On a special anniVersary

Five years ago today, my mother met me after work and we went out to see my coworker’s husband play a St. Patrick’s Day gig with his band. Realizing that we didn’t frequently get a chance to have a night out, just the two of us, Mom and I snuck out of the gig early. For lack of any better idea, we decided on seeing a film and I called the cinema to find out what was playing. I vaguely remembered seeing an ad for one of the titles, that it’d looked good, and it was opening that night, so we decided to see it.

The film was V for Vendetta.

Strange how such a small and seemingly random chain of events can utterly change the course of one’s life.

A closing ramble on Prop 8

*checks clock* Well, it’s after midnight here in Minnesota, but not so in California, so I can still say:

Today (Wednesday, 16 June 2010) saw the closing arguments in the federal court challenge of Prop 8, the California proposition that sought to rewrite the state Constitution to enshrine for good and all that the only people worthy of full rights as citizens of the state are heterosexuals. Sorry, was that my outside voice?

So…I have some thoughts.

Fixing stupid and curing gay

…also known as two of the Impossible Things one might believe of a morning.

This morning, I noted that my Brit Tweeps’ feathers were ruffled over the news that one Philippa Stroud, a “rising Tory star” and prospective Conservative Member of Parliament (MP), was the founder of a UK church that attempted to cure homosexuals by praying away the demons that possessed them. This evening, I watched the latest episode of House, in which the patient turned out to have undergone conversion therapy to cure his homosexuality a while before he met the woman he was in the process of marrying when he collapsed and ended up at Princeton-Plainsboro.

Off the Chart

Earlier today, @myladydisdain tweeted a link to this great article on the attitudes and discrimination faced by bisexuals, even within the LGBTQ community (and I sincerely hope that Ms Schumacher will pardon my hijacking her phrase for the title of this entry):

Many people, straight or gay, understand gender preference with a Kinsey Scale mentality: a straight man likes women, a gay man likes men, and a bisexual man likes both.  But bisexuality isn’t a gender preference for both genders; it’s a lack of gender preference for either.  For most bisexuals, the gender of the person they find attractive is substantially less important than who that person is.  We’re not in the middle of the Kinsey scale; we’re off the chart altogether.