Email to a Friend About the Gay/Bisexual Experience

For some reason, my online friend Cossak at Ruminations seems to value my usually hysterical opinions on various topics. Sometimes he'll show me a post in draft or one that he's already put up and solicits my opinion. I guess he seems to think that my obscure, anonymous voice is more authoritative and worldly than his obscure, anonymous voice.

But today he sent me a draft of a post that, while I won't print it without his permission, made common sense without really grabbing the reader by the lapels. That's my distinction. In my impassioned, disrespectful and often obscene and outraged prose, I'll grab you by the lapels until you at least blink and look me in the eye.

Cos was right in his commonsensical take on gay rights but the only reason it appealed to me is because of my emerging bisexuality and passionately militant advocacy for gay rights. So, remembering my recent coming out post at Pottersville, he asked me for my opinion and what follows is my response. You can infer the content of his post by reading between the lines of what follows.

OK, I think this is one of your better posts although the common sense approach you're taking here is one that has already been adopted by many of us, including me, in the reality-based community. It's correct but it still doesn't stand out. Remember the early Willie Stark? He had all the right facts, figures and numbers but people weren't listening to him until he began to jazz it up.

To more succinctly sum up your first point, homosexuality is not unnatural, just uncommon. That's how one person put it and it stuck with me.

Secondly, you might want to drive home the point that the only thing that straight people, gays and we bis have in common is what we do behind closed doors, which is no one's business and makes for a piss-poor reason to judge someone unless they're violating their marriage vows, being hypocritical about their homosexuality or diddling little kids.

Thirdly, we keep losing and being made to look as if we're advocating an immoral lifestyle choice because we keep letting the right wing frame the debate thusly. It has nothing to do with choice and even less to do with morality. You telling me two gay men happily marrying and devoting their lives to one another in the strictest fidelity ruined Ted Haggard's marriage more than him sleeping with a male hooker for three years and doing crystal meth? Because Elton John or Mr. Sulu got married to other men, that endangered Eddie Long's marriage moreso than him fucking at least four of his male parishioners behind his wife's back?

The hypocrisy on the Far Right is staggering and we need to keep hammering away at the very hypocrisy that automatically undermines their specious arguments.