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.