Anonymous Posts(12.21.09–12.27.09)

Every week, we collect anonymous entries sent in using the link on our sidebar and post them all on Monday. We post anything as long as it doesn't contain personal attacks or hate speech. Feel free to submit your thoughts and questions :)

Hey all! Hopefully everyone's having an awesome break. I've been spending mine counting down to New Year's Eve with Kathy Griffin and Anderson Cooper.

We didn't get any anonymous posts two weeks ago (12.14-12.20), mostly because the Dukies were busy catching up on a semester's worth of sleep. But y'all have definitely stepped it up this week! The comments on the last three posts (not to mention the posts themselves) have been equally intriguing and touching. The discourse, empathy and support among friends and strangers alike on this blog is really pretty amazing. Personally, it is consistently reassuring after seeing all of the hate in the news that this Community not only exists, but is strong, and is there for each other.

But anyhow! Here are the posts from this week. As always, these require our responses, so let's get to it :)

#1

Hi so I saw where you posted something about Uganda, so I figured international LGBT issues are just as welcome as American ones. I'm doing my thesis on a group of people in South Asia called the hijras - they can be best thought of as male-to-female transgenders. The NC Consortium for South Asian Studies (the Duke/UNC/NC State organization for South Asian studies) liked my thesis website enough to link it to their blog, so I thought I'd share it with you guys as well.

Happy holidays!

link: http://lisa.cs.duke.edu/~john/finalproject/index.html

-John

[Ed. Note: Thanks, John!]

#2

Hi Everyone,

Recently, I've been asked by JournElism.org/United Press International to write a 5 articles series on an important issue I hold dear to me. I've chosen LGBTQ equality as one and women's issues as a close second. Anyway, I need to identify 5 key players in the realm of LGBTQ issues (it can be anyone) and have to submit an outline/interview questions.

I would really appreciate any feedback/ideas you all have. So far, I've identified Brian Bond, the White House Deputy Director of Public Affairs, Joe Solmonese (President of HRC), Tammy Baldwin, Wanda Sykes, Ellen Degeneres, Bishop Gene Robinson, etc. Clearly women of color are missing, so any suggestions on that would be a plus. Any out LGBTQ persons or allies in policy-making positions would be especially helpful. Also, any questions you might have for such persons would be great!

In the end, I envision the article series to go beyond the popular gay marriage debate and into some concrete issues that not everyone is familiar with. Things like ENDA, housing discrimination, health issues, even LGBTQ youth (how at risk they are), the Bullying Act, etc.

Any help (small or big) would be fully appreciated!!!

Happy Holidays,

Michelle

[Ed. Note: Hopefully we can help! Readers, I know you've got this one.]

#3

I don't really know what it is I want to write. Or what the point of this post is. But, I've been writing this post in my head for a few weeks now and I feel like I should take the leap and type it out and send it in. For years now, I've been "questioning." It wasn't something I thought about every day, but certain situations made me internally confront my sexuality before immediately supressing my thoughts and moving on with my life. I played this game with myself for a while (honestly, I don't really remember when it started...which is saying something). I met with a new psychiatrist recently to address some other issues when I finally broke my silence. That first appointment I avoided my shrink's questions, but for the next few weeks all I could think about was rehearsing what I'd say next time. Despite how easy it all came in my head and how long I've secretly yearned to have someone to talk to about this, during the next session I found myself hyperventilating, sweating, lightheaded and unable to make eye contact; my heart beat was pounding and I had a serious knot in my stomach. I felt sick for the rest of the day. A HUGE ally with a tolerant, liberal family (and friends), I don't know why this is such a struggle for me. And while I used to not think about it often, recently it's the only thing on my mind. Any quiet downtime I have, I'm running through things in my head. Still, I'm more confused than ever by my sexuality. And you'd never know it.

[Ed. Note: I will leave advice and the like to our comments section, but know that you are not the only person that's dealt with this. Far from it. In fact, this reminds me of post #1 from three weeks ago. Just as I told her, I'll say that I think you'll find that a lot of the Readers have gone through a similar process.]

#4

I have always hated being home for breaks, but the past two weeks have been the absolute worst. This semester, I started my first romantic relationship with another woman (though I've known I was queer for much longer) and being back with my family reminds me how close-minded they are. Well, "close-minded" may not be the right word, but "conservative" definitely is.

It's not even the LGBT stuff that gets to me. My sister is looking at colleges and my dad considers racial diversity a negative aspect of a school and she's not allowed to go to a university that is not religiously affiliated. Ever since I've realized that race and gender equality issues are of paramount importance to me, I've felt a growing distance from my family; they see me as formerly perfect, traditional daughter who got brainwashed by her "radical" group of friends at school (I know, Duke is "radical" to them *eyeroll*) and sort of tune me out whenever I try to explain my views.

So this sexuality thing is like the icing on the cake. We almost NEVER bring up sexuality, not even in a general or theoretical way, so telling them that I'm friends with a lot of gay people and that I consider myself queer is not on the radar. And telling them about my girlfriend (whom they've met on many occasions) is simply out of the question.

For a while, I was really depressed about the fact that I couldn't be open with my parents, but now I just feel feel like they don't deserve to know. When they make me feel like my opinions and emotions are valid, I will be honest with them. But for now, I'll walk the awkward line I'm always tip-toeing on at home: maintaining the prized-daughter status I had in high school while trying to get them to accept and understand what is important to me now. I just need to survive until January 12, when I'm surrounded by everyone and everything I love once again.

[Ed. Note: Going home for the break seems to be rough on a lot of the Readers in this respect. Thanks for sharing your story :)]

Looking back, looking forward.

I need to start being honest about something. This last year’s been pretty rough. As long as I’ve been the me I remember, I’ve told myself that I could make it through anything, alone if need be—that no matter what happened, I could always remain stable and centered, grounded by logic and rationalism. I didn’t need help because I had to be there for people for when they struggled. On most fronts, I succeeded. But I lost a few things along the way.

For example, the ability to ably express emotion to others (caffeine-fueled excitement doesn’t count). Gone. I’m sure an event or two has slipped my mind, but since the middle of May or so, the most I could do in the presence of others was look mildly distraught and deep in thought. Whatever the cause, it resulted in me just kind of having an excess of sadness I needed to deal with whenever others weren’t around, which was unfortunate and, in a word, inconvenient. But that’s just kind of how emotions are.

My ex and I broke up in January—he was my first—and since then I’ve been even more self-indulgent with my introspection than usual. I’ve experimented a lot with the various friendships in my life—admittedly, and shamefully, sometimes to the detriment of kindness, friendship, and my better judgment. I wanted to foster true connections and conversations and, well, love. But I’ve been so focused on the process I’ve forgotten the purpose.

The questions were many: do I work better alone or with someone else? What role do I want my friends to play in my life? What makes a friendship successful? Do friendships necessarily obey certain constraints of such things as time spent together, shared interests, and shared experiences? Or, rather, is it something intangible that draws us together? Romance, too, as well as intimacy, raised their own series of questions.

All in all, it’s been a pretty eventful, if somewhat unusual, year. It has seen the majority of my coming out process, brief flurries of romance (probably ill-advised, though I don’t do regrets), lots of ambiguity and mixed signals. If I had to pick one word to classify the year, I think it would be lonely. Much of the time, I felt like some sort of social scientist, observing and classifying behaviors and patterns without truly being a part of the systems I study. It’s been a year of sadness and disappointment. Hopefully next year I’ll do better.

What I came here to write, though, was about all the time I’ve been spending with my family and what I’ve seen. In a word, love. I think I’ve fallen completely in love with my nephews, just as will surely happen with their yet-unborn siblings. The love and care I’ve seen from their parents—my siblings in particular—has created some sort of empathic response. I feel joy and anguish with them, and just tonight I was finally able to cast myself into my brother’s place and feel the intense love and responsibility of fatherhood. There’s a certain powerlessness to it too. Or at least, that’s what I felt in my brother’s place. It was entirely magical and I could simply feel how life-changing a birth is. At the same time, a felt a certain separation, as though these were emotions I wasn’t exactly intended for.

I’m expressing myself quite poorly, and I’m sorry for that. I’ll give it one more go:

I have decided, for good, that I think I am here on this planet to learn how to love (it should be obvious I am not talking about romance nor, necessarily, intimacy). Sometimes I forget that, sometimes for as long as a year at a time. I understand that questions need not have answers and that stories need not have endings, and time will continue to make me more comfortable with this. Despite a rocky year, seeing the familial love in our household this winter break has reinvigorated my hope for myself and for the world. If only for a moment, I feel like I’m back again, hopeful and whole, ready for the coming year, wherever it leads me. Like I said, I don’t do regrets.

Merry Christmas! Have some judgment.

Yayayayay it’s Christmas! Almost. It’s a time of homecoming: families and friends are reunited and we show our love for each other with gifts. It’s also a religious holiday, which is a mixed bag for me. I put on a nice face and sing at church and wonder what people would think if they knew.

Ugh. You’d think I'd be past that by now. But no.

It's not entirely surprising. I’m out to all of my immediate family, and slowly to some of the less immediate ones, but it’s always hard to know what you can and can’t say (or wear—I brought all of my Love=Love shirts home, if only to annoy my sister. I wore it a few times last year while tutoring at an elementary school and was somewhat uncomfortable, but the school didn’t have a problem with it, so neither did I). My mother told me that she had recently told her sister(-in-law) and that her reaction had been something along the line of, “Oh, I’m sorry to hear he’s made that choice.” Which I’m not even for a moment going to pretend isn’t hugely offensive. It isn’t as though this particular woman doesn’t know me. I’ve stayed at her house probably a dozen times now and our family often spent Thanksgiving with hers.

I don’t know exactly what happened after that; hopefully my parents stood up for me, as they apparently did in another similar incident in which the folks said “love the sinner, hate the sin.” To which I simply respond with incredulity: I mean, you’ve already implicated yourselves in prejudice. You’re on a roll. Why not keep going?

At first I thought it had something to do with how exactly my parents were telling them. Tone of voice says a lot, as do the exact circumstances in which you tell them. If you treat it as a big deal, so will they. If you don’t, well, they’ll probably be so surprised by your cavalierism (It's a word. Promise.) they won’t get to show you their lack of acceptance.

So that's something I’ve been working on lately: casually introducing jokes or sexuality–relevant bits of discussion into conversation so that my family doesn’t treat it as such a big deal. We’ll see if it works (get back to you soon on that!).

It can be difficult with the family though—or, in general, with people who aren’t used to talking about it as much as I am. Last weekend I went to Portland to visit the only other guy from my high school class who’s come out. When I told my mom this, she made it sound like a disease: “Oh, so he's also…gay?” Yes, mother.

Additionally, it’s just kind of hard to talk about with my sister and brother–in–law, both of whom are fairly conservative Catholic (we’re all Catholic, but most of us aren’t quite as strictly traditional as those two). I’ve easily had eight hours of discussions of LGBT–related issues with the two of them, and after all that, my brother-in-law said, “Well, I guess I’m still just not sure that it isn’t a choice.” Which is, I hope, understandably frustrating to hear. But what do I say to that? It seems so obvious to me that no one would wish this upon themselves that I just don’t know what to say next—not that having it be undesirable means it’s not a choice, but there’s also a preponderance of evidence suggesting that it’s a natural thing.

There’s just such a huge range of how comfortable different people can be with it or talking about it that it can make communication difficult. For now, I do what I can for my family, sending them links to blog entries or news stories which have meant a lot to me and hoping they’ll get around to reading them. In a day or two they’ll all be around; I’m hoping to get them to that next level of comfort, and if they’re not ready for it, it’ll just be their responsibility to talk with me privately about it.

There’s no instruction manual to all this “being gay” business (though a friend tells me I can learn almost anything from the Golden Girls, so might have to give them a try). I hate that and I love it. But it’s part of my life. It’s not an opt-in thing; it will always be there, whether I like it or not. I think I like it.

But that’s just personal stuff. Forget about it. It is Christmas, after all. Let’s be friends and family and enjoy each other’s company. I hope all of you, dear readers and fellow contributors, have a wonderful holiday season, whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Festivus, or anything else. Happy birthday, Jesus.

When Winter Break Starts Feeling Too Long...

I didn’t want my blog entries to be about me—I wanted them to be about other people. Find, learn, and record the very important stories of my peers. That was my goal. That was why I wanted to participate as a writer, even though I’m very critical of my writing ability.

But it’s winter break, I just came out to my dad, and I’m freaking out, so please forgive the creative license I’m taking here. I hope you don’t mind if I’m using this blog as a tool for some of my own thought processes that I need to go through. I’m expecting that getting this out will help me from feeling so trapped. I’m going to try and speak in general terms, since this is going online and we seem to have many readers. But I want to be honest and as transparent as possible.

I’m hurting a lot. I don’t know if it’s because being home is hard, or if it’s because my dad and I haven’t had a follow up conversation yet, or if it’s because I feel stuck, or if it’s because I’m changing faster than the people around me. It’s probably a combination of all of these things. And I’m not known for my patience.

What is supposed to happen next? Why did I open up to my dad when I came home? When I need my community most, why am I 3,000 miles from my safe haven? I’m not regretting that I did it, but maybe I should have double-checked my access to socializing a little better first. I’m definitely stoked for the LGBT Discussion Group. (Chris, please schedule one early in the semester!) Or it could be that all this stress is coming from the Holiday Season. I’m not a big fan of holidays. But we won’t get into that.

I must say, I’m kind of crushed that no one is updating over break. I know everyone is super busy but there ARE people who AREN’T as busy. So you should even write a few short paragraphs about something. Anything. So that way, when I’m checking the blog for the twentieth time, there will be something new to read, some hilarious insight to films, or sexual health, or coming out. Please post. Anonymous readers, please submit something.

Like I said, I don’t want to go into details. Those will be freely given on a one on one basis if you’d like to know more about me. I like new friends, and closer friends. I hope this transmits my overall feeling of anxiety and loneliness. 17 days until I’m back in Durham, but who’s counting?

I’m so excited for the LGBT Center Spring programming, and I don’t even know what events there will be yet. But I’m sure they’re gonna be great.

As a few final notes:

I want to encourage all the Duke women to submit to the All of the Above show. Here’s the Facebook link, it’s an amazing production.

I shaved my head while I was still at Duke…to make my big steps feel a little more tangible…so that’s what the photo is all about.

Also thankful for all my friends who have made it home safely from abroad (those storms seemed to detain many of you) and safe travels to those heading out in the spring.

Thank you so much for all of your comments last week.

Anonymous Posts(11.30.09–12.6.09)

Every week, we collect anonymous entries sent in using the link on our sidebar and post them all on Monday. We post anything as long as it doesn't contain personal attacks or hate speech. Feel free to submit your thoughts and questions :)

You totally stepped it up this week with the anonymous posts, Readers. Good work all around!

But don't forget that we also have a responsibility to respond to our anonymous contributors! See you in the comments :)

#1:

"They Don't Understand"

They don't understand the injustice they cause

Nor do they mind passing unequal laws.

They don't understand the sadness they create

Nor do they see that what they're spreading is hate.

They don't understand that their vote matters

Nor do they care about the lives it shatters.

They don't understand the lies they tell

Nor do they realize we're not going to hell.

They don't understand the reason we fight

Nor do they know of the anger they incite.

O God I pray

That you show them the way

Because I am gay

And it's okay.

[Ed. Note: Oh hai, ORIGINAL POEM. Best. Readership. Ever.]

#2:

Absolutely amazing video by one senator during the vote in the NY Senate.

[Ed. Note: This video definitely made its way around the interwebs since this anonymous poster sent this in to us and we've already posted it before, but it's totally worth putting up again (see: "duh"). Let's all share about how many times we said "yes!" the first [eight] times we watched this. Tell her, Artie:

#3:

As I'm getting older, and closer to graduation and the real world, I've been thinking a lot about the possibility of having a family in a few years time. This raises conflicting emotions in me - as a gay male, obviously I won't be able to have children of my own with my partner, the child will only be biologically related to one of the fathers. There is, of course adoption - there're far too many kids out there without homes and families right now. I'm not really sure how I feel about all this, I'm not sure I'd make a good father, or that I'd be able to provide the right environment for a kid growing up.

What I want to know is, how do all of you in the openly lgbt community feel about this issue?

[Ed. Note: This is most definitely a topic that we've all thought about, right? Right. Let's throw a Comment Party for this one.]

#4:

I stumbled upon this website today (literally, stumbleupon.com = AMAZING). Anyways, the picture shows a fantastic campaign that promotes AIDS awareness and prevention in a super creative way. This was done in Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil, and they totally have the right idea.

Check it out [here].

translation: "Take your condom and help in the fight against AIDS" - as more people take condoms, AIDS begins to disappear. Genius? Absolutely.

[Ed. Note: Great find! It is difficult to inspire us desensitized Millennials, and it is always interesting to see the amazing [by necessity, almost] campaigns that Good organizations come up with.]