Blake Morgan Is Bi!

Happy Monday! I'm on a roll this morning: lunches made, kitchen swept, laundry folded. I have a little over 30 minutes to drink some tea and write so I can exercise for 30 min. and still get to work at a reasonable time. Can every morning feel this good?

Because of my time crunch, this will be a short blog post in homage to the writers of Madame Secretary, which I've been watching solo on Netflix (Sonia avoids political shows).

After working together for three years, Blake Morgan, assistant to Tea Leoni's Secretary of State, finally came out to her. Any queer person watching knew this character wasn't just a straight guy. There was something truly satisfying about this revelation.

Blake Morgan is awkward. He's been burned. He maintains his right to hold some thing or things sacred, and decide himself when he wants people in his inner circle. He'll tell you what he wants you to know when he's ready, and not before.

Plus, he's a dashing dreamboat. He's a bi guy I would've gone for in a heartbeat.

One of my first books after beginning to date women was Look Both Ways (NYTimes review). It gave me confidence but not necessarily a language, or a way of talking about bisexuality to gay (especially lesbian) people I knew or my Christian parents.

Among lesbians, beginning in college, I was an outsider. If they suspected I had crushes (oh, did I have crushes!), I was dismissed as one of the silly straight experimenters. I even thought of myself that way.

Among my straight Christian family, I was already an outsider with my education and liberal views. Add feminism, then bisexuality and eventually moving in with a woman & the bisexuality tends to get lost. It becomes a fuzzy stepping stone rather than a part of my identity to choose and fully own.

Thank you, writers of Blake Morgan. It was a rare pleasure to see a bisexual character on television whose sexuality is secondary to his work ethic, determination and adorably anxious overachieving.

I liked this character because he bucks the "all-out, all the time" mandate from LGBTQ leaders like Dan Savage. I see where they're coming from, but I also think it's a little bit like asking your black friend to represent all black people whenever you have a question that concerns "the black community." It's not his or her job, just like it's not my job to represent all queer people, all the time.

Like "the black community," maybe the "LGBTQ community" is less a community and more of an umbrella that serves its political purpose. I'm under it. Is that enough?

Parker (Part 2): On Being Organic

Parker is taking a "legitimate" (his word) acting class so that he can make better porn.

When we talked a few weeks ago, he was engrossed in a scene from the play Edmund by David Mamet, which he'd been working on for class.

He described Edmund as "born on third base," which he had to explain to me because I immediately went to the baseball-sex metaphor, which doesn't even make sense here. He likened "born on third base" to "born with a silver spoon in your mouth." Ok, got it.

In the course of the play, this family man (you get it: picket fence, office job) "in a flourish of self-centered, willful badness, casts off all of these trappings." Those are Parker's words, too. He's doing some casting off of his own these days.

The first fifteen minutes of our conversation was dominated by Mamet's play: the storyline, the description of the scene Parker is working on, and a little background on the class. Most of the other students are recent university graduates looking for connections, help with their showreel or insight into their portfolio. They're not sure if Parker is kidding when he says he acts in porn.

He's taking the course for two reasons: to get more skills as an actor and to make better porn. He wants to push himself to create something that's a little more beautiful.

"I would say that 99% of the time, the sex is just improvised," Parker said. "Just let it roll. Do what feels good, do what feels natural. If there's narrative involved, you'll get a script. If there's not, you just arrive and fuck."

Here was my chance. "There should always be a script!" I interjected. "I think most women would agree with me." Finally, I had the ear of someone in the industry. Why don't they all know this?

They do. "I think most people would agree with you," Parker said. "But here's the thing, they're not going to pay for a script when they can just say, 'ok, here's the set. You're fucking him. These are the positions. And um, yeah. Go for it.'" 

Sonia, who was making breakfast in the kitchen as Parker and I spoke on Skype, disagreed with me about the script. She told me later that she found it incredibly sexy, the idea that porn could be that natural. But of course, so much of what we've seen looks neither natural nor particularly enjoyable. As a result, it hasn't been a big part of our sex life.

Can porn be life-affirming? Yes, and! If it's going to be, we need smart, articulate people in the industry with a nuanced understanding of gender, sexuality and the cornucopia of possible acts of sex (Happy Thanksgiving!).

He talked about the challenge presented each day by his work:

Because the scripts are so loose, as loose as they are, the challenge is the big thing for me. I really enjoy being in that place and not being comfortable, and then being like 'I have to figure this out. This is difficult. How can I make this as good as it can be? How can I bring this to life?' I enjoy the creative elements of it: going through the script, seeing what I can put onto this. That's fascinating. Then, I really enjoy the physical performance side of fucking on-screen. That is terrifically enjoyable to me. 

He also talked about the path that led him to porn. The serendipity reminded me of the early days of my nonprofit organization: one person led to another led to another, and eventually you sat down across from the person who would help you realize your dream. But that explanation is too neat for Parker.

He described his continual progression -- from BDSM and a realization of gender politics, to the end of a relationship, to a party where he met a director, to other directors and eventually someone who would show him how to become an escort in a safe way -- as "little grains of sand that build the steps that I'm climbing up."

He wants me to resist neat stories, and warned about the easy meta-narrative that would do his story a disservice. "I wouldn't be in the position I'm in now without all those little details, and swimming my way, stumbling my way through gathering them up."

Parker is a philosopher who is still unsure whether words can serve his journey. He lives with depression and anxiety, half-imagined careers, memories of relationships that went from dynamic and challenging to stuck. Everything pulls him away from the trappings of Edmund at the beginning of the play.

"I've come to the realization that that's not how life works, you can't just will yourself" to have a certain career or life, he reflected. "You can't take the resources you have and decide to go from here to there. 'I'm going to go there, be that.' One of the reasons porn worked for me is because it's been organic."

I'm pretty sure Parker meant by organic, natural development or growth. But organic also connotes, "relating to living matter." The body. That rang truer. 

This man is a thinker. I remembered why I liked him so much, why we never ran out of things to talk about when we were nineteen and our world was just beginning. 

Although he's thinking about porn, and thinking about it in nuanced and artistic ways, the act of it may provide a little relief, an opportunity to be pure flesh. I wonder how often most of us live in our physical bodies this wholly. 

Sex or not, the experience of being wholly physical must produce an afterglow.

"When you come away from a day of filming and you feel like it's gone well, you're so buoyed up, it's so great. Teamwork is oftentimes really enjoyable...when the teamwork is working, it's kind of buzzing. You're in it together and the engine is rolling. That is exhilarating."

Parker (Part 1): New Frontier

When I first met Parker, we were 19-year-old undergraduates at the University of Westminster in London. 9/11 had just happened.

A few days before, I'd been sitting in a London hotel room with my mother the night of September 11, 2001, and I came out for the first time -- as agnostic. Through her careful protests, I shared my ideas about how the universe might work, based largely on James Redfield's The Celestine Prophecy.

Then I put my mother on a plane back to the States. I was on my own for the first time.

Parker and I met in a drab college common room on the ground floor of a narrow building in the heart of the Victoria neighborhood in central London. A hundred undergraduates were crowded in for orientation, the anxiety and excitement palpable. We all sat in uncomfortable chairs in a circle around the edge of the room, international students and first year Brits. Our lives were just beginning.

I remember looking around the circle of faces, deciding whom to befriend. In my newly empowered state, with mixed results reinventing myself in my first two years of college, I was determined to do this study abroad thing right. I chose Parker, a gorgeous boy with the cheekbones of a god, and a young woman with a tie-dyed shirt and a pierced labret.

The three of us processed the aftermath of 9/11, ate mushrooms for the first time, head-banged in grungy basement bars and danced all night in cavernous clubs. We also ate meals together, watched movies and wondered about the world. By the end of my four months in London, they were my closest friends.

My senior year of college, Parker asked me with some reverence for a phone date. I was sure he was going to tell me that he was in love with me, which meant he was probably going to come out to me (that was usually how it worked).

Instead, he told me that he was exploring BDSM, that it was a part of him. He could share magazines to help me understand, if I wanted. It seemed important to him that I understand.

This was a new frontier, but I didn't flinch. It was like my friends from high school who came out as gay or admitted to abortions despite our years of Catholic education: I knew their hearts and knew all of the pieces of their decision-making. I could not find fault with them; instead, I needed to expand my perspective.

Something similar happened a few weeks ago. I shared my blog with Parker and he had some things to share with me, too: he'd taken up acting in porn in Berlin and working as an escort. I suspected he was queer or bisexual, too, so I asked if I could interview him.

Parker went to school for architecture and pursued careers in art writing and video game design before embracing a life of sex work within the past year. The new frontier for me here was not the fact of the sex work -- I've known anecdotally that there are plenty of people doing sex work who choose it and enjoy it.

The new frontier was that I hadn't loved anyone in the industry. I hadn't had the chance to see how the work fulfilled them in a way similar to how I feel fulfilled in my own work. I hadn't explored big questions like love, ambition and satisfaction with someone who is both a fantastic critical thinker and has found peace and presence in sex work.

I haven't let Parker speak in this first post, but you'll meet him and read his careful analysis and irreverent skepticism in the few that are coming.

It felt important first, to say: I love him, and I'm unsure if we can ever be truly fair to a subject we love. I'll do my best.

Children Are So Cruel

One of the reasons that I started this blog was to have documentation of my relationship, as a queer adult, with my parents. I hoped that documenting the episodes of our relationship as it changed would give me perspective, and perhaps give others comfort.

There were some pitfalls and minor breakthroughs in encounters and conversations with my parents last year, and yet each of them felt like an echo of something that had happened before. I worried we were going in circles rather than breaking new ground.

I have little interest in circles.

About a week and a half ago on a Sunday, my parents joined Sonia and I for When the Rain Stops Falling (NYT review here).

The visit came about following a series of increasingly bitter emails between my mother and I last winter; after the dust settled, my father asked if they could come for a visit and see a play. It was a tradition I'd instituted in my early days in the city, a way of spending time with them and giving them a little exposure to worlds and ideas beyond what they're used to.

There are no plays in the summertime, so we were able to put it off.

I woke before eight the Sunday they came. Sonia had sprained her ankle, so my original plan was thwarted: a quick tour of the apartment followed by brunch and walking around the city. We adjusted, and I started cooking shortly after nine.

We'd have time between brunch and leaving for the play. I texted my dad to bring his drill. Our apartment walls seemed to be made of granite and I was having trouble getting our curtain rods up. That would give us something to do, and I know my dad enjoys few things more than a practical task involving tools. He was eager to help.

It was a brisk fall day, and I met them in front of our apartment complex, and led them inside. My mother wore purple and a determined smile. Dad was a little uncomfortable in a light suit, which he managed to sweat through before the play. They claimed to be impressed by our apartment building.

I've loved every place I've lived in the city, and my mother has done her best not to criticize them when visiting. The last place, she was most concerned by the stairwell, which she claimed was a fire hazard. It probably was. My parents built their home dream home by the time they were thirty-two; they don't understand choosing to live in an old building.

Most of the places I've lived were built in the early 1900s, which I thought gave them charm. I could also afford them.

My parents took their shoes off dutifully, and offered compliments about the apartment to Sonia and I. My mother even brought a gift wrapped in light green paper: a beautiful, heavy silver tray with a tree pattern. Sonia loves trays -- something about the implied luxury, I think -- but we both liked this one. Dad checked out the whole place; mom avoided the bedroom.

When they come for a play, I'm always torn between choosing something like The Importance of Being Ernest, The Lion King or The Nutcracker, and choosing a play I'd like to see. Every time, I choose what I'd like to see, trying within that to find a play as simply beautiful and non-controversial as possible.

Of course, I love theater most when it pushes my own boundaries. I'm inevitably mortified, sitting next to my father during an explicit sex scene or my mother as someone ticks off the reasons God cannot exist. The only difference this time was that Sonia sat next to me instead. My parents were good sports, despite the cursing and dark themes. I was shaken.

"Parents are so cruel," says one character about his mother's silence. This is a play about the secrets parents keep from their children, the secrets that may be horrible but are never as horrible as the silences that are built up around them.

I knew instinctively that the other line was coming, twenty or thirty minutes later, and it did: "Children are so cruel." It's also a play about children and the expectations we set forth for those who brought us into this world, the godlike expectations that are not fair and cannot be fulfilled.

Ok, I cried. A few times.

I was glad to have Sonia in the seat next to me in the final scene, as a father in the year 2039 handed down mysterious artifacts of his family history to his estranged son in a rare meeting. The artifacts passed through the hands of the ancestors and piled on the lap of a young man looking for answers.

We don't get those answers. They are impossible to know, within all those silences. Who were my parents before I got here? What were their desires and demons? Did they learn anything about life or happiness that could ease my journey?

If asked, my father is quick to point to the importance of family as the central value in his life. My mother would say it's accepting Jesus Christ. I don't mean those lessons, the ones they intentionally pass on. Those lessons are nothing more than their own incomplete stories.

I mean the deeper lessons that they haven't yet been framed or even acknowledged, the stories that arise out of their traumas and silences and wonderings.

Sonia would probably say that parents deserve respect, and it is not our right to ask these kinds of questions or try to see our parents this emotionally naked. She told me recently that I'm not fair to them. When she meets them now, absent years of baggage, they seem like genuinely kind people who are making an effort to understand their daughter.

It doesn't feel good to admit it, but she may be right.

Going Into Strangers' Homes

When I wrote arts and entertainment and feature stories a few years back, my favorite part was the interview. I couldn't believe that there was a "real job" that allowed you to invite yourself into stranger's homes, sit down on their sofa, meet their partner and children and proceed to ask them questions about the business, art or hobby that was most central to their lives. I was young, and I rightly recognized it as a privilege.

As I talked to more and more people about this blog, a new project emerged: interviewing ordinary gay people who have found their "gay squared," gay to the power of happy. It looks a little different for everyone.

My parents' generation believed that to be gay was to be sentenced to a lifetime of sadness. That perception is swiftly changing, and it's changing because of the proliferation of gay and queer stories and role models.

There are infinitely many ways to live, and it's up to each of us to find a way to live authentically and get as close to happiness as we can. There can't be too many examples of how to do that: the more, the better.

An initial draft of my lead interview questions follows.

1. Can you tell me a little bit about the religious and spiritual background of your childhood? (Thank you, Krista Tippett.)
2. When did your sexual orientation begin to emerge, and what did that look like? 
3. Who were the key role models and influences in your life as an adolescent and young adult? 
4. How do you define your sexual identity now, and how did you come to embrace that identity? 
5. Has technology played a role in helping your find partners or like-minded communities? 
6. How have the swiftly changing politics around LGBTQ issues affected your life? 
7. What does happiness look like for you? 

I will always try to see the home of the person I am interviewing; homes can tell us so much about a person. I may offer some in Q&A format, but I prefer the flexibility and depth allowed by feature-style writing. I can't wait to get started.

For ease and momentum, I'll begin with friends and ripple outward into larger networks of diverse gay people of all ages. If you would like to be interviewed, email me at gayhappiness101@gmail.com. I look forward to hearing your story.

Sexual Orientation, Identity & Why I Choose "Queer"

From yesterday's blog: 

Sexuality is a dynamic and lived experience like age, career identity or political party. But if I'm truly committed to Sonia, does it make sense for my sexual identity to reference a bunch of hypothetical lovers I'll never pursue? 

This question merits a little more explanation. In particular, the difference between sexual orientation and sexual identity. 

While looking up definitions for clarity, I found out that the Kinsey Institute is still going strong, and it had a baby!

The mission of Kinsey Confidential is "to disseminate accurate, research-based information geared towards college students."

I subscribed to their podcast. One place this blog could lead me is to a future career in sex education curriculum or advocacy. We need to start educating about sex and sexuality a lot sooner than college, and better navigate difficult conversations with the religious right on the topic. But I digress. 

Kinsey Confidential defines sexual orientation as both sexual attraction and sexual behavior (where you land on the Kinsey scale between heterosexuality and homosexuality) "as well as sexual identity, romantic attractions and behaviors, membership in sexual communities (e.g., lesbian, bisexual, gay, kink, BDSM), sexual fantasies."

In other words, the big picture. Many things are contained within sexual orientation. As far as I can tell, sexual orientation has limitless labels. I can be a "woman-loving-woman submissive" or "a bisexual sex worker who works with men but only has romantic relationships with women" or "a gay man looking only for a couple of bears (exactly two) for a monogamous relationship."

Sexual orientation resists simple definitions. I wanted to offer mine here, but the best I can come up with is "queer cis woman in a relationship with a woman, with broad tastes in fantasyland."

When I think about listing each aspect of my sexual orientation, it's overwhelming in the same way writing a resume is overwhelming. It's difficult to remember and qualify each line item.

Sexual identity is simpler. According to Kinsey Confidential, sexual identity is "the label that people adopt to signify to others who they are as a sexual being."

Simply, I am queer. Sonia is bisexual (as she reminded me yesterday, mostly because of Ryan Gosling).

Sexual identity is the one that makes me feel like a grumpy, emo teen. A few reasons for this.

First, I resist the implied authority in the definitions. The terms themselves, especially lesbian, gay and bisexual, were defined in another time, probably by white men in power. The definitions haven't changed much.

Second, I resist the simplicity and historical weight in the words. The terms were coined when society had a different view of the fluidity of sexuality. These identities are perceived as static, and humans are not.

To call myself "lesbian" now would create a false narrative in which I was a lesbian when I had relationships with men and that I was being untrue to myself in those relationships. There is also an implied discovery that I'm lesbian, which suggests a lack of self-awareness.

This was not my experience, nor do I think it's the experience of the majority of broadly-defined queer people today. We know what sexual identities and orientations exist, and we try them on for size earlier and earlier. Then, we love who we love, with increasing impunity.

I choose "queer" for two reasons. First, in that it reappropriates a word that had a negative connotation in the past, it is pushing our language forward. Second, it is broad enough to encompass the fluidity of sexuality as it unfolds over a lifetime.

True Sexuality, Insufficient Words

Two questions this morning.

Is sexuality an endgame or a lived experience? And who needs to know what you're practicing or what you're fantasizing?

Following last Saturday's family victory, I've been wondering about the word "bisexual." It seemed to get in the way of my parents', and perhaps other family members', willingness to accept that I'd chosen a woman for my partner. It allowed them to have a "this is just a phase" phase, when they could hope I'd eventually choose a man.

It made them less kind to the women that I've dated, and less accepting.

When I used the word "bisexual" when I came out to my parents in 2009, I thought it prudent. I'd just met the first and only woman I'd ever dated. I was 26. Chances were, we wouldn't end up together, and I was still attracted to (some) men.

Lately, I've discarded "bisexual" and been careful with "queer" because it seems that the most relevant piece of information that I want people to know is, "Sonia is my partner." So maybe, "gay"? For simplicity or even advocacy, do I need to embrace a "gay" (or "lesbian") label if I'm going to spend my life with a woman?

The short answer is, of course not. Sexuality is a dynamic and lived experience like age, career identity or political party. But if I'm truly committed to Sonia, does it make sense for my sexual identity to reference a bunch of hypothetical lovers I'll never pursue? Is it even fair?

On a recent Savage Lovecast, Dan Savage advised a poly guy to consider coming out in a way that gay people used to do in the (bad) old days. Basically, let the parents meet the partner as a friend first. They'll chat about vacation spots or dinnerware or job woes and grow to really like the partner without burdening them with the responsibility for your newly revealed sexual identity.

The guy is dating a couple, but he hasn't yet come out to his family as bi or poly. Dan's almost-always-100%-on-point advice is:

The first order of business is to come out to your parents' as bi. It's unfair to the couple that you're involved with to make them the focus of that. "Hey, here are my friends. I'm fucking them both. Ta-da!" That will put this couple that you're dating in a very uncomfortable position, particularly if your parents do the pivot that a lot of conservative parents do, and get angry at the romantic partner or partners of the kid who's just coming out. 

Dan advises the guy to come out as bi and introduce his parents to the couple as friends (in no particular order). Then, when he's ready to have the poly conversation, he can reference that nice couple they met the other night. "That can help lay the groundwork for creating the fissure, the little crack in your parents' brain that you can drive the wedge into, to open their minds."

I could have lived a parallel life in which I grew to be 34 without having once talked to my parents about sex (if we had anything like "the talk," I don't remember it). Talking about sexuality, in that it is proximal to talking about sex, is not done in our family. If you respect your parents, you simply pretend that it doesn't exist.

Dan's advice to the poly guy was comforting in that it reminded me that each of us can decide exactly how we come out to each person, what the steps are and how much we reveal.

The flip side of the coin is overwhelming. If I had to create a strategy like this one for each coming out -- to a coworker, to a cousin, to a new acquaintance -- I wouldn't have time for life or work. Perhaps parents are the only people worthy of a strategy.

For everyone else, you just have to decide upon the words, a little piece of wrought language weighed down with the expectations and interpretations of generations before you. An insufficient phrase that is as close as you can get.

Which is why I'm sticking with, "This is my partner, Sonia," until further notice. It's the thing I'm sure of.

It's as truthful as I can be.

"This is my daughter, and her partner."

In a long walk through the city on Saturday morning, I listened to Krista Tippett's interview with Mirabai Bush. She spoke about coming to meditation practice in the 1970's.

"I began to see the basic nature of the impermanence of thoughts as they rise and fall away, and I started taking them less seriously," she said. "It gave me a kind of radical self-confidence: that I belonged here on the planet and that I would be able to understand the basics of how it's all unfolding."

I vowed to keep Mirabai Bush's words top of mind as I steeled myself for unpleasant encounters and anxiety at my cousin's wedding later that day. I would recognize them rise in my mind, and watch them fall.

Armed with this reminder, I pulled on the dress Sonia had ordered me from Rent the Runway, and we set off for the suburbs. The Catholic church was pale and drab. There weren't any flowers and the microphones didn't work.

Sonia and I arrived ten minutes late, entered the sanctuary just as the bride and groom reached the altar and sat in the last occupied pew on the left. No one had told the participants how to turn the microphones on. Even my parents, in the fifth row, couldn't hear a word.

When people clapped a second time, we knew it was over. After thirteen years of Catholic school (K-12) going to mass twice a week, I couldn't tell if it had been a full mass.

After the ceremony, something extraordinary and bizarre happened.

The first pews of people began filing out behind the wedding party, followed by the second row of pews and everyone else. My family -- aunts, uncles, a few cousins and finally my parents -- began to pass by the place where Sonia and I stood.

Everyone was smiling, some tentatively. Sonia and I stepped into the aisle and said hello to them, one by one. I said, "This is my partner, Sonia," after I hugged each aunt and uncle, and most of them hugged her, too.

This partner title is an upgrade, for which I'd asked Sonia's permission on the road to the wedding. We made cowboy jokes.

At previous family gatherings, I'd introduced Sonia as my girlfriend. My mother and aunts call their friends "girlfriends" sometimes, so this led to a little confusion or willful ignorance. Partner felt more permanent. They took it in. They seemed to take her in.

We were in a receiving line preceding the actual receiving line. The line backed up, as they do. We slowed and found things to talk about. Sonia bantered with my aunt about a pillow infomercial; my uncle awkwardly mocked the way I'd said "shopping." It was ok.

At the bar at cocktail hour, my dad introduced us to someone he'd been talking to from the other side of the family. "This is my daughter, Rita," he said, "and her partner Sonia."

After seven years, it was finally working.

One drink later, he revealed that he'd given my brother one of the three family time shares and was feeling guilty about it, especially considering I'd paid my own way to college. He fumbled, clearly unplanned, and asked me what he could do to make it up to me.

I swallowed the feeling of being wronged. I don't have a right to my parents' money or possessions, and I cannot control their generosity.

Sonia and I sat at a table with a few other young couples from the city; my parents were on the other side of the room with my aunts and uncles. A few hours into the dancing, I swayed to a slow dance with my dad.

When I announced that we were leaving shortly thereafter, mom pulled dad across the dance floor to say goodbye to Sonia. He kissed her on the cheek as they said goodbye.

I hadn't once consciously used the morning reminder: I am not my thoughts. The reminder itself was sufficient to propel me into the day with confidence and resolve.

And something that hadn't occurred to me as possible actually happened: we had a good time.

Ani DiFranco on Family, Happiness and God

Ani DiFranco's music played in my 1987 Honda hatchback on repeat until I knew every word, and then I keep singing along for another few months. This was late high school, early college. Music that I came to love in those early years (it was exactly Fleetwood Mac, Ani DiFranco & Leonard Cohen) became a part of me. 

She was my first example of a cool lesbian, but she wasn't one. 

somedays the line I walk 

turns out to be straight 

other days the line tends to 

deviate 

I've got no criteria for sex or race 

I just want to hear your voice 

I just want to see your face  

their eyes are all asking 

are you in, or are you out 

and I think, oh man,what is this about? 

tonight you can't put me 

up on any shelf 

'cause I came here alone 

I'm gonna leave by myself —from "In or Out," released on Imperfectly, 1992 

That was her testimony on her third album, and she claimed the labels "bisexual," and "queer," over the years. She wrote songs about love and sex with men and women.

I didn't subscribe to music magazines. The Internet was still infantile. I listened to Ani's albums in the late 1990s and early 2000s. She affirmed my own advocacy (I had friends who were gay), but I wasn't seriously thinking about dating women at the time. I was straight. I just loved her music. She was a poet, like me.

Not So Soft. Puddle Dive. Not a Pretty Girl. Little Plastic Castle. These albums gave me the anthems that smoothed my rough ride into becoming an adult woman. When it was safe enough and armed with Ani's strength, I practiced Hollaback from sheer rage.

So why did I feel self-righteous, in the early 2000s, when I learned that she'd married a man? It was never outside the realm of her possibility. She hadn't deceived us.

Now, she lives with a husband and two children, Petah and Dante, in New Orleans. If you're going to quiet your indignation, get a picket fence and still practice advocacy (she canceled a show in NC this year to protest their anti-LGBT law), that's the town to do it in. A town worthy of her.

Love or happiness have quieted her rage. "I have that typical songwriter’s disease," she said in an interview with Adam McKibbin in 2009, "where when I have a problem, I reach for my guitar, and when I’m happy, I’m busy being happy." 

After her daughter was born in 2007, she wrote her best love song. 

So I'm beginning to see some problems 

With the ongoing work of my mind 

And I've got myself a new mantra 

It says don't forget to have a good time 

Don't let the sellers of stuff power enough to rob you of your grace 

Love is all over the place 

There's nothing wrong with your face—from "Present/Infant", released on Red Letter Year, 2008

And where is God in all this happiness? Nowhere. In 1999, she wrote and sang, "Up up up up up up / Points the spire of the steeple / But God’s work isn’t done by God / It’s done by people."

Amen. Good deeds and aspersions alike, on this plane, are practiced by humans alone. 

My spirituality tends to be more in the vein of, if there is a God it exists within us, and the responsibility for justice is on our shoulders. What if we just looked to each other in this way? What if the steeples didn’t all point up? What if they all pointed at us, and we had to care for each other in the way that we expect God to care for us? I’m much more interested in that.” —Ani DiFranco, interview by Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive, May 2000

We do not hold humans to this expectation because humans are incredibly disappointing most of the time. Love is rare; balanced and respectful relationships are rare; altruism might not exist. We can't lift humans up with reverence and worship them, the way we can a myth. 

Ani turns to the atom.

The glory of the atom 

Begs a reverent word 

The primary design 

Of the whole universe 

Yes, let us sing its praises 

Let us bow our heads in prayer 

At the magnificent consciousness 

Incarnate there 

The smallest unit of matter 

Uniting bird and rock and tree 

And you and me  

Oh holy is the atom 

The truly intelligent design 

To which all of evolution 

Is graciously aligned —from "Atom," released on Red Letter Year, 2008

YES. The glory of nature and the universe, what we do understand that boggles the mind, contains plenty of reverence and meaning for me. 

And raising our expectations for humans, that we meet one another eye-to-eye and take greater responsibility for one another's care and just treatment, could contain plenty of holiness. 

My Five Commandments

I know from working with elementary-aged children that no one can keep more than five rules in their head at one time.

Although these are inspired by Gretchen Rubin's Twelve Commandments in her happiness project, I've settled on five that feel right to me. Number 1, 3 and 4 are loosely based on my "Discipline, Empathy and Grace" mantra.

1. Wake up early.

2. Words have meaning.

3. Walk a mile.

4. Look up!

5. Change the backdrop.

Each one of the above strikes me as simple and deep enough to remain resonant. The first is pretty self-explanatory; the second, "words have meaning," is the thing that gets me up each morning. So much evil is rooted in intentionally ambiguous language.

My evolving idea of the sacred includes, first and foremost, a reverence for language. It cannot solve the world's problems. It cannot say even what we most need it to say. But it is the best tool we have, and the more we can agree on the meanings of words, the more we can be speak and be understood.

My third commandment, walking a mile, is a reminder to exercise - literally at the very least walk a mile each day. But also, to walk a mile in another's shoes. I'm working on a blog post right now about queer #BlackLivesMatter leader Patrisse Cullors that will be richer for more time taken. The more distant someone's experience is from mine, the more reading required.

Look up! "When I look down, I just miss all the good stuff / when I look up, I just trip over things." That's Ani DiFranco, on the terrible application of opportunity cost in life choices. For my part, I intend that "look up!" encompass both catching all the good stuff and paying attention well enough that I'm not tripping over things. There's magic in a well-placed exclamation point.

This week is a good reminder that my travel radius has gotten shorter. Walking a mile in another's shoes is easier when you "change the backdrop," by traveling outside of your comfort zone. When I hear podcasts about the Syrian refugee crisis in Greece, my empathy is awakened more because I visited the Temple of Olympus, beside the former psychiatric asylum that is now a refugee camp. Travel and exposure lead to increased empathy and understanding, if you're paying attention.

It's been fifteen years since I was in Greece. It was another lifetime for me, and for that country. I suppose the devoutly religious see change of that magnitude and cling to their religion as comfort.

I see it and say, I need to get out more. There's a lot of work to be done.

Finding Our People

Sonia and I arrived to the New York side of Lake Champlain, Plattsburgh, NY, Saturday night around 8:00pm. Our very first experience was a quick-and-dirty wake-up call to the importance of doing a little research before picking a restaurant.

On the surface, it sounded like just what our tired bones and hungry bellies needed: a marina restaurant on the water just a few miles away serving Italian food. Dominic's at Treadwell Bay Marina. We could sit on the water. Let's go.

We made our way through a packed but silent parking lot, the outdoor tables peaceful and visible just past the entrance.

We opened the door to a cacophony of sound: nearly every table filled with grinning, middle aged white people shouting to one another, their late-teen, early-twenties sons and daughters running around as waitstaff.

We probably would have stood at the front door for fifteen minutes without being acknowledged, except that I can be a pushy bitch when I want to. We asked to sit outside, but the hostess warned us about the water bugs (Sonia hates bugs of all kinds).

No tables inside, either, despite a handful of empty ones in sight, because "He's serving a table of thirty right now. It's a private party," according to an 18-year-old brunette with purple streaks who looked like a deer in headlights.

"Who is he?" I wondered. Whoever he was, the place seemed to be falling apart without him.

I ended up suggesting we sit at the tiny bar, which boasted three (not four) barstools. The hostess thanked us for the idea as she set menus beside a group of very drunk white men. Sonia tapped them on the shoulder to alert them to our presence. They finally moved so we could sit down.

It didn't get better. We ordered drinks, then one of those drunk men -- these are not children, these are people with pension plans and boats -- proceeded to insist on "Three Jager shots" repeatedly for the next ten minutes. He was built like a refrigerator and continued to yell at the kids behind the bar, inches from Sonia's left ear, even after he was told that they didn't have Jager behind the bar.

We told them to pack up the food we'd just ordered and stood outside with our drinks until it was ready. At home, we at quietly as we looked out onto the water of another marina where we were staying.

The view is something. Here's what it looks like in the daytime.

Sonia is really good at planning vacations. I'm lucky.

Today, we're off to Burlington, VT. Home of the Pride Center of VT, Outright Vermont, and too many gay-themed blogs to count (but here's one and here's one and here's a very cool local lesbian comic).

We're ready. I have a feeling we'll have better luck finding some folks we wouldn't mind standing next to in a bar.

Coming Out to Extended Family

Because of my fluid sexuality and the fact that I only see some of my extended family every couple of years, I'm still coming out to some of them, most recently on Tuesday. My aunt, my mother's brother's wife, and my 16-year-old cousin passed through the city to look at colleges, and invited me to dinner.

The women in my family are not kind to one another. I have eight aunts and seventeen cousins, about half of whom are women, and I've never liked the dynamics or behind-the-back conversations. I blended in and seldom contributed, so I heard it all.

This ankle-biting was disguised as having the best interest of the children or the women themselves at heart. Aspersions were cast for having a live-in boyfriend, then for not bringing him around at the holidays. They noticed when kids were spoiled, and whose fault it was. Innocent vanities didn't escape judgement: the aunt who only buys name brand clothes, the cousin who dresses too provocatively for a family gathering.

You get the idea.

This particular aunt is an outcast on my mom's side, which I think may be the reason she's been so kind to me. She's more cosmopolitan than the other women in the family, she knows it, and they resent her for it.

I've always had a soft spot for my 16-year-old cousin. She was the youngest cousin with a gap of 18 years, so she didn't have any of the fun we did, growing up on vacations running around with cousins our own age. She was also an adorable baby at a time when I was starting to wonder if I'd have any of my own.

Shortly after our dinners arrived at the upscale hotel restaurant, I was talking about my sleep schedule. "I've gotten on a 10pm to 6am sleep schedule," I said, "Since my girlfriend Sonia was studying for a test earlier this summer. She's not studying anymore, but I'm still getting up early. I started a blog."

Then, of course, my cousin asked about my blog. In this way, I managed to come out to them without so much as allowing them a breath to process the information I'd shared and ask a more personal question. Who is this girlfriend? How long have we been together? How did we meet?

Even when I dated men, I resisted talking to relatives about my dating life. Thank God, there's only a few of them left who don't know about Sonia. This post-vacation "We've moved in!" postcard should do the trick.

When there was another lull in the conversation, my aunt asked about my work. I'd trained extended family members to do this. I helped start a nonprofit organization, and for years it's all I talked about. The classic distraction: "Hey! Look at all of the cool work I'm doing over here, so you won't ask me about my personal life."

Despite my awkward coming out, a few minutes later, my cousin dropped a comment about her theater teacher's girlfriend. Her theater teacher is a woman. When I told my brother about this exchange, he texted, "Yeah as long as the kids are good, then the old ones did enough."

The kids, the millennials like my cousin, are good. Before we said goodnight, she told me that I was her favorite cousin.

My revelation hadn't changed that.

Fluid Sexuality and Why Everyone Is Queer

The movie Kinsey (trailer here) came out in 2004 and was my first introduction to the idea that human sexuality may exist not as a binary (with bisexuals carefully balancing between the two extremes), but as a fluid spectrum.

Today, there are dozens of internet hacks creating ridiculous surveys to reveal your sexuality to you. The most simplistic I found, at the very top of Google, was by Dr. Epstein.

Doctor of what, I wonder. (Yes, that's mine!)

There were less than a dozen questions about dreams, waking fantasies and real life. Each question had a weight of exactly "1," and they were added up in the end. Because the only difference, for me, was the frequency of sexual activity (much more with Sonia than with a random male), I was bisexual leaning toward homosexual, but with a range that took up nearly the entire chart. 

More thought went into OKCupid's Sexuality Spectrum Quiz, but don't try to take it unless you have an OKCupid account, or you're willing to get one. The questions were more nuanced and reflected a more contemporary understanding of sex and sexuality, but you can't see your results without an account. One of the perks of having a live-in girlfriend is that I don't need one of those anymore. So go have fun, kids. 

Where you fall on the spectrum changes through time. For me, I guess that means that I'm somewhere in the 2-13 range on Dr. Epstein's chart at any given moment in time, which is the same as saying nothing at all.

When I was twelve or thirteen and had my first sexual encounters with my best friend (a girl), I didn't label myself. At some point subsequently, I called those encounters "experiments."

Through high school, college and my early twenties, I was mostly straight. I identified as straight, I sought the attention of men and enjoyed it when I got it. I had at least one phenomenal boyfriend that I grew uninterested in for no good reason, and one good fuck buddy who was too old for me and broke my heart. I enjoyed all of it, and made out with some women, too. 

When I was 26, I met my first girlfriend in the basement bar of a gay nightclub. She hit me like a ton of bricks. Even though I thought it may be a one night stand, I called my best friend Liz immediately afterward, excited and giddy, as though the world had just opened up. 

"Your life story is not your life. It's your story." Who said this? 

I repeat it now because I'm aware of something I could have also said about that one good fuck buddy, who is still a dear friend: "He hit me like a ton of bricks. Even though I thought it might be a one night stand, I called my best friend Liz immediately afterward, excited and giddy, as though the world had just opened up."

Yup. It still works. 

As a result, I called myself bisexual, queer and gay. Now I use "gay" to explain my living situation in shorthand (we're not roommates), but most of the time, I just say, "My partner is a woman," or "Sonia is my girlfriend." 

The Oregon Trail Generation, and the millennials that followed are understanding this fluidity more than any generation. I'm so grateful to have been born into this time. Growing up with the Internet, I was able to find, in each city I lived, work, community and lovers who fit the life I wanted for myself. We can curate our lives with more grace and communicate ideas whose time have come with more speed than ever before. 

On the ground, that means more people identifying as (and joyously reappropriating) queer than ever before. Not only do I not want to be put in your box, but I won't presume to create my own label. I know that I am a mutable and developing being who won't stop changing until I'm dead. 

So let me live how I please. 

Choking on Credal Arguments

Joanna Macy - A Wild Love for the World, an On Being interview with Krista Tippett, stopped me in my tracks yesterday. I stood in the kitchen, frying my mother's zucchini from a too-abundant crop, when I heard Joanna Macy describe becoming devotedly Christian at 16 and how, four years later, everything changed.

"When I went into studies of Biblical history and theology, I began to choke," she said. "I found there was something that I balked at terrifically, which were credal arguments about items of belief, but also any hint of exclusivity, that there were people who were 'beyond the pale.'"

After 13 years of Catholic school (K-12), I left the church by my second year of college. Since that time, I've struggled in my arguments against the Church because I didn't know everything. In Macy's words, I recognized that fallacy. I need not know everything about a religion in order to decide that it doesn't serve my journey.

Senior year of high school, my best male friend, in the moment when I thought he was going to confess his love to me (how many of us have been in that boat), instead came out to me, and made me promise not to tell a soul. We went to the same Catholic school.

Three years later, I learned that a girl I'd known and loved since Kindergarten had had an abortion that same year of high school. Catholic credal arguments against homosexuality and abortion would never trump the innocent struggles of young people I loved, whose high school traumas were linked inextricably to the church calling them sinners in their moments of greatest strife.

According to Catholics, my friends were "beyond the pale." If an institution as powerful as the Catholic church could not offer comfort and support to its own children, honestly trying to navigate the world into which they were born, I didn't want any parts of it.

I've softened in my distaste for the church, the more I've become exposed to its evil stepchild, Evangelism. Where Catholics twist themselves in knots to provide sound reasoning on their credal arguments, Evangelists cater to the same lowest denominator as Fox News. It's all pomp, circumstance and emotionality; they don't even try to develop sound arguments.

My sexuality is intertwined with my spirituality. Both come from love, and from my sense of purpose. About twelve minutes into the interview, Macy talks about falling in love with the Tibetan people because their joie de vivre shone through their hardship so clearly. They are what drew her to Buddhism.

The ever-wise Tippett pointed out how Macy was drawn to the lived experience of the faith before learning more about its tenets.

I want to live my sexuality and life with Sonia in a way that reveals my own joie de vivre, clearly and emphatically, to anyone who is paying attention. It will require more grit and unabashed optimism than I generally wear publicly, but that struggle feels purposeful.

The next step is a picture postcard to the extended family. We'll get a shot on vacation and send it to the extended families and friends, a sort of "We've moved in!" announcement despite the homophobia expressed by several of them.

With the postcard, we'll know officially who's on our team, and the rest of them be damned. At least some part of finding joy in life must be curating the people you choose to have in it.

Vacation begins Saturday!

Sonia Saves the Night

For eight years, college through the age of 27, I was one hell of a waitress. Sometimes it was my full-time gig; other times I used it to supplement my income while freelance writing.

One of my favorite places to work was a big, purple windmill near my parents' house, where they served country cookin' and Greek food, diner-style. The waitstaff was mostly rural and white; the kitchen guys were all Mexican and lived in a single house across the street, sending money back to their families.

I preferred the kitchen guys, even though they flirted with me. It wasn't entirely unwelcome at the time, and they stayed on the other side of the line or kept a respectful distance.

The restaurant never had enough help, which meant more tips for me. I didn't mind. I'd have six to ten tables in a shift, at least one of them an 8-top. It's where I built my multi-tasking skills (a great asset in the nonprofit world). It's also the origin story of the anxiety dream that still haunts me.

When you're running around trying to keep 30+ hungry people content and well-fed, it can get a bit hectic. When you're a pleaser like me, and genuinely want to keep everyone happy, too, it can be an impossible task.

To this day I have dreams that harken back to that time, with additional dream-like elements like the restaurant is on the side of a mountain (I can't get to the table at the top) or I have one table that's outside, but all the doors are locked. Other obstacles pop up along the way - I don't have the right change, the kitchen is out of a particular food or I'm stuck in slow motion.

I have these dreams when my anxiety is piqued. They've been rare since I quit smoking, but I had a few cigarettes Monday night, so I had the dream again. This time, there was a Sonia-related twist.

It was a typical restaurant-dream setting: a sprawling restaurant the size of the wing of a mall, a disgruntled white dude with a mullet who was insistent that I give him $18 cash back from his debit card (no one does this), $15 for him and $3 for his wife. The wife apologized for his rudeness. I left to figure out a way to get cash back and make sure they had the right change.

The usual obstacles came up: I squeezed through the first room, crowded with bodies both seated and walking around, so tight I could barely move through them. Other tables tried to wave me down along the way. I found the cash register, but it was empty.

I squeezed through another room, equally crowded, only to find Sonia, also in a waitstaff apron, with a black check book full of cash. As she counted out the money I needed, I woke up. I didn't even need to get back to the rude guy; the anxiety had dissipated. It was the first time the dream ever ended with a solution before I opened my eyes.

Sonia is good for me. Being partnered is good for me. And because this is the first time in my life I've lived with a partner, it's still novel to wake up from dreams (not to mention dreams in which my partner saved the day) to see her lying next to me.

It's Friday of my first week blogging about gay relationships and happiness, and I'm grateful. Now, if I could only figure out how to get a follower or two...

Discipline, Empathy and Grace

Every January for the past fifteen years, I've made an intention collage. It's an excuse, once a year, to do a crafty project and anticipate the year to come. What do I want to bring into my life? Most collages include pictures of glasses of wine, books I want to read and short phrases about friendship, the future or financial goals.

About five years ago, I simplified. I spent my long, four-hour afternoon paging through magazines for large, beautiful letters to the words discipline, empathy and grace. The experience of making this different kind of collage had a more Zen-like quality. Instead of anxiously looking among all of the possible pictures and words, I skimmed calmly for exactly what I was looking for. The result hung on my wall for years.

I have never been more true to these intentions than in the two months I've been living with Sonia. So we may still be in the honeymoon period; I'll grant you that. Nonetheless, there's no denying the fact: I'm happier, calmer and more productive when I'm partnered.

Discipline

Getting up early has been a struggle since I was a teen. I always have grand plans, which when I lived alone meant setting my alarm for 7:00am and then dozing for at least an hour. That's the worst kind of sleep. I've read the articles, but that didn't stop me from hitting the snooze button half a dozen times. It was a rare day that I jumped out of bed when the alarm went off.

When Sonia and I first moved in together, she was studying for a test that required her to get up at 5:30am. I got up, made breakfast, made the bed. I even motivated her many mornings. When she was finished studying for the summer, I continued rising early. Drinking less helps, too. Sonia doesn't drink, and giving up the weekday brews is good for my waistline and health. Now, I'm getting up by 6:15am to write before work, something I've been meaning do to for years.

Empathy

I picked this trait at a time when I realized I'd broken a woman's heart because I'd allowed the relationship to go on for far too long, even though I knew my own heart wasn't in it. I knew I'd hurt her deeply, but was completely detached through the entire breakup. We weren't able to stay friends. Maybe this is normal, but I carried a lot of guilt. Maybe if I'd broken it off sooner, it could have been less painful.

It's always been easier for me to empathize with a stranger or acquaintance than with someone close to me, but that is changing with Sonia. Daily life together, and two years of dating before that, have helped me to understand what she's thinking and feeling about a situation, even before we talk about it. That doesn't mean I'm going to stop nudging her to be a little more social (like me!), but it has taught me when to back off and let her be Sonia.

Grace

I have never been particularly graceful. Like many aging women, I look back at myself as a teen or twenty-something and can't believe how lovely I was at the time. But I didn't feel beautiful; I felt overweight and awkward and insecure. There's a lesson in there. Now when I look in the mirror, I try to imagine myself at seventy, looking at myself now. I will regret it if I don't revel in my youth and vitality, so I'm learning to toss the self-criticisms aside.

How does Sonia support my gracefulness? Well...she encourages me not to be such a klutz! When we first moved in, I think I stubbed my left, second-biggest toe on every single new piece of furniture we brought into the apartment. Thankfully, I've gotten more used to where everything is in the new place. In all seriousness, I'm working out more -- and more regularly -- than I have since my early 20s, and it feels good. The clothes are fitting the way they should.

One day soon, I'm going to use discipline, empathy and grace to build my own set of Commandments. But for today, I'm just grateful, and yes, happy. This is what it looks like.

Flipping the Script on Christian Parents

I visited my parents last weekend. We hadn't had much contact for the six months prior. My grandmother (dad's mom) was in the hospital.

First, some history. I came out to my parents as bisexual seven years ago, at the age of 27. At some point a few years later, I called myself queer. Now that I'm living with a woman and hoping to spend the foreseeable future with her, I call myself gay.

In the seven years since I came out, my parents have tried to convince me that I wasn't this Other, that I was going through a phase, and/or that I was hurtfully disconnected from God. They also spent a good deal of time being utterly avoidant of my sexuality and related subjects, not unlike when I was a teenager.

For two years (when I was about 30-32 years old), I was single and I'd bring friends to my childhood home. Most of these friends were queer. My parents live in a rural area about 90 minutes outside of the city and some summers, we visited four or five times for barbecues, campouts or bonfires.

In retrospect, I brought these friends home to desensitize my parents to this idea that LGBTQ people were Other. By giving them the opportunity to meet and get to know several diverse, queer friends, I thought I could help them see that we couldn't all be put in some easy box.

But people, especially Christians, see what they want to see. They choose the frame of their pictures, sometimes quite literally.

In April, Sonia and I stopped at my parents' house to pick up a few pieces of furniture that they were getting rid of. We were moving into a new apartment. After we loaded the two bulky chairs and a corner hutch into the back of the UHaul, my mom asked us to turn around for a picture.

(No UHaul jokes, please! We waited two years to move in.)

As I turned around, Sonia was on my left, hesitant. My dad stood to my right. I pulled them both toward me for a picture, and my mom dropped the camera like a hot potato. She'd meant a picture with just me and my dad.

I was furious, and my rage fueled the next several weeks of email boxing between my mother and I, as I tried to set the perimeter for our relationship, and she quoted the Bible to me.

Her approach doesn't make sense. You may lose your oldest child, the only child who lives in any proximity to you, and you can't get it together to form an original or nuanced thought? The more dire the situation, the more she relies on vague Biblical maxims.

Last weekend, following the visit to my grandmother in the hospital, my mother gave me a handwritten card for Sonia. I cringed. I'd received dozens, if not hundreds, of those over the years. I gave her the benefit of the doubt and, when I got home, handed the card to Sonia, still sealed.

Dear Sonia,

I had hoped to see you today, look into your eyes, and tell you that you are loved. All human love is imperfect, mine most of all. I'm sorry if you were hurt by any action or word of mine, they were not conscious or intended on my part. I long for you and Rita to both experience completeness in the One who created us and loves us completely. I pray you will find it in your heart to know that you are welcome in our home and in our hearts.

Love in Christ,

Jillian

She thinks she is some kind of saint. She's known Sonia for over a year, and has not yet acknowledged that our relationship is more than a friendship. How could we possibly feel welcome in a home where we are seen as incomplete, or have to pretend?

I love Dan Savage, and I wish I'd found him sooner. That one year ultimatum for Christian parents, or anyone having trouble accepting an LGBTQ child, is priceless. (Basically, get to acceptance in a year or I'm out of your life.) I'm thinking about calling into his show, but I'm afraid he'll tell me what is obvious to me intellectually: the relationship with your mother is toxic. Cut it off so you can live your life.

I'm getting there. Maybe I'm writing my way there.

Do you think it's possible for LGBTQ children to flip the script on their devotedly Christian parents, or will we never find a common language?

On Humility and Not Knowing Yourself

Gretchen Rubin noted the Voltaire quote, "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good," as a kind of mantra she returned to throughout her happiness project. For those of us with high standards and fair ability to meet those standards, this is resonant. I'm taking it to heart this morning. It's going to be a short one.

Paulo Coelho, late-blooming writer and a kind of mystic to many readers of his book The Alchemist, recently told Krista Tippett that he doesn't know who he is. Keep in mind this guy is pushing 70, a writer with a simple elegance that gives him the aura of a guru.

"To be totally honest, I don't know who I am," he said, "and I don't think people ever will know who they are. We have to be humble enough to learn to live with this mysterious question: who am I? So I am a mystery to myself." Find more and listen at Paulo Coelho - The Alchemy of Pilgrimage.

The idea that we could be humble and recognize that we cannot fully know ourselves has a unique resonance for LGBTQ people, who are so often asked to put ourselves in a box so that the mainstream might understand us better. So that we may be less threatening in our otherness.

For all of our differences, I credit my parents with instilling in me a keen sense of justice and a deep trust in my own mind and heart. And although I used the word "gay" for this blog, I've wrestled with all of the language thrust upon (and yes, often owned and embraced) by LGBTQ people. It's part of the reason it's taken me so long to begin writing about my own otherness.

Although it's early in my own pilgrimage of this blog, I'll pose my first question to you, reader. How do these words: lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer work for you? How have they contributed to or detracted from your own joy in being a person traveling through the world?

Gay Squared

Gay squared: as in, both gay and happy. Is it possible?

After I finished Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project, I decided to start a blog to find out what you think, and share my evolving thoughts on the subject.

The Happiness Project sat on my shelf for almost three years before I picked it up. It’d been given to me by Liz, my best friend from college and a straight woman, at a time when our relationship was strained. I didn’t picked it up for the same reason I never picked up the books called “Finding Your Pathway to God,” and the like, given to me by my mother from the age of thirteen onward. A gift in the form of a judgement.

I finally did pick Rubin's book up, following a yoga weekend, Liz’s alternative bachelorette party, during the summer of 2016. It was a quick read, pleasant and light. I liked the businesslike approach Rubin took to her own life and improvement. It felt familiar. Familiar, too was her self-deprecation, her love of urban life and her too-quick criticism of others, especially those closest to her. What wasn’t familiar, however, was her straight, nuclear family: loving husband, adorable girls, one set of grandparents around the corner, the other across the country but very present.

I’m a 34-year-old queer woman, the daughter of an Evangelical Christian and a Catholic, living with my Korean girlfriend, Sonia, in a major east coast city. Sonia is first generation American and has an actual language barrier with her own parents; my parents and I all speak English, but as you’ll see in future posts, that doesn’t always mean that communication happens.

Rubin’s book brought up some questions for me. What does happiness look like for LGBTQ people who can’t share their happiness with the tribe in which they were raised? (There are still too many of us in that boat.) How do we affirm our happiness in a way that makes it easy for others to see, regardless of creed? Perhaps most importantly, how do we protect our happiness from those who would demean it?

Alongside these questions, for me, is a unique relationship to technology highlighted in Anna Garvey’s article on the Oregon Trail Generation. I was born in 1981. In sixth grade, I typed the log of my science fair project on a typewriter; I stenciled the backboard with stencils purchased at A.C. Moore. The very next year, I typed my science project into our Apple computer and printed the pages out on our dot matrix printer, carefully removing those perforated edges.

As I was growing up, so was the internet. I remember venturing into my first chat rooms in seventh grade, meeting kids like me (at least, I hope they were kids) from around the country, making small talk and feeling the world open up. Prior to that, I’d only had books as evidence of what regular life was like outside my little nuclear family and immediate experience. Books and TV didn’t count, to my mind; that wasn’t regular life.

Now the director of a regional nonprofit, I cut my teeth using online outreach to find constituents at a time when most of my supervisors were still learning what social media was. From then to now, when I have found myself stymied, personally or professionally, I have turned to the web in various forms, whether it’s learning a new application or finding a top ten list of ways to talk to your Evangelical mother. Sonia and I met on OKCupid almost three years ago.

Which brings me to my relationship with you, reader. I'm looking for something, and believe in the discipline of daily writing practice, but it's easier with an audience.

What does gay happiness look like today, and how do we affirm it?

I look forward to sharing my observations, analyses and stories, and reading yours.