Love (Angel) Music Baby

This has nothing to do with gay issues, and I know this, but when I find something worth sharing I'm willing to break a couple rules. So here it is, there is a website called Musicovery : interactive webRadio and it is brilliant. It is a music site that you choose your mood and it starts to play music associated with that mood, you can choose different countries from which to hear music, you can hear music that are hits or not, or both. You can hear different genres or all genres. I really really suggest that you give it a try. I've been impressed every time I've visited the site. Just try it once for me.

Dying in the desert of lesbian porn.

Granted, straight porn usually includes at least two chapters (if that's what you call them) of lesbian porn, but still. My point is this, I like porn, always have and probably always will. I like watching it alone or with my girlfriend, not with friends --> that's weird. But I find that I usually like straight porn or even gay porn(gasp!) more than I like lesbian porn. The reason being; that I know when I watch straight porn and there is a lesbian "chapter" that it's going to look fake and stupid because they are catering to an audience that is mainly consistent of men. Big fake boobs, bleached blonde hair, and girls that do things with their tongues that would make me giggle, are all par for the course. So why is it that lesbian porn is the same way? Is there not a large enough audience of lesbian porn watchers to make a decent lesbian porn film? Maybe I'm just picking the wrong titles... If there is someone out there that can recommend a good, semi-realistic, lesbian porn will you please tell me, send me an email.. something.

Oo! I have another idea. Maybe I should make a community in livejournal, or a blog in myspace, or a group in facebook, or a video on youtube (that of course would go viral), and then hopefully the porn industry would see the demand for good lesbian films and produce a couple. Who's with me?

London and the two hairstyle craze.

SO I'm back. I took a well needed trip to the other side of the ocean. I was there for ten days and it was really just a great trip. First of all, my girlfriend and I had invited another couple along with us. Now, I'm not someone who originally would have thought that a double-date across the ocean for ten days, with nowhere to run, would be a great idea... no no, far from it. I must admit that I was very excited that these two particular people would be joining us. So we went... all four of us... and to make matters a little more complicated, I lost my voice on the plane ride over. How do you lose your voice in a less than 6 hour time period.. I have no idea, but it happens. The first few days that we were there, it was plenty of drinking, visiting, and going to straight bars. Once, we managed to convince everyone to go to a gay bar, (which of course I didn't even notice that it was a gay bar until we were leaving, because I was smashed), and that was quite a bit of fun. But stop me please, this is not what you want to hear about.

Cocaine. Yes I said it, and I even meant it. Most shocking moment of the trip.. getting ready to go out for New Years, three million british lesbians roaming the house, and I come downstairs to see cocaine thrown onto the table, mashed by credit cards, sucked up noses. Apparently, cocaine is really really big in the UK, especially in London. I would just like to say that personally I don't do cocaine, I never have and I never will, (too many bad experiences around cokeheads), but at the same time, I could care less what you do to your own body. Therefore the reason that it was the most shocking moment of the trip was not because of the cocaine itself, but because of the way that it ended up on the tables... without a second thought. It was just plain odd to be in a room and watch cocaine be inhaled, knowing that everyone just kind of took it for granted that it was the way things were to be done. Speaking of this reminds me of a more amusing thought.

British lesbians, do they really only have two haircuts? Now if you are a british lesbian reading this, please know that I love the hairstyle and even thought about going and getting mine cut while over there, but still... how is it possible to have only two hairstyles? Brunettes have one, and bleached blondes another. A particular gent came with us on New Years Eve and at one point we ended up looking for our friends and realized that judging from the hairstyles, our friends must have cloned themselves several times over, because they were everywhere! If you are in need of a visual, here:

Blondes:


Brunettes:
Overall, I think that the trip went very very well. I am still prone to traveling alone or only with my girlfriend, but that is only because there are not many couples I would trust to keep the trip drama free. That being said, in this case, our double-date went very well, especially lasting over a week. I would definitely recommend to anyone of the gay nature to visit London, as it is a very open place and a lot more accepting than I had previously thought. Cheerio.

A Christmas Story

So everyone knows that Christmas is a stressful time and my goodness, this year is really vying for the "MOST stressful Christmas EVER" award. Tomorrow I have a meeting with former employers who want to offer me a job that would have been my boss' job at the time of my employment with them. I'm extremely lucky to have a job either way, whether or not I take the new position, but it's still stressful, I hate interviews/meetings, I always have. I don't know what to say or how to go after those things that I want. These are one of those times that I wish I had the aggression of a straight man. They see the woman they want in a club/bar and boom! they walk up and offer them a drink. If they are turned down, either they persist or move on to their next target. That kind of "this is what I want" forwardness doesn't happen for me. Not in bars/clubs or interviews.

Right now, I have a friend (straight man) who's coaching my demand-skills. Number 1) Act like you're just going in to have a conversation. They are not better than you, they want you, not the other way around. Number 2) Don't be afraid to ask for more than you want, or you think you will get, worse that can happen is they say no and offer what they are willing to give, it still might be higher than what you would have accepted. Excellent so now that I'm armed with these two pieces of advice I'm still shaking in my boots... or in my case my really cute sneakers.

To add to my stress level, Christmas is two weeks away and I haven't bought one present. I have three things I need to pay for in the coming month, 1) rent for january, 2) London (the 27th to the 6th), and 3) Christmas. Now I know that I'm not poor, but I'm not rich either. So everyone's getting arts and crafts for their gifts. It's the thought that counts right?

And probably a stress inducer that I'm not really allowing myself to think about is that my brother gets home from infantry school on the 20th and on the 3rd will be flown to Hawaii to his first duty station, where he will be for the next few years (if he isn't sent to Iraq). Basically I think that Christmas will be the last time I see him before he goes to Hawaii and then Iraq.

In the end, the point is that when I stress out I take it out on everyone else and really hate when people try to help. Mostly when my girlfriend tries to help. Do straight couples have this problem? Not the stressed out, take it out on each other problem, but the "you make more money than I do and that really bothers me" problem. This may feel like it came out of left field and knowing me it probably did, but I really think they are all tied in together: money stresses me out, not having money stresses me out more, not having money when things need to be paid really stresses me out, and then add Christmas! Forget about it, it's over.

Back to the issue at hand: My girlfriend makes more money than I do, and most of the time it doesn't bother me, but when a lot of expenses are coming in and I'm having a hard time keeping my head above water, its really hard for me to watch her direct her yacht. And worse even is when she invites me onto it! I end up feeling like I owe her, like she is the reason I'm making it, and that without her I would have drowned. I am a very independent person, and a very strong willed person. I don't like to depend on my girlfriend for anything, especially not money. But I watch straight couples and it seems that it's almost expected. If you are the boyfriend, you will pay for things, and if you are the girlfriend, you will like it. I completely understand and if the couple is happy with that arrangement than more power to them, but if it were me.... I would feel like something was being taken away from me, because I was not contributing half to expenses. How do straight girls do it? How do they feel ok letting someone else take care of them financially and emotionally? I think it's fantastic and if any straight girl is reading this and wants to teach me how, please please let me know. I wish I could do that too.

Sex, is it really that hard to get over?

Billy Crystal once said that men and women can't be friends, because the sex part always gets in the way. That in the end men always want to have sex with women, even if the women is unattractive because the sex part is already out there and therefore the friendship is doomed. So what makes this statement different if it's two gay women, or two gay men? Why is that to the best of my knowledge and in my experience gay women and gay men usually are friends with mostly gay women or gay men, respectively? Do we not operate the same way as a man, or is it just that we constantly ignore that at least half of the friendship wants to bang the other half?

Personally, I know that there are quite a few of my friends that I find attractive and if I were single and they were single, I might this whole banging them idea a proper go, but because of circumstances they will never be more to me a friend, and of course the attractive friend that makes me look good when we go out. At the same time, lots of my friends (and I) have either hooked-up with each other or had relationships that didn't work out, and now are just good friends. How do we do that? I'm amazed by that. Even just now thinking about it, I remember conversations that I have been a part of where we compared notes about who in the room we had hooked up with, and by determining who had hooked up with more people in the room, who was the bigger slut. Straight men and women generally don't do that sort of thing, they see as if not impossible, uncomfortable. I'd also like to know about gay men. I'm not a gay man and I don't have many gay men friends, but do they screw around with their friends and then maintain these close friendships?

If this is a perk of being a gay woman I'll gladly take it, somehow we have worked out a way to not only get close to other gay women without the need for sex to be a part of it, but if sex were to become a part of it? We've found a way to either, 1) make it into a relationship that works because it was built on a friendship, 2) have a couple week fling, realize it's not going to work, and be able to laugh about it with everyone else later, or 3) have sex once and wake up the next morning not able to look at each other, but somewhere down the line go out for coffee and realize there is a friendship to be salvaged. And to those that let sex (not feelings, but sex) ruin a friendship, maybe you're straight after all.

Halloween, my favoritest holiday

So Halloween has come and gone. I really love that holiday. I know a lot of people who don't, but there was something always really exciting about being able to dress however I wanted and not have to hear it from anybody. No little kids asking if I were a boy or a girl, no parents looking down their noses because I don't like to wear capri's or tight jeans. I remember when I was little, my younger brother and I would dress up in the exact same costume. If we were dracula, we both had the same cape, same tuxedo, and same mask. If we were pirates, we both had the same sword, the same pants (made to look like a skirt), and the same shirt with a vest design. I just thought it was soooo cool that he and I could be the same thing and no one would question why he was dressed like me (a girl) and I was dressed like him (a boy). It was just cute and endearing.

Sometimes it even occurs to me that no one really understands that it has nothing to do with my desire to portray something that I am not, but that I really just never found girl clothing comfortable, or hair clips attractive. Yet still when my mom would get upset enough to say something, it always ended up being, "why do you want to be a man so badly?" Are you joking? I don't even find myself attracted to men, why would I want to be one?? Nothing against men, but I can't imagine being one and I definitely don't have any desire to change who I am.

So my mom finally got used to the idea that her daughter was going to wear pants that didn't suffocate her skin, or shirts that the only part that contained a "V" was the "v" in whatever word was written across her chest and I finally got used to the idea that as long as my hair was short and my clothes weren't "girly" that I would constantly be called "Sir" or have little children ask if I were a boy or a girl. This was just going to be a fact of life and I learned to be okay with it.

Yet at the same time that I spend 364 days of the year being okay with the idea of being mistaken for a man or even better a prepubescent boy, it is really nice to be able to get dressed up like a man or a woman and have no one look at me twice. I don't get the weird looks from small minded rednecks at the convenience store who aren't sure what to make of me, I don't get the "oooo you look so girly" jabs from fellow lesbians (if on a normal day I would decide to girl it up for once), everything is just accepted for what it is, my outfit for the day. Not a change of personality, not a change of being, not a factious life I've decided to live because I can't deal with the hand I've been dealt, but a full 24 hours of being just one of the crowd and maybe even being one of the normal looking people.

And if you were wondering what I dressed up as for Halloween, it was Eddie Knox from Guitar Hero 2:
What were you?

Don't Call Me Guido!

Last night I felt oppressed by a straight man. It was the first time in a very long time that this had happened to me. And the worst part about it? I knew it wasn't him doing the oppressing, but me. I saw his macho attitude and his trophy wife and started to feel very different. So what did I do... I listened to him talk and I felt better.

While Guido 1 and Guido 2 talk to each other I realize that while they both may be very intelligent, well behaved people, their accent successfully makes them sound.. well Guido-ish (macho, dumb, and vain). This is a Bon Jovi concert and it's me who in the end feels out of place. Not that Guido would feel out of place anywhere, cause I'm not sure yet whether he's even aware there are other people in the world. There is still something so unsettling to be a in a room (or for heaven's sake an arena) that is 65%-75% men, and not gay men, but men men. The kind that scratches their balls and puts their arm over their trophy to show to the other men men.

A friend said to me today, (in regards to my recent relationship behavior), "You just have to come to terms with the fact that you're a dude." I will never be a dude, to the extent that these guys are dudes. I think that's what gets me, while I definitely do not want to be a man, there is something about being that "strong" and believing so strongly that you were put here to be a blessing unto everyone, that makes for a very powerful existence. I think a lot of us are really annoyed by that attitude of "I'm god's great gift to women, look at this hair, look at this muscle, look at my car, and look at this hair!", yet at the same time I have to admit that sometimes being that confident is an attractive idea. It does seem to me that they get to do what they want, when they want, more often than most of us. Maybe if we took that kind of attitude more often, the "we are god's great gift to women, look at my pick-up, look at my style, look at my charm" maybe more people would stop questioning our being here, because we would stop questioning ourselves.

Dog days and sad gays

By now most of you have probably gotten a whiff of the Ellen/Iggy debacle. For those of you who haven't heard anything about it, you might want to catch up. Basically Ellen adopted a dog, Ellen couldn't keep the dog for whatever reason, Ellen gave the dog to a friend's family. Moms, Mutts & Madness, or whatever their name is, came and took the dog back from the family, stating that Ellen had signed an agreement that she would not give the dog away. The family is heartbroken, Ellen is devastated, and the agency is trying not to have itself burned down, nor the employees harmed.

Let me first state that I think the agency has their heads up their bums about this whole thing and if the family already has a dog that is well taken care of and no young children that would mistreat it, so what if the dog went to a different home than the one originally assigned to it. But here it is, I can understand how the agency feels, whether or not the family was a good family, someone of Ellen's position should know what she is signing at all times and follow procedure to avoid situations such as this one. (And definitely not end up crying on her own daytime television show about the issue). If the agreement was that she would not give the dog away without proper notice to the agency, then she shouldn't have. But stop me, I'm getting away from my original point which was that how I found out about this whole thing threw me into a sort of rage, not because of the ridiculousness of the situation, not because of the fact that Ellen sobbed on national television about the damned dog, but because the radio talk show host that was talking about it said that the reason Ellen had acted in such a way was the she was a lesbian and that lesbians have had horrible childhoods and were messed up from their childhoods on, so Ellen had identified with the family's little girl and that's the reason she was SO upset about the little girl being upset. WHAT??

First of all, I probably shouldn't have been as shocked or pissed as I was when I heard this bullshit. Dennis and Judi are radio personalities on NJ talk radio 101.5 and they come on every day around midday. Usually I'm at work by the time they come on and they are long gone when I have the pleasure of coming home. The few times I have caught them, they have mostly been funny, kind of crazy, don't always agree with them types, but good to listen to. I have only heard Dennis talk about gay people (lesbians included) once before, and that time it was no different. He's very open about the fact that he does not accept gays as a part of the community, whether normal or not. He truly believes that we are all products of bad childhoods, and when he talks about us if someone calls in to defend the gay community he basically calls them crazy and hangs up on them. He also denounces the idea that he's homophobic or in any other way against gay people. And I believe him.... to an extent.

Sometimes I have this feeling that when told by someone that we are not normal, that we should not be allowed to marry, etc. Our immediate reaction is to label that person "homophobic" or someone who hates gays. In the vein of this example, Dennis is the perfect subject. Dennis believes that we are who we are, because every one of us has in some way or another, rebelled against our very f-ed up childhoods. He doesn't blame us, or take fault with us, in fact to him it may seem like a very natural reaction, but at the same time it doesn't make us worthy of the ability to be married, I mean hey, if we just worked out our issues we probably wouldn't be wanting other girls anyway. There is an inherent flaw in his argument however, which is that not all of us had f-d childhoods, and even if we did, that really makes us no different than those straight people who had f-ed up childhoods as well.

I think there is an entire population of people out there, who don't hate us, are not scared of us, but will never accept us as long as they can rationalize why we are the way we are with reasons like child molestation, rape, dad leaving home when we were young, mom not being a strong role model, etc. It is not fear or hate that drives them but the inability to see the real reasons we are who we are. In the end, they explain away our existence with their own reasons, because they never stop long enough to listen to ours. The hope, or at least my hope, is that we can all slow down long enough to hear each other and understand each other, because no matter the reasons that we're here... to quote a great gay slogan "we're here and we're queer." And that's not about to change.