Tag Archives: sexuality

Playgrounds

Well, he’s at it again, only this time he’s only pissed off a community. Makes a change from pissing off an entire country. A while back, Trump, for some unknown reason, decided to tweet out about the LGBT community not being allowed to join the army anymore. Perhaps a man in a dress stole his ball and won’t give it back, who knows. And with his usual vacuous flourish he’s now signed an ‘executive order’ about it.

It’s not that he singled out the LGBT community. We should be used to people like him singling out communities by now. It is not even what he said really, that certain people can’t join the army. OK, it’s a total dick move, but it’s your army – if you want to reduce recruitment on the brink of WW3, that’s your call, I guess.

Continue reading Playgrounds

The rainbow hint

A new trend seems to be washing over the USA and, consequently, over the world – because why wouldn’t everybody follow in the footsteps of the great freedom dealers, amirite? Teenagers all over North America are coming out via school yearbooks. You see the gay expression on their faces, smiling above some semi-funny quote about having been in the closet.

This makes me quite nostalgic. Gone are the good ol’ days when you’d go on reddit and read about teenagers coming out to their parents by baking a suggestive rainbow layered cake and then writing “I’m gay” in icing, just in case their progenitors were too slow to get the rainbow hint. Yearbook quotes don’t go on Youtube, folks, thus they do little in terms of providing entertainment, which sort of defeats the purpose of the whole thing.

Now, if you’ve managed to read this far, you’re probably expecting some sort of homophobic rant following that introduction. If that’s the case, you clearly haven’t read my last piece of writing, which shows I’m as pro-LGBT community as one can be. Partly because I’m part of it.

There, I said it. Coming out on a semi-obscure website, in an article that will probably only be read by Chris who has to proofread it before publishing it, is not as original and creative as a yearbook quote, but I’ll take what I can get.

You see, where I come from, there aren’t any yearbooks. There’s only patriarchy, homophobia and all the gender and sexuality stereotypes you can think of. Where I come from, I was summoned to the principal’s office when I was 16 because when my literature teacher asked us to write a piece about someone we loved, I wrote about my girlfriend at the time. They took it as a bad joke, since I’d always been the rebellious one. I laughed it off and admitted that yes, it was an attempt at being funny, because that was easier than having to face the reality that I’ll probably have to deal with that kind of reaction my whole life. I re-wrote the stupid essay and got away with it.

When I started dating a boy a few months later I could actually see the relief in my teacher’s eyes as she saw us kissing in the school’s corridor. Then I went away to uni and I was far enough from that forsaken little town to do whatever I wanted and whomever I wanted without having to hear the gossip. I avoided visiting my hometown like one would avoid being at a Justin Bieber concert. For a while I thought it was because I was scared, but then I realized I was not scared at all. I was just annoyed, and the task of explaining myself and my sexuality to whomever happened to see me making out with a girl in the park would be onerous.

That’s how I made it so far in life without ever having to admit that all those rants at family dinners about LGBT rights were more personal than any of them knew. But in the light of the Pride parade that just took place in London and me being on the team of volunteers, I decided to come out.

The idea was strange at the beginning, because I thought – and probably rightly so – that nobody would actually give a fuck about who I want to shag. But then again, I will eventually have to talk about it, either when someone will see me holding hands with a girl or when I get into a serious relationship with one and want to introduce her to my friends and family. At least if I came out I could do it on my terms and not be forced to explain myself.

After coming out to some of my closest and oldest friends, I learnt two things. First, nobody can ever prepare you for the kind of pain you feel when your friends mock you for who or what you are. Second, there’s a huge misconception about bisexuals. Guys gave me meaningful looks and started throwing subtle threesome hints my way. One of them said “Now that I know you like girls, I can talk to you like you’re a guy; that makes everything so much easier”. Well I have to check to make sure, but I think I still have my vagina, even though I just said I was bisexual, so yea, pretty sure I’m still a gal.

My girlfriends, on the other hand, just shrugged the whole issue off and said “You still like guys, you’re basically straight” and then gave me the patronizing talk about how everybody experiments during uni. I suppose they missed the part where I was having sex with girls at 15 and I’m not in uni anymore. And of course, I got the classic “You either like men or women, you can’t have both”. Well I think Alfred Kinsey would disagree.

Obviously, the story of my coming out won’t go viral on Facebook and I will probably not end up throwing a “bye bye, closet” party, where friends and family gather round and try to ignore my Mum’s tears and pretend they’re not picturing me scissoring some woman. Instead, I’m taking the easy path of anonymity, writing about it under a fake and rather shitty name, in an article that will never be linked back to me. It may sound sad. It’s not, though, because thanks to the Pride parade on Saturday, I realized that strangers can sometimes be closer to me than family or friends. Also, there’s an overwhelming sense of belonging when you’re floating through a sea of approximately 70,000 people who are united by the same goal of having the freedom to be and to love whomever they want.

In the end, I suppose we all have our skeletons in the closet, but there’s no reason why we should live in there with them.

The gay wedding cake

I don’t have many phobias, but…fuck, who am I kidding? I have plenty of phobias. I’d make a nice case study for those of you interested in the brains of freaks.

One of these phobias is called musophobia and it means I have a fear of mice. And not like one of those “Ohmigosh I have a mouse in my house, I’d better get a jar and catch it because ew” kind of fears. More like being unable to move for 25 minutes because I just saw a mouse and even though it ran away as soon as it saw my ugly face, I feel like any move will make it come back with an army of little hairy wingless bats desperate to chew through me.

So here I am, at 4am, sitting in my bed, desperately trying not to wet my pants, because I saw a mouse two hours ago and now I’m afraid to step on the floor in case the beast attacks my toes. After half an hour of lying here, trying to regulate my breath and convince myself that no, a thousand mice won’t suddenly jump on my bed and crawl all over my body, I managed to move enough to get the computer from my desk and go online.

Facebook is very interesting at night. There’s only a handful of people online, half of them are drunk and the other half are either depressed or very tired but unable to sleep for various reasons. Also, there’s nothing interesting on newsfeed because, d’oh, everybody’s fucking sleeping in their pest-free homes.

However, after a lot of scrolling (hello, carpal tunnel) I come across an article shared by someone with the title: “The moral of the gay wedding cake row: the law can’t create tolerance”. The description of it says the following: “A Christian walks into a Muslim signwriter’s shop and orders a placard. He says it should carry a cartoon of the prophet and the slogan Muslims Go Home. The signwriter is deeply offended and says he cannot complete the order. The customer is outraged at the discrimination, is supported by the Equality Commission, sues, and the signwriter is fined £500 plus costs. I think most people would find such a saga absurd.”

When an article begins with such a ludicrous comparison, by putting hate speech and love together and saying they’re basically the same, I lose all interest in reading the rest of the piece. So I confess, for the sake of full disclosure, that I only read bits of it.

What I can say is that, for me, religion has no place in this debate. It has absolutely no value whatsoever as an argument in the issue of gay marriage. Law is above religion, period. Sure, everybody is entitled to their own beliefs, but making laws out of said beliefs, laws that millions of people will have to obey, is about as laughable as saying that the legalisation of same-sex marriage will turn more people gay.

Why is it that lawmakers keep religion as their ace in the hole, something to take out and flaunt when it’s beneficial and then conveniently put away when it’s not? A man beats his wife because she showed her ankles in public? Put that fucker behind bars. Where does he think he is? This is the West, we’re civilised here, people are free to show off some skin (although, if you’re a lady, keep your nipples covered, because that’s taboo even for the civilized and progressive Western society; not if you’re a man, though, because your nipples are special and can and should be seen by the world). A woman refuses to take off her veil for a license photo because of her religion? She’s a threat to national security, that freak.

Some old, white, Irish Catholic dude and his wife refuse to bake a wedding cake because it’s for a gay wedding? Well who the hell do they think they are? Oh wait, no. Actually, they can totally do that. It’s their right, because of their religion and their beliefs and… you know, all that freedom thing we have in the West. Sorry, gay dudes/lesbian ladies!

Yes, I’m aware this is not how it happened in this particular case, but it’s certainly the outcome a lot of people were hoping and arguing for. Because, in the words of this little genius who wrote the piece: “Law can’t create tolerance”. Well guess what? Law was just as unable to create tolerance back when black people had to ride in the back of the bus and use the back door to get into buildings. Same when women were not supposed to be in those damn universities, but at home nursing future misogynistic little shits and trophy wives to be. Yet it somehow changed and the world changed with it, because the fun thing about law is that it doesn’t give a fuck about your totally legit reason to break it.

It’s 2015, the world is going through economical, social and environmental crises that need our attention, so the fact that we waste our time and resources to debate the legality and morality of marriage between two people who are in love, based solely on their genitalia, is ludicrous to me. Can you no longer pray to whatever god helps you sleep at night if your male neighbour is touching his dick to another dick? Can you not attend your church on Sundays because there is some woman out there who just ate pussy for breakfast? And should your neighbour marry his boyfriend, will that make it physically impossible for you to breathe, blink, eat, piss, shit, reproduce, sleep etc?

I’ll go out on a limb here and assume the answer to all these questions is “no”. Based on that, I urge you to think of this: there was a time when Christianity was illegal and if you can now exercise your beliefs without fear of being executed it’s only because some people, thousands of years ago, fought for you to do so. Your battle is over. Now let others have their wins.