I was reading an article about something — I can’t remember what — last week that referenced a web series over on “Funny or Die” that has such a strange premise I couldn’t help but check it out. The web series is called “Gay of Thrones,” and each week a gay hairdresser from Los Angeles recaps the most recent episode of Game of Thrones in under four minutes. I was surprised to find that the clips are effing hilarious.
The recaps are about episodes of GoT from the current season, season three. They contain what could be considered minor spoilers, so mind that detail if you get crazy about having your progrums ruined by extraneous discussions before you watch them.
NOTE: Don’t go blasting these clips from your work computer. NSFW content abounds. Trust me on this.
The guy’s name who stars in the recaps is Jonathan Van Ness. I have already messaged him through Facebook. Someone needs to give this guy a talk show.
Click the image below. It’s linked to my favorite episode.
I want to preface this post by writing that I have no intention of this blog being turned into “Mike’s Big Gay Blog.” With that said…
Is being gay a choice? It is possibly the quintessential question to answer when dealing with GLBTA (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, asexual) matters. It’s a bothersome question, and there is so much rhetoric masquerading as truth on both sides that it polarizes everyone involved. I’ve always felt like the question lacks a kind of reduction needed to get at the core of the quandary with more surgical precision. The following video seeks candid answers from real people caught off guard. It’s a method that’s probably best when trying to solicit honest answers.
I knew I was attracted to men when I was five years-old. Sometimes people look at me doubtingly when I say that, but it’s true. I had no idea what sex was or why it existed when I was five. But divorcing the act of sex from the descriptor of gay is almost impossible when we’re adults. What I knew at five was that I fancied boys. And as much as I didn’t know what it was to be gay at five, I did know that there was something abjectly wrong with the way I felt. Although I didn’t know the concept of what it was to feel shame back then, I can definitely make the connection when looking back on my childhood as an adult.
What I’m about to write I’ve written before, mostly to the chagrin of people in the GLBTA community. In the United States, gay = anal intercourse. That is how people who don’t understand gayness characterize what it is to be capital-G Gay. When people talk about how disgusted they are at gay folks and the things they do, they are disgusted at the idea of one guy sticking his penis into another guy’s anus. Plain and simple.
Of course, a synonym for gay isn’t sodomy. However, I have to disclose that I have been guilty of interchanging the terms for comic effect. I have said “They went home to gay each other,” because I am an emotional fifteen year-old, and it makes me snicker. I feel like I have been through enough shit to be able to say something like that, no pun intended.
I got off track. We were talking about chagrining, and here is the part where I inflame the Gay Rage: if you think about it in pure terms of sex and choice, being gay really is a choice, just like being straight is a choice.
We’ve established that when we use terms like gay or straight, we’re really preoccupied with whose downstairs parts are doing what with whom. Discounting rape and other similar situations, we really do chose how we express our sexuality. If penis plus vagina equals straight, then we have to agree that penis plus penis or vagina plus vagina equals gay. This is basement thinking in that we all understand how sex is done. As a gay man, I can make the choice to go my entire life without engaging in sex with another man. If I am successful in this endeavor, and, I have to say, I think some people are, I have not participated in homosexual behavior, and, therefore, I am technically not gay. It goes the same way for straight people. If a straight man never has sex with another man, then, indubitably, he is straight. What people don’t take into consideration – I’m talking about straight people here – is that being gay isn’t just about who rubs their man parts — or their lady parts — on whom. If only it were that easy.
Sexuality is about comfort and who you chose to be vulnerable with. It’s about physical attraction, but it is just as much about emotional attachment. These are feelings we do not choose to have, and they are attachments we cannot choose to let go of. Sure, we can make a dedicated effort to never engage in homosexual behavior, but it’s not the behavior that compels people from the GLBTA community to kill themselves. It’s not the behavior that drives people to abuse alcohol and drugs and other methods of psychic escape. And it’s certainly not behavior that drives people to kill gay and lesbian persons in ferocious, horrifying ways. Instead, violence against members of the GLBTA community is violence against the essence of a person. Homosexuals are seen as threats based on how they present themselves. It’s dress, it’s talk, it’s gesticulations, nuances, and postures. If everyone on this planet exhibited the same essence, I wonder if sexuality would ever be an issue. Unfortunately, sexuality will always be an issue and it won’t be an issue about grinding crotches, instead, it will be an issue of how a person is conceived as being and what that conception yields.
One woman in the video said that no one would choose to be gay. Well, I agree with that. No one wants to be discriminated against in matters of employment, housing, marriage, and adoption, among other issues; no one wants to be told that God doesn’t care about them and, therefore, neither does the Church; no one wants to be a social pariah and isolated from friends and family with no one to love her; and nobody would choose to be tied to a fence, tortured, and beaten into a coma until he’s deemed brain dead at the age of 21.
There are people in the Community who yearn for the day that homosexuality is proven to be genetic. Not me. If being gay is proven to be a “genetic defect,” and that is exactly how it would be treated because we live in a straight world in which being other-than-straight is a deviation from what is “normal,” scientists will work to “cure” homosexuality. Why the hell would you want to do that? Sure, there are some people who would take the cure, and that’s fine. If cured is what you need to live your life to the fullest – if that’s your eudemonia – then seek it.
I used to cry myself to sleep at night praying that God would make me normal. When He didn’t, I shut Him out. Then there came a time in my life when I came back to God and asked Him to help me deal with those things that make me different. And it’s the acceptance of my dissimilarities, sexual and otherwise, that have made all the difference in my life. Do I struggle? Yes. Will I always? Probably. Am I okay with that? Yup. Who I am is not a choice, it’s an acceptance. And it’s an acceptance I made a long time ago. Besides, I’m a pretty cool guy to know, and 99% of who I am has nothing to do with who I am or am not gaying or straighting. There are things about gay people I will never understand. Likewise, there are things about straight people I will never understand either. But I don’t believe our differences are a matter of choice, and the great fallacy of sexuality is black-or-white thinking.
At the top of the Home page, you will find the “Fav Fliks” page link. This is where I will add videos I find entertaining from around the web. First up: three episodes from the web series “Break-ups: The Series.” Because we’ve all been there.
Last week I was walking home having just been out for dinner with my ex-wife and daughter. I’d finished a master’s program at the University of Louisville, so it was a celebratory dinner of sorts. After having dropped off my passengers, I parked my car in its regular place, which is a parking garage two blocks from the building I live in. Summer is here, so the nights have more light, and I like walking around. I live in downtown Louisville, and I am acquainted with several different kinds of crazy. Homeless men selling flowers out of garbage bags. People in cars screaming insults at people on bicycles for whatever traffic injustice plagues them. Schizophrenics trying to get garbage cans to go on dates with them while they simultaneously have arguments with trees. Grown men screaming “And you call yourself a wig shop?” Not long ago I rolled up on what I thought was a pair of pants laying in the road. I was right, but the complication came in the form of the man still inside them. How I do love the chaos.
So I’m walking down the street, and this grey truck big enough to pull an elephant on a skateboard drives past me, and someone inside yells “FAGGOT!” at the top of his lungs. Of course, my gut reaction as an educated, civil man was to flip the guy off. After having hoisted the bird, panic struck me immediately. I was equal distance between my car and my apartment building, and what if those guys come back around the block? There was no way I could get to either in enough time, so, at this point, I’m like shooting faggots in a barrel. I walk r e a l l y s l o w. My run is most people’s walk, and my walk is about as fast as Stephen Hawking with his back tires blown out. If you then factor in my sluggishness from having just enjoyed delicious pizza, I’m not sure I would have passed a field sobriety test, let alone protected myself from getting hate-crimed in broad daylight.
I made it to my building, and I saw no signs of the grey truck. Once I got to my apartment, I start mulling the whole thing over in my mind.
I’ve been called a faggot before. Most of my life from the first day of kindergarten until high school graduation was an exercise in trying to stay alive. I come from a very small town. And I mean 300 people small. I started getting called faggot when I was in the third grade. The events that surround all this bullying are too time consuming to rehash here. However, having just been called a faggot as a 37 year-old man, I was dealing with some flashback moments and feelings of compromised self-worth.
Why would that guy say something like that to me? I wasn’t wearing a “Faggot” T-shirt. I wasn’t giving a blow job in the middle of the sidewalk. I wasn’t dressed like Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis riding around on a parade float while “It’s Raining Men” blared from boom boxes held by super-cut twinks in sequined jockstraps. Not then, anyway. I came to an unsettling conclusion: somehow, that guy knew me.
I have, like, four friends. I have a dozen or so people I like to hang out with from time-to-time, but I have only four really good will-you-come-to-my-house-even-though-it’s-two-thirty-in-the-morning-and-even though-I-know-you-have-to-get-up-in-three-hours-because-I-need-you-to-kill-this-spider-that’s-super-big-and-completely-freaking-me-out-right-now friends. And since none of them drive a grey truck, I knew it wasn’t any of them. Now: I don’t exactly make an effort to hide my sexuality. I talk about it when it’s appropriate, and, when it’s not, I don’t feel like everyone I meet should know me on such a personal level. However, and more so since my divorce, I have been talking about it in my classes. Couple that with knowing I live on the same street – Third Street – that can be used to get to U of L relatively quickly. I have come to the realization that whomever was in that grey truck has to have known me from school, and, even more disconcerting, probably had a class with me in the past nine months. It’s the only explanation I have, other than the generalization that guys in grey trucks hate faggots.
I wish I could have gotten a better look at the guy’s face for two reasons: the first being, if he were cute, I might have been more apt to overlook his homophobia. We all know the prettiest are usually the stupidest, and I have a soft spot in my heart for ignorant straight guys. The other reason is that I would honestly go and try to talk to this person. I don’t feel like I have been in classes with anyone I’d deem either misinformed or overtly homophobic. This ain’t Indiana. Although I just had the thought that my likeness might be on one of those giant building signs like Diane Sawyer, Colonel Sanders, or Mohammed Ali with the caption “Louisville’s Faggot” beneath. I didn’t say it was a realistic thought.
So this is an open invitation to the grey truck dude: if you truly know who I am, then you know how to contact me. Let’s go get some coffee. No hard feelings. You’re probably just as misinformed about gay people as I am about rednecks.
