More later

I am a teacher.

And if you've been following Saskatchewan's news at all recently, you'd surely know that I spent the past two days on strike.

I am a teacher.

And I am a gay man.

I am a gay teacher who happens to be a man.

I am a man who happens to be gay and a teacher.

I am a teacher who happens to be gay and a man.

I am not happy with my government. I don't know if I will be happy with them when an agreement is made regarding the funding of teachers in our province. I know that the current goals of teachers are unrealistic if only because the public thinks it is demanding too much - in reality, it is about where we should end up, if not aiming a little low. We won't end up there though. We will have to give up more than a third, maybe half, of what we want and deserve in a raise.

But I am not going to complain about politics. Or my job.

I am going to complain about being a teacher who happens to be a man who happens to be gay (which means I happen to like men).

Because education is a big part of where my heart is, and I am seeing it mix with sexuality in some pretty disastrous ways right now.

In Burnaby, B.C. (my future home). And the state of Tennessee (which I doubt is my future home).

More on both later.

Sports

I am not a big fan of professional sports. If I were to construct my ideal world, they would likely not be on the list of things I would remember to reproduce. But I'd make sure athletes were included - and that these athletes were on my soccer team, or worked out at the gym that I work out at. I would hate to miss out on being around them.

But it is the Stanley Cup playoffs. And Vancouver is doing well. And I am Canadian, so I find myself interested in what is happening in sports. For some reason - and I assure you that I am pretty much completely confused about why. I asked somebody yesterday how the game went. I was working while it was happening, so I couldn't watch. Would I have anyways? No. Did it give me a momentary conversation topic? Yes. Did I know what the consequences of the game were? Yes. Mostly.

And then the past month has blown my mind. In sports. (Did I just type that? - who am I, and am I still lost in the world of that beautiful man that I have not yet seen again?)

(yes, I can confirm that I just wrote that. Weird)

One of the blogs I follow, Gay Persons of Colour, has been popping up on my dashboard for the past couple weeks with headlines like Dutch gymnast Jeffrey Wammes comes out, and Sean Avery endorses marriage equality with video. Sorry. What?

How about Carolina Panthers linebacker Nic Harris in support of marriage equality.

Pheonix Suns President Rick Welts comes out; players featured in pro-gay PSA.

San Francisco Giants to produce "It Gets Better" video.

Is this the same world of professional sports, filled with the same dumb-ass, homophobic jocks that I grew up with? The fans that I remember hating the idea that I may be gay?

I was out for a visit with some friends this evening. One of them is a former varsity basketball player - a lesbian who admitted that she hadn't watched a single professional basketball game since ending her basketball career years ago. And then she mentioned this story.

Joakim Noah directed a homophobic slur at a fan. Is getting fined for it, much like Kobe was (and as I mentioned in a previous post). But, unlike Kobe, Joakim has come to the press with a complete apology for his actions and words. He provided no excuses. He said his comments were bigoted and wrong. And that he apologizes for the ideas he seemed to be promoting.

Sorry, what?

This is a changing world, my friends. If we can reach some of the most popular leaders of male, misogynist culture, and make them leaders in the fight for marriage and social equality, we know that this is a different world.

And my friend, the former varsity player, has said that she is going to start watching professional sports again. Maybe. She feels like she has a place in it again, or for the first time.

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.