I is for It Gets Better

Back while I still pondering over what H is for, I felt I was for Invincible. I said to myself, being open, being confident, being who you are, makes you invincible, makes you impervious, makes you incredible. I felt of sharing: When I’m afraid, when I don’t think I can go on, I surround myself with positive things–with thoughts of my friends, thoughts of the great people in whose presence I stand, of the glory of God imbuing everything there is with his light and his love, and then I feel invincible and I can go on.

Last week, I began to wonder if I really is for invincible. Instead, I began to think I is for Individual. I felt of sharing: There is no greater bliss than of knowing who you are, all your faults, all your foibles, all your fortes. To understand what goes on inside is to make you impenetrable, insightful, indivisible. To feel, nay, to know what is hidden beneath your exterior, that part of us that we so often wrongly equate the entirely of “I”, is to open doors and possibilities and events that otherwise would remain lost forever. To be an Individual is perhaps among the greatest gift God has ever given us.

Today, although both of these statements stand true and always will–I am Invincible, I am Individual–I know that they are not all I is worth. I is worth a wealth of ideas, a well of inspiration, a river of incentive. I spoke the other night with a wonderful man, a man of whose nature and build I did not think even God could have crafted, and it made realize, in that strange way that unrelated events inspire worlds of difference, in the way that butterflies in Africa incite hurricanes in America, that I is well worth so much more than all of this.

If Students Be the Food of Life, Lead On

Two down and one to go. My in-depth analysis of my college grading rubric is coming to a written close, and yet is still just blossoming into something more tangible and usable than written thoughts alone.

On Wednesday I discussed the features of a college’s basic profile–their location, their expenses, school colors, and a few other points. Yesterday I spoke about academics, math and Judaica, foreign languages and politics, as well as some things like student/faculty ratios and accelerated programs, and I got some great feedback, too.

Today, I’m talking about life. Student life in particular.

A Walk to Remember (or Something Like It)

Thursday was a busy day. It’s hard to think of a day recently that wasn’t busy, but Thursday was busier than usual. I had my calculus class in the morning, then I had three hours tutoring math (and barely working on my own homework, but getting enough done to know I had a lot to do that evening), and then at noon, to the first Gay-Straight Alliance meeting of the semester. It went well. I wish it could have gone better, but nothing in life is perfect.

(And those things that feel perfect often have their own flaws beneath them.)

Then at two I headed over to be a part of an interview that my school was putting together for a presentation I was asked to be a part of. I went to the meeting place…but could not find them anywhere. (Later on I was told that there was a studio in the back of the room I was sent to, which explains why I didn’t see them initially.) So I sent a text message and waited. I looked out the windows at the new parking deck across campus, the one I’ve literally watched since it was grass and trees, then fenced-in mud, and now starting to look beautiful again, and waited.

After a few minutes, I decided I’d missed the event and went for a walk. I stepped outside into the cool air, took a deep breath of the freshness of spring waiting to happen, and then plugged in my earbuds and turned on my iPod.

Something special happens every time I do that.

An End to Reflection

How fast time travels when we’re having fun, right?

So far most of the year has gone by in but two days of recollection–the ups and downs and loves lost and found and lost again, the trials and triumphs of dire courses and cross-country adventures, the happiness of new friends and the sorrow being away from friends inflicts every day. And yet, the year is not yet over.

A Pause for Reflection

I began last year by looking at the last decade. This year I’d like to continue the tradition–but with a somewhat narrower scope. Throughout this last semester’s calculus class, my friends and I would frequently ask for a moment to pause for reflection, to look back at what we’d just done to make sure we understood it properly. Just the same, I’d like to take a few moments over the next couple of days to look back over the past year and see what I did well and also where I could improve.

There’s a saying that goes “two steps forward, three steps back” and usually it implies a success followed by a greater failure that set us back further than we began. A moment ago, as I finished writing that last paragraph, I thought of saying that it’s good to begin something new by taking a look back (which reminded me of the saying aforementioned), and together these two thoughts, so parallel in structure, made me wonder: Is it really worth looking back? Isn’t looking back just the same as taking a step forward, to take two back?

I thought about it a moment longer (the thinking mind is truly a wondrous thing, and often works much faster than we give it credit for), and I decided–like my philosophy of no regret (which I think I tried explaining once but didn’t do it justice)–that even a step back can help us take a step forward. We’re never really back where we began, no matter how many times we find ourselves in the same situation; so long as we learn from where we’ve been, it can only help us get to where we’re going next.

So why not take a look back? If only to remember, it can do us no substantial harm.

Half a Smile and Lots of Love

I was at SOAR yesterday. I think I’ve mentioned it here before, but SOAR stands for new Student Orientation and Registration. It’s usually pretty fun, actually: I get to see my ambassador friends and usually a couple SGA friends, too, and it’s always fun to hang out with my computer lab buddies. (Isn’t it odd, perhaps, to associate my friends with how I know them? I personally find it natural–after all, I mold myself to the situation, and in some regards to that, to the people I meet in each of them.)

In any case, SOAR is structured. Very structured. At 11:30 we start to set up. By 12:15 we start checking people in: At the table before mine, they’re signed in and given a nametag and their program booklet. Then they move to me. “Good afternoon,” I say, “Welcome to SOAR.” And proceed to hand them a colored folder. I’m very particular with my folders: I arrange nine at a time, in three sets of three shell-shaped structures, laid out like a perfect salesman. I’m very careful to vary my colors, and to not leave any folder on the table too long. Sometimes this means shuffling things around. Other times it means using an entire shell before restocking. It’s formulaic. It’s just like I like it.

And then, when the table before me speeds up just a little, or someone slows down long enough while writing their name, two people come at me at once. “Good afternoon, welcome to SOAR,” I say to the first, handing them a folder while I turn to the second, “Good afternoon, welcome to SOAR.”

Then I realised something: Despite my smile, I wasn’t sincere.

F is for Fearless

Call me arrogant. Call me blind. Call me careless, defiant, or egregious. But don’t call me stupid. Don’t call me unprepared. And definitely don’t call me out on coming out.

Thankful Friday

Yesterday. I had class all day and homework in between. Plus the first Gay-Straight Alliance meeting of the semester and paperwork and Project Runway and math tutoring. Felt like I was stretched thin and rolled up, spread out, and stepped on by the end of the day. I was thankful for a lot of things–being able to get some homework done, doing well in class, having a great GSA meeting–but none of those things stood out as an exceptional reason to be thankful. I’m always thankful when I can get some homework done. I’m always thankful when classes go well. I’m always thankful for the success of the GSA.

But merely being thankful isn’t the point of finding a hundred things to be thankful for.

For Just Us

I had a whole post planned out…and then I got caught up in TV and header designs and talking with friends and forgot all about it. But that’s no reason not be thankful–in fact, TVs and headers and friends are all great things to be thankful for (and I’m thankful that I’ve got the opportunity to spend my time in such ways, when I know many in this world sadly do not), but it’s something else I’d like to be thankful for today. Something that seems to affect just us in the GLBT community, but I believe will affect all of us for the better.

7. I’m thankful for justice.

Yes. I’m thankful for just ice, because when it’s hot outside, and you want to be cold inside, you need one thing, and one thing only: just ice.

Or not. You need a glass and water and air conditioning, a fan, something extra to fan yourself with, and the shade of a nice leafy tree to lie under. But all these things, coupled with the bit of ice, come together to cool you off. And in the same way, a lot of forces have come together recently in the pursuit of justice, and I know I’m indebted to each of them, even if I don’t know any of them.

You’ve probably heard this already: Yesterday in California, Proposition 8 was voted unconstitutional. And it should be! How can anyone vote away the rights of another and feel neither shame nor regret but instead pride in their own prejudice? Love is a family value, and family is a traditional value–and I don’t understand those who say that allowing people in love to marry each other will ruin such traditional values as these! As many a t-shirt has said, hate is not a family value.

I’d like a family of my own one day, but I suppose saying a “family of my own” is rather vague in the first place. I’ve already got a family. My nuclear family, my extended family, my Phi Theta Kappa and GSA families, my Ambassador family, my NTWF family, my synagogue family, my school family, my best friends who are sometimes closer than family. All of these people are my family. But there’s still an illusion to this world that until you’re the head of the household–or at least co-head, as those married should be–it’s not truly “your own” family. I want to be married someday. I want to have children some day.

And these people, fueled by hate, are fighting to take that future away from me!

I can only stand and fight so much on my own. I have not the power nor the strength to tackle every battle there is to be fought. But thankfully, as seen in Perry vs. Schwarzenegger, there are plenty men and women as capable and then much more capable than I am in fighting this fight, and with their help, and with all the little things I can do, and with the help of the just and righteous worldwide, what’s right will in the end win out. And remember, all of you who are the S in GSA, it’s not for just us, it’s for justice.

C is for Courage

It’s come to my knowledge that there’s only one human emotion from which all others are born and construed: Fear. It makes sense with sufficient thought, of which I’ll try to abridge adequately here: Sadness is but an amassing of worries and anger is the fight side of flight or fight–the fear response. And happiness? Simply the momentary alleviation of fear.

It’s all best illustrated through relationships, especially those of the romantic kind. When John cheats on Cindy and she’s furious with him–she’s only afraid that she’s not good enough, that he’ll leave her and she’ll be alone. When Carl missed Joe while he’s at work, Carl’s only worrying what might happen if Joe doesn’t come back, if something terrible happens along the way. And when all of them are comfortable and happy in bed, their fears are for the moment set aside and they feel intimately content.

And if fear is the root of all human emotions, courage is its only cure: Merrian-Webster OnLine defines courage as the “mental or moral strength to venture, persevere, and withstand danger, fear, or difficulty,” citing it’s ultimate origins in the Latin “cor,” meaning heart. So when we’re afraid and drowning in our fear, our only anchor is truly to take heart and swim to the surface.

Hatred knows no boundaries, and even the most loving can become the most hateful once they realise you’re gay. I’ve seen the most conservative become the most welcoming, the most liberal become the most aversive; I’ve seen friendships and families fall apart; and I’ve seen new bonds formed through the greater openness shared among all of those involved. I’ve seen faces of courage and faces of fear, faces of love and faces of hate, but the worst face of all is one that’s none of these–one that’s the face of ignorance.

Last weekend I wrote about time, because last weekend time was a premium: I attended the Carolinas Regional Honors Institute of Phi Theta Kappa, and for this reason I had practically no free time this weekend and decided it best to put my Pirkei Avot series on hold for the week (it’ll resume this Saturday, of course). It was also at the Honors Institute that this post was inspired, that I came face to face with a face of ignorance and saw in striking clarity the importance of courage.

The courage I speak of is a special kind of courage. The courage I mustered up to participate in the debate is not the same courage I gathered to present during the Readers Theatre is not the the same courage I called up to come out. It’s a courage most people never know–it’s a courage reserved for the few of us who ever have to come out. Gay men, lesbians, transgendered men and women, queers of all colors and contexts–we’re the ones given this precious gift. So often, though, we don’t know how to use it.

I came out late. Even to those closest to me, I came out late. A part of me has always known I’m gay (the rationale is long and tiresome, to be saved for another day or else another audience entirely), but it wasn’t until I was sixteen that I truly began to call myself gay (I repeat my last parenthetical here), and then it wasn’t for two or more years that I came out to anyone in person. And then I wasn’t the one coming out; I was merely responding to another’s having done the same. I fed off his courage since I didn’t know I had any of my own. And even then, it’d be two more years before I began to truly come out. And only now, another year since then, have I truly become comfortable saying to people quite simply, “I’m gay.”

Some people have it easier than me. They find their courage early: I know a guy who came out at six, and another before he turned sixteen. Others have it even easier: They don’t have to come out at all; people just know it already. For them, though, they have the added pressure of perhaps not being ready when the news is broken to them that their secret isn’t really secret at all. It’s sad, it can’t be anything else, but sometimes I still resign myself to thinking, “If only I was more obvious–I’d have less to explain every day!”

It was in some such situation this past weekend that got me started. I was sitting at dinner, telling a friend I was president of the Gay-Straight Alliance, and I was asked, “Are you gay?”

I answered, “Yes.” She was shocked (most people are for some reason), and later in conversation she said at least I was one of the lucky ones who wasn’t obvious: The Face of Ignorance.

Then yesterday I was discussing categories of sexual orientation and gender identity and expression with one of the the tech guys that help out with SOAR. He seemed to think (forgive my vulgarity) that guys who bottom want to be girls and that guys who cross-dress are just wrong, wronger, or really wrong: The Face of Ignorance.

And last night a friend told me he’d known a guy who thought gays were just plain girls anyways: The Face of Ignorance.

It’s for all these misconceptions that courage becomes so important. I said to him last night, and again I’ll be blunt, that most guys think gays are sex-crazed or just girls on the inside. Reality check: We’re only as sex-crazed as anyone else (whether that’s a lot or a little is as varied as anyone else,  I mean) and gay guys are well, still guys. Simple as that, to use a cliche: Guys will be guys.

But when people like me–the guys who are clear about this, who hold the face of ambiguity and could be taken for either or when people glance at us and build split-second impressions–hide behind this mask of assimilation, and only those too obviously something for their own good are the only face of courage these faces of ignorance see, we all crumble and suffer needlessly.

It took a lot for me to come out. It still does, to some people, when I don’t really know what they’ll say or what they’ll do. And I know for a lot of others, the battle is just as hard and sometimes even harder. But until we all take a stand and come out, until we let those who know us, those who think they know us, really know us as we are inside, nothing’s going to change. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell won’t change till people in the army serving in silence come out and let the world know they’re already there and have the right to stay there, until the bonds they’ve based upon lies are instead filled with honorable truth and people can see that what the media and misinformation has shown them is not the same as what’s right before their eyes. And this goes for all people–for police officers, firefighters, teachers, doctors, actors–anyone who’s anything to anyone can be a face of courage for everyone.

Until we all come out and shout to the world that we are here and  we are queer and we are good this way, nothing will change. We’ll remain second-class looked down upon, less-than and other and inhumane. As wrong, and wronger, and really wrong. It won’t change until we show them our faces of courage and change their faces of fear and ignorance into faces of love and acceptance.

But to get there, to get anyone there, we have to get there ourselves first. We have to muster up and gather up and call up all our heart and all our soul and let our hearts shine out and shine through the face of courage we all have inside us, waiting to be found, waiting on us to stand up and come out and change the world for all of us, for each of us.