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Editor’s Note: Rachel Asher, our associate editor (she coordinates this blog, the front cover and the Tuesday and Friday editions), has been pinging me on doing a little something for Gay Pride Week, and I asked her to put together a short essay for this space.
Planet Waves has always taken an “out” position on sexuality. We’ve done so whether the accolades come in, or the complaints, or whether someone in England has a heart attack when he discovers the Sexuality Resources Area. It’s impressive how simultaneously popular and unpopular of a topic sex can be, even within the confines of one individual.
However, regardless of public opinion, ignorance prevails most of the time. Most people are ignorant and neglectful of their bodies, and many seem to lack the basic emotional literacy necessary to connect sexual experiences with their ideas about intimacy.
Hopefully times are changing, but I’ve heard waaaay too many stories from clients about not being given basic information on such things as menstruation. And who exactly is qualified to educate their kids about how to handle relationships? Yet it’s more significant to me how little true self-understanding exists about sexuality, given the papered-over version of reality that we are typically handed by nuns, school teachers and our parents. Add in the crime of abstinence-only sex education and you can see we have not been heading in such a good direction the past couple of decades, and we have a lot of reason to be on the alert for blatant ignorance.
It’s my sincere belief that everyone needs to come out of the closet — not just people who are queer. I sometimes call it coming out of the basement, because that’s where most of us keep our sexuality.
People wonder why exactly gay, bi, lesbian and trans people, and the many other forms of queer, have to come out to their parents and friends. I’ve thought about this or years, and I think the question is a reflection on the prevailing state of heterosexuality. Coming out is a crucial ritual in the life of someone queer, because through the process of being queer, they [we] invariably discover how close to the core of their emotional and psychic reality their sexuality is; and they cannot keep being different hidden.
It is a rite of passage, and I think that heterosexuals decidedly lack this to their extreme detriment. We have no established sexual rites of passage in Western culture, except in the queer community. I think we all have something to learn here. Tomorrow I’ll come back to the Pride theme with some coming out thoughts of my own. I now leave you in the very capable hands of Rachel…besides myself, I think the first openly queer person besides me to serve Planet Waves. (As for myself, I’ll tell you what I mean by ‘queer’ in the next edition.)
Dear Friend and Reader:
“Do you think I’m stupid? You think I don’t know what’s been going on with you and J. this whole time?”
A shiver of shock and melancholy snakes up my back when remember his words like this, so precise, so vivid. My father died almost seven years ago and, for those of you reading who have lost someone close to you, you know that from that moment of loss, you will struggle to maintain their memory: the sound of their voice, their mannerisms, how they’d react to this or that news.
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There are a couple of memories of my father that I know will never fade: one of them is the goofy dance he did in the living room to The Beatles’ “I am the Walrus” and how he pronounced, “goo goo gu choob.” Another is the day I came out to him.
It’s raining this morning in Dublin and, before you roll your eyes at the predictability of the Irish weather, it was actually a sunny spring. In a few hours, I will be attending the Gay Pride Parade, huddled under an umbrella with my girlfriend as the largest rainbow flag I’ve ever seen winds from Parnell Square on the North Side to the top of Dames Street on the southern side of the city.
I’ve earned my right to stand there amidst the floats and fanfare: eight years ago, I sat my father down at the dining room table with an informative packet on sexuality, a recently broken heart and open ears, absorbing his response to my coming out speech.
I don’t think there’s anything more difficult for a teenage girl than talking about sex to her father, and straight girls can avoid this confrontation well into adulthood if they want to. It didn’t work that way for me, though; both because I was bisexual and an activist, and because I was having a lot of sex. My queer sexuality was central to my life as a teenager: I formed the first gay-straight alliance in my high school, my friends were primarily bisexual and gay and, if they were straight, they were in Drama Club.
Coming out is a relatively recent phenomenon, it originated with the gay rights movement which rose like a pheonix out of the Stonewall Riots on June 28, 1969. When sodomy was still illegal in New York, policemen were permitted to raid bars that were known to have gay clientele and arrest people for dancing with members of the same sex. (For a personal account of what this pre-liberation time period was like, Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg is a beautifully written book.)
Gay men were automatically considered perverts and child molesters. Homosexuality itself was considered a mental disorder, like having bipolar or borderline personality.
When a bunch of drag queens, gay men and lesbians resisted arrest during a raid of the Stonewall Inn, a popular gay bar in New York City’s West Village (that is, Greenwich Village), the gay rights movement began.
The movement raged on into the 1970s and 1980s with groups like ACT UP and Queer Nation marching through the streets, demanding the decriminalization of sodomy laws, to fight AIDS, to be equal citizens socially and legally.
That fight has mollified in most Western countries as queer people have gained many more civil rights, though there are notable exceptions like Poland, whose Warsaw Mayor Lech Kaczynski banned the pride parade two years in a row, claiming it supports a homosexual lifestyle. The European Court of Human Rights finally overturned the ban this past September.
While we can’t forget instances in the United States like Matthew Shephard and the fight for marriage equality, the gay rights movement has turned into more of a celebration and less of a fight. Coming out has become the primary right of passage for a queer person; it’s a story we tell our friends over and over, a badge that we wear that says “I own who I am, and I’m secure enough in myself to tell those around me.”
We may be different from the mainstream (or not, in truth, because everyone secretly thinks there is something queer about their sexuality), but we each found our courage, at some point, to buck that trend and force our loved ones to accept us for who we are. To steal the words from Queer Nation: “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!”
And, for me anyway, it seemed my father already had.
Happy Pride,
Today’s Oracle takes us to Aug 08, 2005 – Aries – Daily
Invest a little effort today into solving what you’ve come to think of as impossible problems at work and you’ll make months of progress. You’ve had more than enough brilliant ideas the past couple of days; you really should be working on cracking the riddles of theoretical physics. What’s different about today is that you’ll have the diplomatic skills to share your wisdom in ways that people will appreciate. It’s really simple — they will be as patient with you as you are with them. The best approach is to ask their opinions and give them credit for your ideas. Just remember the goal which is making life easier for everyone.
Saturday 21 June 2008
Eros (8+ Cancer) quintile Vesta (26+ Aries)
Arachne (3+ Libra) sextile Hylonome (3+ Sagittarius Rx)
Eros (8+ Cancer) trine Pandora (8+ Scorpio Rx)
Hidalgo (6+ Scorpio Rx) opposite Asbolus (6+ Taurus)
Venus (3+ Cancer) sextile Saturn (3+ Virgo)
Venus (3+ Cancer) quintile Eris (21+ Aries)
Amor (20+ Taurus) square Chiron (20+ Aquarius Rx)
Venus (3+ Cancer) conjunct Kronos (3+ Cancer)
Eros (9+ Cancer) semisquare Mars (24+ Leo)
Eros (9+ Cancer) sesquiquadrate Neptune (24+ Aquarius Rx)
Mars (24+ Leo) opposite Neptune (24+ Aquarius Rx)
Jupiter (19+ Capricorn Rx) trine Logos (19+ Virgo)
Mercury (13+ Gemini) septile Eris (21+ Aries)
Vesta (26+ Aries) trine Galactic Center (26+ Sagittarius)
Venus (4+ Cancer) conjunct Ceres (4+ Cancer)
Sunday 22 June 2008
Venus (4+ Cancer) septile Pallas (13+ Taurus)
Atlantis (13+ Libra) quincunx Pallas (13+ Taurus)
Psyche (11+ Scorpio Rx) semisquare Galactic Center (26+ Sagittarius)
Sun (1+ Cancer) square M87 (1+ Libra)
Amor (21+ Taurus) conjunct Sedna (21+ Taurus)
Mercury (13+ Gemini) opposite Ixion (13+ Sagittarius Rx)
Ceres (4+ Cancer) septile Pallas (13+ Taurus)
Pallas (13+ Taurus) quincunx Ixion (13+ Sagittarius Rx)
Vesta (27+ Aries) sextile Hades (27+ Gemini)
Eros (10+ Cancer) semisquare Admetos (25+ Taurus)
Mars (24+ Leo) quintile Hidalgo (6+ Scorpio Rx)
Nessus (14+ Aquarius Rx) semisquare Pluto (29+ Sagittarius Rx) – Near Miss Only
Venus (5+ Cancer) trine Chariklo (5+ Scorpio Rx)
Venus (5+ Cancer) quintile 1992 QB1 (23+ Aries)