I Want You to Know

I feel I have to post this as a way of keeping myself accountable. I recently went with a friend to get tested for HIV and syphilis. I was extremely nervous cause I had had unprotected sex with four different men over the span of one year. Two of them claimed to love me and the other two claimed to be in "open" relationships. At first I thought I was fine since they all claimed to be clean and to be faithful. Well only one guy appears to have been honest, the other three slept around before and after I came into the picture. I am no ashamed of what I've done because I believe shame only tares a person down. But I am not proud of what I have done either. Even if a person wants to experiment and get a better sense of what they like sexually, they should honor themselves enough to use protection. Everyone has a right to have their own views on sex and how it plays into their lives but everyone should be safe regardless. Unprotected sex belongs within the confides of committed relationship where the sexual status of each partner is known by the opposite partner. Why did I do what I did? Cause I was lonely and didn't feel that I deserved better. But even I get lonely again, even if I have sex again, I deserve better than unprotected sex from two guys cheating on their boyfriends, a man I will never see again, and a man who believes in jumping on anything with an erect dick. To all the people out there who have made similar mistakes to mine... YOU DESERVE BETTER! I DESERVE BETTER! So starting now I am trying to be better to myself. I prayed for God to give me a clean slate. Today I got back my test results. I tested negative for HIV and syphilis. Apparently God has answered my prayer.

What Love Really Means

"Why do people have to love people anyway?" - Shirley MacLaine. This quote is from a film that Billy Wilder wrote and directed and stared Shirley MacLaine titled The Apartment. The line was originally spoken by Shirley during rehearsal when she lamented to her co-workers about a love gone wrong. Wilder loved that insight so much he asked Shirley to say it in the movie. This question I find a staggering one to answer. Why do we need to love? I personally think its one of the very things we need to live. We need to eat, to move, to laugh, to yell, to cry, and to love in order to survive. Love is the reminder that to ourselves that we matter in this world. We need to love ourselves so we don't forget that and we need to love others so that they don't forget it. Why I am so focused on this topic of what love really means? Well in America today one of the biggest debates comes from this very topic. Marriage equality is one of the most hot-button issues and we all know it will come up in the course of the 2012 election. I am not here to talk politics nor take sides on the political spectrum, but I get very offended when we as Americans claim that this is a free country and yet its a debate on whether or not someone can get married. How is that free? I get even more offended when the opposition to marriage comes from many of my fellow Christians whom claim it is against God's will or God's plan to allow marriage equality. God created Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve, they say. I love my fellow Christians but I simply just don't agree. First off, we can never know God's plan or what God has in store for any of our lives so how can we claim to know what is or isn't against God's plan? And second, am I the only one who read the story of Adam and Eve? Within that story God creates what appears to be the perfect set up; Adam is a man, Eve is a woman, they love each other, they live in a world of access and need nothing, life is perfect until (insert plot twist here) they discover they have... FREE WILL! And because of free will the screw up making God realize that imperfect beings can not live in a perfect setting and casts them out into a imperfect world. Adam and Eve were not the model of perfection because they proved they weren't perfect. This story proves that perfection can not and will not ever exist for humans. So why do we still fight for it? Why do Christians hold themselves to this unattainable level of perfection only to set themselves up to fail? Why? Because we are afraid of appearing not good enough. So many gay Christians will never come out of the closet for fear of not appearing good enough. What we are forgetting is that God's love transcends all that. We don't need to appear good enough because we are good enough and it doesn't matter who you love because all love is Good. To quote Les Miserables, "To love another person is to see the face of God." As long as we love we are doing God's work, and if that is a person of the same gender that we love, God knows that love is real. And that brings me to my final point; why do people put so much emphasis on loving a member of the same gender? "It has to be a man loving a woman and vice versa to be a meaningful relationship." Note that this is the only relationship where the love is required to be of a specific gender. A father is not required to love his daughter and not his son, and a mother is not required to love her son and not her daughter. If someone said that the gender of either yourself or your child dictated whether you could love and care for them it would be considered hateful and laughable. Even in most social circles gender is not usually a deciding factor of whether or not two people can be close friends. So why does this prejudice only exist amongst spouses? Perhaps its the fact that only a man and woman couple can procreate independently. But even in that case a couple could still be unable to conceive and need to adopt or get a surrogate. They could even just adopt cause they wanted to. But not all straight couples have children, neither do all gay couples want children. But then when they do, the argument comes up that its not beneficial for a child to not have a mother and father and two moms or two dads simply wont do. Really??? How about the mother who's husband died and never remarried? Her daughter is now married, has two kids, has a career, two masters degrees and is happy mind, body and soul. How about the man who's wife ran out on him leaving him with eight year old? That eight year old is now eighteen and just got into Julliard as a concert pianist. These were cases were a child didn't have both roles filled in their life and one person had the strength to fill both shoes. Isn't it fair to assume that if two people are raising a child, even if they aren't both genders, that they will be able to do what all parents do and make it work? When you truly love someone, be it friend, spouse or child, it is not the gender or the supposed role that needs to be filled that matters. What matters is the love you feel and how it drives you to do what you can to give that other person a better life. All you need is to love the other person and everything else will work out the way it needs to. So forget gender, forget prejudice, and forget preconceived gender roles and learn what love really means.

Being Alive

It has been over a year since my last post. I had began to feel like I had no more to say, but whoever is reading this can tell that is simply not the case. My last post was at the end of my freshman year of college, it is now past the end of my sophomore year of college. In the time that has past, I became a camp counselor at a Methodist camp over the summer, I had my first actual boyfriend however brief the relationship may have been, I quit going to safe zone, quit attending Christ Church, became as immersed in the Wednesday Night Bible study as I could, dived head-first into the music department to crack down on my minor and ended up becoming a music major, participated in Western Oregon University's Spring Dance Concert, and some how have come to the end of yet another school year still alive and somewhat smarter and stronger than before it started. Year's Breakdown: Camp Counseling; I was asked by a man attending Christ's Church if I would like to volunteer to be a camp counselor at Camp Magruder in Rockaway, Oregon. I apprehensively agreed upon finding out that there was a background check to be done before I began. I thought being kicked out of school would come up on my record and be a red flag for them not to hire me. I then told them why for fear it would come up and there would be questions asked. Despite my fears they did not care. Not about my past, nor that I was gay, but what I was currently doing with my life. That won them over and soon found myself doing improve with twelve-year-olds on the beach. I felt like a kid again or better yet for the first time. I never really had the childhood experience of just being carefree and fun-loving. As a friend ironically told me a week before hand, "When you accept God as your savior and eternal parent, you can forget about the childhood you were denied and will be given a second childhood for you are now a child of God." I never thought his words would come true in the literal sense, but they did. I am a child of God and I finally feel like I've had some sort of childhood, but its still a work in progress as is everything in my life. Boyfriend; Not much to say. We met online, dated briefly, had too much focus on sex and little else, and grew apart. We still talk on occasion but there is little chance we will ever get back together. Christ's Church and Safe Zone; I had a falling out with the music director whom I was very close to. In fact, too close. I fell in love with him and we both agreed that my affection in that form was inappropriate. We however had different opinions on what the next step to take was. Hurtful things were said and hearts were broken. Thats all I will say in regards to that. It led to me feeling extremely uncomfortable to continue attending Christ's Church. I then realized that I had used Christ's Church as a safe place to hide from the campus when things were hard or scary. I then decided to stop hiding out and dive into campus life by becoming more active with everything, including Safe Zone and I was even elected to be head of their fundraising. It later turned out that I was completely unqualified to hold that position and step down. Due to disagreements in how the organization was being run I stepped away to focus on other things. Music; While working on my minor I began taking other music classes, such as Singer/Songwriter where I got orchestrate and perform my own music. I also continued with voice classes and found a strength from my singing that I didn't know I had. I feel most honest when I sing. After months of deliberating if I could really handle the material and having barely passed the music theory sequence, I decided to take the plunge and go for it. This received much praise from my new best friend Drew whom I owe much thanks to as a friend and as a music theory tutor. I will be taking 18 credits of music classes in the fall. God Help me. Bible Study; This year i really wanted to grow in my faith. I went to Wednesday Night Bible Study almost every Week and about the same for Men's group. I became very apprehensive about the Men's group because this year was a whole new group of guys, only one of which knew I was gay. It never really came up but soon the guys started talking about lust for women and wanting to remain pure for their girlfriends or future wives. I began to feel that I was alone and couldn't tell my everyday struggles or about how much I wanted to find the right guy. I finally couldn't take it anymore and told the leader of the Men's group whom I knew was a safe ally that I wanted to share my testimony. I hyperventilated the whole day leading up to it and the whole day after it. Oddly enough the guys seemed more in shock about me having attempted suicide than me being gay. It was the scariest thing I ever did. Most were supportive but others were confused and remained confused. I answer questions when asked, but no one has been hostile nor rejecting towards me and that is a huge improvement than where I was before. The Dance Concert; And finally, the dance concert. This year I took up tap dancing. I enjoyed it quite a bit and decided I wanted to do the spring dance concert to show off what I had learned. The night before the audition I was plagued by doubt and thought I wouldn't be good enough to get into the show. I kept going back and forth in my head about why I should audition and why I shouldn't. Then I remembered an old quote by Bea Arthur that I refer to often lately, "Sometimes when you take a chance in life, good things happen, sometimes bad things happen. But honey if you don't take a chance nothing happens." And with that line in my head I went to the audition. It turns out they weren't doing a tap number anymore but asked that I please audition anyway. I did and had the time of my life. I couldn't do half the moves they were asking for but still had fun despite the fact that I was sore for the whole next week. I didn't expect to get at all and ended up cast in two dance numbers. I rehearsed for three months, 8 hours a week, had neck and back injuries, had one whole dance number cut from the concert while the other was cut in half. It was hard to see only a fraction of my work get presented before an audience but it was worth it all the same. Not to mention I got to perform that number a month later at the historic Elsinore Theater in Salem, Oregon in front of a one-thousand person audience. I couldn't have foreseen any of the events of this year. Some sucked and some rocked in ways I can not describe. The overall theme I guess was not being afraid and jumping in head first. I can't say I'm proud of everything I've done this school year, but I'm proud that I tried and was able to walk away knowing that I had done something. I feel in order for us to really be alive we have to push our selves to try knew things and go for it. If we don't try we are not living. If we step outside the box, take a chance, lean on the edge.... its not just trying, its being alive.