Sleep

I've not been able to sleep properly for days. Ever since Saturday night.

Saturday night I went dancing, and got lost in somebody across the dance floor and haven't been found yet. I fall asleep and I imagine his body and face and eyes. I wake up and am haunted by his body and face and eyes.

The man who I wrote about months ago - depressed, incapable of falling out of love with me - has managed to fall out of love with me. Or so it has been reported to me by a very good mutual friend of ours. And I'll believe her. And I will say that this frees me up to *ahem* pursue some of the *ahem* distractions that I see every now and then - and to do it in his presence, and to do so sparking his jealousy but not his sense of self-worth. Or so I hope.

So this man in whom I have been lost, I address you. When I next see you, prepare to be approached - because I need to find myself again, and it would seem that I can only do so by meeting you. Cause I'll be damned if I don't want to get to know you, and find out what it really means to get lost in your body and face and eyes.

(not about really about silence but on the success of talking)

I went out with friends last night. Met some new people, and really enjoyed myself. Watched a drag show, danced until the world ended - classic kind of stuff.

Afterwards, as I was driving my friend home, she said something that made me really happy.

This friend of mine has worked for the on-campus GLTB centre for the past couple years as either a staff member or a board member. She has noticed that involvement in the group has declined in the past couple of years. Alarming, no?

She said involvement in urban-raised youth has particularly been reduced. Rural youth involvement is actually on the rise (but is a much smaller population than urban populations so it does not make up for the loss) - and their reliance on the centre as a social environment has increased.

But she has noted (and this is the happiness-inducing factor of my late-evening/early-morning) this:

Young gay people are much more confident now than she ever expected she would see. They exude happiness once they are out. They like who they are. Depression is on the decline. People are visibly happy in the gay community. And even though they hate themselves a little bit, they have never hated themselves less in history than they do now.

Smiles abound.

A treatise on How Silence is Broken

A shout-out to Amak over at Queer Behind the Mirror for introducing me to this video earlier this week through his blog; it fits in well with what I am developing at the moment.

Silence

And why do we get frustrated by our friends who are silent? This is a question that we must also ask ourselves, because it is more of a reflection on us than anything else.

Most of us grew up in fear, and a fear that is far more real than many perceive it to be. We hear the comments on the playground, and we see the hatred in people's faces - all directed at this mythical creature. The Faggot. And we create this creature - we draw it in our minds. It is ugly, and it is feminine, and it is not popular, and it is not well-liked by anybody. It is disgraceful. It is not worth defending in public. It is a monster, that eats children after boiling them in a cauldron of lust, that offers them candy and asks them to come into the car for some more, and then drives away and does things to them that everybody knows is bad but nobody knows what is.

And we do everything we can to make sure that this mythical creature constructed in our head looks nothing like us.

And so we are silent.

We also know that people direct these words at us - that people can smell it on us, somehow. And so we know that if we stand up for them we shall only confirm what they already think is true. And with that confirmed we can only imagine what life is going to be like - our skin will turn green, we'll grow longer teeth, and carry cauldrons in the trunks of our black sedans. All the words that have been thrown at us like spears will turn out to be true.

And so we are silent.

And our friends are silent because we are silent, and everybody continues to be silent except those who are particularly talented at throwing spears.

And then we decide we are gay, and that our skin is not going to turn green, and that we don't have to buy that black sedan if we don't want to. And that the image of a Faggot, the one that was so ugly so long ago, is slowly becoming more and more like the one we see in the mirror, and slowly it is starting help us affirm our own identity. And this bothers us at first and then it stops.

And we stop being silent, sometimes (but not all the time, we have to be safe still, right?).

And we somehow ask our friends to no longer be silent.

"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."

- Martin Luther King

Is this perhaps an explanation of why so many young gay men and women and inbetweens have such a hard time trusting others and exalting the relationship into the realm of true friendship rather than the dance between acquaintance and friendship that can only be termed business?

Perhaps the silence of our friends is more painful than anything else.

A letter to Gay Family Values

This is a response to a post about transgendered rights on a friend's blog that I recommend you check out.

Bryan and Jay! Long time, no post.

I'm loving this topic. It is something that has been bothering my quite a bit over the past couple weeks - ever since a Transgendered Rights bill was brought up in the House of Commons and then shot down because of the Senate and our current election (it only passed the House of Commons because of our minority government, not a single Conservative MP voted in favour of it).

Recently a read a Canadian novel called Annabel by Kathleen Winter, which is about growing up transgendered in rural Newfoundland. I thought it was a great novel, and I found myself relating to it far more than I ever anticipated - not only in the parent figures who often reminded me of my parents, but also in how the main character so often feels alone and trapped in a body that doesn't make sense to them.

I'm not trans.

But I am gay. And oftentimes I realize that, even as a 'relatively masculine' gay, I play with that gender variant line a lot more than I ever could've imagined I would. And that is important to me. For the past couple weeks I have been toying around the philosophical idea of being transgendered myself - or perceiving myself as such - because I am not exclusively male in a traditional sense. And I am not a woman. I sit on the fractured earth between the two continents of our cultural ideas, and sit there with millions of others who can't identify as one or the other.

Today I was filling out a job application. It had me check a box for my gender. Male or female. I checked male - but only as a formality. Inside I knew that it wasn't me in that word, and I wished I could've drawn a line between the two and place myself on that spectrum.

Some people encounter that moment every day. And moment of their existence.

I would highly recommend Annabel - if you can't get your hands on a copy in the States, let me know and I will ship one to you.

- Neal

So a gay man and a priest walk into the bar...

This title has nothing to do with this story. Sorry if you came here looking for a story because you won't find it.

Instead I've a much less interesting story for you.

A friend of mine was talking to me today. We sing in choir together - we've known each other for quite a few years. She found out last year I was gay; I had my suspicions of her being a lesbian confirmed at the same time. We have been good friends since - beforehand being connected by nothing but our mutual love of singing with large groups of people.

We had a rehearsal for a performance not too long ago. A technical rehearsal actually; our performance involved a lot of changing lighting, projections, and much more - everything was very studiously considered and synchronized by the director. And she had an image.

In the consummate love song, towards the end, the director asked us to hold our partner's hand or do something else to communicate a sense of attachment and friendship. I was ok with it. So was my friend. I held my partner's hand - a stunning young alto that I am sure has been admired by many people from afar for her amazing black hair - and my friend held her partner's hand - some young man that I can only recall for occasionally failing to sing the correct tone.

Being in a choir, there was not quite enough men for all the women to be partnered to one. (what I am not telling you here is that we accidentally had a couple sopranos get through the auditions who could neither sight-read music with pitch or with rhythm, and so we had to search for more sopranos to try and smother them, and this almost destroyed the balance of the ensemble as a result.) So some women were partnered with women.

One, a friend of my friend, refused to 'hold hands with a woman'. I remember overhearing this and being a little bit annoyed - as I was holding hands with a woman myself. A stranger at that. And regardless of her beauty, I had no interest in her whatsoever. The friend of the friend did not provide an explanation, but the song we were singing was clearly written with romantic love in mind. What was communicated was that a woman cannot being romantically involved with a woman, or, at the very least, a woman who is not interested in being romantically involved with a woman should not be forced to act as though there is some sort of chemistry between her and another woman.

This bothered me for a moment or two, but I let it pass. She is young, and from a small town in B.C. I figured she would grow up in her years at university.

My friend did not let it slide. She told me how she raised it with her friend in a conversation, as something that really bothered her. That she was angry at her friend for her comment, her insensitivity to the fact that all of the homosexuals and other-sexuals in the room were actually not having their romantic relationships recognized at all but were in fact being asked (once again! oh scourge of existence!) to act straight. She was angry.

My friend then told me how her friend did not feel she had done anything wrong, and that she was confused by how anybody could possibly think she had. This is a friend (of a friend) that knew of my friend's sexuality, and that was supportive, and that celebrated my friend's recent first move into the world of romance with her.

And they have not spoken since. Certainly there are many rational explanations for why they have not spoken for the last couple weeks - it is finals period, which is busy for students. My friend's friend has been moving to a new apartment, and is prepping to do a quick visit home to B.C. before her job starts up. My friend just started a new job herself, and has had a series of concerts and associated rehearsals ever since (the joy of being a musician during Holy Week).

But she wanted my advice anyways.


And I told her this (not a direct quote):

"Don't ever get mad at your friends for what appears to be insensitivity. This existence is newer for them than it is for you. The language we expect of them is confusing. They will make mistakes all the time - we make mistakes all the time. Your allies are your core people, and they will suck some times. Be patient with them, just as they have been with you."

Thankfully my friend is quite introspective. I know people who would never accept a response of that nature.

Don't become hetero-phobic and get angry at people when they are making mistakes about gender and romance in a new world of developing sexual equality. This is hard stuff for society to accept, even harder for them to change consciously. Let them make mistakes, and don't correct them in anger.