, and feminists.

Face

(As published in the Coe Review [http://coereview.org/] in our Fall 2013 issue... please excuse the vulgarity.)

Face

I feel his breath but don’t see his face,

feel, rather than see, the rips in his jeans,

the bruise beneath his left, wilting eye,

and vodka with the lingering and opaque tint of

Ibuprofen still drips between the thin slits in his lips as they touch my own.

I smell the cigarette that he pulled from the mouth of the crew-cut lesbian

a clit-licking butch

run down by an SUV outside,

feel the sharply ridged ladder,

cut crudely

from his wrist

to bicep.

he’s a faggot

He’s incredible.

He’s hopeful,

on his knees

to suck your cock

to pray

for sunlight and for a crosswalk,

for eyes to replace his ears.

 

I don’t see his face

because the strobe light carves through the pitch blackness,

because my eyes can’t adjust,

because you can’t take your head out of his crotch

because I could love him,

because he has no face,

because his face is my face and their faces and the face of the boy

who loves a boy and of the lesbian

the dead cunt

and of the other women

in the grime-lathered underpass by the street—

fucking other women,

loving other women—

and I have no face,

 

but the boy has a tongue.

Tight Fit Jeans

I wear V-neck shirts. (I'm in a pink V-neck right now.)
I wear skinny jeans; most have rips in them. (I have a white pair... well, two actually.)
I have seven belts, five of which are studded.
I have a three by four foot poster of Adam Levine next to me.
My favorite musician is Kelly Clarkson. (I mean, "Miss Independent"... My girl Kelly knows what she's doin'. Her poster's right next to Adam.)
I have every Britney Spears single.
I've sang "My Heart Will Go On" by Celine Dion at a karaoke night in front of 200+ people(... three times)
I've watched every episode of Glee. (And I have 543 Glee songs on my iPod...)
I'm a Gender Studies major.
I'm Co-Moderator/Co-President of our LGBT Alliance.
I'm an active member of our campus's V-Day group.
I have a tendency to carry books on one side of my chest.
I have nine piercings.
There's a picture of me, age seven or eight, on a couch with four girls, my best friends at the time.
My friends have always been almost entirely female. (Those who aren't are other gay men.)
I went to Studio 13, a gay club in Iowa City, with one of those friends for his birthday at the end of last semester. (It was a "Magic Mike Night" which included two drag queens and five male strippers.)
I own Magic Mike.

Yeah... so I'm definitely gay, right?

The Magic Mike DVD case is turned backward, showing only the black, indented edge.
I refuse to say what song I sang yesterday in the car(out of embarrassment).
When I got my haircut the other day, the hairdresser asked if I'd had many girlfriends and I told her, "A few, but only back home."

I fight off the stereotype even when I fall almost entirely beneath it. It's a conscious decision.
These aspects of my life and personality that fall under the stereotype of a gay man, on the other hand, have hardly been conscious decisions. They're mostly natural. So by hiding the image of a shirtless Channing Tatum and by singing... that song... I'm defying my nature.

I say "hardly" conscious and "mostly" natural because they're not entirely natural qualities - at least not originally. I decided to start wearing skinny jeans senior year of high school. V-neck shirts got a place in my closet a few months later, during the summer before heading off to college. I wore these jeans and t-shirts because they were what gay men wore. I was starting to get exhausted from hiding anything, so I began to try to make it obvious - to make officially coming out the following year easier, to make it known to potential partners/boyfriends that if they asked me out, they had landed in that ten percent chance of potential success at getting a date.

I hide the fact that I work out as often as I can. I don't think anyone in the world knows. Well, maybe you do now, but I don't care. Why should I? I almost always go up and down six flights of stairs instead of using the elevator. I do push-ups just about every day. Pull-ups too. I don't even know why I do? Maybe because working out is a gay thing. Or maybe because it's a straight thing... Or maybe I just want to be fit.

I always wonder how I managed to fall under the stereotype. It's clear that nature, a willingness to conform, and an eagerness to be acknowledged as who I am combined to get me here. And, simultaneously, there's always been some semblance of defiance of that stereotype working against these three entities. That's why there are so many different types of gay men and women. Everyone experiences different levels of each of these, perhaps in different combinations, and maybe there are other aspects of our personas and of the world that affect some further.

But what if there was no stereotype to conform to and none to be afraid of and if I had been stripped of my eagerness for a same-sex romantic relationship? Who would nature have a gay man be? Is there some biological difference between me (and other gay men) and straight men?

It's impossible to imagine right now, isn't it? There's always been rejection and conformity to flamboyancy and the visual and hidden attributes of homosexuality, hasn't there?

Why does it even matter? It doesn't. But it's curious.

Sam / Proud

Maybe this should have been my first post. I don't know. Either way, it's number two. Number two isn't so bad.

I'm from Foxborough, Massachusetts. Some may recognize it as the hometown of Gillette Stadium and the New England Patriots or maybe by the accomplishments of our town's high school jazz ensemble such as performing at Barack Obama's 2008 inauguration. Or maybe even as the hometown of the singer JoJo...

But, this week, the way people should recognize it is as the hometown of Sam Berns. I went to high school for a year with Sam. He was a freshman when I was a senior, but my connection to him is irrelevant.

He was known as "Sam the Man" to some "Big Sam" to others, but I always just stuck with Sam. He was short, probably no taller than 4'6". He had no hair for most of his life. His limbs and joints were shaped by bone rather than by muscle. There was no denying he looked different than everyone else in the room. He had progeria, a disease that caused him to age quicker than the average person and inflicts fewer than 350 people in the entire world. However, within minutes of meeting and speaking with him, I dismissed all these shallow observations as did anyone else who spoke with him. After a day, his differences barely registered when I saw him.

Because Sam was, to me, an inexplicably happy person.

His life expectancy was twelve years. He passed away last week at the age of seventeen, less than eighteen months shy of high school graduation. However, Sam's seventeen years were incredible, and I am one of presumably hundreds who didn't realize this until after his death.

He spoke at a TEDxTalk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36m1o-tM05g
He spoke with figures like Katie Couric, Robert Kraft, Tom Brady, and Dave Matthews
He was the focus of an HBO documentary: "Life According to Sam" http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/life-according-to-sam/synopsis.html#/documentaries/life-according-to-sam/index.html
He was intended to be an honorary captain at tomorrow night's Patriots game.

And all along, we heard from him again and again some incredibly powerful statements: "I want you to get to know me. This is my life. Progeria is a part of it. It's not a major part of it." And: "I didn't put myself in front of you for you to feel bad for me. I put myself in front of you to let you know that you don't need to feel bad for me."

He is part of one of the smallest minorities in the world; he faced some of the hardest unavoidable challenges a person can face. However, all the way through it, he led the most inspirational life, I have ever been witness to(even if I was just a part of it for a single year, albeit, an undoubtedly insignificant part).

Part of me feels selfish, even ignorant, to even try to compare my life with his, but, as Ash Beckham in her own TEDxTalk states, "There is no 'harder.' There is just 'hard.' We need to stop ranking our 'hard' to everyone else's 'hard' to make us feel better or worse about our closets and just commiserate on the fact that we all have 'hard.'" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSR4xuU07sc
And the more I think about Sam and his life, the more I realize the power that being a part of a minority has. He was plagued with progeria, yes, but, because of it, he discovered opportunities to change the world with his very presence, through unimaginable pride, positivity, and personal strength.

Sam is why I can be proud too. Because, no matter how difficult the challenges are that I face, I know that struggle, being a part of a minority, is as much a source of strength as muscle.

Me and My Future: The Facts

So, I recently had a few "re-realizations," something I've been dismissing for months now, but recently came up again, and decided it was a decent way to start a blog. It's a perfect representation of what I want to say; I want to say what I feel should be said and what I feel doesn't get said enough.

My being gay doesn't define me, but it defines parts of my life for me.
-There will always be a reason to feel awkward in public with a potential partner/boyfriend/husband, whether I'm holding hands or simply walking beside him.
-It will (almost) always be obvious to others that we are not brothers or just friends because there's at least some semblance of "gay-dar" in everyone today.
-The only way to reduce these chances of being "visibly gay" is to wear different clothes, act a different way, and speak a different way than is natural for me.
-If I come out to someone who knows another gay man, he/she will likely have the inclination to assume that he and I are destined to be together.
-(And when I ask what we have in common, and he/she has nothing more to say than, "well, he's gay... and you're gay," I will likely be criticized for not having an open mind.)
-If I am to ever actively "hit on" or flirt with a stranger, I have approximately an 8%(some say 10, some 5, some 3) chance of the man being even a potential partner.
-I am expected to go to certain isolated areas of a town or city to find the "gay culture."
-Any attempt I make to openly date may potential exhibit negative side effects on my other relationships with friends, family, and acquaintances.
-Any attempt at trying to make conversation with another person of my gender, someone I share biological similarities with, can be perceived as an attempt at flirting or "hitting on" them.

-I will not have a big wedding.
-It will be far more difficult for me to have a carefree wedding, even more difficult to have a happy one.
-My wedding will make people I don't know furious.
-Since there will be no bride, there cannot be a bridesmaid and, therefore, if the situation is to arise, I will need a new word for her role("groomsmaid," possibly).
-We will have to strategically choose the state, city, neighborhood, and home that we live in in order to ensure that we will be allowed as "normal" a life as possible.
-Once married, we will have to remain in one of the 18(for now) states that acknowledge our marriage or lose divorce as an option.
-If I am to ever get a divorce after marriage, I will be more likely to be criticized, expected to honor the sanctity of marriage higher than a heterosexual person.
-If I am to ever have a child, he/she will not be biologically related to both me and my husband.
-(I feel more comfortable saying I will have a "wife" than I do saying I will have a "husband".)
-I will have to look more critically at any job opportunity, at their contract, to ensure that my sexuality will not allow my coworkers to treat me differently and/or allow my coworkers to fire me without any other just cause.

-And, while I am compelled to speak and write to others about these struggles that I will face, I risk further allowing my homosexuality to define me.
-And my stating these facts about my life and possible fears can easily be perceived as a request for pity.

I'm not even necessarily mad or sad about any of this. I don't say any of it for pity at all. I say it because there is no reason for me to say it to most people. There's no reason they need to hear it, so they don't know. And I say it because being gay shouldn't define my life in any of these ways, but it does because of a cultural tendency to alienate and perceive differently those who are unlike the majority. And because, if every person would read, understand, and see these facts as disgusting as I do, then their opinions would negate almost all of these facts.

And, at the same time, I can also say that just like biracial, monogamous relationships have achieved near equality, same-sex, monogamous relationships will too, someday(most likely sooner than many would be led and may wish to believe).