On the cure.

I’m proud to live in a democracy. The whole idea of ‘rule of the people, by the people, for the people’ is the lifeblood of our freedom. It has the ability to bring together a massive group of people - people who, in reality, have very little in common - just by allowing them to vote, to choose which direction they want their country to go in. And when it comes down to it, that’s not too shabby.

A vital feature of our democracy is that the people we elect must represent our views. That’s pretty basic, and one way we do this is by forming pressure groups. These can be massive organisations like the National Trust, or instantly-recognisable groups like the infamous Fathers 4 Justice. Their common aim is simple - influence the people in government to enact changes in the law which are favourable to them or support their cause.

The pressure group that I want to talk about (this is an LGBT blog, after all) is Stonewall. Stonewall is a group that aims to promote the rights of the queer community, a minority who’s rights are certainly in danger. They’ve been hugely successful in lobbying politicians in cases such as removing the ban preventing openly LGBT men and women serving in the armed forces and repealing Section 28 of the Local Government Act. In short, I’m in love with them.

However, another feature of democracy is allowing every opinion to be heard, which means that Stonewall’s many opposition groups have every right to promote their cause as well. In the last month or so, Stonewall launched its amazing series of bus advertisements in support of the Coalition government’s equal marriage consultation. In response, a group called the Core Issues Trust responded with adverts that read ‘Not Gay! Ex-Gay, Post-Gay And Proud. Get Over It!’ I’d never heard of the Core Issues Trust before this, but I damn well won’t forget them in a hurry.

The Core Issues Trust describe themselves as a ‘non-profit organisation seeking to support men and women with homosexual issues who voluntarily seek change in sexual preference’. This means they’re a cure group, and I really don’t like cure groups. 

Cure groups offend me because they’re such a con - it’s now widely believed in the United Kingdom that homosexuality is not a disease, and so the whole concept of a ‘cure’ simply cannot exist. So many men and women, boys and girls, struggle with their sexuality and are uncomfortable with it at first, and so all these cure groups are doing is capitalising on this rock bottom self-esteem and making them hope for something that cannot be. 

I say ‘hope’ because the very existence of these cure groups send out the message that being gay or lesbian or bisexual or transsexual or pansexual or asexual or anything else is wrong. And that really pisses me off.

However, the most infuriating part of the Core Issues Trust is just one line in their website description: ‘it respects the rights of individuals who identify as ‘gay’ and do not seek change’. This is probably the most condescending piece of crap I have ever read. Not only do the inverted commas around ‘gay’ tell of how they believe there to be no such thing, but the whole wording of it sends out a message loud and clear: ‘if you do identify as ‘gay’, then you’re beyond even our help’. It’s safe to say that my response to this begins with ‘f’ and ends with ‘f’.

Strangely enough, the presence of these hugely disappointing sections of society doesn’t make me despise free speech, or say it’s gone too far. I will always be a wholehearted supporter of free speech, because it means that for every bigoted, ignorant, twisted group like the Core Issues Trust, there will forever be a group like Stonewall fighting my corner. And like I said earlier, that’s not too shabby.

On MSM.

So last week, my sister came home a little bit agitated; she’d tried to go donate blood at the blood bank, and had been told to go away because she didn’t have enough iron in it. The slogan the NHS use to get more blood donors is ‘Do something amazing, give blood’, so I decided that that’s what I wanted to do. I googled the Give Blood site, and found that because I’m aged between 17 and 65, I can just go along to any blood bank and offer my life fluid to all who need it (through the NHS obviously, I don’t mean just offering it to any random vampire-lookalike in the street). 

But then I found something even more interesting. With a few conditions, the NHS don’t accept blood from MSM.

MSM stands for ‘men who have had sex with men’. The NHS don’t accept blood from any man who has had sexual contact with another man within the last twelve months (and also any woman who has had sexual contact with a man who has had sexual contact with another man within the last twelve months). This is because MSM are apparently ‘more at risk of contracting diseases such as syphilis and HIV/AIDS’, and that to give this diseased blood to someone else would, of course, be dangerous. 

But that’s if their claim is true, which it isn’t. 

Let’s start with HIV/AIDS. The AIDS epidemic was first discovered in Los Angeles, where five homosexual men were recorded having Pneumocystis pneumonia (a form of lung infection that hits people with weak immune systems, like those with HIV/AIDS), which had been caused by some kind of disease. Because resultant investigations made out that this disease originated in the gay community, the press coined the term GRID, or ‘gay-related immune deficiency’. Thus the stigma began in the LGBT community, with society now believing that homosexuals were at fault for AIDS - and this stigma still hasn’t disappeared.

Rather than support the NHS’ claim here, this fact completely disproves it. Because of all the attention the LGBT community got from the media because of this, they were completely aware of the dangers of AIDS, and so homosexuals practised safe sex. They all knew the risks of unprotected sex, they all knew the outcome of contracting HIV, and so the gay community took more steps to protect themselves than heterosexuals did. Yes, condoms aren’t 100% effective, and not all LGBT people used them all the time, but the gay community were more likely to protect themselves than straight people - so why bother prevent MSM giving blood if they’re more likely to practise safe sex, so less likely to have these diseases?

Carrying on from that, it really pisses me off how unfair this ‘12-month deferral’ is. Why can a gay man who is in a monogamous relationship, and who practises safe sex, be prevented from donating, when a straight man who has frequent unprotected sex can easily give his possibly-diseased blood to someone else?

It’s homophobic, there is no other way of describing it. Their slogan is ‘Do something amazing today, give blood’, but more accurately it should be ‘Do something amazing today, give blood, unless you’re gay, so you’re not allowed to perform this amazing deed even though your blood may save someone’s life, so we’d rather have some straight guy’s syphilis-rife, HIV-infected red gunge he passes off for blood’. 

I want to do something amazing, I want to give blood. No wonder the NHS are painfully short on blood donors, if they’re so discriminatory.

(Source: thatclosetgotstuffy)

On flirting and the like.

So last Tuesday I started Sixth Form at my school. It’s quite exciting, we all wear suits (I look dapper, everyone else looks like gimps), and we only do four subjects. Anyway, about fifteen or twenty new people have joined, and one of these guys is in my English Literature class. Normally I wouldn’t take that much interest (not that I completely ignore them or anything), but this guy is intriguing. 

He’s currently a seven on Jui and I’s joint gaydar, and when I had a look (i.e. stalked) his Facebook profile, it said ‘Interested in… Men and Women’. I just hope this is true and not some forgotten remnant of a frape or -worse - a joke. However, in his profile pictures, there was also one showing him making out with a guy, so it seems likely he may have more than a passing interest in guys. 

Anyway, the reason why I’m talking about this is that this is completely new territory for me. I’ve never met a guy like me who was completely comfortable in not being straight (the ever-present pessemist inside reminds me that I don’t know for sure he’s gay/bi yet), and I’m not entirely sure what to do. 

How do I act? Do I ever ask him whether he’s gay/bi? Do I flirt? How do I flirt? I can already envisage the train-wreck this inevitably turn into, and it makes me feel scared. What if I flirt with him, and he’s not gay/bi? Or ask him and he’s not gay/bi? He’ll tell other people, I’ll get those pitying ‘wow you hit on a straight guy, way to go for overstepping the boundary’ looks and I won’t be able to talk to him without me thinking “he hates me he hates me what have I done now I’ve just ruined his life at his brand new school he hates me” thoughts.

May have gone off on a little bit of a tangent there. Back to business.

I am genuinely lost here. I’ve never been confronted with the actual possibilty of a relationship, and I’m a bit… bewildered. For once, there isn’t an app for that - iFlirt hasn’t quite been perfected yet - and I can’t download a boyfriend off the internet. I have no map, no guidebook, no GPS, I am diving into completely unknown territory.

I think that’s one of the main differences between straight and non-straight teenagers in high school; for one group, flirting and having relationships out in public is a social norm, for the other, it’s something rarely seen and sometimes condemned. Although it’s not condemned (openly, at least) at my school, I think it’ll be slightly indimidating at first to show affection in public - although I am, of course, firmly against PDAs. 

Of course, this new guy may turn out to be straighter than Ashley Cole’s internet history. But still, I will eventually have my first relationship (although I may simply die alone with my twelve cats), and this will apply. And I don’t know if I’m just a little scared by it.

(Source: thatclosetgotstuffy)

On it being a human issue.

I’ve noticed something recently, something which confuses me more than annoys me. Whenever something slightly LGBT-related comes up in a conversation with either my friends or my family, they always turn to me and go, “But what do you think?”, as if my opinion is somehow more qualified than theirs, just by virtue of me being gay. If it’s something homophobic, then they ask, “Doesn’t this offend you?”, without expressing their own opinion first.

This really does puzzle me. Of course queerphobia offends me, but it has nothing at all to do with me being homosexual. It’s entirely to do with me being a human being. Personally, I think one of my best virtues is that I have a strong sense of justice, a strong set of morals. In most situations, I can see when something’s right or when something’s wrong (although that doesn’t mean that I always do the right thing), and homophobia, biphobia, transphobia and every other type of phobia under the LGBT umbrella falls strictly into the latter category. Of course, I’m not saying that my sense of morality is absolute and any better than yours, but I’ve always been aware of my own morals, and I’ve always had a strong belief in them.

Prejudice towards sexual minorities, and the active discrimination that appears because of it, is wrong. Any kind prejudice and discrimination is wrong. This has always been so painfully obvious to me that I really do find it astonishing when people take part in it, or - just as worse - turn a blind eye to it. It’s astonishing to me that some parts of society can’t see this too. Of course, I’m definitely not as naive to not understand that other people are not me. They don’t share my opinion, they have opinions of their own, which are grounded in morals as strong as my own.

Someone did once ask me (before I came out) whether I supported gay rights. I said “no”. And I stand by it. You know why? Because I support human rights. I support human civil rights. When campaigning for the civil rights movement, did Doctor King talk about black rights? No, he did not. Did he talk about black pay, or black voting? No, he did not. He talked about equality. He talked about human equality. Who are we to say who deserves more rights than others? Who are we to say that ‘everyone is allowed to marry, it’s a right, except for you gays, you don’t get this right’. Either we all get the same human rights as everyone else, or none of us do. 

So this is what I find confusing about people thinking that, for some reason, I’m more qualified than them to talk about LGBT-related things, or homophobia. They aren’t gay issues, they’re human issues. So why aren’t more humans speaking out?

(Source: thatclosetgotstuffy)