I don’t think you need to use “het” as a pejorative. It’s just another place on the scale. Also, I don’t think this is an exclusive club. I think it’s just a state of mind.

You did kiss that lady spectacularly. But even if you hadn’t, or never did again, you’d still be my friend. Y’know, I’m just sayin’. And I’d want to hear what you have to say.

Blaise and I still laugh over how long it took us to be friends, because I was convinced he was too cool for me. Shows what I know :).

“of having no right in a world where right is gained through suffering”

Thank you for saying all this, again. I feel double-schmucky, because I wan’t even AT the meeting to be hugged by Kate Borenstein and told that I’m officially a friend to the genderqueer. The other night at Summer CV I noticed that I used the word (prefix? neologism-prefix?) “het” as a semi-pejorative about myself, to Blaise, and rolled my eyes a bunch. Because I want in on the club, i somehow feel like i need to prove that I’m on the Happy Sloppy Kisses team, even though I’ve only kissed one lady (spectacularly!!)

True to form, that senetnce went 10 places. Still with me?

What is it with me and authority, that i feel like I need a certificate of authenticity from someone who is essentially an iconoclast?

I totally hear you on somehow feeling guilty/deprived because my early life lacked dire struggle. Poor little me, right? And yet I AM jealous of people with thick skins and an unwillingness to take the bullshit of others. Hoo.

I have always been in the rare circumstance of being able to actually cross the bridge and relate to people on both sides. (This is actually a motif I should maybe write about. It shows up in my sexuality and my education and my mental illness and many other parts of my life, as well.) I have had what very many people would consider to be a very fucked up childhood (and life in general, I guess), but I also am friends with people whom I consider to have much more fucked up lives than me. I couldn’t even count the number of sexual abuse victims I’ve befriended and had friendships with over the years. I’ve been the last person someone talked to before that person took a gun to her head. So, y’know, all things considered I’m very much the middle ground. Being the middle ground is weird that way, the being on both sides of the bridge way.

I guess this whole thing is just preface to the simple point that people very often and completely wrongly compare emotional angst based on arbitrary measures of fucked-upness, when in fact comparing one person’s emotional angst to another’s this way is itself fucked up.

And I’m amazed it takes someone so entrenched in the middle ground, or so experienced with both euphoria and depression depending on your point of view, to make that plainly obvious.

A couple of years ago I was involved with two people who were both, in slightly different ways, very fucked up. I started to feel that there was something wrong with me because, y’know, there wasn’t something wrong with me… Both of them were at pains to overtly reassure me that this wasn’t the case, but in practice it meant that they got to have the angst & have their stuff be More Important Because Of The Fucked Up, & I got to do the supportive thing, pretty much full-time. Argh.

Can we say “all of the fucked up?”. Yes, we can, probably several times. It really was “fucked up = rights”, in spades. Not good.

I think you could probably say “fuck” a few more times, there, May. I might join in ;)

Once again, I want to say thanks for writing exactly the words I wanted to. At first I thought, I better write what I want to write, my own experience of it, before reading someone else’s and forgetting which memories are actually mine. Then I realized from reading your posts that so many of the thoughts you had were the thoughts I had, because of where my brain happened to be and who it was focused on.

The other thing is maybe that the weekend was such a dream for me that everything seemed to have its perfect poetic place. I mean, it wrote itself like a brilliant piece of fiction, and maybe that’s why it was so great. I love that you wrote it and that I can be a spectator to it all over again, in all of these installments.

Yay. Happiness. And to think it was only a week ago.

What do I think happened to him? I have no idea what his internal motivations or beliefs were. His story has been so blown up that the actual facts of what happened (i.e. what he was arrested for) have been pretty much ignored. Although it looks like what he was busted for clearly indicated a criminal intent to the officer who arrested him, the story itself has obviously become about the larger implications.

I wrote a while back that kink is naturally inclusive, in that you print your own membership card, so to speak. The same could be said to be true for all sexualitites. In this particular case, Mr. Craig clearly doesn’t want to be a member. So, do I think he’s gay, or wanted to be busted, or gets off on sex in bathrooms? I don’t give a shit, to be honest. I just want him to stop calling other memberships wrong.

I think it’s a damned shame that the man lost his position and appears to have destroyed his career over an alleged identity. But that’s because I think it’s a damned shame that we live in a contry where your sexual identity can endanger your job. And where your sexual identity is pretty much a necessarily political part of your life.

I’m wary to hold Mr. Craig up as a poster child for the “Ohmigod look what happens when you criminalize alt sex and have to deal with the repression, you big fat liars” way of thinking. For one, he’ll continue to deny it, so this becomes nothing more than gossip. And for two, I think this is a crap way to change people’s opinions about sex.

As the poster child for emotional angst, I want to second the notion that it’s nice to hear that line connecting with other people. Makes me think that perhaps the world’s not quite so bad a place for everyone after all, which is encouraging in a way.

Naturally, it also bears saying that the fact that people think rights are gained through suffering is a completely fucked up idea to begin with and only makes people more eager to get themselves all sorts of fucked up and be okay with being fucked up which is so fucking fucked up I can’t even fucking say fuck enough times to express how fucked up it all is. Augh!

I’m glad that you read this post and picked out that one line. I feel like that doesn’t get said a lot, so it’s nice to know it connects with other people.

Dee-

I’m glad to reference you to her! I hope you enjoy more of her work as you get the chance; she really is brilliant. Please let me know or write about your thoughts on her topics when you get the chance.