249. obstreperous

Sorry about the gap in posting. Grad school started up again in September, and on top of working full-time, doing music for Sunday Assembly, and serving as secretary for the campus archivists group, I’m also taking two fairly demanding courses, both in cataloging.

So time is extremely limited.

Of course, because I’m apparently a masochist, they’re both in the same subject area—cataloging—except that one is a beginning-level organization of knowledge course, and the other in advanced cataloging. Because I’m ridiculous.

But I’ve also discovered that really enjoy cataloging, which I wasn’t expecting. Homework (which usually consists of actual cataloging activities, such as identifying Library of Congress subject headings, looking up RDA rules for classification, or consulting LC authority files) is thoroughly enjoyable.

I could seriously spend hours doing this. It’s so relaxing.

So there’s that.

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Had a mini grieving moment on Saturday, following by a minor meltdown in the evening.

I came across some recordings that I did in 2007 of music written for a play and performed with friends of mine. It’s music that I’m actually quite proud of, some of my best work, and overall that was a nice time in my life. It was the year before I came out, so it was actually a pretty turbulent time emotionally and psychologically, but working and creating made for a refreshing oasis in the midst of what was otherwise dark chaos.

It hit me while putting the tracks together that I really don’t write music anymore, and currently have no inclination to do so. Maybe I will again, someday, but for now that seems to be done. Wrote about that a few months ago when the Source Song Festival came around again, but it finally sunk in, like the awful significance of the death of someone close to you hitting home all of a sudden, that that part of my identity, the composer and classical musician, is gone.

It’s a striking absence considering how many years and how much effort I put into becoming a musician and composer. Hours spent practicing and writing, working on projects with friends, struggling to get my work out there for it to be (hopefully) discovered, and then finally accepting the inevitable conclusion that this wasn’t

This came up in the most recent meeting with my therapist, on Monday. The past few months I’ve been gradually stripping away the final vestiges, exorcising the remaining ghosts, of that now-defunct period of my life. It was an identity designed to please my father, the people in my life who I looked up to and respected, who all said that music was my divine calling (or however they phrased it—not quite so dramatic as “divine calling,” for sure).

I started writing music around age fourteen or fifteen, began a bachelor’s in music composition at seventeen, tried for years to make a career as a composer, failed, and finally wrote my last “serious” composition last year for a wedding.

Music formed the core of my identity for over fifteen years, and now it’s gone.

So it just hit me how much much time and effort passed investing in that identity, and how much of both was wasted when I could’ve been putting that into pursuing authenticity instead.

And, of course, that thinking shifted over into my personal life and into looking at the wasteland my romantic prospects are at the moment, how everyone else seems to be settling down or moving forward to getting what they want while I’m looking more every day like a tiny rowboat that’s drifting out, alone, into open water.

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I’ve also been more aware recently of a sense of discomfort around intimacy, of both the physical and emotional kind. There are times when I can fake it in social settings and am able to pretend for some reason or another.

Fundamentally, I believe that this discomfort is rooted in a fear of disappointment, of hurt, or both, and not wanting to get involved with a guy when it’s unclear where his intentions are. Because frankly, I don’t have the emotional bandwidth to deal with bullshit of that kind.

And there’s the lack of trust that I have in my own judgment around the kind of guys I typically fall for. The last couple of guys I’ve been interested in or merely attracted to (and we’re talking about four or five over the last two and a half years) have either been emotionally unavailable, already taken, or hetero.

The conflict is in the reality that I seem to be surrounded by gay guys who have no qualms about having a fuck buddy, or just fucking someone who they’re into, seemingly without hangups or interest in where it goes. They just go after what they want.

It’s not guilt or anything that holds me back.

It’s fear of getting hurt.

So I can’t do fuck buddies.

Five years ago I was able to, in the months after breaking up with Aaron and then the debacle with Seth. And maybe that’s part of it—that I’ve done the sex-for-sex-sake thing and have no desire to revisit the emptiness that it became for me. Maybe it works fine for other people. For me, it was a lonely experience, especially when being with other guy’s boyfriends.

Yes, I was the “other guy” for a time.

Plus, there are new anxieties about getting older as a gay man, about the slowing-down of my body as I get into my thirties, how I’m no longer the supple young thing that guys were into. I don’t have time (or money) to spend at the gym, and I’m worried that not taking care of myself exercise-wise will eventually come back to bite me later, both in the sense of my health and in attracting romantic partners when I’m finally able and ready to pursue that.

Just a lot of anxieties overall.

I need to step back from this for now and pursue things that bring me joy and happiness.

232. degust

I hate Christmas music—but not the for reasons you might think.

Sure, I hate going into a store in December (sooner in some places) and hearing dodgy lyrics written about a mythological baby god-king.

• “Worship Christ, the newborn King”
• “Go, tell it on the mountain that Jesus Christ is born.”
• “Jesus Christ was born to save!”
• “Hark! the herald angels sing, “Glory to the newborn King!”

Unless you’re someone who left behind a religious community saturated with language like this, you’re probably not going to notice this very much. Most people don’t. To most, Christmas music is often infused with rich and fragrant memories of childhood, of time spent with family and friends, and of the beauty of winter (if you’re into that sort of thing).

And most people have likely never stopped to question the logic of the whole Christmas story. A teenage girl in Iron Age Palestine suddenly becomes pregnant with the son of the Hebrew God, who himself is the Hebrew God in human form? As David Hume (via Christopher Hitchens) once quipped, “Which is more likely, that the whole natural order is suspended or that a Jewish minx should tell a lie?”

And why did Jesus have to temporarily suspend his divinity and come down to Earth as a dirty, squalling, snot-nosed infant? Because four thousand years earlier, two presumably immortal humans who lived in a mythical garden ate a piece of fruit that they were warned not to after a talking snake (just think about that for a second—a talking snake) told them to go ahead and do it anyway.

Because of this, God got royally pissed off; threw them out of this garden and put an angel with a flaming sword to guard the entrance; cursed them both with mortality, with work (for the man), and with painful childbirth (for the woman). So now every human born since then was also cursed with this “original sin” and is doomed to burn in the eternal fires of Hell.

(Brief side note: Hell is actually a Greek invention and wasn’t included in Christian theology until a bit later as a means of capitalizing on fear of death to control behavior (especially sexual behavior). Just in case you hadn’t figured out yet what a ludicrous invention this story is.)

As if that wasn’t overreaction enough, now all of creation—every tree, rock, animal, star, planet, galaxy—is cursed and spoiled because of the presumed disobedience of two humans on an insignificant piece of rock orbiting a small unregarded yellow sun (as Douglas Adams once wrote) “far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy.”

Anyway, that’s the fundamentalist Christian take on the story.

And let’s not even get into the fact that early Christians didn’t observe the birth of the their Lord and Savior. According to the website Biblical Archaeology, “Origen of Alexandria (c. 165–264) goes so far as to mock Roman celebrations of birth anniversaries, dismissing them as “pagan” practices.” It wasn’t until late in the 4th century CE that the date of Jesus’ birth was moved to December 25th and celebrated, mainly as a way of appropriating pagan holidays. December 25th has been the date of several Roman holidays, including Saturnalia and Sol Invictus.

Sorry, guys, Jesus was not a Capricorn.

And what are the chances that other gods like Krishna, Mithras, Horus, and Buddha were also born on December 25th? What a crazy coincidence!

For me, the atonement theology underpinnings of Christmas were impossible to miss growing up. It was drilled into us virtually every day that humans are sinful, and the reason that Jesus had to come to earth to be murdered was because of how sinful we are. The whole Advent calendar was essentially a daily theological lesson in how awful humans are, and how the only redeemable thing about us is Jesus dying for our sins to make up for the fact that God loves us so much that he wants to torture us forever to show us how much he loves us.

So you’ll excuse me if I don’t find Christmas carols particularly heartwarming. In those lyrics I hear the self-hatred and self-loathing buried deep in the heart of Christianity, that tells us that not only are we not good enough—we’re fundamentally flawed and broken.

You know, the language of an emotional abuser.

But that is not the reason why I hate Christmas music.

And it’s not necessarily that I hate Christmas music. Some of the melodies to the songs are quite nice. And I do have some warm and fragrant memories of Christmas from my childhood. It was a magical time of year. Everything was transformed, by the cold and snow, and by decorations around town and around the house. We used to put cloves in pomegranates and oranges and hang them around the house, so the house smelled like spices.

When I became an atheist, it was as if twenty-eight years of my life no longer belonged to me. All of those memories, all of the enjoyment that I’d found in singing songs at Christmas, in the celebrations, in the community, were all part of someone else’s life.

You must not seek to add
To what you have, what you once had;
You have no right to share
What you are with what you were.
– C. F. Ramuz, Histoire du Soldat, trans. by Michael Flanders

So that’s why it’s hard for me to listen to Christmas music. It’s not so much the lyrics that bother me anymore. I’ve developed enough coping strategies to walk into a store without asking to yell at a manager to “turn that shit off!”

Christmas music is a reminder of everything that I lost when I jettisoned my faith. Further, it speaks to the fear I have of what I may never have—a family of my own to make new memories with, to banish the sadness of the old ones.

But who knows. Anything’s possible.

192. solstice

My breakfast this morning was two tumblers of whisky (neat), about three fingers each. This after getting up to feed and water the dogs I’m looking after for the month. No sense in them going hungry. I got an email last night from the University of Michigan at 11:10PM, which seems an odd hour to be sending emails. A bit like waiting until you know someone’s gone to leave a voicemail. The email read:

I regret to inform you that your application for admission to the Music Composition MA program at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance has not been approved. We are therefore unable to offer you the opportunity to audition. This decision is based on a careful review by the faculty committee of your pre-screening recording and your application materials. The staff of the Admissions Office and the Composition faculty are not able to provide individual feedback from student auditions because of the volume of candidates to consider. We ask your understanding and thank you in advance. As you continue your college search, I know that you will find another school at which to pursue your studies. We wish you continued success and every good wish for a career that will fully utilize your interests and abilities.

Basically, a “thanks for trying, now fuck off” email. This might not have been such a blow had my temp job not ended yesterday, a week and a half early than what I was planning on. It also might not be such a disappointment were I not single again for the holidays. Last year was the first time in a while that I’ve been employed during the Yule season, and the first time ever that I’ve been dating someone for a major holiday. Now I’m back to where I was in 2011, when I told my parents that I wanted nothing more to do with them for their bigotry, I was still reeling from heartbreak and my loss of faith, and I’d just been laid off from another temp job right after Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving. As in, thanks a lot. There are still two applications out there that might yield something, but I’m terrified now that the results will be the same there—that my work just isn’t good enough on its own to merit a place as a cohort in graduate school. A friend of mine tells me that it may have nothing to do with the quality of my application or compositions; that it’s more about finding a group of students that coalesce together. If that’s the case, I may never get into grad school as I’m really an oddball when it comes to music. And everything else. What I’m terrified over is the prospect of yet another year of living in purgatory. I’m tired of working these temp jobs that pay far below the skill level required for the work the client needs performed. I’m sick of being expendable. I’m sick of working with the 9-to-5ers, the workaday folk who go home after a long day at the office of doing something they ultimately don’t care about and aren’t invested in; who are planning to working long enough to cash in on their 401K pension and retire somewhere comfortable. This is not the world I belong in. Remember this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ofKJ6UFv60 Instead of a Shakespearean subtext, my inner voices have quite another Jungian game going on:

• Id: Running back and forth, simultaneously trying to make ends meet and bash my head against a wall to get anything artistic done.
• Ego: Uncertain about whether I’ve made the right career decision or whether my music is even good enough to pursue a career in, even though it’s pretty much the only thing I’m really good at and give a fuck about.
• Superego: Those strident subconscious voices that are difficult to shake, like Christianity:
  • Every single rejection letter or person who has rejected my music, told me that it’s too difficult, or that it’s just not very good.
  • My lack of business sense and self-promotion; of knowing how to strategize, network, who to talk to, how to talk to people, etc.
  • Frustration over my dating life and singleness; over how I haven’t found a guy yet who ultimately doesn’t disappoint me (cf, Fiona Apple); how my current scheme is to find a like-minded guy at grad school; feeling anxiety over nearly being 31 and that I’m at the age where younger guys who are into “older guys” are interested in me but not interested in a relationship.

That bloodcurdling scream the girl playing Ophelia lets out at the end of that scene? That’s the sound in my head almost all the time these days. “Get thee to a nunnery” indeed. I’ve also grown weary of the Midwest and its seemingly provincial attitude toward sophisticated art and music. I once shared the recording of my senior composition recital with a supervisor of mine, and he called it “long-haired music,” a reference (I suppose) to graduate students of the 60s and 70s being somewhat shaggy in appearance. I’ve sent pieces of mine to ensembles all over the Twin Cities, hoping to get performances, or the very least readings. No bites. If I get feedback at all, it’s usually something to the effect of: It’s really not what we’re looking for. … thanks, now go fuck yourself. It’s difficult not to think that I’m the common denominator here. What’s more probable? That hundreds of people have had the same independent reaction to my music, or that my work just… sucks? The latter is what I’m afraid of. We’ll see what happens in the coming weeks as I wait to see what happens with the Eastman School of Music and with the University of Southern California. I have a little hope, but not a lot. In the meantime, Christmas is in four days and I feel like drinking myself silly to forget that I’m single and miserable, and that my entire family is fundamentalist Christians.

191. hardihood

Last night I posted to Facebook about how yesterday evening I was mopping the floor of my apartment to music written about a thousand years ago, and imagining that someday, a guy is going to find this ridiculously nerdy trait (i.e., my interest in early music) incredibly endearing. A friend commented: That isn’t pretentious at all. 😛

My immediate reaction was to apologize all over myself, realizing how snobbish and pretentious such a statement might come across as. Instead, I replied: Perhaps… but it’s unique!

After doing a little more mopping, I came back and added: Actually, no—it isn’t pretentious at all. It would be pretentious if I’d posted this to appear more cultured or sophisticated. But the truth is, I am listening to medieval music at this very moment while mopping my apartment floor.

Merriam-Webster defines pretentious: “Having or showing the unpleasant quality of people who want to be regarded as more impressive, successful, or important than they really are.”

Here I’m reminded of a passage from C. S. Lewis’ Screwtape Proposes a Toast, in which the Senior Tempter and Undersecretary of his department in Hell is remarking on the importance of reframing democracy “as an incantation; if you like, purely for its selling power” in order to produce in people the feeling that “prompts a man to say I’m as good as you.”

Presently he suspects every mere difference of being a claim to superiority. No one must be different from himself in voice, clothes, manners, recreations, choice of food: “Here is someone who speaks English rather more clearly and euphoniously than I — it must be a vile, upstage, la-di-da affectation. Here’s a fellow who says he doesn’t like hot dogs — thinks himself too good for them, no doubt. Here’s a man who hasn’t turned on the jukebox — he’s one of those goddamn highbrows and is doing it to show off. If they were honest-to-God all-right Joes they’d be like me. They’ve no business to be different. It’s undemocratic.”

The fact of the matter is that I’m a nerd—and a very specific type of nerd at that. Shortly after my family moved from Kansas to Minnesota, my father took me to a concert where the first of Bach’s Brandenburg concertos was on the program. By the end of the piece, I was madly in love with early music.

Some of the happiest moments of my teen years were when I was playing or studying Baroque music. I nearly majored in historical performance (which would’ve required going somewhere other than Northwestern).

I’m not even sure I can explain what it is about early music that so captivates me. As I’ve been musing on what it is that I love especially about medieval music, I figure it’s probably the same thing that attracts me to history—that though most of us live in a more sophisticated world than the vast majority of our ancestors; travel about in cars, airplanes, and even into space; and have access to technology and medicine that would have made us gods to earlier generations, we’re not that different from the people who lived ten thousand years ago.

Take the song I posted above. It was written sometime in the late 12th century by a woman known as the Comtessa de Dia (Die, a county in the High Middle Ages located in the southeastern part of France), or as just Beatritz. She was a trobairitz, a female troubadour. If you remember your music history, the troubadours were composers and performers of lyric poetry, usually about chivalry and courtly love. Compare this lyric from Ab joi et ab joven m’apais to any pop song written in the last hundred years:

I feed on joy and youthfulness
and joy and youthfulness content me;
since my friend is the most cheerful
I am cheered and charmed by him,
and because I’m true to him,
it’s well that he be true
to me; I never stray from loving him
nor do I have the heart to stray.

Sure, the sentiment is a little different, just as the clothes were different and people believed that demons were the cause of sickness and disasters, or that women were conceived because of weak male sperm or the direction of the wind at the time of intercourse. (No kidding on the last one. See Thomas Aquinas’ “On how a woman is to be born a woman” from the Summa Theologica. Crazy.) But it’s clear from the lyric that Beatritz is excited about being in love. It’s like a postcard from the 1100s.

In a way, I find in early music a link to humanity by composing my own music, the same as people have been composing music since the first humans joined their voices in song. I find a link to my humanity in housekeeping through images of excavated floors of Neolithic houses that show signs of having been regularly swept, or indentations in floors where someone knelt regularly enough while tending a fire to leave permanent marks.

I’m not interested in any of this because it’s “intellectual.” I’m interested because it fascinates me and captivates my imagination and my thoughts.

So it’s frustrating when I get labeled as “pretentious” for liking these things, for being a Classically trained musician, for not liking most of what’s on television or the radio or in theaters. Because I do have a love for music, for history, for good stories, for science (even though I don’t understand most of it), and for good literature.

And I’m hoping these qualities (e.g., mopping floors to mediaeval music) will be intriguing and endearing someday to the man I marry—whoever he is. That’s one of many reasons for leaving Minnesota for graduate school—wherever that is. Because having interests in obscure subjects is not a Midwestern virtue. It is something, however, encouraged in academia, where it’s becoming clearer that I belong.

As Alanis Morissette sings, “… what I wouldn’t give to meet a soul-mate—someone else to catch this drift.”

190. enormity

Ohmygoodness, has it really been fifty-one days since I last updated this blog? That’s terribly delinquent.

My world as of late has been consumed with stress, worry, anxiety, and the like. A few weeks ago my therapist asked me what’s been keeping me going. I replied that the thought of graduate school, studying music again, and having a real career in music (as supposed to the state of meager subsistence I’ve been in since graduating from college in 2004) has prevented me from being totally consumed by depression.

At the end of last month I submitted my first grad school application, this one to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY. At the end of this month, I’ll be submitting two more applications, these to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the University of Southern California. Of these three, my top picks are Eastman and the University of Michigan. USC would be a great opportunity as well, but I’m more an East Coast kinda guy than West.

The process of writing statements of purpose got me thinking a lot about my past, and since I don’t have much else to write about, I thought I’d discuss some of the music that has been most influential to me. I don’t talk about music that much here, probably because LGBT issues and atheism have been such dominating forces the last few years.

One of the first pieces of music I can remember is Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. My parents had a recording with Mia Farrow narrating that we’d listen to in the car or around the house. My early tendencies toward neoclassicism probably started here.

My early ventures into composition were largely shaped by exposure to Classical music. The first piece I ever wrote was a minuet that I composed shortly after learning to read music. One of the pieces in my lesson book was an arrangement of the menuet from Act 1, Scene 2 of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. I’d seen a production on television and skipped ahead in the book to learn it and probably drove my family crazy by playing it over and over.

After my family moved to Minnesota in 1993, we found both a church and a library to call home. In my piano lessons, I was studying a lot of Baroque music, and I probably checked out the library’s entire collection by the time I finished high school. By then, I’d listened to everything Bach ever wrote, plus a good deal of Handel, Corelli, Purcell, Domenico Scarlatti, and Purcell.

My love of Bach and the Baroque though was firmly established around age 10 when I went with my dad to an orchestra concert where they played the first of the Brandenburg concertos.

When we left the concert, I asked my dad for a recording of the complete Brandenburgs, which I still own. I was obsessed from that point on. Throughout high school I studied everything of Bach’s I could find, which were my first lessons in orchestration and counterpoint.

I also adored Mozart. My first opera was Le nozze di Figaro, and it remains my favorite to this day. A seminal moment in my composition career is at the end of Le nozze, when the Countess sings: “Più dolcile io sono, e dico di sì.” It’s ridiculously simple: a G major chord in first inversion, to C major, to d minor, to e minor. It took my breath away the first time, and still does.

Everything changed when I heard Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps. Considering the majority of my listening up until that point, it almost felt like checking out pornography. I knew that it was supposed to be dissonant and that it had caused a riot in Paris in 1913, and that I should be familiar with it as a musician, but I didn’t know what to expect.

Rite of Spring literally turned my entire world upside down. It was violent, dissonant, chaotic, and unfamiliar—and I loved it. I listened to it straight through two of three times that first day. Then I discovered Prokofiev’s adult music through his seventh piano sonata; Béla Bartók; Alban Berg; Paul Hindemith; Steve Reich; Francis Poulenc; Maurice Ravel; Samuel Barber; Benjamin Britten; John Adams; and probably most importantly, György Ligeti, whose music I heard in the film 2001: a space odyssey. And I almost abandoned writing tonal music completely.

About midway through college, after hearing repeatedly from colleagues and teachers that they preferred to hear my “nicer,” tonal work, I reversed course and delved into what my friends affectionately refer to as my “Tallis and Tavener” phase.

I got back into Henry Purcell after hearing a piece from King Arthur used at the end of Theatre de la Jeune Lune’s The Miser. I also heard an incredible “completion” of his anthem, Hear my prayer, O lord, by Swedish composer Sven-David Sandström in 2002. I actually include a chord from the penultimate bar of the anthem—a G major chord with an added fourth—in all of my own music.

I’m also still obsessed with the funeral sentences from Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary.

My voice teacher in college specialized in Baroque music, and I discovered Monterverdi’s L’Orfeo. My piece for double brass choir, Elisabethan Musicke, is an homage to the opening.

I also got very interested in Stephen Sondheim and Kurt Weill, and in writing music for theater… especially music incorporated into productions. I don’t remember at what point, but I realized that why I liked Mozart so much was that all of his music seemed to have dramatic links, and the music I enjoyed writing the most also had extra-musical links and was spatially oriented.

Moral of story? At age 30, I’m finally figuring out who I am, personally and artistically. I’ve tried on different styles and have found what works for now. I also know there’s more to work on, and that’s what I intend to pursue in graduate school.

023. phthongaphile

Colin Meloy and Jenny Conlee of The Decemberists

If I were the sort of person who had idols and celebrity crushes, this might be the moment for it.

Behold, my heroes!

A few weeks ago came the culmination of months of excited waiting and jumping up and down like a silly fangirl…

Rock the Garden 2009.

Why so ecstatic, you ask?

The Decemberists, that’s why. Only my favourite band in all of creation. And they were headlining the concert!

I feel kind of bad. In this picture they were standing off to the side watching the band right before them, Calexico, perform and I first saw Jenny and distracted everyone around me by pointing her out, leaning over the side of the rail trying to see the band. Then frontman Colin Meloy appeared, followed by Chris Funk, and then honourary Decemberists Becky Stark (of Lavendar Diamond) and Shara Worden (of My Brightest Diamond).

Needless to say, I was completely beside myself. And part of me felt bad that this band was putting on a great show and all I could think about was the next band.

It’s not like I have a crush on Colin Meloy or anything. For one thing, he’s not my type at all. I do have a little thing for Jenny Conlee though, kind of a keyboardist crush. Her work on Crane Wife was exemplary (especially on “The Landlord’s Daughter” from the epic track No.2, “The Island”). They’re just really, really good!

Yea, even amazing!

They are currently touring with their new album, the 17-song folk rock opera The Hazards of Love. From what I can decipher of the plot, it’s about Margaret, a maiden who falls in love with the shape-shifting William (faun by day, human by night), the son of the [jealous and possessive] Queen of the Forest. What follows is a twisted tale of love, perversion, infanticide, kidnapping, haunting and drowning.

And the music is divine. However convoluted the plot may be, the music is some of the best and mature that Meloy has written so far. And I got to hear him live!

Shara Worden as the Queen was absolutely incredible in her silver glam rock pants, working every angle in her performance. She just exuded sex. If I were straight… well…

So that’s all I’ll say. Go out and buy the album. Hazards of Love. Prepare to be amazed.

So that was two weeks ago.

This past weekend was Twin Cities Pride—the third largest in the nation, according to festival organisers. In 2006, Minneapolis had the fourth-highest percentage of GLBT persons in the adult population, with 12.5%. (That figure may be higher now.) Not surprisingly, the area has an active arts and theatre scene, boasting the highest number of theatre companies per capita in the nation (including the Guthrie)!

This year, even though it’s my first “out” year, I decided not to be in attendance. For one thing, the sight of drag queens and the like does absolutely nothing to boost my pride. And while the sight of shirtless, chiselled, muscular boys wearing next to nothing was temptation enough to go (I do like me hot some shirtless men), I can now see that anytime on my way to work. [insert goofy grin]

But pride in what? I ask.

I won’t go on about that because it’s a moot point and I’ve ranted about this before. I don’t aspire to be a woman or surround myself with gay icons or role models (e.g., Judy Garland, Barbara Streisand, Joan Crawford, Bette Midler or Cher), pursue promiscuity and multiple sex partners, go out clubbing (I can’t dance worth anything and refuse to make a fool of myself in public that way) or play into any of the stereotypes that culture expects me to fit as a homosexual.

As a blogger wrote recently,

If we want Joe Public to understand that GLBT is not about sexual deviancy, then half naked, leather wearing, whip carrying people are not exactly sending the message that we want them to understand . . . Is the purpose of the parade to widen societies acceptance, to honour our peers who made the parades possible in the first place, or just a party? If it’s one of the first two, then I think it damages everything that we want society to understand and also devalues everything that the earliest parades and marches worked to achieve.

It’s just not something that I’m comfortable with. I’m not “Loud and Proud.” My sexuality is something I treat with reverence and respect. It’s not a political tool or an activist badge. For me, it’s very personal, and I refuse to see myself as different. We’re just people.

As my boyfriend and I have discussed on many, many occasions, straight people don’t have pride festivals. They don’t flaunt their straightness in front of everyone and expect the general public to just accept them. Of course, they are accepted by Joe public and enjoy all rights and privileges therein:

• Parents don’t have to explain to their kids what a couple stealing a kiss or just full-on making out is, unless said PDA gets so gross (as in, misdemeanour) to the point of calling the cops.
• Old ladies don’t scowl at a man and a woman holding hands (and more) in public. Unless they’re just bitter old hags who scowl at everything…
• Christians don’t show up to protest with hate signs at their weddings.
• Straight people aren’t beaten to death just for being straight.

Granted, at Rock the Garden there were some very public heterosexual displays of affection (including a couple haxing sex on the lawn, according to a friend of mine); and honestly, shirtless guy with his hands all over his girlfriend right next to me made me uncomfortable.

As did the drunk guy trying (and I mean trying) to dance with his girlfriend. And hitting blond girl in front of them in the head twice as he attempted to twirl GF. Things were not working well for them that night.