Questioning

this blog has allowed me to open my eyes and widen my perspective to the LGBTQ community. Now that this semester is closing, this blog has created an on going topic of the of sexual orientation, it has allowed me to question and ask question about my and others sexual orientation. i believe that this blog has provided a portal not only to the William & Community but to the world and will allows others to alter the perceptions on love and others along with their sexual orientation. so i would like to say a big thank you to the BECKY, MEAGAN, STEPHANIE and MIA because with out them this blog would not have been possible! go questioning!!!

LOVE,

Rachel

I read this post sitting at my dad’s house in the few minutes I have on the computer while my five year old sister and my three old brother take a bath. Though I am in college and living on campus, I spend as much time as I can at my dad’s house (where I did not grow up) so I can hang out with the two most beautiful, amazing kids I have ever seen in my life.

Since I am so much older than my brother and sister, I am both their sister and their parental figure. I am part of raising them, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. They mean more to me than most things on this planet. When I read this post, I started crying thinking of the first time someone was mean to my little sister at school. She was upset, but she said to me, “Some kids are just mean and don’t understand.” She is the most mature five-year-old ever.

But when I think about how vicious kids can be, and how hurtful their words are, and how even though sticks and stones may break your bones but words will never hurt you can be heard on any playground, it’s not always true. Words hurt. And the way we teach the next generation either perpetuates the cycle of hurt or puts an end to it.

It is important to see kids as the impressionable, beautiful beings that they are, and it is important to remind them, always and forever, that their words and their actions have an impact.

“Be kinder than necessary, because everyone you meet is fighting some sort of battle.” -anon.

<3 Mia

The following piece was first submitted to the I Am William and Mary campaign.  According to the W&M website, the campaign is “a multi-event diversity campaign presented by the Student Assembly dedicated to celebrating the identities and personal stories of the Tribe community.”  This piece has been posted here with the permission of the author.

Written: Thursday, April 08, 2010

By: Kim Green 13’

                The real reason I came to William and Mary was not quite academic at all. I wanted to get as far away as possible from what had become the norm. I wanted to start over:  meet new people, hear different ideas, participate in things I would not have normally—which brings us to this “thing”. This thing that had been a secret to me and that I wanted to know more about. One of the most amazing human connections: SEX.

SEX

I want it

Got to have it

Can I get it

I deserve it

Let me hit it

Let me hurt it

And if you want

I’ll take it slow

Just let me know…

Orangeburg-Wilkinson High School

Orangeburg, South Carolina

Home of the Mighty Mighty Bruins

Through the front doors

Past the main office

On the cleanest corridor ever to exist there

Where the smart kids were

Some cool

Most cool

Not gonna say I was cool

But,yea,you know

Never slacking on work

But if we did, it probably wouldn’t mean much

Honestly, no matter how much they attempted to discipline us

We knew what we wanted

We knew what we liked

And for most of us

Especially on the clean corridor

We knew we needed a diploma to get it

So most of us pumped out those college applications

Got the best recommendations

Wrote magnificent personal statements

And found what we were looking for

And it’s crazy because 7 hours away from the only place I would have ever called home

I found just what I was looking for

The most captivating and fascinating women

Yes women

Not just one

But many

And not omitting myself

But damn

I had never seen it in all these flavors

And the way I just said that might be heteronormative

But damn

I never had conversations like this before

I never even saw sex as a language

Just as bodies doing what they do

And I feel kind of deprived

But, hey, I never knew

And I’m not afraid to say that this craving for physical eye candy drove me

To the College of William and Mary

Where I Love

My Community

And sadly there are some people I would never confide in

But for the most part

I have found people that I can call family

People who I can send an email

And I know they’ll reply

People who embrace that I’m different

And still say hi

People who boost my confidence

Even though they know I’m shy

People who define themselves

And don’t need a name brand to call themselves fly

People who say the word “VAGINA”

I mean really that’s what it is

People who can help remold stronger individuals because their sexual substance has been degraded

People who CARE about bodies

Sexualities

Mentalities

And all the other shit that fits in this conversation of Intersectionality

See, this to me

Is what my short time here has taught me that SEX really means

And trust me I like it all

Oral

Anal

Phallic

Porn

Mental

Emotional

Freaky eye language

Workouts in the Rec  Center

Running down DOG Street

Meet and greets

Office hours

Late night papers

Facebook chats

G chats

Emails with cute endings

Hugs

Kisses

Smiles

Bliss

And I’m not ashamed at all

To say that this

Is the reason

Why I am

Who I am

Where I am

And I am not afraid to flaunt my identity

As an intimate, tender, passionate, and compassionate

SEX Fein

For those of you who have never had the misfortune of hearing about Pat Robertson:

He is the evangelist Christian from the show “700 Club”. He preaches about why God hates America, why Katrina was a deserved disaster on the city of New Orleans, why feminists and gays and lesbians are all bad news and going to hell, and the list goes on.

Here’s some quotes for your reading pleasure:

“(T)he feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.” –Pat Robertson

[about Planned Parenthood] It is teaching kids to fornicate, teaching people to have adultery, every kind of bestiality, homosexuality, lesbianism - everything that the Bible condemns.

[about Gay Day at Disney World] I would warn Orlando that you’re right in the way of some serious hurricanes and I don’t think I’d be waving those flags in God’s face if I were you. This is not a message of hate; this is a message of redemption. But a condition like this will bring about the destruction of your nation. It’ll bring about terrorist bombs, it’ll bring earthquakes, tornadoes, and possibly a meteor”

[about homosexuals] It’s one thing to say, “We have rights to jobs, we have rights to be left alone in out little corner of the world to do our thing.” It’s an entirely different thing to say, well, “We’re not only going to go into the schools and we’re going to take your children and your grandchildren and turn them into homosexuals.” Now that’s wrong.

Point of all this? I am a hostess at a restaurant in Williamsburg, and last week, I kid you not, Pat Robertson and his wife came in. They sat on our lovely, sunny back patio and ate lunch.  The best thing I can say about that experience is that he tipped 30%.

I was talking to the waiter who had the misfortune of serving him, and I said, “Man, I wish I could just sit down and have a little chat with him.  See how his brain works.”  The waiter said, most seriously, “You wouldn’t even be speaking the same language as him.”  Well, true that.

Pat Robertson’s words make me so unhappy.   He makes me sad.  What’s really scary and upsetting about it is that he means what he says and he’s not the only one.  It’s prejudice like that which leads to anti-gay marriage laws, hate crimes, and a system of social outcasts.

I’m trying to end this post on a positive note, but I’ve gotten myself pretty depressed. I guess all there is to say is that the haters can hate all they want. But I’m a lover, and I will keep on loving, even the haters.

source for quotes: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0149408/quotes

—Mia

I spent the first 14 years of my academic career in private, all-girls, Catholic school. Terrifying, I know. And not surprisingly, my experiences there, or more specifically my experiences with the opinions and comments of my peers, shaped the way I currently view sexuality, gender and gender performance.

Looking back on my time there, I find the importance of the minutiae of gender performance fascinating. In school, we were required to adhere to a strict uniform code, placing everyone in identical outfits nearly every day of the school year. This made any non-normative gender performance based on clothing extremely difficult to execute. However the one out lesbian couple in my grade, and only two of a very small group of students that identified as LGBTQ was subject of constant behind-the-back ridicule and speculation. It made me wonder how in a society in which so many assumptions regarding gender and sexuality are made based on people’s physical appearance, how everyone aside from one couple was safe from similar speculation.

These experiences made my coming to college, a much more liberal-minded and accepting environment, so surprising, as people questioning my gender quickly became a regular occurrence. What was also surprising was that some of the people doing the questioning were part of the very left-leaning activist community or identified as LGBTQ themselves. I went from a social group that considered their fellow students’ lesbianism a phase and illegitimate to a seemingly more progressive social group that saw my straight identity as something that would inevitably disappear like an awkward adolescent stage.

This is of course not to cast any blanket statements, and the ideas I express here are mostly ones that I intend to flesh out more in later posts. My goal with this piece is to show how expectations of and assumptions about people can change based on place and context, and not necessarily in ways one might expect. To quote an earlier post by Meagan, “I don’t question your orientation, don’t question mine”. 

~ Steph

When I was in high school, the drama class put on a production of “The Laramie Project”, a play comprised of assorted interviews of people from Laramie, Wyoming, where Matthew Shepard was brutally murdered in 1988 because he was gay.  Matthew was a 21-year-old student at the University of Wyoming, who had gone to a bar where two men acted like they were interested in him, only to rob him, beat him and torture him, and leave him to die tied to a fence in a field in the middle of nowhere.  He was found nearly dead by a biker the next day, having spent the night with his hands bound beyond the necessary tightness to keep someone from moving, and bleeding from the head.

His mother, Judy Shepard, came to my high school to talk to the drama production crew and cast, as well as Safe School Ambassadors, of which I was president at the time (SSA was started after the Columbine shooting to encourage peer advocacy and dilute uncomfortable to hateful situations before they became acts of aggression or violence among elementary, middle school, and high school students).  I was given an “ERASE HATE” bracelet. A simple message, you’d think.

The show that my friends in drama production was intense. It made several hundred people cry, and while you sat there and watched it, the worst part was knowing that it was real. Sure, Laramie, Wyoming is a very different place from the Northern Californian city where I grew up, where almost everyone was thankfully open-minded and generally politically liberal and socially peaceful.

The thing about the show that had the most impact on me was how stupid it all seemed. To kill someone, and to have the capacity to even consider ending someone’s life, seems audacious to me. But these two young men not only were capable of thinking it, they went ahead and did it, and just because Matthew was homosexual.

The prejudice and incredible hate involved in such a crime is astounding to me. But listening to Judy Shepard talk, I could only think about the fact that out of something so hateful, she and her husband had created a movement of love and raised awareness in countless minds and hearts. Matt’s father once said, “Matt’s beating, hospitalization, and funeral focused worldwide attention on hate.  Good is coming out of evil. People have said, ‘Enough is enough.’”

The play ends with one of the characters (Matt’s cab driver to the bar) saying “Hope, that’s what it’s all about. H-O-P-E”. That rings true today,and always.

 H-O-P-E.

—Mia

So it has always been a question to many is Ricky Martin Gay? Well in fact he is. 

According to US Weekly this is what he states: 

“I am proud to say that I am a fortunate homosexual man,” the singer, 38, posted on his website Monday afternoon. “I am very blessed to be who I am.”

Martin says his twin boys, Matteo and Valentino — whom he welcomed via surrogate in August 2008 — inspired him to speak out.

The following statement is one that I could not agree with him more: “These years in silence and reflection made me stronger and reminded me that acceptance has to come from within and that this kind of truth gives me the power to conquer emotions I didn’t even know existed.”

If this isn’ t the key to true happiness, what is? Be yourself whatever and whoever it may be. Famous or Not, Boy or Girl, Young or Old. We are who we are, So try it, think about it, be happy as you are.

** Rachel

Sources :http://www.usmagazine.com/celebritynews/news/ricky-martin-yes-im-gay-2010293