Eclecticism

A list that rumbled its way through my head today at lunch: I am a…

• 40 year old (neither particularly old nor young)
• middle-class (not rich, but by no means poor)
• employed
• cisgender
• straight
• white
• male
• married
• homeowner
• in good physical and mental health.

That’s a whole lot of privilege all piled up. And I’m sure that doesn’t cover all of it.

I have friends and acquaintances (and there are millions of others just here in the United States whom I’ve never met) who don’t fit into one, a few, or all of those categories. They have every right to live their lives just as comfortably and without fear of repression, censure, or attack as I do. But for far too many of them, that’s just not possible.

And that’s why, more and more, I’ve been finding it incredibly important to pay attention to issues like equality, sexism, racism, ageism, and whatever other -isms we all come across, directly or indirectly, in our day-to-day lives.

While I don’t think I’ve come across it terribly often lately, one of the phrases that used to be common among LGBTQ allies was “Straight but Not Narrow.” I’ve used it in the past, as have other friends, and I have a CWU Pride shirt from a few years back that uses that phrase.

However, as I’ve thought more about it over the past year or so, I’ve become more and more aware that something about that phrase really bothered me. I’d started putting it into words a little while ago, and had talked it over with Prairie, but something I came across today brought it back to mind.

In this Reddit post (which is actually about problems with the HRC organization — problems I was not aware of before, and will want to consider in the future), a couple lines stood out to me as tying directly in to my discomfort with “straight but not narrow.”

[The “equal sign” logo is] the easy way to display your political stances without having anyone question your gender identity or orientation. It’s the physical embodiment of “I’m not gay but,” much like the rebranding of feminism to “egalitarianism.”

…it’s also extremely offensive, I think, to attempt to distance yourself from the movement with qualifications like “I don’t hate men, but” or “I’m not a feminist, I’m an egalitarian,” and “I’m not gay, but.”

While I know that the “straight but not narrow” phrase is well-intentioned as a way to express support for LGBTQ issues (“I’m an ally!”), the very fact that it starts with the “straight but” disclaimer lessens the impact of that support. If you truly support a community, why express that support through a phrase that begins by separating yourself from that very community? It feels like a socially-accepable way of saying “Well, you know I’m good with the gays and all, but I’m not gay. Uh-uh, man. Not me. No homo, y’know?”

I certainly don’t regret using the phrase in the past, nor having bought the shirt (I’m quite happy to support the campus LGBTQ organizations). Also, please note that I don’t want to sound like I’m censuring anyone who does use that phrase, or doesn’t have problems with it. As I said, it’s well-intentioned, and for many people, that will be fine. This is just a personal thing for me, and I don’t think I’ll be using that phrase or wearing that particular shirt again.

I think that most people who follow me will already know this from Facebook, Twitter, or Google+, but just in case there’s someone out there still paying attention to this site but not any of my social media outlets…

…just over one week ago, on June 19th, eleven years after our first date, Prairie and I got married in a small civil ceremony at the Kittitas County Courthouse here in Ellensburg.

We’d started talking about this a few months ago, when we started talking about what to do for my 40th birthday. “We could get married…?” And we were off.

We very intentionally kept it quiet. We didn’t want a big to-do made of the event for a few reasons, chief among those being that we’d already been dating for eleven years, living together for eight, and even bought a house together two years ago. Our relationship isn’t new, and this seemed to us to be a combination of something very trivial (a few words from a judge, a few signatures on a piece of paper, and we’re done) and something weirdly big (c’mon…it’s getting married!). Most importantly, we wanted to do this for us and how we were most comfortable, and part of that meant keeping it as low-key and low-stress as possible. We each told our immediate family the month before so that they wouldn’t be caught completely off guard when the news eventually came out, and other than the friends we asked to be our legal witnesses, that was it.

We’d actually originally considered not making any announcement at all, but we eventually decided to have a little fun with it. So, once the ceremony was done and we’d had a short “thank you” gathering at our house with our witnesses, we made the “announcement” by switching our Facebook statuses from “in a relationship” to “married” and waited to see what would happen next.

Of course, what happened was a lot of surprised and happy well-wishes, and we had a lot of fun watching the “likes” and comments come in over the course of the evening.

Thanks to all of you who know already for your kind comments, to our families for understanding (or at least accepting) how we decided to do this, to Cody (and Jackee) and Courtney (and Andy) for being our witnesses, and to Judge Fran Chmelewski for making it official.

Thanks also to Jackee for taking photos, since I couldn’t very well do both at the same time. Here they are:

And that’s it!