Not my best pun, sure. But how often do I get to make decent Biggie / LL Cool J puns?
Anyway, this won't surprise you, but it isn't a whole lot of fun being a Progressive Liberal in Modern America (as in, since about 1945 on). This is part of the reason I've long since gone off the news media in almost any form. However, every so often, an encouraging news story crops up that delays my transformation into a bomb-tossing anarchist by a few months.
Yes, those damn activist judges in California have decided that perhaps gay people are people after all, thus joining a handful of states who have already done so (and, errr, most of the Western World).
To this day I'll never quite be sure what the big fucking deal is with homophobia. Obviously, Christianity has a disproportionately sized bug up it's ass on the subject (except that they're stealing this one from the Jews, who don't seem to care nearly as much), which really isn't much of an excuse, but at least they've got something on paper. You know what, fuck it, that still isn't an excuse.
Yet what the rest of society is griping about is really a mystery. Well maybe not.
If you ask me, I have to wonder if the gay rights struggle for men isn't halfway what feminism was for women. After all, the last few decades have proven to us that women crossing into the Land of Man doesn't really hold disastrous consequences for society. Yet I still think it's interesting that, to this day, the same gender flexibility doesn't exist for men.
Women can wear pants in their business dress, but men can't wear lipstick or mascara. Women can go into the workplace, but a man staying home to do the chores is bizarre. A girl can listen to Led Zeppelin, but a guy that listens to Madonna probably is going to lose any invitations to the next Super Bowl Party.
Hell, even commercials (which are usually good as cultural thermometers) present a fairly traditional portrait of men. It's hard to find a man in an ad that doesn't watch football, wear plaid, pound brews and practically live in his garage with his arsenal of power tools. In fact, almost every time you see men traversing the gender boundary, it's almost universally just used as a sense of humor ("Oh brother, dad screwed up dinner again. Let's call Dominos!").
Simply put, while women have been allowed nearly the full spectrum of gender identity over the years, men have never really dared to make the same jump, except in the odd subculture, which usually results in scorn from their fellow fellas (Oh those faggy goth kids and their makeup! And poetry, poetry! Yuck).
That was, until gays started to put the kibosh on the whole business. This is why, to me, a possible dimension of the gay rights struggle is the idea that men of all sexualities shouldn't be scorned for wanting to deviate from a rigid and specific definition when it's clear that it doesn't work for them. Honestly America, we have enough actual problems to work on instead of harassing men that want to dress feminine, surrender their breadwinner status and, yes, like boys.
So it's good to see a story like this coming out of the nation's most populous state deciding that it's about time it started to progress. It reminds us that ideas like "all people are created equal" can still have meaning, and can overcome obstacles when their time has clearly passed.
