My first pride was in Toronto, mid 1990s. It was fun. For some reason I attracted the attention of the leather crowd even though I wasn’t into leather. I hung out with the leather people for like four days. It was fun and educational. Made lots of new friends, hooked up with guys who were like me, not into leather, and had a blast. The leather community back then was super tight and friendly to everybody. Still have friends from that time when I met them.

Easy. I waited until 1994 when I moved away to go to college. I hid it from everyone in my small town, even though I knew what I liked by the time I was about 11 years old. I decided to wait until I could far away from that place. I told my mom over the phone and she said, “Yeah, I knew that already.” Super easy. So was I in college. When I moved away to go to college, I stayed away most of the time. I found work to support myself to avoid coming home for the summer every year until I graduated. After graduation, I worked to stay away. I came back home for holidays only. My older brothers were a real problem for me, plus the people in the town I was afraid of. One of my brothers confronted me, yelling at me at Christmas in 1995. He attacked me and I kicked his sorry ass. After that, no issues. I found back then that it was very helpful to your own cause coming out if you could fend for yourself, depend on yourself, and keep the homophobes at a distance.

Yeah, sometimes I don’t ask. I directly tell my sister and brother-in-law that my sister is the man in the relationship. I affectionately call my brother-in-law “Paula.”

I’m not into Heartstopper, but this is a very sweet testimonial and I like it.

Agreed. It’s pretty much the same plot formula. All it needs is a husband jealous of the gay bestie plus a murder and it’s all set for the Hallmark channel or Lifetime. Maybe even late-nite TLC after the show about the morbidly obese people.

Things are so in the shits even Bloomberg reports on these things.

Public service journalism is really good in the US and yes, it deserves public funding. It needs to be funded publicly. As a matter of fact, NPR and PBS are, in my opinion, the best news sources in the world. I’ve lived with public journalism in other countries. It’s publicly funded, but its reporting often gets filtered by whatever party is in power. It’s a shame more people don’t realize what a national treasure the US has and does not appreciate it because, you know, taxes.

I’ve always been able to separate the artist from the work of art. I had to be able to if I was going to be a successful student. Now that I am middle aged I think my tendency is to read and watch things with complete ignorance about the creators’ biographical details. I don’t use Twitter or Mastodon. I don’t follow creators on any social media platform. I sometimes wonder what would happen if I did consume more media and payed attention to what creators say and do online. Maybe I would change my attitude. I don’t know. What I do know is that a work of art can convey a message that has absolutely nothing to do with the artist’s beliefs or political leanings. But then I remember attending a lecture that Gayatri Spivak gave at Cornell’s School of Criticism and Theory. She talked about how sometimes the politics of something, its “political value” if you will, can be much more important than what it is worth intellectually and people should go with that perception if that is what they ponder when contemplating a work of art (or literature, or any product of creativity). So, this is where subjectivity becomes important. Our subjectivity as we contemplate a work of art is important and if we feel we should disregard it because the artist is not to our liking, we might be better off rejecting it and doing something positive for the world and society. So, I guess my take is that I won’t mess with other people’s subjectivity and I hope they don’t mess with mine. On the contrary, we might be better off if we encourage each other to express our subjectivity and appreciate it for what it might mean in a social context.

Imagine getting grant money to tickle rats and play games with them. Best job ever.

Bears are people, too.