Bisexuality is not a stepping stone between "straight" and "gay."

Content advisory: use of the word "queer" throughout, in a neutral context.

Were The World Mine is one of my favorite movies.

Firstly, it's a musical. Secondly, it's about one of my favorite plays (retroactively - this movie is what got me into Shakespeare in the first place). Thirdly, it's about an out queerbro who suffers frustrations but finds happiness in the end. I am an out queerbro who suffers frustrations, so it's good for me.

There's just one line that bugs me.

"Firstly, Shakespeare has never been proven to be a homosexual. Bisexual, perhaps."

The context of this quote is as follows: For some reason, all of the students participating in a school performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream have started falling in love with each other. In an all-boys' school. Parents are freaked out about all the homosex and are claiming that the play is somehow responsible because Shakespeare was - to quote the dialogue - queer. The above line is the play director's rebuttal.

Which is not a rebuttal at all.

Bisexual (and pansexual) people are queer, too. We're defined in part by our being attracted to members of the same sex. Just because we also like people of the opposite sex does not mean we somehow lose our queer status. Or our magical queer powers of turning others to our orientation.

Quite the opposite, in fact. Bisexual people in media are often shown encouraging formerly straight characters to explore their queer side.

Without that component to the argument, her "rebuttal" comes across as extremely weak, essentially no more than a matter of semantics, or some nerd's personal pride at making sure that dead, tertiary character's sexual orientations are properly understood. Pointless.

Here's another one:

Earlier today, I read an article listing a few individuals throughout history (all white, natch) who were also gay. One of the names mentioned was Hans Christian Anderson, who while not definitely gay, demonstrated some interest in men based on his correspondences with various men that he new. The article explains this by saying that he was probably "at least bisexual."

In other words, if he wasn't a whole queer, he was at least half queer.

The general theme I'm getting from both of these works is that many people see bi/pansexuality as some sort of "middle ground" between being gay and being straight. Which is not remotely true.

Someone is not "at least" bisexual, because bisexuality is not lesser than homosexuality. Bisexuality, to repeat myself, is a fully fledged sexual orientation in its own right. My own attraction to men and my attraction to women (as well as my attraction to individuals of nonbinary genders) are tied in with each other in such a way as to be inseparable. For example, I have to reconcile my choice of pursuing a woman with my desire to be with a man. My love of men and masculine things causes me to be very attracted to masculine and crossdressing women (without disregarding their womanhood), while my attraction to feminine things is often strongest when attached to a competent, interesting, and strong individual of any sex.

I doubt that this can accurately describe how most bisexual or pansexual people's orientations work, but the point I hope to make is that my sexual orientation is its own beast, different from either gay or straight people. I may be differently queer, but I am not less queer.

We are not "just" bisexual. We are not "at least" bisexual. We are simply bi/pan. Do not talk about us as if we're some kind of transitional form between straight and gay.

Gay men: It's time to stop enabling the abuse.

Gaybros, I am disappoint.

It has come to my attention that some of you are letting straight people walk all over you. This is unacceptable and it needs to stop.

My first complaint is with Teen Wolf creator/director Jeff Davis. Look, I know it's hard being an out gay person in the industry, even harder to convince people to buy a gay character. But do you have to keep making Danny the butt of Stiles' awkward sexual harassment? Why are you doing that? Are you afraid that we're going to forget that he's gay if you don't shoehorn in terrible scenes of him ogling shirtless Derek? And that line "you may bat for the other team, but you still play?" Really? Danny is an amazing character, but stop using his sexuality as a joke. You're insulting and embarrassing us.

(On a less complainy and more requesty note, don't bother writing him in a boyfriend. We all know that Stiles is only straight for Lydia and that he would much rather be boning/getting boned by Danny. Do that.)

My second complaint is directly to the friends of the guy I spoke to the other day, and any guy like him. He tells me that he told you that he would punch you if you so much as hit on him, and you said "fair enough." Where the fuck is your self-esteem, guys? When did it become okay to agree to physical assault just because of your sexual orientation? I'm sure you're probably friends with this guy for any number of reasons - you've been friends for years, he's the only straight guy you can hang out with without feeling threatened, whatever - but seriously, let's see some self-respect. Tell your friend that it was not cool for him to deck you because you got drunk and came on to him. Frankly, people have done much worse things while drunk. If he's really that sensitive about it, then he's not as comfortable with your sexuality as he claims and you should dump his ass. I've never met you, but I've met him, and trust me, it ain't worth it. In fact, that's why I'm not friends with him.

In general:

Don't laugh self-deprecatingly when people tell gay jokes.
Don't let people tell you that your sexuality is offensive.

I don't always succeed at this. I'm pre-everything and transgender, so it's not easy for me to explain to someone that I am a GAY MAN when she (a straight woman) tells me that it's offensive to use the word "gay" to describe same-sex relations. Frankly, self-respect is an everyday battle for me to achieve. But I think that we can all do better. And we owe it to ourselves to do so.

Women's products advertisements are for privileged women only.

I've been sick lately, which means I've been watching a lot of stuff on Hulu. And since my gender on Hulu is still set to "female," I get a lot of ads for products geared toward women. Products like KY Intense, menstrual pads (y'know, if you don't want to think about your pad you might consider a cup), yadda.

And what I've noticed is that all of these ads are geared toward straight women.

Take the KY Intense commercials, for instance. It's being marketed as "specially formulated to create female satisfaction" (whatever that means). Yet in every commercial I've seen, it shows a man and a woman (clearly married) discussing how much better it has made their sex lives.

I'm all for women's sexuality being shown in a positive light, really. The general message of these ads - that women deserve to be satisfied in bed - is a good one. However, while the sexualities of straight, cisgender, thin, white, married women are being encouraged, the sexualities of virtually every other kind of women are being erased.

For instance, all of the couples are cis and hetero. Despite the fact that the marketing of this product has, ostensibly, nothing to do with testosterone-fueled penis bearers, you can find one in every single commercial. Two women having sex using KY Intense and having a great time? Unheard of. A het couple wherein both members have estrogen-fueled bodies and vulvae? Unheard of. (Not that I'd expect to see that in this day and age, but erasure is erasure.) I am left uncertain, as well, as to the usefulness of this product for trans women of varying body types. Since the product is "clinically proven to enhance female satisfaction," I assume that it was specifically formulated to work on womb-generated vulvae and left at that. Given that we are at a point where trans women are visible and being recognized as women, it would be great of KY to try to include them in this shallow quest to make a buck.

All of the couples have been white, as well. The sexual satisfaction of black women, Asian women, etc.? Doesn't matter. Well, it matters inasmuch as "they'll see the ads and buy this product too, so we're good" but that's it. There's no real interest in promoting the idea that there are happily married non-white couples out there, having gratingly traditional hetero sex and using KY Intense to make things more pleasurable. I don't know that I have the depth of information necessary to explain why this is so harmful, but it has to do with stereotypes regarding black people never getting married, and Asian men being emasculate/feminine. Basically, they're not considered physically capable of engaging in a "normal" relationship.

And, of course, they are all thin, young, and able-bodied. Heaven forbid we hear about fat, old, and/or disabled people having any kind of sex life - much less talking about it on television. Sex is gross if the people involved aren't perfect.

(And they're all couples. Despite the fact that a woman might want to get some "female satisfaction" without a partner. I guess solo sex is still too nasty for TV.)

For other ads, this becomes even more grating as there are even fewer reasons to put the woman in a relationship, yet she somehow manages to hook up with Mr. Wealthy McCisgender every time. An ad for menstrual pads, for instance, includes a woman saying good-night to her lantern-jawed white date at the end of the night, while fantasizing about giving him smoochies. Ads for other products show our thin, frequently white heroine preparing dinner for her family, roughhousing with her children, and arguing with her husband - all expressions of privilege in some way or another. Not every family is white - for better or worse, black folks have garnered a position as the other "American" race and appear infrequently. Yet we never see a man of Asian descent playing the dim-witted, meat-chomping foil who fails to detect his wife's yogurt. We never see a mother in a wheelchair sharing a special moment with her child. Never an old woman preparing dinner. God forbid we have some combination of these.

Even as young, white, thin, able-bodied, straight, married, cisgender women are being oppressed by many of these ads, every other kind of woman is being erased.

There's one exception that I know of - the Hamburger Helper commercial, which is a completely disgusting and exploitative piece showing why poor single moms should stop eating fast food, which is making them fat, and buy someone else's unnecessary product instead. Good times, yo.

Your penis is not a dowsing rod for uteri.

I bring this up because some douchebags who presume to write fiction will include woman characters who successfully disguise themselves as men, and then man characters will be Inexplicably Attracted, causing them to have a breakdown and wonder if they're really teh ghey!omgz. But of course they aren't! Because even though they couldn't tell at all, the person they are attracted to had a Really Real Uterus buried deep down underneath all those clothes, and that makes it heterosexual.

This is bullshit.

Dear "Straight" Man: Your sex drive does not magically know the True Sex of whoever you're looking at. If a woman is successfully passing as a man, albeit a pretty one, to the point where you would never ever question her sex, and you're attracted to her, then you're attracted to her as a feminine man. Period. If you're not attracted to her normally, but when she gets in a certain light she looks a whole lot like a woman and suddenly you're into her, then you're attracted to her as a woman. Otherwise, that inexplicable feeling you're getting is - as much as I hate to say it - just a little bit gay. But hey, good news! Being gay, bisexual, straight-with-exceptions or whatever you are is not a bad thing. It's not! It doesn't make you less of a man. It doesn't make you less of a human being. It just means that you sometimes like dudes.

Dear writers: See above.

In addition to the fact that you are essentially assigning psychic uterus-detecting powers to men's penises, this trope is deeply offensive because it implies that someone's biological sex is their "true sex" and always trumps the way they're presenting. This effectively de-genders all transgender individuals and undermines the validity of those who are attracted to them as their true gender.

Oh, and in honor of my asswipe family: no, the answer is not "pheremones." Pheremones play a role in attraction; they are not a fucking panacea. How do we know this? Because trans women whose bodies are currently fueled by testosterone have successfully attracted the attentions of heterosexual men who, upon finding out that the woman in question does not actually possess a vagina, throw a fit and kill her because she threatens their heterosexuality and masculinity.

Which is, in part, because assholes like you keep writing stories that perpetuate the "true sex" myth.

"Scott was just a regular guy until one bite changed his life forever." A rant.

Firstly, the new "Teen Wolf" TV series is coming out on June 5th. That's five days from now. I am so pumped.

I know it's going to be terrible. It will be full of melodrama and teen angst and privilege denial; you know, the usual. I'm hoping, at least, that it will be the kind of terrible that I can stand to watch instead of the kind of terrible that makes me throw up my hands and wail in despair.

It's not looking good, though. I was browsing the promotional website and I found this gem:

Scott was just a regular guy until one bite changed his life forever.

At first I was like...
And then I was like...

It boggles my mind how the phrase "just a regular guy" is still considered a valid descriptor. It shouldn't, I realize, but it does. It really bugs me that this descriptor is being applied to this Scott guy, who judging by the promo videos is anything but regular. I mean, he's...

1. White.
2. Straight.
3. Cisgender.
4. Completely able-bodied and -minded(as far as I can tell).
5. Middle-class.
6. Late teen-aged.
   
7. Conventionally attractive.
8. A sports player (lacrosse, specifically).
9. A citizen of the United States.
   

Do you know anyone who is like that? Anyone at all? I certainly don't. And I'm not just saying that because I hang around queer circles. I'm saying that because I have never (knowingly) met a human being who was that privileged. For instance, nearly my entire extended family is low-class. Most of us are not conventionally attractive (a few of us are bald, in fact), nearly every one of us who would actually admit to it is gay, bisexual, or pansexual, several of us are gender-nonconforming, the majority are over the age of forty, and nearly all of us are disabled somehow. It's the same basic thing on the Internet. You run into a few people like Scott, and a lot more people who are outside the cishetero demographic, physically or mentally disabled, poor, homeless, conventially unattractive, into unconventional fashion, members of plural systems, non-white, and/or non-States citizens. Most of us don't fall under all of these categories, but very few of us fall under "none."

So when these guys say that Scott is "just a regular guy," it occurs to me that it has no real-world applications whatsoever. Scott may be regular for someone with as much privilege as he's got, but he's not regular as a human being. Regular people, near as I can tell, aren't almost completely perfect until we get bitten by werewolves. Regular people want to be cheerleaders but don't make the cut. Regular people are lesbians. Regular people are middle-aged, single bookworms who wouldn't know how to date if the opportunity was staring them in the face. Regular people become construction workers because they can't afford college. Regular people become independent, then run out of money and have to live in their parents' basement. (True story.) Regular people are smart enough to be lawyers but aren't because even if they wanted to, they haven't had the opportunity. Regular people fall in love for reasons that don't make any sense, with people whom they have no business falling in love with for actual reasons that have nothing to do with societal expectations, and sometimes it works out anyway but usually they just break up. Regular people don't make the same predictable mistakes over and over - instead, they make ridiculous, embarrassing, mind-blowing, life-ruining, and/or trivial mistakes that most writers aren't creative enough to think of.

So until you can make your characters at least as normal as the casts of Buffy and Angel, don't call your protagonist "just a regular guy." The only thing regular about Scott is that he is exactly the kind of person people use as a cheap protagonist.

Children with privilege are the only ones who matter.

I will asplain.

I just read this post on Womanist Musings: Oh Oh, Bigots Steamed Because Sheriff Woody Endorsed 'It Gets Better Campaign'.

According to Alan Chambers, an "ex-gay" fellow who spends not inconsiderable portions of his time turning his internalized prejudice onto his fellow GLBP folk, it is saddening and disappointing to see a children's movie character speaking up about something that, to quote a quote, "at this point children have no need to know about."

Where do I start with this?

Firstly, I assume he's talking about the bizarro version of gayhood wherein it is a horrible, horrible curse and everyone who has it struggles with their feelings of abnormalcy and just wishes they could be straight, unless they're complete perverts.

Secondly, he also seems to be talking about the bizarro version of gayhood that magically kicks in at puberty (whereas straight children are straight from the age of four or so).

And thirdly, as usual, the only children that Chambers is worried about are the straight children.

This is a typical claim from bigots who are trying to prevent education in "politically-charged subjects" from happening at an early age. (Ironically, these are usually the same people who believe that children need to learn Christian Creationism in public school science classes.) I read about this frequently on Womanist Musings. White people say that children don't need to learn about racism, because it is just too horrible for their delicate little minds and their innocence needs to be maintained - plus, by teaching them by racism we might encourage them to be racist! Onoez! Of course, "children" is a misnomer -as Renee points out repeatedly, children of color in the United States start learning about racism as soon as they are cognizant enough to understand what the words mean (pretty much as soon as they have a good grasp on English.) So what they're really worried about are white children.

The same argument has been made re: disability. In another post, Renee shares the story of a woman who, in the process of giving birth to her children, sustained an injury that has rendered her unable to move any part of her body except her eyelids. The children's father, with classic sympathy, took advantage of her incapacitated state, took the children, and ran. Since then he has refused to let the children see their mother because he fears that it might scar them.

Really? SCAR them?

Scare them, maybe. The kiddies probably aren't used to interacting with someone who is paralyzed (definitely, if Dad's behavior is any indication), and it will probably concern them, and they might not know how to act at first. But if they were actually allowed to spend time with their mother and interact with her, they'd get used to it. They could have a wonderful relationship and it wouldn't bother them in the slightest. Because KIDS ARE FLEXIBLE.

Which brings me to my next point.

Kids ARE flexible. They're also in a state of perpetual learning. Kids are open-minded, and often very compassionate (once they develop empathy). There is no better time for a person's life to begin learning about oppression and develop the desire to fight it than when they are a child.

And it doesn't take much. A child only has to witness one act of blatant discrimination to figure out that it's messed up (and yes, even privileged kids have the ability to figure out when someone is being put down) and speak out against it or even start a charity to fight it. (Not saying that the kid's going to be perfect at it, but the motive is there). You can read countless stories on the Internets and Highlights Magazine about a child who does something that seems incredibly plucky, like mowing lawns to earn money to buy shoes for poor kids, or refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance until true equality has been reached, or whathaveyou, all because they were given information about the issues in question.

But most children are not given this opportunity. Instead, we "shelter" them from these issues, protecting them from as much badness as we can. And what are they shown instead? Straightness, cis genders, whiteness, able bodies, single minds. At the point in their life when kids are most able to learn tremendous amounts of things about the world, we so rigidly filter their intake that they can only learn the most privileged side of the story. And the kids, being kids, suck it all in. Their understanding of the world, of society - of what behaviors and bodies "should" exist - becomes framed to prioritize these privileged bodies.

The result of this is that when these kids do begin to gain information about a new perspective, they have no idea what to do with it. When they begin to meet people who are fat, or need special equipment to move around, or have "weird hair," or "talk funny," they don't know how to react. They might know how to pity the crippled child, or to accuse the child who speaks out about racism of making things up or being too sensitive - the limited types of interaction that are conveyed in mainstream entertainment. But they don't have any real knowledge of how to handle these people on a tangible human basis.

Some kids are more flexible than others, of course. Some of them are very open-minded and will instinctively treat nearly everyone with some level of respect and kindness. But a lot more will not. Children who have learned that the world is a place of sunshine and roses and SCWAT bodies will freeze up when they meet someone who is different. They may refuse to deal with the "other" person. They may make fun of that person to assuage their own confusion. Or they may look to their peers to learn how to deal with the person - and their peers, having roughly the same upbringing, will teach them how to scorn the nonconformist.

As the privileged child ages, unless someone intervenes in xir life, nothing is likely to change. Instead, the problem crystalizes. By the time this "innocent" child has become a teenager or young adult, xe is now convinced that the world is exactly as xe learned it, or close enough, and xir reaction to a different perspective will likely range from disbelief to an outright refusal to consider the possibility. Sure, xe is now old enough that xir innocence is probably not considered an issue, and others might finally decide that it's time to teach xem about oppression - only to find that xe is lacking the core education needed to understand these concepts. The core education can be had, of course. And the education that builds upon it. And teenagers and young adults are, relatively, more impressionable than older people. But at this point there are two things stacked against them: firstly, they may not have access to the information they need, and secondly, they may simply decide that they don't want to learn because they have other things to worry about (like building their own life).

A young child doesn't have other things to worry about. A young child's job is to learn about the world. By preserving "innocence," by shielding them from anything that might be considered controversial or "too harsh" (apparently the real world is too much for children to handle), their parents are instilling a worldview that is one-sided and profoundly naïve. Not only does it hurt the marginalized - by implicitly training children to ignore their lives and struggles - but it hurts the child, by limiting xir ability to function with various "other" persons on a fully human level, as well as xir capacity to understand why extra work and sanctions are needed to protect marginalized persons.

As for gay children, transgender children, children of color, disabled children, and many others - all of them are getting a firsthand education in some form of discrimination. "Innocence" is a luxury that they cannot afford, at least for those realms to which they are privy. Through sheer happenstance of birth or life events, we were rendered clinically incapable of retaining this quality that is supposedly so valuable to a child's healthy development, and somehow we managed not to be ruined for it. Yet this inconvenient fact frequently gets swept under the rug by people who continue to insist that innocence is the most valuable thing a child could have - not understanding that maintaining the innocence of a privileged child often means destroying the innocence of marginalized children.

I am very, very angry today.

In my state, we have a sizeable Latin@ population. Mostly descendants of Mexicans. A lot of these Mexican-descended people are lower-class - you can tell, because they make up between ten and twenty percent of the local population but until the economy crashed they made up a sizeable population of the people shopping at Wal-Mart (yet were almost never seen at Costco or Fred Meyer).

The other day, while my mother and I were shopping for groceries, I stopped to look at a stand of Valentine's Day cards (or Singles Shaming Day cards, whichever you like). I discovered that all of the cards that depicted humans were showing peach-skinned people (to no surprise on my part). I pointed this out to my dear white mother, who immediately informed me that (to paraphrase) "they probably get the cards in from somewhere else where they don't have that population; I doubt they have any control over what they get in."

Later, my sister remarked that if I asked the store employees (again, to paraphrase), "they'd probably tell you that they have the cards with animals for the non-whites."

I've been thinking about this today, and I'm still mad.

• I'm mad because my low-class, brown, yet straight neighbors - be they Mexican-descended or any "other" race, can't afford to shop at a store that actually cares enough about them to represent them in the merchandise.
• I'm mad because that's exactly what the damn store employee would say.
• I'm mad because if I want to get a card for me and my hypothetical significant other, I have to fully transition (whatever the hell that means - T, chest surgery, phallo) and spend the rest of my life with a white woman; any other possibility rules me out of the group. And if I didn't toe the line in relationship terms, and complained about the lack of cards representing us, someone would point me to the animal cards. And it's the same way for most people in queer relationships, regardless of their skin color. For the same reason that they won't make cards with brown people for my non-peach, but straight neighbors - THEY ARE BIGOTS.
• I'm mad because, when I shop for cards, I can expect any card that shows a man dominating a woman to be "funny" in a "yuk-yuk, he's in charge, all right" way and any card that shows a woman dominating a man to be "funny" in a "yeah, my wife walks ALL over me, too - why can't she do everything I want?" way. NEVER MIND the lack of same-sex and/or brown people cards depicting this, much less in a positive light.
• I'm mad because anyone in a committed relationship with more than one person, even if they are peach-skinned and heteronormative, can give up on finding ANY card representing them, even if they're white. Even if they're rich. Not even the animals. Heck, if they tried to get a custom job done they would risk gross-out reactions, bigotry, and potential threat to their physical selves.
  
• I'm mad because if I complain about this to someone who doesn't have any problems finding people like them on greeting cards, I can expect to be answered with "Well, I can't find people who look just like me, either," (i.e., HAVE THEIR EXACT FACE) or "So just don't get one with people on it," or (class privilege a-comin') "So just make a custom card with your faces on it. That would be romantic." LIKE AS IF I OWN A PRINTER.
• But I'm mainly mad because my straight brown neighbors who shop at Wal-Mart are a VISIBLE DEMOGRAPHIC, and a not insignificant one, and Wal-Mart puts out its merchandise like they don't even exist. My non-heteronormativity (and that of my neighbors of all colors)... well, I know that they actively hate it around here. And yeah, that pisses me off, but the failure to acknowledge brownness, specifically, feels like they don't even care. WHY THE FUCK DO YOU NOT CARE. Owait. Because white people all around you keep telling you how demanding those brown folks are and how ignoring them is the best way to deal with racism. Yup yup.
• The cards depicting fat people aren't exactly charitable, either. We're either slobs or we've somehow "fallen apart."
  

I Am Invisible

I am invisible.

I usually don't realize that because I spend a lot of time hanging around transgender-safe message boards, but the fact is: I am invisible. When people talk about atheists, even though they don't specify, they are thinking of cisgendered atheists. When people talk about gays and lesbians, even though they don't specify, they are thinking of cisgendered atheists. Men means cisgendered men. LGBT means L, G, sometimes B, and those other weirdoes we heard were out there. Transgendered people are invisible.

Obviously there are some people out there who know we exist - shows such as Family Guy, The L Word, Coronation Street, and Degrassi have had transgendered characters. The film The World According To Garp has an excellent portrayal of a trans woman, and there are other movies that are just about us. But to the majority of people, we do not exist - or exist only in a theory so abstract that we may not exist at all.

I know. I used to be one of those people.

For the first eighteen years of life, I either didn't know about transgendered/transsexual people, or what I knew was very abstract: sometimes there were boys that felt like they should be girls, and underwent treatments to become girls, and often their parents kicked them out of their homes and they ended up homeless and/or addicted to drugs but sometimes they turned out okay. I'd heard somewhere about FTM's (courtesy of my mum, actually) but it never sunk in for me. Why? Because I didn't know anyone who is transgendered. I didn't know anyone who knew anyone who was transgendered. I'd never bumped into a transgendered person on the Internet, and when I did, I didn't spend a lot of time with him. My mother was on the site, watching my every move, and she didn't approve of his "lesbianism." Plus I think I was afraid that if I told the forumites that I felt similarly I'd be laughed at. You can't be a "gay man in a woman's body," after all. You can only be a straight woman. But I digress. Naturally, I never thought to include trans people in any of my writing or correspondence or anything.

This is the mindset that prevents trans people from getting their rights. Someone introduces a piece of legislation that covers trans people (or gays, or POC, or atheists, or whatever), and you think that since you don't know (or like) anyone who will be affected, it isn't important. So you let it slide.

People can't live like this. You can't go on holding in your minds that transsexual people don't exist, or there are too few of us to count. There are never too few of us to count. This is something that I didn't truly understand until I became a member of two of the least regarded minorities in the United States of America, and looking back I am ashamed to think that I once thought differently. Here is what I didn't realize: The majority, or the average if you will, does not equal the default. There is no default for the human condition. I am not a cisgendered white male unless I specify otherwise. It's not easy to remember this, with our parents, teachers, peers, and the media convincing us that diversity equals deviance. Society is not a dichotomy between white males and everyone else. It is a complex mosaic of people. Some of them are descended from Europeans, some from Africans, some from Asians, some from Eurasians, some from Americans, some from European-Asians, some from African-Caribbeans, some from people of many different continents. Some of us are Christian, some are Hindu, some are Jewish, some are Muslim, some are Jedi. Some used to be religious but aren't anymore. Some were never religious at all. Some are close to six feet tall and others are closer to three. Some are HIV-positive, some have cancer, some have diabetes or syphilis or angina or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or missing organs and some have no outstanding health problems at all. Some are organ donors; some aren't. Some are female, some are male, some are intersexed. Some are cis, some are trans, some are genderqueer. Some are bisexual, some are straight, some are gay, some are pansexual, and some are one or the other but willing to experiment. Some of us have very little money, some of us have a lot; some of us just have what we need to get by comfortably. Some of us live in the cities. Many of us live outside of them. Some of us love only one person at the same time, but some love more. Some of us masturbate. Some of us don't. Some of us do and lie about it. Some of us promise our parents that we'll never have sexual intercourse until we find the one we'll be with for the rest of our lives. Some of us wouldn't have found the one we'll be with for the rest of our lives unless we had sexual intercourse first. Some of us love feet. Some of us hate feet. Some of us couldn't care less about feet. Everything about you is part of your identity, and it is no less diverse, beautiful, and strange than that of someone whose traits are less common than yours. And here's the thing: every trait about that person, to the extent that it does not harm another person, deserves to exist and be respected and protected by human law. If your identities are protected, and you can't find the time to make sure others have the same courtesy, then you don't deserve the protection you have.

Offensive As Hell: I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry

Come to think of it, I don't even know why I watched that movie. It had Adam Sandler in it. That should have been enough to put me off, except I was naive and idealistic enough to think that being a comedy about gay people might counteract the involvement of Adam Sandler. I was very, very wrong.

For those unaware, the plot runs like this: Chuck and Larry are two straight, white firefighters and best friends. Larry is a lovable fat guy whose wife died about a year ago, and Chuck is his slimmer, sexier, perpetually single best friend who gets laid at a rate of about 1.5 women per night. Larry realizes that, with his wife dead, he doesn't have a beneficiary for his life insurance, and that it's too late to change it to his kids. He's got to find a beneficiary or else his insurance will expire. In a fit of mad inspiration, he discovers that gays have just been given civil partnership laws in his state (New York, where all the cool movies happen), and so he hatches a mad plan: obtain civil partnership with Chuck, making him beneficiary of his insurance policy.

What a wacky plan, right? This poor, dear man is so desperate to take care of his kids that he'd do anything - even marry his male best friend - to make sure that they were taken care of in the untimely event of his death. Isn't that amazing?

No.

The movie is nothing short of a train wreck from beginning to end. While the creators took a stab at making Chuck and Larry likable, forgivable characters, the movie is so deeply entrenched in "irreverence" (read: toilet humor and complete insensitivity) that you end up too mad at its creators to even care about Larry's motives.

No, I take that back. The fact that the movie's writers obviously thought they were being sensitive about the issue made it even worse.

The movie starts out with a scene that's going to set the tone for everything to come: our two main characters, out on a call, struggling to rescue a hugely obese man from a burning building. The man insists that he is too fat to walk, so the characters end up carrying him out on his bed (or something else equally huge; I don't remember exactly). The entire scene is disparaging and generally insensitive of this kind of obesity, playing it (like everything else) for laughs. Given that the man's fatness has absolutely nothing to do with the remainder of the story, it feels pointless, jarring, and just dumb. The only thing I can figure is that it serves as a kind of litmus test for the rest of the film: if you liked that scene, you'll enjoy the rest of the movie; if not, please get in line for your refund. I probably should have stopped watching there, but like I said, naive and idealistic. Moving on.

During this brave rescue, there is an accident and Chuck is injured. Larry rescues him, ensuring that Chuck will forever feel indebted to him, and reminding him of his own fragile mortality. That's when he abruptly decides to check up on his own life insurance (or something like that), only to find out that while he could have named his kids as beneficiaries back when his wife died, the only way he could get a new beneficiary now is if he got married.

So he talks Chuck into signing up for civil partnership (remember, he owed him - otherwise there's no way in Hell he'd have OH MY GOD ACTUALLY MARRIED A MAN EEW EEW EEW), and they start down the path of their whole gay-marriage charade: Chuck moves into Larry's house, they put up a rainbow flag, they drive up to Canada and get married for realz (by a disturbing pseudo-Asian guy who seems to get voyeuristic thrills from the weddings he performs), they start attending gay parties, the whole nine yards. Along the way, they deal with Larry's gender-nonconformist son, squick out the rest of the firefighting team (with one exception, as follows), inspire a fellow fireman to come out of the closet, punch out an anti-gay protester, and generally come to the realization that being gay is OK after all. At the end, when the fraud is exposed, all the gay people that they've met over the course of the movie cheer for them. Never mind that they lied to everyone; never mind that they exploited the newly-granted rights of second-class citizens for their own gain, never mind that their attitude throughout the entire movie is "it's okay for you to be gay, but for me it's disgusting." Never mind that, as the movie explicitly states, by committing this fraud they're making things harder for all the genuine gay couples who want civil partnerships. They have learned a valuable lesson about gay people and acceptance, and so they are now heroes. Somehow.

The really sad part is that, even though this is supposed to be a movie about how gay people are people too and deserve to be treated as such, the movie is about straight people. Straight people who, from beginning to end, can imagine no worse fate than to be gay. Straight people who waltz into the gay scene, fool everyone despite their obvious disgust for anything resembling physical intimacy for one another (though a threesome with a blow-up doll is apparently okay... yeah) suffer a little bit of discrimination, strike an epic blow for gay people everywhere, and then emerge from the experience more-or-less unscathed. (They do get arrested, but because of the outcry from the gay community the charges end up dropped.) In fact, they come out better for the experience, as Chuck and Larry both find super-hot women that they can start dating now that they're not gay anymore.

Don't be fooled by its appearance. This isn't a movie about gay people, or even about gay acceptance. It's a movie that exploits the lives and problems of actual gay people (and several fake ones) for cheap laughs, without giving them the dignity of an actual voice in the film. (The closest that they get when a gay character speaks up to praise one of the protagonists for their courage/inspiring actions/whatnot.) This movie is, in essence, a straight guilt film - and a bad one at that. (See also "white guilt films," the genre from which this movie gets most of its cues.)

The really sad thing in all of this is that the premise of this movie could have done better. For instance, if the jokes had been less rude and in-your-face; if the main characters had had some actual hesitations about what they were about to do (besides "EEW EEW GAY NASTY"). If they'd actually learned something. If they, instead of the gay community, had been the butt of the movie's jokes. If everything hadn't turned out magically sunshine-and-rainbows (but EEW NOT RAINBOWS EEW GAY) in the end. If they'd accepted that the audience was going to hate the protagonists and ran with it, instead of trying repeatedly to garner our sympathy, it could have worked.

But they couldn't do that. After all, Adam Sander was in this movie, and nothing is more important than his ego.

(Incidentally, what is it with the portrayal of gay black men in comedy films? Did I miss the memo from the black gay community that they're all big, scary-looking men who secretly just want some romance? Naw, I'm nitpicking. This entire movie was so clueless that I shouldn't bother expecting any better.)