wishing that i could be writing what i wished

well, i have a twelve page research methods paper due in two days. less, even. oh, god, less. and despite having read the article weeks ago, and despite having sat down to write it on several occasions, i have written...zip. and even when i have tried, i have realized that perhaps i am not a critical thinker. crap. that is going to make writing a "critical review" very difficult.

instead, i read this on a friend's livejournal:

While on the website yafro.com, i came upon a tonne of homophobic posts, all from the same guy. so i responded with the following. it wasn't intended to be a livejournal post, but as it chronicals my present, i thought what the hell.

Crapper,
Your logic is childish and rooted in dogma and fear. If god hates gays, then why did Florida and New Orleans get hit with hurricanes and not San Francisco, Montréal, Belgium or Netherlands?

I don't know which way to rebut you. Easily walk though the inconsistencies in your posts, or respond with love. I'll choose the later because it seems you haven't been exposed to much of it.

I am gay. I live with four straight men, one straight women (we are university students) and my homosexuality barely plays into my relationship with them (ie. the boys I live with are very hot, all skinny and tall with great bodies and fucking hot faces. So occasionally I make a joke about getting with them. They laugh and joke back. Sometimes a housemate and I will go to the gym or pool, and they aren’t nervous about me seeing their package. Despite to popular belief, I do have self control). We all have significant others that we have been seeing for quite a while who always hang out in our house, meaning there is frequently 12 of us at home. Each of us are of completely different personality types, evident in the 12 different university programs we're enrolled in. This diversity makes our house awesome. And there is a genuine sense of love in our home. And I must play a big role in this as I frequently get told that I am the alpha male.

I love my partner. And I have dated many people before him, and had casual sex, and I don’t regret either. I can give you excuses about growing up in a small town of 31,000 people where being gay would take your stock off the social market, and about thinking that I would never be able to really love the wife I would have to get because of my family, because I would always feel that I am lying to her about a core aspect of my being. But if you are uncomfortable with casual sex, I respect that, and have many friends that never partake in it. Having found someone I love now, someone who is tall, hot, graduated top of his class for a top university, enrolling in a MA, and is smitten with me, wow, I never thought I would get here. I never expected to be able to have this sort of love in my life – complete honesty, acceptance and enjoyment. Being able to marry him (as I am Canadian) matters a lot. It means that I have the same [potential (as I will not rush into marriage)] validation of my relationship as my friends. It means that when I have kids – through adoption or surrogacy – they will know that our family is a real family, recognised by law.

Mr. Crapper, I am shocked that you would expel energy on a campaign against gays, a campaign of hatred. I guess the only comparative exercise I have participated in is the thousand essays I have written for school about how the American version of free-market capitalism, known as neo-liberalism, is destroying global cultures and serves to keep billions of people in insolvent conditions. But even then, I don’t hate capitalism – there are hundreds of little reforms that could happen that would make it work for more people. What I do hate are the pious folk who are scared of change and of not being the centre of the universe, who hide behind religious doctrine (or are atheists comfortable with extreme inequality) and partake on crusades against those that are different. Mr. Crapper, love doesn’t have to be scary, indeed it doesn’t even need to affect you if you don’t let it.

There are times when i find myself surprised at how wonderful and inspiring, and absolutely original, my friends are. sometimes, hey, we can be assholes, but then, then there are moments like the above. perhaps its is when something strikes a nerve deep inside of us...but i do not think this would do my friend justice. he's brilliant. and lovely. and admired. not because he is gay. but because of who he is.