Pride & Opinions

That’s right, today I’m choosing to spotlight a film and not a person. Why? Because if you haven’t seen this, you should.

TransAmerica stars Felicity Huffman as Bree, a pre-operative MtF transwoman, and the chronicles the adventure she faces in reconciling both her past life as a man and the inclusion of a son into her life. It covers a difficult cross-country journey in which Bree first appears to her son, Toby, as a stranger with a yen for helping troubled individuals - only for Toby to eventually discover, over the course of the trip, that not only is Bree M2F…but also his father.

The film does a very good job of covering complex issues that face the trans population of the world when dealing with society, family, and life in general, while handling them in a humorous-but-not-indelicate fashion. Beyond Huffman’s stellar performance, the film also offers a chance to combine education with entertainment and broaden the scope of those unfamiliar with trans issues in a way that makes it easier for them to accept and understand.

What I love the most about it is that it feels very real. There may be humor, but it’s real humor at the drollness of life rather than a slapstick attempt at comedy that would undermine the message underneath an evocative tale of companionship and self-discovery - not just for Bree, but for her son as well, and anyone who can identify with the search to be comfortable with one’s own life and one’s own choices.

Though don’t get me wrong, it is damned funny. And heartwarming, and tearjerking, and…

Oh, just go watch it. You won’t regret it.

My favorite quote from the film: “My body may be a work in progress, but there is nothing wrong with my soul.”

Amen.

transgender tales, thursday transgender tales, transgender, transvestite, transsexual, crossdresser, crossdressing, mtf, ftm, m2f, f2m, male-to-female, female-to-male, gender identity, gender dysphoria, transition, transitioning, sex change, transamerica, felicity huffman, trans media, trans films

Today’s Ask Adri question isn’t the usual request for advice, but I feel strongly compelled to post and answer it anyway, because the question asked simply staggers me and I can’t help but think that even if this person doesn’t need situational advice, they do need guidance and information. Someone’s got to flip the other side of the coin. So here goes.

Hey, Adri.

I’m not gay or anything, but a couple of my friends are. I brought one friend to Church with me the past weekend and he met my pastor. I guess he’s kind of out there, because my pastor figured out he was gay without asking. He was really nice to him and invited him to come back, but later he asked to talk to me and started asking me weird questions about my friend’s family life. It made me really uncomfortable because he was asking if his parents did things to him. I know his parents and they’re great people. They’d never do anything to him.

I asked my pastor why he was asking me this, and he said that he is worried for my friend. He said that homosexuality happens because people are sexually abused as children, and then they grow up to abuse children. Is this true? I don’t know much about gays, my friends are just my friends and I don’t ask them that much about it. I don’t think my friend is a child molester. Is that really how it happens?

No. Gods no. I’m going to ignore the fact that it was your pastor who told you this, as that fact is somewhat irrelevant and it could have been any misinformed individual regardless of their role in the community, religious or otherwise. The urge to go off on a rant about Christian bigots making decent Christians look bad is very strong, but it would be unfair of me. So we’re going to talk about the real issue at hand here: a little basic education.

First, you need to understand that homosexuality is not a disease, disorder, or post-traumatic effect. Nor is it a sin. Nor, really, is it a choice. It’s a naturally occurring trait that is gaining more and more scientific backing as perfectly ordinary within nature, developing as a result of hormonal effects on the brain and body. (I know, I know, it’s a Wikipedia link, not the most reliable, but it’s got a few dozen decent cited external sources.) It’s as ingrained as the color of your eyes or the tendency for high blood pressure. Before you believe everything you’re told, find your answers for yourself. I think you’ve already got a firm handle on that concept, though, considering that rather than blindly accepting your pastor’s assumptions you instead found me and decided to question this at the source.

The sad thing is, this isn’t such an uncommon assumption. It’s linked to the unfortunate lumping in of homosexuality with perversions such as incest and pedophilia, spreading the idea that homosexuality is unnatural and must be stamped out and even cured. The best way to combat such an assumption? By education, and by positive example.

So to answer your question concretely? No, homosexuality is neither a cause nor an effect of abuse. I can name a number of homosexuals that I know personally who weren’t molested or abused as children or adults, and who have never committed said acts or felt the urge to. I’m on that list; I may not have gotten along well with my family, but they would never have done anything like that to me, and they educated me quite well on how to protect myself from people with those intents. I had a safe childhood, and lead a safe adult life. The same can be said for my gay best friend, the ex-boyfriend I was angsting over a few posts ago, my lesbian cousin. We are all well-adjusted individuals with no abuse-related trauma in our pasts, no desire to enforce abuse on another, and yet we are all comfortably and openly homosexual.

If you’re comfortable enough talking to your friend about these things and think he can hear this without being offended, direct him to this article and I’ll bet he’ll tell you the same thing - that he’s not hiding any secrets, his parents are as great as you first thought they were, and nothing untoward or deviant has happened to him in the past. He’s not a secret child molester dwelling under the skin of some guy you thought was pretty cool. He’s just an ordinary guy who happens to be gay.

People who spread ideas like this are becoming a real problem; they promote misinformation as truth, and blindly think that they are doing good. I know that your pastor meant well and was actually expressing concern for your friend’s well-being, but if you can, please guide him towards resources that educate on the nature of homosexuality and encourage him - gently, not aggressively - to broaden his scope and make a better effort to understand these things before he spreads such assumptions.

The only way to stop the spread of misinformation is to counter with healthy, valid information.

We are not an abnormality. We are not a byproduct of perversion. We are normal, and we lead happy, stable lives in which instances of personal trauma and abuse are no higher or lower than instances among heterosexuals. The two are wholly unrelated, and to tie them together not only demonizes homosexuality, but trivializes what real abuse victims suffer.

So now that you have your answer, go forth and spread the good word.

Your friendly gay elucidator,
~Adri

ask adri, sexuality, homosexuality, abuse, sexual abuse, pedophilia, counseling, scientific sexuality, dispelling homosexual myths

…or at least, that was the first snarky thought to cross my mind as I read this article:

YOUR NEXT DATE COULD BE 10 METERS AWAY - OIA Newswire

 
WORLD’S FIRST BLUETOOTH BASED “GAY PERSONALS” FOR MOBILE PHONES ENABLES REAL-TIME AND IMMEDIATE CONNECTIVITY

AJ Entrepreneurs announced today the availability of its revolutionary mobile phone social networking software, emale mobile(TM), enabling immediate connectivity between today’s highly mobile individuals. This “personals” platform uses Bluetooth technology to instantly connect gays and lesbians within a 10-meter (33 feet) radius range, acting as a second sense of gaydar - the intuitive ability to ascertain whether another person is gay.

[...]emale mobile(TM) scans for others nearby while the user goes about his or her daily routine. When emale mobile(TM) detects another user, and if a match is found, both users’ profiles are exchanged automatically and saved to the mobile phone’s memory.

I admit, this seems like a pretty cool idea, at first. I love techno-widgets and I’m tempted to go download this to my little Bluetooth-enabled Motorola just to poke it and play with it. But I’ve seen services like this before, targeted to heterosexuals or to the dating pool in general, and every time I’m faced with a general sense of unease and the concept of feeling like an animal who’s been voluntarily tagged for tracking in the wild.

Maybe it’s just me. I’m not exactly paranoid, but I am rather protective of my privacy, and I don’t want every gay man within a 10-meter radius (or straight man or anything female masquerading as a gay man to play with the software) flagged with a “Homo on the port bow!” alert just because I happen to have my cellphone in my pocket when I head out to Wal-Mart to sate a craving for a bag of Dilettante chocolate-covered espresso beans.

There’s also the stalker factor, and how easy it would make it for some creep out there to use this service to hunt down people to assault, molest, or just be really, really weird around. Or the idea of some homophobic jackholes playing pretend and using it to hunt down someone to harass…how does emalemobile.com intend to make sure that only the target demographic uses the service?

The easy solution, of course, is to turn the software off and uninstall it, if those concerns bother you - or just don’t download it in the first place. But I suppose I do wonder about safety and privacy issues for those who intend to use the service in earnest, and how emalemobile.com intends to guarantee user security. It’s a little different from a personals site, where the decision to meet up with someone is your choice and even if you do end up with someone potentially dangerous, in the end you made a conscious decision to place yourself in the physical vicinity of a person who’s expressed interest with you in a digital format.

With emalemobile.com…some of that choice is removed by alerting others to your presence in their immediate vicinity, without giving you much of a chance to screen those people before they find out where you are on top of who you are. Supposedly the profile exchanges are automated, so if your profile contains a photo (not wise), you could be in the checkout line at Target only to suddenly find some big bruiser bearing down on you to ask you out for a date just because they recognized you from your profile photo and spotted you from two queues over.

Mm…maybe I’m just being an old fuddy and imagining worst-case scenarios, imagining Homeland Security officials using the service secretly to create databases of known homosexuals. (I don’t seriously think this would happen, I’m just being dramatic. Although HS has been known to classify gay advocate groups as possible terrorist threats who bear observation…)

What about you? Would you use the service, and feel comfortable with that kind of alerting and profile exchange system without established safeguards?

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They’ve been kicking him for so long now that the pain no longer seems real: dull, thudding impacts on flesh so bruised that it’s lost the capacity to feel. Or maybe that’s his mind, retreating into blessed numbness. Hiding until the ordeal finally ends, or until he dies. He gave up on fighting what felt like hours ago, even if it’s only been a few eternal minutes. Fighting only makes it worse.

“F*ckin’ breeder.”

Weren’t expecting that, were you? It’s a story you’ve heard a dozen times, but with a different ending. Tennessee Williams. Matthew Shepard. Charlie Howard. Aaron Webster. Richard Jefferson. Ryan Smith. We know these names the way Christians know the Psalms, take their stories to heart, swear retribution, swear remembrance, swear that we will make a change for the better. We will make sure that their deaths were not in vain, even as we curse those who caused them and the hatred, the phobia that laces our community sinks deeper, becomes more firmly entrenched.

Can you imagine the situation if those victims had been straight rather than gay, and yet still persecuted for their sexuality?

It’s a dramatic stretch to make, especially with such a graphic tale; members of the GBLTQ community aren’t exactly famous for going out for a wild night on the town that ends in huntin’ down some heteros and kicking the crap out of them just for being straight. But it doesn’t mean that we can’t still be just as hurtful, just as hateful, and just as hypocritical in judging straight people by their sexuality as they can be in judging us.

We call them breeders. We curl our lips at them in distaste if they dare to exchange a quick kiss with their opposite-sex partner in our presence. We seek to exclude them from gay-only venues not out of a sense of safety and solidarity, but because they just aren’t good enough to be there. We disdain their friendship, even their support, just because they couldn’t possibly understand what it means to be gay. And we do it because we think we’re justified, because of what we have to endure simply for being gay.

It’s a broad and sweeping statement that doesn’t assume this behavior from everyone in the GBLTQ community, but it’s a trend that I can’t help but notice, and a trend I sure as hell don’t like. I’ve seen enough of it - and embarrassingly participated in enough of it when I was younger and more angrily reactive - to wonder just what gives us the right to this hypocrisy. Yes, we are treated like pure and utter crap by a percentage of the heterosexual community. We are reviled, our icons defiled, our rights contested and stripped away anywhere they can be. We’re the freedom fighters of the twenty-first century, struggling to follow the same path taken by women fighting for equality, African-Americans fighting for freedom and recognition as human beings. Some of us take it as an unfortunate necessity, and strive our best to be a positive example to try to sway those against us with persuasion and arguments for our validity as human beings.

Some of us only take the hateful behavior and perpetuate it by returning it not only to those who condemned us, but to everyone who shares a single trait with those people.

So I wonder…are you heterophobic? Do you mock all heterosexuals as cruelly as some of them mock you? Would you perpetuate violence against them simply based on their sexuality? Do you stop to think that every time you call them breeders and every other derogatory sexuality-based term you can think of, every time you mock their way of life as opposed to ours and deride their right to be who they are in your presence…you’re only demeaning yourself by being everything that you claim to hate about them?

Or do you advocate tolerance, and remember the do unto others rule? Eye for an eye won’t get us anywhere; all it will do is deepen the hatred on both sides until both are willingly advocating a segregated society. I know we’re a minority. I know we have a right to be frustrated, a right to be angry…a right to fight back. But we can fight back without lashing out against those who don’t deserve it. We can fight back without absorbing the ugliness thrown at us. We can rise above, lead by example, and avoid creating a double standard by being prejudiced against those who are prejudiced against us.

So ask yourself, next time you’re pissed off and feel a snarky comment hovering on the tip of your tongue: are you heterophobic?

And how would you feel if your behavior was turned back on you with a homophobic slant?

homophobia, heterophobia, gay bashing, straight bashing, hate speech, hate crimes, breeders, prejudice, persecution, anti-gay, anti-straight

US Military Fires Three More Gay Arabic Linguists as Shortfall Continues - 247gay.com

More Arabic linguists in the US military have been fired under the “Don’t ask, Don’t tell� policy, the Associated Press reported Thursday.

The linguists were investigated after military officials listened in on conversations conducted on a high-level government computer system which allows intelligence personnel to communicate with troops on the frontlines.

One linguist was serving in Iraq with a Marine combat unit when he was discharged. A military source reported that he was known to be gay but was allowed to serve and was only formally investigated after an Inspector General audit obtained language from the computer chat rooms that apparently suggested he might be gay.

And now, my darling ones, my little piglets, my little gold stars on the shoulders of every stiffly starched uniform, I am going to tell you exactly the problem that I have with this.

There is something severely hypocritical about a government that runs around constantly preaching about fighting terrorism (I refuse to say “fighting terror”; terror is an emotion and you cannot conduct a war on an emotion, you conduct a war on the bloody effin’ acts and people that cause it, thus the war is on terrorism, thank you) and how we need the support of every American to defeat terrorists at the source, how everyone has to encourage the war effort or they’re not real Americans, they’re terrorist traitors…

…only to turn around and willfully throw away valuable American assets just because in their down time they like to rub knobs with the same sex.

Is this what we need a $120 billion war budget for? To pay people to waste valuable hours and resources eavesdropping on conversations and monitoring chats to see if anyone betrays any signs of the dreaded homosexual infection? “I don’t like the way that bastard types. And he mentioned a date in casual conversation! He could have meant a date with a man. Drum ‘im out of the military! Was that a lisp I heard? Speech impediment? Don’t try to fool me with your speech impediments, I know what that means! You! Out of my armed forces! What? Oh, those heteros are abusing the computer resources to have cybersex? Well, that’s okay, I mean, they’ve got to vent their frustrations…”

Waste of time. Waste of time, and waste of soldiers. It pisses me the hell off. I’ll confess flat out that I oppose the war in Iraq, I oppose continued American involvement in their affairs and the damned reasons we went over there in the first place, but I damned well stand behind the soldiers stationed over there. They’re there to do a job; they’re doing what they’re told and some may believe in what they’re doing, some may not, but every last one of them has placed their life on the line for service in the American military. No matter what they’re over there for, I wish them victory, I wish them hope, I wish them whatever it takes to get them home in one piece and I’ll save my venom for the legislators behind the war and not the men and women serving their tour of duty in Iraq.

With that in mind, they are there on a term of military service. They are not there for a hot homo hookup. They are not there to have a good old-fashioned burnination with a big fat fag strapped to the stake in lieu of a witch, either. They are there because they have valuable skills to offer, whether they’re specialists or trained ground troops.

So why are those skills being wasted monitoring even more skilled professionals over such frivolous issues that have absolutely nothing to do with the reason that they’re there?

This is reaching ridiculous levels. News flash: in order to successfully conduct any sort of war, negotiations, communication of any sort, whether hostile or neutral or peaceful, with members of another nation you will need a way to bridge the language gap to make sure that you are clearly understood. This is common sense. Common sense also dictates that talented and capable linguists who can bridge said gap are invaluable. You don’t throw them away over BS like this. You don’t disrespect their skills, their intellect, by discharging them not based on conduct, but based on a matter of personal orientation that has just about as much bearing as the color of their hair.

Don’t ask, don’t tell, huh? I’d like to see you ask anything when you can’t figure out what the hell the opposition is saying. Tell them to back off, you don’t want to shoot when you don’t speak their language, they don’t speak yours, and you’ve got no one around to stand between and say “We can talk this out.” Gives a new meaning to “don’t ask, don’t tell” when you can’t ask a damned thing, can’t tell anyone anything. I’ll bet those troops on the front line don’t give a damn who their translator is boffing when he interprets intercepted communications containing data that can save their lives. Yeah, that’s a real threat to the integrity of the unity. That’s going to destroy the morale of the soldiers. Sure. Right.

Why are we wasting time, money, and resources on this? Why are we wasting people’s lives investigating this, and damaging others’ with the outcome?

Does anyone think of the real consequences of these investigations, or do they just care about adhering to the letter of a law that doesn’t really matter on the front lines anyway?

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I’m still sorting through some submissions for TTT (Thursday’s Transgender Tales) and don’t have an appropriate one for today…so today, it’ll be me telling you a story. I hope you don’t mind.

Before I ever knew her as Kelly, I knew her as Keith. Keith and I worked together at my first job out of university, suit and tie all the way, a corporate hellhole that killed a little piece of me every day that I walked in and plastered on that false smile and listened to the little buzzwords thrown about like sticky, saccharine candy.

Keith and I were comrades in arms, the office queers. Corporate life is a world of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, military secrecy in fine-knit Italian suits, encrypted code and sexual espionage. We’d talk in our off-hours, sleeves rolled up and elbows on the bar at the nearest place to get a good drink, unwind, and gripe about what the weasels on upper decks had passed down to the lowly slums that day. Drinks after work became weekend hangouts, late-night phone calls, inside jokes shared in the office simply by exchanged glances, raised brows, and secretive smiles. After hours we’d be bursting, waiting to laugh, brimming with a dozen “Did you see–?â€?-s. Camraderie had become friendship, over the course of a few short months. We were brothers, in a way, stationed deep in enemy territory with only each other for support.

It was a few months before he trusted me enough to confide in me, however. A few months of Mai Tais and cigarettes and working weekends meeting deadlines screwed by managerial oversight, a few months of enduring company barbeques and picnics and griping about boyfriends and the local scene before he said, “I’ve got a secret. And you can’t tell anyone at work, Adri. You can’t. Promise.�

I promised, and that was when Keith introduced me to Kelly.

Kelly was a tall woman, redheaded, strong-shouldered, with the softest brown eyes you’d ever see. She carried herself awkwardly, uncomfortable in her skin; under her off-color foundation hints of stubble peeked out, and her clothes never sat quite right, bunched oddly in all the wrong places. Kelly had Keith’s pouting lips, and could have been his sister if Kelly wasn’t Keith peeking out from behind a face that didn’t quite belong to him.

To her.

She was nervous, the first time she showed me. Nervous and shy as a virgin, and even then she was pretty when she blushed, lowering her eyes and afraid to meet my gaze. I don’t know what she thought I’d do. Laugh, maybe. Recoil in disgust. Walk out, refuse to talk to her anymore. All I did was hug her; I didn’t know what else to do, or say. Just because he was now she didn’t change that she was still the same friend I’d known; I was a little confused, yes, trying to reconcile one identity with the other, but over time she taught me to understand, explained to me in the same honest and frank way that she always had.

At first I didn’t understand that she was turning to me for support, and shelter. At first I didn’t know what to do, once she made that fact clear. She wanted to transition fully, and hadn’t the faintest idea where to start – though she was willing to quit her job and start somewhere else anew, to avoid the awkwardness of coming out in the office. That, I knew how to help with. I helped her with her job hunts and dressing for interviews, helped her with looking for transgender resources, went with her to her first meeting of a local transgender organization. I went with her to local trans-friendly bars, made an ass out of myself shaking it on the dance floor with her, made an even bigger ass of myself snarling at the “tranny-chasers� who went after her looking to satisfy a few sexual kinks and use her as a fetish object.

I’ll admit I had no damned clue what I was doing. I’d never seen anyone transition before, and here she was asking me for help – but in the end, she didn’t need my help so much; just the support of a friend. She found her own way, forged her own path, and even when she curled her hand tight in mine while she waited nervously for her first meeting with a doctor about hormone therapy, I knew that despite her shaking fingers she was braver and stronger than I’d ever be.

She was brave enough and strong enough to openly proclaim that she would live her life as she chose to, and unashamedly step from the role that she was born into and into the role that she was meant for. I’ve never seen anyone fight so hard, or bear it so stoically. Over years I watched her change – watched as the estrogen affected her body structure and she softened and curved, watched as she struggled with adapting to feminine behavior, with changing social perceptions towards her, with dressing to flatter her body type, with disappointment on the days when she couldn’t pass convincingly to the general public, joy on the days when she could. Sometimes she was resolute, unwavering.

Sometimes, she was all too understandably human, and fragile. Sometimes she almost broke, almost gave up.

But she never did.

And yet she’d ask me some days, on the verge of tears, “Adrien, am I a freak?�

A freak…she was anything but. Every time I held her and stroked her hair, I told her that she was beautiful, told her that she’d made the right choice, that she was doing what made her happy. I never knew if my words really helped her, if she needed that or just needed someone to hold her while she spent her tears.

But I do know that in time, she stopped asking, stopped needing to be told. In time she began to smile more, began to bud, then blossom, until she was nearly giddy with the relief of discovering life as Kelly, discovering life where Keith no longer existed. Now she’s one of the brightest, most vivacious people that I know, and being in her presence can lift even my dour and humorless spirits. Sometimes I tell her she’s gorgeous just to see her smile, but the best part is that she doesn’t need me to say it for her to know it.

Yet I don’t think even she knows how lovely she really is, or what a triumph her personal struggle has been. To her it’s become normal, as it should be. To her every day is just like any other, a new life and a new world for her to explore, wonderful and yet no less acceptable than hetero life or queer life. I don’t think I even know the words to tell her how much I admire her for that.

But I do know that she’s a beautiful woman, one of the most beautiful that I’ve ever seen. I know that standard conventions of beauty don’t matter when I look at her, because she is every inch what a woman is supposed to be, no matter how she was born, no matter how she looks now. She is a woman’s strength, she is a woman’s resilience, she is a woman’s softness and warmth and dynamic versatility.

But most importantly she is a woman - and to me, Kelly is every inch a goddess.

Are you a MtF or FtM transgender/transsexual/transvestite/crossdresser, or considering/questioning? Want to share your story or motivational anecdote? E-mail your story to adrien-luc.sanders@451press.net with the subject “Transgender Tales” or use the Contact Form to send your story in.

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It is so time to lighten the mood around here a little bit. Let’s see who needs a little sarcasm advice today:

Adrien,

I’ve comfortably identified as a lesbian for years now, but now I have a crush on a man and it is FREAKING ME OUT and completely screwing with my sense of self-identity. It wouldn’t be a big deal if I was just attracted to his personality as we get along really well and I like everything about him, but I’m also attracted to him physically when normally I have to be really REALLY drunk to even think about doing the kind of stuff with a man that I want to do with him.

Does this mean I’m not a lesbian anymore?

Yes. Fork over your flannel, cut up your membership card in the Dyke Club of America, and turn in your Diva Cup.

…actually, keep the latter. Um.

Seriously, though? No. You’re fine. Calm down, have a Valium, and sit down; Papa Adri’s gonna have a little talk with you about human sexuality.

…that sounds so, so wrong.

Anyway. Despite what our more hardcore, intolerant brothers and sisters might tell you, labels like “gay” and “lesbian” are just that: labels, things that we choose to adopt in order to identify ourselves but that don’t dictate our modus operandum any more than we allow them to, and certainly don’t guarantee 100% attraction to the same sex. Now, you shouldn’t be running around boinking everything male and female and still calling yourself a homosexual; you’re either bisexual or a nymphomaniac in need of a little counseling. But attraction to one member of the opposite sex should not be enough to destroy the sense of identity you’ve built over the years, because you know as well as I do that there’s a lot more to that identity, and who you are, than the label of “lesbian” you’ve applied atop it to make it neatly comprehensible.

Human sexuality really isn’t a hard and fast thing. You’ll rarely find anyone who’s 100% hetero or homo, hence all the jokes straight people make about the person they’d go gay for - and sometimes, they’re even serious under that. (Why do straight men pick some of the scariest-looking blokes I’ve ever seen, though?) Sometimes attraction simply happens, regardless of gender; the way our bodies respond to people isn’t something wholly within our control, and despite studies we still don’t fully understand the chemical processes involved. For the most part your body may respond to the presence of a woman: the sight of her, her scent, that intangible whiff of pheromones that says female and just gets your blood hot and sets a few other things tingling. Every once in a while you may stumble across a man who hits that same chemical trigger-point, but it’s simply much more rare for that right combination to be there.

You’ve probably heard of the Kinsey Scale, and probably thought you were firmly ensconced in the deep end of the pool. If you’re easing a tiny bit towards the shallows, don’t worry about it. It’s normal, even if I may face a lesbian lynch mob for saying so. Your identity as a lesbian isn’t threatened because the only one who can really define that identity is you, and it’s going to take more than attraction to one man to shake that. (When you’re getting more towards four or five, then you can have an identity crisis.) Once every few thousand years or so, I run across a woman that I’m attracted to (mmm, Milla Jovovich…) but that doesn’t stop me from identifying myself as gay. I’m just not 100% gay. 99.99999% works for me.

The truth is that recognizing this attraction has not changed who you are at all; it just changes what you know about yourself, and what you know about yourself is that your sexuality is just as fluid as any other human being’s. The potential for that attraction has been there all through the years of your comfortable self-identity, and the only difference is that now you’re aware that it exists. So really, if nothing’s changed at all, why worry about changing your identity?

There could be other factors involved, anyway. It’s no secret that women form attachments, including sexual attraction, differently from men. For some men all it takes is the right endowments on either sex for us to decide we’re in love, and the scary thing is that sometimes we actually mean it. Women can be a bit more complex, and while they may not feel sexual attraction towards someone at first, that attraction can develop as a result of an emotional attachment. You’ve said that you like everything about this guy, right? It’s quite possible that you developed an emotional attraction to his personality without consideration of gender and then, as a result of natural female pair-bonding tendencies, progressed to a physical attraction. This isn’t a 100% hard-and-fast rule on how women work (do you really want to trust a fag to know how women work?), but it may help to ease your mind as to how this happened if you’ve been quite secure in your “no men, no way” status for so long.

The bottom line is this: stop worrying. If you like the guy, enjoy it. Attraction and flirtation feel good no matter the gender or we wouldn’t do it so much. And if it turns out you’re not fully a lesbian? That’s perfectly all right. In the GBLTQ community we tend to be a little (hypocritically) intolerant, as if the labels we wear are more exclusive than the bastard lovechild of Gucci and Versace and that to revoke those labels is to be rejected and cast into a pit of worthless heterosexuality or even the dreaded bisexuality (we’re so mean to the bi folks. Poor kiddies). Nuh-uh. Screw that. You have worth far beyond the label of your sexuality, and what matters most is that you are happy and comfortable with yourself and your chosen mate, male or female or…well, let’s just not go there.

I’m sure you’re a wonderful woman, with many things to offer anyone lucky enough to know you, and far more to tell the world about yourself than “I’m a lesbian”. I know you’re a bit shaken up right now, but just take a breath and relax, let yourself get used to the idea. Whether your attraction to this guy fades or deepens, you’re still yourself, and that’s the only label that really matters.

Your chatty No. 5,
~Adri

Have a question you’d like to see answered on Ask Adri? E-mail your question to adrien-luc.sanders@451press.net with the subject “Ask Adri Question” or use the Contact Form to send your question in.

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It’s amazing how bittersweet talk of romance and relationships can be, isn’t it? Thank you, everyone, for your responses to yesterday’s article – though I don’t know if I can write another one like that for a while, not when Sihaya wasn’t the only one crying by the time it was finished. I wasn’t expecting to evoke such replies; they made me smile. They even made Steve smile, when he called me to tell me that he’d read the article…and to say that my ex is a lucky guy.

My ex seems to think so, too. Knowing what a pain I can be, I’m not so sure.

Thinking of how I walked away from Steve, though, thinking about the sting of rejection, made me think of the times I’ve been rejected. It doesn’t happen often - not because I think I’m such hot stuff, but because under my cocksure sarcasm I am terminally shy and rarely make the first move. The times I have have been a 50/50 split of success and disaster, and the failures still bring a flush of humiliation to my face and an ache to my chest, every time I remember the names. David – and Louis, oh, Louis, that one still hurts deep down in a place that isn’t going away any time soon. I’m a proud creature and can’t stand embarrassing myself. I hate even more when I embarrass myself over another person, especially when I should have known better.

Stacy was one of those times when I should have known better.

It’s raining right now, slapping hard and silver whiplashes against my window. The glass is cold against my shoulder, coffee cup warm in my hand. I haven’t talked to Stacy in a few months but rain always makes me think of him, even if only for a few seconds, with a smile for the thought of a friend that I really need to keep in touch with more often. It was raining the last time that I saw him, too, years ago, a quiet night in my dorm room just like many others. We’d been watching a film with our friend Shawnessy – Brotherhood of the Wolf - but she’d left. The three of us were known as the PowerPuff Trio, even if Shawnessy was the only girl among us. She was the authoritative one – Blossom. He was the blonde, sweet-faced, making him Bubbles. I, being the dark-haired sourpuss with the acid tongue, was the most natural choice for Buttercup.

I still haven’t shaken that nickname.

I still call him Bubbles, too, or when he’s in one of his moods where he’s successfully channeling Hannibal Lector, Hardcore Bubbles. You wouldn’t think such a demented personality could lie inside someone who looks like the adorable halfbreed offspring of Matt Damon and Alvin the Chipmunk. I used to think it was cute, when he’d get all twitchy. Then again, I was in love with the guy for a while during university.

Too bad that he was straight.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s a rite of passage that we have to go through: The Straight Crush. Just like the hetero version of The Gay Crush, we know better. We always know better; he or she just isn’t buying what we’re selling. It should be easier to take than other types of rejection; we can say “It’s not me, it’s just that he/she isn’t attracted to my gender. It’s not personal.� Only it is personal – too personal. The human mind is addicted to hope, even false hope, and false hope’s favorite phrase is “what if�.

“What if he’s just in the closet? What if he’d think differently after just one kiss…what if…� When the rejection is more because of your bits and bobs and less because of who you are, you want to find a way to make it work. Want to find a way to get past that, especially if you’re a young and naïve university student who still, under his defensive cynicism, believes that love conquers all.

I still remember spending aching hours on those “what ifs� – aching hours in the student lounge of the engineering building where we all had our advanced computer science classes, where Stacy could often be found dozing on the couch between classes. The room could be full of the boisterous noise of freshman CS students getting their geek on, and still we would be two islands of silence: him asleep, me watching him sleep and clenching my fingers into fists to hold back the urge to brush his hair from his eyes, wishing like hell that we were alone so I could work up the nerve to kiss him awake, knowing in the most bitter part of me that no matter how many “what ifs� I dwelled on, I’d never do it because he’d never want it.

Stacy knew. He always knew, but he never brought it up, and neither did I. I think, now, on those days when I’d watch him sleep…sometimes he’d pretend to be asleep longer than he was just so he wouldn’t embarrass me by catching me in the act. I’d look away for a moment, look back, and freeze to find those dark eyes watching me, as if he’d just been waiting for his moment. Two people alone in a crowded room. I always had to look away first, always…and then he would smile, say “Hey there, Buttercup�, and the moment would be over. I’d smile as if my heart wasn’t clenching like a fist inside my chest, and tell him he was drooling again. Just two college guys screwing around. That’s all we ever were.

I don’t know how long I held on to that crush. It was fading by that raining evening that we spent squinting at subtitles and joking that the only role that Mark Dacascos could fill was one where he didn’t have to speak often. Maybe I was getting over it, or maybe over passing semesters I’d simply grown resigned to it, learned to ignore it so that I could enjoy time with my friend without feeling like a lost puppy every time I looked at him. I’m gay. He’s straight. That wasn’t going to change, and I considered myself lucky that I had a friend who could quietly accept my unspoken feelings towards him without thrusting me away in a fit of homophobic disgust.

Knowing that, I should have kept quiet. Knowing that…I should have enjoyed that last evening, the last time I’d see him in gods only know how long, considering that I left after that and came to Houston to find my career. I should have held my silence, and let the “what ifs� die a lonely death.

Getting hurt, that time, was my own damned fault.

“I’m going to miss you,� I told him, and he laughed and ruffled my hair, then yanked back before I could bite him.

“Me too, Buttercup. You’re gonna IM, right?�

“Yeah. Call you when I can.� Comfortable silence, or it should have been. He was sitting on the couch, I while I sat on the floor near his feet, leaning against the couch, so close that I could have pillowed my head in his lap had I wanted to. I wanted to. Badly. “Stacy, I…�

“Yeah, Buttercup?� Fingers in my hair. I hated when he did that, played with my hair. It gave me false hope, made my heart do mad voodoo dances against my rib cage.

“Nothing.�

When I say nothing, it’s never nothing. Anyone who knows me knows that. Nothing, betsuni, mou yeh ah, no matter what language I say it in it means it’s something, but I don’t want to say. I didn’t have to, this time.

“I know, Adrien,� and his fingers stilled in my hair.

“Ah.�

And that was it, just like that. Awkward, tense silence, and that pain reaching cold and wet down my throat and into my stomach. I shouldn’t have said anything. I wished I hadn’t, even if I didn’t really say anything at all. It could have been worse. He could have said cruel things, he could have fleshed out in detail just why, and why not. He could have left, and never spoken to me again. I could have lost my friend.

Instead what I lost was a little of my innocence, and a little of my naivete. I lost a little of my faith in what if, and quite a bit of my youth. Stacy had been my first straight crush, and thankfully I haven’t had one since. Instead I’ve had the growing maturity and discretion to keep my heart in check, and carefully guarded. It hasn’t saved me wholly from heartbreak, but it has avoided creating more than need be.

I think we all have to go through that, at some point. Perhaps it’s part of the unique experience of being gay, or perhaps it’s not so unique at all. Perhaps instead it’s a unifying factor, a human experience that we all know regardless of sexual orientation: longing, and heartbreak, and that desire for companionship. A reminder that no matter how we divide ourselves by labeled partitions, in the end we all feel the same things, crave the same things. I even remember the nights I spent with Stacy, listening to him talk about girls, about how his love life never seemed to work, about how the ones that he wanted never seemed to want him.

No, it’s really not so different after all.

Perhaps it’s just part of growing up.

This is posting a bit late, because the storm that made me think of Stacy also killed my lights and I’d have lost this article if not for the laptop battery. It’s very quiet in here now, very dark, the only light the grey mist coming through the curtains and the low-power glow of the laptop screen. I’m surrounded by a hundred other people in close proximity, little ant-boxes of human life stacked close and separated by thin walls, and yet without the constant electric hum of life to remind me I feel isolated, alone. Just me and my thoughts, me and the rain.

I should really go call him.

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His name is Steve. It’s what my father would call a good, strong name and he’s got a good strong, handshake to go with it.

We meet in a Starbuck’s a few blocks from my place; just a five-minute walk across cracked sidewalk and descending dusk and I’m ducking through the Barnes & Noble, barely resisting the lure of the books to find that he’s already there in the cafe, seated and waiting and looking better than the photograph on his profile. He’s not handsome or even pretty, but there’s a certain sharp precision to his features that says he doesn’t need to be, and charisma enough to compensate even without.

First impressions take in neat black hair, blue eyes, swarthily tanned skin and strong, firm shoulders. Large hands. Rough. He’s got a smile that could knock me over from across the room, boyish but sincere. I’m wondering what the hell this guy is doing hunting down dates on an online dating site, and thinking that I might be in over my head and very close to forgetting that I only went along to blog about this. He’s looking me over and blushing, then standing and pulling out a chair for me. It’s hard not to smile. I’m not used to gentlemen anymore. I’m not used to dates anymore, either. Two years in a committed dead-end relationship and you get out of practice.

He’s wearing a crisp, clean white blouse and artfully faded, deliberately-tattered jeans that fit just right in all the right places - clothes that tell me he knows how to look nice for a date without going overboard. Me? I’m wearing slacks, a tight black tank, and Dragon’s Hide, a Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab scent that makes me smell like leather, musk, and dark, smoky sex. A come-and-get-me scent if ever I smelled one. I’m feeling catty tonight, and wearing it more to spite my possessive-but-dense ex than because I really want the new guy breathing me in and getting all those hot little urges. If the ex-who’s-still-in-love-with-me won’t respond to the “sniff me, I smell like sex� hint, someone will, whether he’s actually getting any or not.

Probably not the best thoughts to be having at the start of a first date.

They say you can tell a lot about a person by how they order their coffee. I wish someone had given me the decoder ring on that, because all I can tell about a double-shot espresso is that Steve likes espressos. Maybe he’s figuring out that I’m a cat person from some secret message in my mocha latte. Or maybe he’s chuckling and indulging my insistence on paying, all the while completely oblivious to the fact that he’s rousing butterflies in my stomach every time that he smiles.

Chemical reaction? I’d say so. There’s something exothermic going on in my adrenals, and even I can smell the BPAL on me intensifying as it reacts to rising pheromones. My stomach’s so twisted that I couldn’t eat even if I wanted to, although that’s not why I decline when he asks. I ate before the date; it’s a habit of mine that I jokingly call a Southern thing learned from Miss Scarlett O’Hara herself.

It’s not hard to start a conversation. He kicks it off by telling me that he’s never gotten far enough to meet a guy from online before, but my article prompted him to contact me. My response is cynical, amused that my jaded take on online dating actually fired any optimism in him. He says he didn’t think I’d accept. I say I didn’t think I would, either. He laughs, and the butterflies ramp it up a notch. This guy is devastating.

He’s also painfully shy, and even if I can’t for the life of me figure out why, it explains why he’s still single. No, Steve isn’t the guy I met online. He’s better. That guy online was confident, cocky, swaggering, a little arrogant. I can’t stand that type, honestly. I like this Steve, though. Face-to-face this Steve is shy, completely unaware of his own charisma and what that smile can do to a boy, and thus trotting it out every time I make him blush with a playful comment - and tonight, I’m full of ‘em. I can’t help it. Someone like that needs to be teased, and I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t rise to the occasion. He gives me plenty of chances.

It isn’t hard to find things to talk about, from literature to music to really bad comedy sketches. We have completely opposing viewpoints on almost everything, and yet somehow manage to counter each other without really arguing or disagreeing even when he tells me that he has two pet birds and I remind him that to a cat person, “bird� is just another way of saying “dinner via airmail�. We can’t even come close to agreeing about the war in Iraq, and yet there’s no tension, no ill-feeling at all. Whomever said politics was a bad subject for a first date never had the chance to twist the word “pundit� into an inadvertent innuendo.

I’m having a great time, and if his laughter and those bashful glances are any indication, so is he. Sometimes he stammers trying to find a response, then flushes and covers his face in embarrassment. I think it’s cute, and I can’t believe he’s older than I am, a successful contractor who conducts business transactions with absolute confidence every day while I’m just a scruffy, antisocial writer with quite a few years’ less experience under my belt. Apparently the boardroom is his place to shine; it’s just his love life that turns him into a shrinking violet. Frankly, I’m in awe that a man could remain this way well into his thirties.

I’m also in awe and disgust that even though my stomach is doing capricious somersaults, my intellect is feeling distinctly stimulated, and my body’s calling out for a little stimulation of its own…I’m completely disinterested in ever going out with him again. While the rest of me may be completely enamored of Steve, my heart is straining several blocks back, tugging me towards home and, even when Steve’s pretty blue eyes are lingering quite curiously on my pretty pink lips, thrusting in painful, longing thoughts of my ex. My ex, whom I’ve had two years and another relationship to get over, and yet who can still pull my heartstrings with just a look.

My ex, whom I’m wishing like hell was sitting across from me right now, even as I laugh at another witty rejoinder from Steve.

No, these aren’t good thoughts to be having on what should be an otherwise successful first date with a guy who’s attractive, fun, intelligent, and stable. I shouldn’t be distracted underneath my laughter; I should be falling head over heels into that giddy feeling that you get when you meet a guy who can make your toes tingle and your breath come short with just a single look. I can’t help but wonder how I look, to him, especially since he hardly looks away from me the entire time that we chat. Do I look engaged, amused, inviting? Or can he see that slight distance, that little bit that I’m holding back, that refuses to give in and say Hey, I could really like this guy?

Yeah, I could really like this guy. I could really like him…but I can’t get over the fact that he’s not him.

The time flies by more quickly than expected before he’s checking his watch and I’m checking my cell phone for the time, as we both have working evening plans and agreed beforehand that we’d only be able to meet for a set amount of time. I’m honestly reluctant to part, as even if my heart wasn’t in it I really did have a good time. But it’s time to get moving, time for awkward farewells, and time for that moment of truth.

He gets up to pull my chair out for me before I can rise, then catches my fingers in his as I stand. I’m not startled when he kisses my hand. I am startled when he presses his cheek to my wrist, and I feel warm breath and rough stubble. His lips are close to my skin, parted, just a little damp. My pulse is pounding; it’s hard to breathe. What happened to being shy?

“You smell nice,� he says, and the bitch in me feels both vindicated and tempted even if I know I’m being unfair, and snotty to boot. It’s silly things like that that make me so mean, sometimes. So difficult to be with. I could argue that I’m only human, and I’m lonely and responding to some much-needed attention, and well aware that I’m not really mad at the ex for not noticing, but upset over a much bigger issue between us. But I know the truth: I’m a brat. I’m a brat and the brat in me is smug that Steve noticed something so simple without prompting while the ex ignored it even after multiple hints: I went out of my way to smell sexy, I feel sexy, and I want a little male attention instead of derisive comments. The brat in me is spiteful and hurting and wants to invite Steve closer to catch the slight whiff coming from the daubs of musk on my throat and wafting from the hair laying against my shoulders…even if the brat in me knows that it’s not Steve that I want to be inviting at all.

Thankfully there’s a little adult left in me, enough that I can thank him with a quiet laugh and gently tug away from his grip with a glance that I already know from experience says come hither to anything with a pulse. And hither he comes, holding the door for me before trailing me out into the parking lot. Even if he’s shy and flustered while I’m the confident alpha male here, I’ve been placed in the role of the femme fatale. He’s too much of a gentleman for it to be otherwise, and I don’t mind. It’s nice to be treated like the soft one, for once. It’s nice to be courted as an object of desire.

We linger, taking our time in the parting, waiting for one or the other to say the words or ask the question that will end this. Instead “You’re going to write about this, aren’t you?� he asks. I agree, and ask if he minds. He says no, then laughs and asks me not to embarrass him too much.

I promise that I won’t.

It’s when he asks if there’s going to be a second date that the laughter fades, and I look away. He already knows the answer’s no, and he won’t say that he’s hurt and disappointed - but I can tell, and it wrenches me a little inside and makes me feel like the biggest bastard on the face of the earth. As shy as he is it probably took hell for him to ask me out in the first place, and I doubt he could have done it without the easy anonymity of a screen name to cushion a possible rejection. And as much as I enjoyed his company, I can’t lead him on by saying yes. That goes beyond bastardry and into downright cruelty.

So I tell him that I’m not looking to date seriously right now, but I’d love to be friends. I don’t tell him that there’s someone else, but I think he knows. With that line? They always know.

He hugs me before we part ways; he smells good, too, like aftershave and clean, rough-skinned male. I promise to call him, when I know I won’t. So does he. He’ll call me, I can already tell. He’ll read this, too, and chalk it up to another loss, and hope the next guy works out better. I hope the next guy works out better, too; he deserves it. Hell, I could even say he deserves someone less difficult than I. Steve’s sweet, and charming. The kind of guy women groan over when they find out that he’s gay. The kind of guy men groan over should they find out he was taken.

He could have been. I could have said I’d see him again. Hell, I could have gone back to his place to ease a little itch that’s been building up in me for a while and craving satiation, and ended up going home smelling like sex for better reasons than a little fragrance in a vial. I could have gone with chemistry, gone with instant attraction, and run with it.

Instead I’m walking back to my place. Alone, even though Steve offered to drive me home safely. I can still smell espresso and aftershave, even though I’m blocks from the coffee shop now and the din of traffic is loud in my ears, headlights and street lamps fighting each other to stain the night sky from purple to orange. I’m going home to a cat, an almost-finished novel, and an ex who’s probably pacing restlessly and waiting for me to tell him that nothing happened. I don’t yet know what I’m going to tell him. I may love him. He may love me. But we’re not together, so my dates aren’t his business.

But I’m going home to him anyway, still irrationally mad at him and thinking about spending the rest of the night with him anyway, even as I stand on the street corner and wait for the light to change so I can dodge right-turning traffic to take that last leg home to my apartment. I’m wondering what I’m going to write, how I’m going to describe this night that hurt more than I thought it would, more than I think it should…and how much of my thoughts I’m going to bare to an impersonal network of strangers whose only interest in this is out of a glazed, blank-eyed case of train-wreck syndrome.

I have answers to the points I brought up in that article, now. No, you often don’t meet the person that was profiled online, but that’s not always a bad thing; no, sometimes even when the base animal attraction is there, it still isn’t enough. Sometimes it just doesn’t compare to that intangible something that you don’t always miss when it isn’t there, but that you can’t fight when it’s already taken root in you and refuses to let go.

There’s more to it, now, something more complicated, more personal than just a cup of coffee and a blog in the making. I just left a great guy behind for one who drives me crazy; I just walked away from a new possibility to instead ride that same old dead horse: a nag too broken to run, let alone go anywhere. Damn. I haven’t had a cigarette in a long time, but right now? I could really use a damned Sampoerna. Djarum Black would be even better.

We fought the night before, the ex and I. He still doesn’t know why I’m sulking and depressed. I still don’t know why I let myself care that it’s driving him nuts that I went out with another guy. We’ll talk it out anyway, and then go back to being “friends�. Friends who kiss like the world is ending tomorrow, who hurt each other just from wanting, who keep fencing around each other and yet flinching back every time we start to get close - coming up with a million reasons why we shouldn’t and ignoring the most blatantly, painfully obvious reason why we should.

It’s stupid. It’s impractical. It’s illogical. It’s nothing to do with chemistry; if it was just chemistry, I’d probably be with Steve right now instead of wondering bitterly, eyes stinging and throat tight, why I brushed him off because I couldn’t stop thinking about a guy who can piss me off without even being in my general vicinity. It’s the dumbest thing I’ve done in a long time.

And it hurts like hell, but it’s what feels right.

Yet even as that light changes and the crosswalk signal gives me the go-ahead, telling me that I’m that much closer to home and that much closer to him, I wonder:

How stupid can I possibly be?

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On a rather amusing personal front, you’d be amazed at what can happen from a simple blog entry. After yesterday’s article on gay online dating, Digital Dating in the Pink Triangle, I was contacted by one of the fellows whose profiles I’d skimmed before writing the post.

Apparently he’d noticed I’d looked at him, looked over my profile, followed the profile’s personal website link here, read the article, liked it…and then clicked back and decided to contact me.

A few e-mails and some amicable chatter later, and we have a friendly coffee date set for tomorrow night.

Am I the only one distinctly amused by this?

I suppose by tomorrow I’ll be able to answer my own question: how often do we meet the person that the profile portrays?

I’ll let you know how it goes on Monday. Wish me luck.

~Adri

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