I posted this photo
His comment was as follows:"that's so gay or something"
Well, yes, he's right. It's gay or something. No doubt about that. But I didn't feel like that definition belonged to him.
The thing is, though, I have a great love for Amon. He's always been a good person to me. When we come to disagreements, like when he tried to tell me that Ron Paul was the best candidate for prez, we had a productive conversation. Amon listens to me. And that's why I sent him this lengthy response to him comment on my picture:
Congrats on the new baby. I don't even know. It must be something else.
The purpose of this message is to iterate how important it is to be careful about your use of language. When you call something I do "gay," I have no choice but to read it with an air of homophobia. I am not, and I can't underscore this more, calling you homophobic. I am saying that, without knowing the true context, and the basic intention of my appearance in this image, it is rather offensive to hear you call it "gay." I've been abused by that particular word, and as much as I've proclaimed it to be my identity, it has also been used to hurt me; it has been used to make me something less than I am, a human.
I only mean to address this so that we can come to an understanding. "Gay" quotes a desire that is different from the norm. As we both grew up, however, it also came to mean "stupid," "inconsequential," "wrong." These are definitions I resist in my skin. These are the definitions that force many of my "gay" brothers into closets, not because they are merely afraid, but because they know that violence is real; they know that violence is a threat to their lives.
I am one of the lucky ones. Maybe I have been in the right places. Maybe I have been amongst the right straight people who, like you, who are willing to judge me on the simple basis of our own interaction and not on the assumptions we are lead to make about each other. I do not perceive violence in my everyday life. This is not to say that there are not those of us who don't.
To be personal, I would like to propose this to you. It might seem distant, easy to dismiss, but I urge you to pay attention, if for no other reason than that if my parents had listened to this, I would not have had such a hard time accepting myself for who I am. Amon, imagine your beautiful child grows up and discloses to you that she is a man, deep in her heart, or that she is a lesbian, or that she might be bisexual. It happens to countless parents in this country, and many of these children are exiled from their homes, literally made homeless, because their parents don't believe that they can understand. Many of these children are the fucked-up examples of the bad-gay, the person my parents originally feared I would be become when I came out. The children literally, without homes. Or will you be the parent of sublime loving acceptance? So my question is this: which parent will you be? Will you be dismissive, will you deny the truth of your child's self-definition, like my own father? Will you be the callous father, casting your child off to be a drift wood in the tides? Will you be the loving father who is, indeed, a father above all?
I am not, of course, making my advocation unknown. I am who I am, but I have seen so many of the people in my life ruined by the hateful homophobia of their own families. I would suggest, by all means, that you prepare yourself for a charismatic, deep fatherhood, that is nothing if not loving. Without love, you are nothing but a sperm donor. You didn't, after all, carry the child and go through the pain of her emergence.
Your's, with love,
Mike
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