The hot blonde on TV...

I saw something on TV the other night that made me a little sad.

I don't remember what time of night it was, probably around 1 a.m., and I was going to go to sleep. But as I flipped the TV back from my DVD player to a regular station, I caught a scene that held my interest (later to be determined it was The Real World: Denver).

Right away I could tell it was some Reality television program, a genre that I never watch. I was going to shut it off when I stopped and heard what the gorgeous blonde guy was saying.

Stifling tears, he was talking about, "How much I loved him," etc etc. At this point I was interested. Whats this about gays on TV?

The girl he was with tried (not so desperately) to calm him, patting his hand and offering him some simple statements. But he kept getting more adgitated, and kept on drinking. Seconds later, he was pleading with another guy, asking why his boyfriend had left him, when he was all he had. The other guy tried to calm him, but had no revalations to give the blonde.

Then, out of nowhere, the blonde wipes his tears back and says, "I don't want to be gay. I hate it, I want a wife, and a family, and kids and a house. I don't want to be gay! Do you think I'm really gay?"

The friend says yes, you're gay. Don't deny yourself.

"But I've got demons inside me! I'm going to go to hell, I won't be saved. God won't save my soul! Please, pray for me, I want to be saved. Do you think God will save me?"

Moving in, the friend holds the blonde's shoulders. "You're not going to hell. God will forgive you."

It cuts to an interview with the blonde after that night, and I learned a bit more about the story. Seems he cheated on his boyfriend in some one night stand, and the boyfriend left him. Not so shocking, and not really undeserved.

But then the real sad parts come out. How this beautiful blonde is really actually an almost completely lost soul. His family has no connection to him, simply because he's gay. "It's like they treat you like some friend, its an imposition to pick you up at the airport," he explains, as tears slide down his face. There's nothing good in his life, he drinks too much, and the only person that really loves him, the boyfriend who now left him, he drove away because of some stupid decisions.

My heart really broke for this guy, someone who normally I wouldn't think of as having such a sad story. After all, when I first see him, he's in a bar looking hot as hell, with a body and face to die for. He's chatting with his friends, he must have his shit together. I mean, what problems could this guy possibly have? He's too pretty to have problems.

But his probably not-too-uncommon story, about his family and his being unloved, really killed me. Sure, I've got my issues with things, but I don't have anything nearly as bad as him. And there, drunk (and honest), he's proclaiming that he wants to be straight, and to purge himself of the demons that make him gay. I'll admit I welled up a little seeing the pain flash on his face, and hearing the real truth about the pretty boy on TV.

I went to bed feeling thoroughally sorry for this guy, but when I thought about it in the morning, I realized I gave him the benefit of the doubt. I did something that I try to do when I am all to willing to lable someone as a victim of circumstance: change the characteristics of the person in question. Instead of a hot gay guy who cheated on his boyfriend, I thought of a straight girl who had done the same thing, and my sympathy was drastically scaled back. Sure, it's horrible about his family, but he also did something that would, if not for the other parts of his story, seem inexcusable.

Ultimately it boiled down to two different parts. The first being his depressing life story, and how eye opening it was for me to hear it. And the second, his one night stand that ruined his only loving relationship, something that I'm not as ready to forgive him for. Either way, I learned something, and tore down another stereotype that I didn't really realize I had built in my mind.

P.S. And what the hell was with the demons part! I didn't know people who were actually gay bought that crap! I thought it was just hate mongering from the far-right religious camps...poor guy!

This is 2007...

I really should start a series - "This is 2007" - showcasing all the things that piss me off about how the people in our world seem to still be stuck in some backward pasttime and have not realized that we live in a civilized, evolved society.

(Maybe I should have italicized those words...)

I bounded out of bed this morning, feeling awake and alive and almost over jetlag and exhaustion. I tiptoed over to my computer that now sits in my bedroom, a novelty that I'm still getting used to. Before I went to school, I never had a PC in my room, but since moving home this summer, I've decided there's no room to put it anywhere else (not that there's room on my dresser...but these things are ment to try us...). Naturally, it makes jacking off a lot easier too, because when that door is closed in the evening and I've 'gone to bed' I can beat to my feverant delight and theoretically nobody should walk in the door. God help them if they did!

This morning I surfed my usual pages, checking my messages to see if anyone has gotten back to me about a job (poor Steve is unemployed at the moment...nobody seems to want him and his stellar resume...) and landed on Facebook to check out the pictures people had posted from our France trip. This is a good thing about living in 2007, the internet is so pervasive that everyone willingly puts up their private photographs for others to see. So instead of making multiple copies off the negatives of film cameras, us poor students get to enjoy 1500+ images from each other's cameras.

Before I even got to checking the pictures, I browsed the newsfeed to see what had been going on since I slept. In case you don't use it, Facebook provides a 20 line newsfeed of your friend's activities; who messaged who, who added photos, etc etc. I came across an item of a guy I knew in high school, who had just added 'Queer Eye for the Straight Guy' to his favorite TV shows. A little strange, I thought, but what the hell. I clicked on to his profile, and a flicker of excitement waved in my chest.

His profile had changed. His sexual interest was now Men.

This was not entirely impossible in my view. He was a great guy, a little reserved (not unlike myself), definately not the boneheaded jock that he could have been. And he's also really easy on the eyes, and still on the swim team at college (though that only added to the hope that indeed he was gay...because he's real easy to look at) So when I considered it, I gave myself a moment to analyze, and ultimately thought, "Sure, he's gay. Good for him!"

After I had decided that this was logical and possible, I scrolled down and checked out the rest of his profile. There were a few more changes listed...he now likes 'gay music', 'Brokeback Mountain', 'How To Attract Gay Men - A Guide' and "flamming sexual partners whom I hope to meet at the bars now that I'm 19".

I exhaled and sighed aloud. Possibly because yesterday was his 19th birthday, his friends had hijacked his account and made a 'really funny' joke of his profile. Which included changing his sexual orientation, and then writing some insane garbadge about being gay. Too bad, he'd have made a cute gay guy.

Then I found myself getting pissed off, because of the thoughtlessness and stupidity of what people had done. How can anyone our age make gay jokes anymore? How is it funny to make it look like your friend is gay? Why is being gay funny to straight people?

It's not that they defaced his profile...if done properly I think it'd be pretty funny. But to make him gay as part of the defacement, and think that that's funny, blows me away. I didn't think people thought being gay was a joke anymore, or that it s something to laugh about. I found myself really offended by the fact that college boys our age still stigmatize homosexuality so much that they make a big joke of it all.

And it wasn't even saterical or farcial or anything remotely witty that I could appriciate. It was a step above calling someone gay on the playground to make fun of them. And that's it.

This isn't the first time I've seen it done, in the exact same method. But this was the first time I felt really offended and shocked that people my own age could still be so unaware. Come on guys, this is 2007.