Queer Dictionary Revisited

Below is something I wrote at The Good Men Project after writing a three-part “queer dictionary.”

Wait just a minute, you say. There were only meant to be three parts to the queer dictionary. Well, I lied. Okay, not really. I didn’t lie; I just needed to revisit¹ a few terms in Part 2. Oh, also I need to admit and apologize for screwing something up, which I’ll do in just a second. (My haters are rubbing their hands together in glee, and my lovers are...well never you mind what my lovers are doing just now).

Obama and VAWA

The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) has been a controversial bill since it was first passed in 1994. It has been up for reauthorization multiple times since then, as well as facing a Supreme Court hearing. It’s been modified and changed along the way, including creating more gender-neutral language, including same-sex couples, and even eliminating some parts of it on the grounds that those parts were unconstitutional.

Obama Personally Supports Same-Sex Marriage

Barak Obama

The relationship between federal and state laws in the U.S. is surprisingly complicated. Sometimes state and federal laws clash. Sometimes the federal government has to persuade state governments to enact certain laws. Rarely is the relationship as simple as federal trumps state. In many ways it’s a good system. The U.S. is geographically and culturally quite diverse, and the federal system we have helps ensure that the cultural and political norms of one region don’t overshadow the norms of another. However, as it’s a system that was created by people, it’s not perfect. There is one aspect to our system that I wish was more national instead of federal, and that is with regards to civil rights.

Marriage Map

On November 4, 2008 I sat in a pub in Durham, U.K. with a bunch of other U.S. students watching the election results come in with anticipation. However, unlike most of those other students, my attention wasn’t really focused on whether Obama would be elected or not. I kept waiting to hear about the results from the three states that had ballot measures banning same-sex marriage. I was particularly anxious about my home state of California. Up until just a couple weeks before the election I had been sure that the ban would be shot down. It’s California, one of the most liberal states in the country. Yet as I sat in that pub, refreshing a website with election data every 30 seconds, I was really worried. The Yes on 8 Campaign had seemed to be so much more successful than I had thought it would be.

Gay Sex on T.V.

***This article contains spoilers for the HBO series Game of Thrones through Season 2, Episode 3***

In the past couple of decades, LGBT representation in mainstream media of the U.S. has progressed in leaps and bounds. We have popular television shows that focus exclusively on gay and lesbian communities, shows with gay gangsters, gay slobs, and gay teenagers, one Oscar winning movie about a gay political figure and another one about gay cowboys. As for real life people in the media, there are out news anchors and political commentators, out actors and actresses, and out musicians. We’ve come a long way from Jodie Dallas and Xena; it would be easy to think that we’ve achieved equal representation in the media. Unfortunately, we haven’t.

Tolerating Intolerance

Coming out of the closet was a gradual process for me. The first person I came out to was a friend in 2003, but I had my biggest coming out in 2005. That’s the year I finally told my parents, and every other little coming out since then has been easy in comparison. Or at least, almost every other coming out has been easy. I have gone back into the closet exactly once in my life, and this is a discussion around that situation.

Somebody Shoot Me Now

Missouri is poised to become the first state to pass legislation which bans discrimination in the workplace against an often forgotten and maligned political minority. No, it’s not sexual orientation or gender identity; it’s not ethnicity or religion. The group they’re providing legal protections for is gun owners. Apparently in Missouri, a state with some of the weakest laws regarding firearm ownership in the country, there is a fear that the people who own these easily obtainable firearms will be fired from their jobs without cause. Yeah, that makes total sense.