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But that doesn’t feel like an accurate description of my sexual history, either. How do I explain that I was honestly in love with a woman? Some people might argue that I am innately bisexual, with the capacity to love both women and men. If so, that ‘blip in the road’ has always been a thorn in my flesh. After all, most kids experiment with heterosexuality in college, don’t they?
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But that was nothing more than a blip in the road. Well, you must have been gay the whole time, some might think, and because of some religious shame, you decided to lie to yourself and experiment with a girl. To this day, she and I joke about how she was the only girl I was ever in love with, and how I would’ve been quite happy marrying her.Īs a writer, this kind of complicated story is incredibly interesting to me – mostly because it shows that my own personal history resists the kind of easy classifications that have come to dominate discussions of sexuality. I even went so far as to fall in love with one. During that time, we both pal’d around with girls on the side. I came out at a conservative Christian college in the US and was in a gay relationship for around two years with a basketball player who ended up marrying a woman. My sexual journey through college was anything but run-of-the-mill. They weren’t subject to human imagination or experimentation – to the frustration of many sociologists, and kids, like myself, who found themselves inexplicably in bed with a player from the other team. If you happened to engage in activity that ran counter to your sexual identity, then you had two options: you were lying to yourself and everyone else, or you were just experimenting.
#YOUNG PEOPLE ARE SO GAY MEME FULL#
It was 2006, a full five years before Lady Gaga would set the Born This Way argument atop its unassailable cultural perch, but even then the popular understanding of orientation was that it was something you were born with, something you couldn’t change. You so obviously cannot be gay, was her implication, because this is good sex. Young people struggling to come to terms with their identity in a hetero-normative world need that opportunity and it’s a chance for everyone to understand one another better.It wasn’t a command - it was a challenge. This means not only practical information on safe sex, but also open, encouraging conversations on identity, relationships and mental health.
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So what is the solution? I believe LGBTQ-inclusive education in schools would be a great start. In making this film, I’ve learned just how much of a loaded term gay is. Despite being in a famously gay-friendly area, one person hastily said: “I’m not gay”. In Soho, I handed out stickers promoting the film and reactions were mixed. Staff noticed how the audience’s body language often shifted and became awkward on just seeing the word gay projected on screen. In the week leading up to the premiere of my documentary, The Gay Word, its trailer was shown in a London cinema. Equal marriage legislation may suggest that society has advanced in its thinking, but there remains a gap in its grasp of gay identity, culture and sexuality. Saying “eurgh, that’s gay” reveals a lack of collective understanding of what it means to identify as gay. The language we use, consciously or subconsciously, can reflect our feelings towards minorities. Many older people I spoke to felt strongly that it should it not be allowed to be used negatively. Younger people, whom we might have expected to have more awareness of what it means to identify as gay because of media coverage, were often the demographic defending the negative use of this word. Some gay people I spoke to were content with the word evolving, while there were straight people who were outraged. With just my student overdraft as my budget, I decided to make a documentary exploring how this piece of language had evolved, and speak to people both gay and straight to see how they felt aboutthe word taking on a negative meaning. “The problem with saying ‘that’s so gay’ is that even though you and your friends might know you’re not being homophobic, if you’re using it in a public or semi-public space, other people might see you as homophobic,” he adds.