Category Archives: Pride

My Boyfriend’s a Girl

fishnet lipsTrust me, I’m as surprised as you are.

OK, it’s not quite as dramatic as it sounds; he’s not an actual girl.  He didn’t secretly begin life as one, nor is he in the process of transitioning into one.  But he has started dressing up as one for fun and profit, and it’s taken some getting used to.  We spend a lot more of our disposable income on makeup than we used to, for one thing, and there are feathers everywhere.

Our Favorite Queens from RuPaul's Drag Race Season 3

Our Favorite Queens from RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 3

Last summer — our eighth together, mind you, with nary a whisper of “I want to be a drag queen” in the interim — we were glued to Season Three of RuPaul’s Drag Race on Netflix.  Jared has seen every season, but I have not.  I have only seen Season Three.  Over and over again, because RPDR is produced in such a way that I am riveted to every episode, even if I’ve seen it several times before.  Knowing the outcome before we even sit down to watch a given episode, I’m still on the edge of my seat by the second commercial break, yelling my commentary and critique at Jared, at the television, and all up and down Facebook each time, because my ideas and opinions stay fresh like that.  (Don’t roll your eyes at me.)  Raja totally deserved to win, but I still root for Alexis Mateo each time around, just in case RuPaul does Drag Race like the movie Clue and there might be a surprise ending.  But really, as long as they keep sending Carmen Carrera home, I’m happy. Continue reading →

Homophobia Hits Home

(Avoid alliteration always!)

Pinky and MeI will stipulate that we might not be a strictly “conventional” couple, what with both of us being men, and one of us being a pink-coiffed drag queen who’s about six-foot-eight in heels, but for the most part my husband and I just sort of go about our gay business. We neither seek input nor require guidance from our families, any church, or the government on how best to conduct our Big Gay Relationship.  We don’t spend a lot of time, at least not intentionally, tearing at the Very Fabric of Society, although we do watch a lot of Golden Girls and order in kind of a lot of Indian food.  We do each have a tattoo of a naked man — I guess if society really is going to crumble, you wanna get a few good chips in, kinda the way people eventually flung themselves at the Berlin Wall once it became clear that puppy was comin’ down.  I say all this to say: I don’t give a shit what you think about me, just stand aside and think it over there so I can get at the garlic naan.

And you know what?  No exaggeration, that’s 99.9% true.  I don’t care what other people think of me.  At least not enough to let it be a factor in my decision-making.  It doesn’t affect what I write or how I write it, how I choose my friends or how I relate to them, what color I paint my toenails.  Nobody who cares about you judges you, and nobody judging you on criteria like your sexuality has a stake in your success or your happiness.

Which is why the way my husband’s grandfather reacts to me at family functions like the wedding we went to over the weekend pisses me off.  I don’t care what he thinks of me, and I for sure don’t care that he uses his “religion” as an excuse for his own rigidity, but I do care that he hides behind a set of values that he chooses to let external forces impose on him when he disrespects Jared. Continue reading →

Closets are for Clothes

Today is National Coming Out Day.  One of my favorite holidays on the Queer Calendar, although I traditionally celebrate it from the sidelines.  At 40, I’ve been out of the closet for more years than I was in it, and the door on my closet hung half-open all askew on its hinges at its most secure.  I was Raggedy Ann for Halloween when I was in Preschool, for heaven’s sake — I never got to surprise anybody!  Starting on the literal very first day of high school, I was bullied for being a big fag — physically never, verbally every single day, and mostly by guys who grew up to be big fags — until I had the sense to transfer to a public school.  I told almost no one there that I was “gay,” although I would wax like a drooling idiot with cartoon hearts for eyeballs about the boys I had crushes on to anybody who would listen (or to passersby, whether they listened or not).  When I was 19, out to dinner with my parents and my sister, my mom turned to me over chips and salsa and said, “So, you’re gay, right?”  I confirmed that I was.  My dad asked if I was safe — this was 1991, mind you, when we still kind of thought that gay sex was a short, slippery slope from a bed to a coffin — and I confirmed that I was that, too.  The food came, we ate it, and poof, I was Out. Continue reading →

How Gay are the London Olympics?

Reblogged from The Pink Agendist:

Click to visit the original post

A gay dating website crashed within minutes of the first Olympic athletes arriving in London – due to the volume of demand, say experts...

...Technicians believe the arrival of Olympic teams on Monday sparked a flood of new customers – and loss of the service in East London.

Gay app Grindr crashes as Olympic athletes arrive in London

Jul 22 2012 by Keir Mudie, The People

My latest short story, "Hot Shots," focuses on the Olympic aspirations of handsome young Beau, whose Life's Primary Ambition is to become an Olympic athlete, so that he can then have sex with as many other Olympic athletes as possible.  "Hot Shots" turns into a romance as Beau warms up to his coach, but this funny article seems to foretell (or at least fantasize about) the true-life version of my original idea, an Olympic Village gone hook-up mad!  I just got way more excited about watching the Olympics on TV.