Monthly Archives: May 2011

Non-moralizing alternatives to gay bars

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Posted by maxporter on May 25, 2011 – 12:42 PM
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I feel that, in my recent entry about gay bars, I wrote with a more moralizing tone than I intended. I don’t know about you guys, but I definitely get put off by health educators who sound as if they are preaching, especially when it comes to queer issues. Since I grew up in Utah, a highly moralistic state that constantly tries to codify Mormon ethics into law, I grew up being told to not do this, to not do that – “Don’t wear that gay-friendly shirt in public,” “Don’t take your same-sex date to prom,” “Don’t hold hands with your boyfriend in class.”1

That’s the primary problem that I have with public health services: sometimes they feel as if they are overly moralizing. A lot of public health posters in my university had a very similar tone to what I experienced in health class in Utah: they told us what to not do because of some vague consequence. After growing up queer and being told how to live my life by straight people, I was tired of it all and I explored things for myself.

Then, later on, I never went to any smoking cessation services or anything like that2 because I was concerned that I would find more of the same moralizing tone and people would yell at us for being stupid enough to smoke. The one time that I went to an AA meeting, it was highly disturbing because it was very Jesus-centric and highly moralizing in a manner that I found uncomfortable because Jesus has been used against me as a justification for why it’s bad to be gay. I don’t think that I’m alone here – I think it’s hard for queer people in general to find nonjudgmental support in terms of substance issues. We’ve been judged enough for being gay; we don’t need to be judged even more for being addicted to substances.

So, returning to the issue of gay bars. I’m going to state that I definitely believe that human beings need a pressure release. Once, Ronald Reagan responded to criticisms that older generations used martinis as a crutch by saying, “why not be a generation that doesn’t need a crutch?” This sentiment is very familiar to me – many people in my community said similar things. Well, frankly, I think it’s complete bullcrap. I personally feel that life is inherently stressful. To alleviate that stress, sometimes we need substances. It’s not a sign of a moral weakness – it is simply a realistic acknowledgement of what human nature actually is like. For many people, gay bars function as a pressure release.

The thing is, I strongly feel that we need more alternatives to alcohol as a means of relieving stress. Realistic alternatives – if people can get rid of all of their stress through, for example, yoga alone? Great! More power to them! But it is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Conversely, alcohol is not a one-size-fits all solution either. That’s one reason that I believe that we need to legalize and socially accept more varieties of drugs rather than only sanctioning one of the most dangerous drugs for recreational use.3

I’m not a fan of alcohol. But, like I said, we all need a pressure release, so if alcohol works for you and you aren’t addicted to it, I’m not going to judge you. And like I said in my previous entry, I enjoy gay bars. We’ve fought long and hard struggles for the right to have gay bars; I’m not about to say that we can’t enjoy them.

I do find it disturbing, though, when one of the most important aspects of our community revolves around such a dangerous drug. When I read the cold, hard facts about alcohol and then go to the gay bar and see young men and women thinking that fun can only be found in a drug that is so dangerous, it doesn’t sit well with me. It’s highly addictive, its social impact is very negative, it is the only drug from which withdrawal causes death, etc. But what can I do about that without sounding like a moralistic prick?

Because we all need to have fun in a community-centric space, I believe that the community desperately needs alternatives to alcohol-centric social activities. Queer sober spaces are a lot of fun, and we need more of them, but I definitely feel that we need even more alternatives. If it were up to me, I would start a gay cannabis coffee shop. Unfortunately, this country places a drug that is less harmful and addicting than alcohol on a Schedule I (equivalent to heroin) classification. God, irony fucking sucks, doesn’t it?

That, however, doesn’t solve the issue of social spaces for queer youth. As much as I love pot, I definitely think that it, and other drugs, are suitable for people who are 18+. I was lucky in that I had a lot of options in high school compared to most queer youth, so I’ll have to come back to that and describe what it was like for me.

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  1. I did all of those, of course. [↩]
  2. I was lucky in that I was able to quit cigarettes on my own. [↩]
  3. Other reasons: It would help restore order to nations that export drugs, it would reduce the corrosive effects of the black market upon urban communities, and it would reduce the staggeringly high number of prisoners – the US incarcerates people for simply possessing drugs. [↩]
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Simba

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Posted by maxporter on May 23, 2011 – 12:38 PM
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I got a stuffed Simba for my fourth or fifth birthday, when I lived in a school district with a large d/Deaf population. I slept with him every night, but during the day, I was too busy playing with the other deaf kids on the playground to pay him any mind.

He accompanied me on our move West. Other than my younger sister, I didn’t know any other deaf kids in this new town. During the first day of school in the Rockies, my teacher led me into the classroom and said something. The entire class said something, then waved to me. Nobody signed or cued! I was immediately overcome with fear and walked out of the room.

So, alone in a world full of children who moved their mouths a lot, Simba became one of my most constant companions. Then, at some point, I discovered the mountains and trees. Thanks to the combination of toys, nature, my younger sister, and my translators, I gradually found footing in this strange new environment full of hearing kids. I became self-sufficient and adjusted to life as a solitaire.

Years after I came to think of myself as a mountain kid with a niche in his hearing school, my parents asked me if I would like a cochlear implant. I said yes. Needless to say, it changed my life. I slept through my birthday because of the sedatives, I couldn’t swim for the rest of the summer, and it hurt to put on a shirt for months.

Soon after I got my cochlear implant surgery, I found a round, flat magnet. I taped a piece of wire to it so that it looked like the electrodes that a surgeon threads through the cochlea. I then cut open Simba’s head and stuffed the magnet into his head. Next, I asked my mother to sew his head shut. She humored me and found thread that matched his color. From that point onwards, Simba was like me: he also had a cochlear implant! Somehow, it made me feel less alone.

Gradually, I forgot about Simba and I got used to my cochlear implant. But, even though it became easier to communicate with hearing people, I never quite felt as if I fit in Hearing culture. To this day, I consider hearing to be an “extra” sense that enables me to enjoy listening to music and helps me to get by in an audist world. When all is said and done, though, hearing is not strictly necessary. Growing up deaf helped me realize that, and I am extremely grateful for the fact that my parents didn’t implant me early.

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Gay Bars

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Posted by maxporter on May 22, 2011 – 1:52 AM
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Now that I am over 21 years old, I’ve found that there’s a strong emphasis upon gay bars as a central facet of gay life. And that bothers me.

To an extent, alcohol is everywhere in popular culture; there’s no escaping it. Think about how many people go to the bar for happy hour after work, for example. And think about how common it is to just pour a bottle of wine for guests without thinking about it. In a sense, it’s not just a ‘gay’ issue; it’s a straight issue. For a lot of people, alcohol is an essential ingredient to socialization.

However, I think that the cultural emphasis upon alcohol is magnified in LGBT culture: for a lot of 21+ LGBT people, bars are a primary means of socialization. Because straight culture is the ‘default’ culture, straight people have all these options to choose from when they want to socialize, and they don’t have to worry about others reacting in horror when they hold hands while walking their dogs in the park or whatever. In contrast, gay people have precious few options for socializing or expressing themselves. Therefore, in a lot of areas, gay bars are one of the very few places where 21+ gay people can relax and just be themselves.

I rarely talk about alcohol in real life – I’m not going to be a debbie downer at a party.1 But it’s my blog, so I do feel that it needs to be said that the inherently harmful qualities of alcohol means that, if gay bars are the only way people can socialize with each other rather than simply being another activity on their menu of possible outings, there’s a problem.

Another problem with the emphasis upon gay bars is the fact that bars are 21+ in the US. Where does that leave youth? If going to gay bars is a marker of gay culture, that means waiting for years before you’re allowed to “really” participate in the scene. How unfair is that?

And then there’s the issue of paying exorbitant amounts of money to have fun. Actually, as much as I love the densely populated East coast cities, this is one problem that I have with them: sometimes it feels like there’s precious few activities to do for free. A lot of times, I felt like I had a false choice: spend a lot of money having fun, or stay at home. That’s pretty screwed up, in my opinion.

Gay bars are not bad in and of themselves. Even though I don’t enjoy drinking, I go to them because they are a lot of fun. And it is important to have enough personal freedoms that we can choose to go to a gay bar if we want to. But we do need more options for socialization.

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  1. Basically, I firmly believe that many people are misled to believe that alcohol is a ‘safe’ drug, but it absolutely is not. There are much safer drugs out there than alcohol: less addictive, less physically damaging, less psychologically damaging. [↩]
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Learning Foreign Languages

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Posted by maxporter on May 18, 2011 – 12:02 AM
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For years, I’ve been wanting to learn a different language – preferably Spanish, because I live in an area with a large population of Spanish-speakers. I’d like to be able to read the local newspapers and to speak with my neighbors to understand everything that is going on in my larger community. Also, I want to work with at-risk LGBT youth, and, given where I live, I think it’s utterly naive to expect that all of them will feel comfortable talking to social workers in English. However, I’ve run into problems whenever I’ve tried to learn another spoken language.

Because I’ve always been mainstreamed, my teachers have approached the matter from a Hearing-centric perspective. To them, speaking and listening are among the most important aspects of learning a language, if not the most important. Of course, I completely disagree – after all, I didn’t need to hear to learn English.

I began to learn English when somebody gave me a book and I quickly devoured it. That book led to another, and another, and another, until I was reading at 8th grade level in 4th grade and college level in 8th grade. The fact that my parents used manual communication rather than straight-up oralism also helped, but I definitely am grateful for books. That’s why I don’t understand why on Earth hearing people put so much emphasis on speaking and listening exercises – why not just let us read and write? As a result, I became bitter for many years and thought of spoken languages as “Hearing people languages” until I realized that it’s illogical of me to not think of English in the same manner. That’s another post for another day, though.

Classrooms, in my opinion, also tend to be very sterile environments filled with stupid games. I would be a lot happier with a more immersive experience. For example, I learned ASL by going to Deaf camp and fending for myself. At first, I knew very basic signs like “thank you” and “please.” Staff members who knew manual communication translated for me during the first year. Then, after eight years of going to that camp every summer, I could carry on more complicated conversations in ASL.1 When all is said and done, I don’t care what this piece of grammar is called; I don’t care about the boot drawing that illustrates how to conjugate verbs; I don’t want to practice the most incredibly awkward conversations in the world. I just want to be thrown into the language and figure things out on my own.2

Sadly, queer issues got in way during the only time that I’ve ever come close to a language learning experience that would have been close to what I wanted. I took a Spanish course at the community college in my home state, and our teacher was a native Spanish speaker who had immigrated from a Spanish-speaking country – I forget which one. She was very big on contextualizing the language within the various Spanish-speaking cultures and wanted to work towards an English-free classroom.

I really liked the class and was looking forward to finishing it. But then, one day, my Spanish instructor was teaching us about pronouns. She pointed at everybody in the room and said either “el” or “ella.” Well, she pointed at me and said “ella” – at that point, I was an androgynous femmy twink. Then the entire class turned around to scrutinize me. All I could do was stammer. It didn’t matter that she was wrong when she read me as female; I was still too scared to go back to Spanish class because my home state is super homophobic and is extremely hostile towards androgynous people. I dropped out of the course with no explanation.3

Lately, I’ve been thinking about trying again. It’s true that I’ve run into a lot of problems in the past and that language education in the US is, in my opinion, awful. But that’s become a poor excuse for me to keep deferring my goals. When all is said and done, I want to learn Spanish for the reasons that I mentioned. I know I’ll probably have a terrible accent, but I’ve come to peace with that. As long as I can communicate with others without inadvertently saying something completely different, I’m okay with having an accent – I have one in English, too. What’s more important to me at this stage is learning how to read the local Latino paper and carrying on basic conversations with my neighbors; I can always improve my spoken Spanish later.

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  1. The problem is that I haven’t really communicated in ASL since I was 15, save for one year in 2009, so I’ve forgotten it. I’m confident that, if I had stayed immersed in the Deaf community, I would have continued to improve my grasp of the language. [↩]
  2. Incidentally, this applies to English, too – in fifth grade, we learned how to diagram sentences. I hated it. To this day, I couldn’t be arsed to tell you the difference between the subject and the object. All I care about is the fact that I know how to make sentences sound right; I don’t want to split hairs with terminology. [↩]
  3. Looking back, I could probably have handled the situation a lot better, but it was a really difficult summer for me in a lot of respects. [↩]
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It’s just a hobby, after all

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Posted by maxporter on May 14, 2011 – 4:03 AM
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It’s about 3:40 am in the time zone where I just came from, so I probably shouldn’t be posting to my ‘serious’ blog in this state. But I’m restless and eager to say something, so here I am.

I wanted to give you guys an update on this post about my changing relationship with the Internet. A friend of mine and I talked about it a little and she wrote an entire post about blogs. She says that:

In large part, I write this because I myself value from this discussion. I might contend that the completion of the thought process isn’t communication or discussion, as maxporter contends, but articulation.

I thought about it some more, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I agree with her.

For one thing, I realized that there are other places on the Internet to discuss things. I tend to categorize my online use: Tumblr is for pretty pictures, LiveJournal is for personal blogging, etc. It’s okay for me to have a space where I just talk; I can find a more two-way avenue of communication elsewhere on the ‘net.

And it did remind me that I enjoy blogging for blogging’s sake. The happiest that I’ve been with this blog was when I decided to do NaNoBloMo – I posted once every single day for 30 days. The point was just to keep generating new content and to keep writing. I enjoyed that, and I hope that others gained some enjoyment from it as well. The more I think about it, the more I think that blogging is largely a “build it and they will come” type of endeavor. If you don’t write anything, of course nobody will read it. But if you write posts, people may or may not read them.

Now, I’m going to be honest – I have mini existential crises pretty regularly. To me, changing my mind is good because it’s a sign that I’m alive: it means that I am growing and evolving into a better person. (Hopefully.) That being said, part of why I felt a little bit of uncertainty about this blog is because the Internet becoming a hobby rather than my primary means of socialization. I feel that, for me, it’s a much healthier relationship.

But it does mean rethinking how I blog and so forth. In the long run, it actually may be a good thing for this blog. If I’m not obsessively counting hits and attaching my self-worth to how many blog readers I have but am instead treating it as an outlet that I engage in for pleasure, I feel less pressure to produce posts with Earth-shattering insights.

And, with that realization, I don’t feel like I need to write a jaw-droppingly good conclusion. Hopefully this will suffice for now.

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On Belonging and Scapegoating

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Posted by maxporter on May 12, 2011 – 11:28 PM
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In my previous entry, I mostly talked about the positives of urban life. Well, let me tell you: I have some problems with urban life.

Philadelphia Gayborhood street signPersonally, one of the biggest problem with cities is that they sometimes feel like the only place where some minorities can be accepted. When I was a teenager, I fantasized about moving to the city as an adult. I have a theory that this is common among LGBTQ teens in particular: people don’t feel like they can build a safe and loving community in their intolerant home towns, so they dream about joining a pre-existing community in a big city. It got me through high school, but now its unfairness doesn’t exactly sit well with me.

I’m glad I was able to experience living in cities, but the problem is that it’s not the right choice for everyone. Some people would genuinely prefer to live in a three bedroom house and run an organic farm than deal with the daily grind of living in a city. But if living in a rural area also means giving up certain civil liberties, it’s understandable that people sometimes feel like they have no choice. That’s why I say it’s not fair to expect every single minority in the US to live in a city. Plus, even though I’m okay with living in a city, I have family and friends in the reddest of red states. Even though I live in a city, I’m not willing to feel like I’ve been exiled from my home.

Another problem that I have with cities is that they can be bubbles. Maybe I just had bad luck with the people that I met, but a lot of city folk that I met would talk about things like Constance McMillen being prevented from bringing her girlfriend to prom as if it is only something that could happen in the boonies. (Many city folk didn’t even bother to distinguish between locales – if it happened outside of the city, it didn’t particularly matter where it took place because, to city folk, everything outside of a city is the same: trees and roads.) They would then talk about how glad it makes them to live in a diverse and accepting city. Well, I think it’s hypocritical to praise cities too much because cities can be super intolerant places too. For example, during this past year, at least one trans woman was killed and another trans woman was beat very brutally with a glass bottle in the gayborhood, which would probably have surprised my overly optimistic/naive teenage self who thought that cities accepted all queer folk.

The more that I think about it, though, the more I think that this isn’t a problem unique to cities. I’ve met many small town folks who also tend to think that bad things only happen elsewhere. They blame all of society’s ills on the ugly side of cities. Some people from small towns don’t appreciate all the complexities of city life and think of all cities as being the exact same: buildings and people. They complain about cities being cold and unfriendly, but in most cases, the problem is that the small town person did not take the time to learn the etiquette that governs the city and simply expected everyone to behave just like people back home. Whether it comes from a small town person or a city person, superiority complexities bother me in general.

The problem is, if people scapegoat one type of area, it creates the illusion that nothing bad ever happens in their home. That, in turn, makes them feel good about living in complacency rather than actually fixing the problems at home. For me, that’s not enough: we have to solve problems in cities and in small towns instead of just thinking that bad stuff only happens in one place or another.

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City Life

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Posted by maxporter on May 10, 2011 – 4:30 PM
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City Skyline

As I take a break in packing boxes to move out of this coastal city, I’ve been reflecting upon my experiences of living in cities. I’ve been living in this state for a total of five years at this point, and I spent three of those years in the city.

One of the things that I enjoy most about city life is obviously the diversity. To be honest, like many people who grew up in a small town and then moved to the city, I initially engaged in some tokenism: I enjoyed simply seeing people who are different than myself on the streets and making friends with others who had completely different upbringings than I did. But, as the novelty of being in a heterogenous community wore off, I realized that diversity gave me more tangible benefits because people know how to deal with others who are different from themselves.

In the city, I have met many strangers who know about deafness. Even better than that, people understand how to treat those who are different from themselves even if they have not met a deaf person before. Usually, I have to go into a long explanation of how to interact with me, but here, I meet more people who understand. Because they have interacted with a variety of people from a young age, very few things can shock a typical city dweller.

The difference is especially clear when I contrast my experiences in the city to my experiences back home. I come from one of those upscale liberal mountain towns where everyone is very good at putting on an appearance of being liberal but don’t always put it into practice. It was one of the only counties in the entire state that voted blue, but people still sought out others like them instead of talking to strangers. Pretty much everyone in my family’s social circle were alike, and they were all privileged people.

I would say that, overall, I come from a supportive community, but I felt like a token sometimes: others could say that they are very open-minded and accepting because they accept me. The problem with the people in my hometown is that there’s an ultimate goal inherent to becoming friends with me: instead of enjoying my company because they value me, I become a curiosity, an exotic item who can answer as many questions as one desires. In the city, I am taken as a person upon the basis of my merits and flaws instead of feeling like a zoo animal.

City life isn’t perfect, and I still debate moving out of the city. When it comes down to it, there are definitely aspects of city life that I dislike, but for me, the benefits outweigh the cons.

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