Gay Education

Okay, if you haven't seen this yet... watch and be edified. 

The names have been changed to protect the inocent.

This past week has reminded me why I find dating so challenging in the 21^st century. I will not use names, because it is not my purpose to embarrass or accuse anyone but what I will relate are two actual things that happened to me.

A week ago last Thursday, I got a message from a guy I have been chatting with that he was out near my office visiting. We decided that I could get away for a few minutes so we could grab a cup of coffee and actually meet. He had told me that someone he really cared about had just passed away and so I was glad to meet with him. We had a nice cup of coffee and discussed our lives and what we like to do and I was thinking that I would really like to get to know him, he seemed nice and open and honest. He told me he was going home to head for Tahoe that night for a week and I left looking forward to our next meeting after he was back from Tahoe.

Fast forward to the day before yesterday, Saturday; I am chatting online and I notice that this guy comes online so I say hi. We start chatting and he is using “we” a lot in reference to his trip. He then says in the course of the converstation that “we” left on the previous Sunday for Tahoe, and I thought to myself, that’s odd, I thought he went the Thursday before that, but I let it slide. Well I like to be flirty online, just so it’s clear I’m interested and in response to one of my flirts he says, “too bad I have partners”. I about fell over. You think in the course of a coffee meeting and the preceding “chatting” that we might have mentioned a partner, let alone multiple ones; one down.

So then this past Tuesday, there is a guy I have been chatting with on facebook. I don’t rightly know how we became “friends” there, but we did, and I thought he was cute. We have exchanged several messages back and forth as people do on facebook. On Sunday we were chatting and decided we would get together for coffee after my gym time on Tuesday evening. Monday in a brief chat at lunchtime I discovered that he lived near my office so I suggested lunch Tuesday rather than him having to trek into SF Tuesday night, good deal all around.

Tuesday we had a lovely lunch at a local guilty pleasure of mine. Good conversation, lots of flirty looks and touches. Very promising; we left promising to call each other. Tuesday evening I got home late, and didn’t feel comfortable calling, so I sent a message Wednesday morning via facebook saying that I was unsure how late I could call, but had had a great time and was looking forward to the next time.

In response to my message I got a message saying how I had just disappeared in a whoosh. I responded politely pointing out that I had sent the message he responded to, and said that I was unsure when I could call.

Wednesday evening I had plans and so Thursday during the day, I called and left a voicemail for him. Crickets.

Yesterday evening, I am online cruising around and I notice that he is online, so I send him a message. He says “Hi” back and so I think, okay everything is fine. I ask how he is and get, I kid you not, “I’m scared of you”. Okay, I admit it, I should have deleted and blocked at that point, but I am so, as Kenneth says, optimistic, about people that I just had to understand. I said “How so?”

The response was, again I kid you not, “Because there was an architect, whose name I never got, who was stalking me in December and you might be him.” 0 for 2. I politely thanked him for chatting with me and wished him well.

Dating cannot be this difficult. How can any of us ever expect to connect with each other in any honest way, if we cannot be honest about the simplest things? I am so very discouraged, and yes I know none of this has anything to do with me, but it does cause me to question my judgment which is normally accurate about people, why is it so bent when it comes to men I want to date? It’s very frustrating.  

Stop trying to substitute your religion for mine!

So here’s what I don’t understand about those who support “traditional marriage”, maybe one of you, if you can avoid the hate speak, can explain it to me rationally. Here’s my question/thesis.

Last time I checked we live in a secular democratic republic, correct?

Conservative faiths of all brands love to remind us that we were founded by faithful people, correct?

Those faithful people saw fit not only to not name a national religion, but also prevented the federal government from establishing a state religion in the future, correct?

And for the past 232 years, we have created this nation based on religious freedom, the freedom to worship as we all see fit, correct?

 

So how does this work this morning, when I go to the public square of my city, Civic Center Plaza, in San Francisco, California, to participate in an inter-faith prayer service for the California Supreme Court as they prepare to hear oral arguments this morning and determine if a majority of Californians can take away the constitutional rights of a minority of Californians; and we are having a nice service celebrating our queer spirituality and the bigots who believe that my desire to marry a man instead of a woman is somehow going to ruin marriage for heterosexuals, come over and try to disrupt that service. You don’t see me showing up to some conservative church in Orange County on Sunday morning when they are praying that I will die because I’m gay, trying to disrupt their worship, no! That would be disrespectful of their PERSONAL religious beliefs. But you cannot extend those very personal religious beliefs and impose them on all of the people in this great nation, that is not permitted by the constitution of the State of California or the United States of America.

Having been quite conservative in my faith at one point in my life, I can understand how this happens, but it MUST stop. We must learn to live together if this country is to survive.

Make no mistake, rights, including marriage, for the LGBTQI Community are Civil Rights in every sense. What happens for proposition 8 will forever influence how any given majority treats any given minority in this country. We must stand together; all minorities, sexual, racial, gender, religious. We must protect each other’s rights, even if they are not in line with our personal beliefs. That is the only way that this great nation will survive.