betsyshane

Guys I realize it has been forever and a year and I intend to get back on track (it seems like I say that a lot lately)...

This month, October, has been a month of broken dreams and trying moments. First off, a dear friend of mine was arrested and incarcerated. It is not necessarily a surprise, we all saw it coming, but his troubles still hurt me deeply and I found myself somewhat depressed over it.

Secondly, I found out that someone I have known my whole life is HIV positive, and rather than being supportive, many of the people this person is close to have blamed and shunned this new status. I feel worst of all because I know how commonplace the disease is and how horrifying it can be, but I feel as though I can say nothing because I am too young and not close enough. It is a powerless feeling.

So, I didn't actually say that. But I finally broke down this week and told my mother the awful truth: I don't know what I want to do with my life, but all of her hopes and dreams for me are not in the running. I attend a top 10 school, was planning on going to law school next year, but this summer, working the 9-5 at an unpaid internship, I realized that it's not the life for me.

Aside from the fact that law is a profession whose training is best categorized by jumping through hoops to get a degree and THEN you start to learn the trade, I really really hate it. Listening to other people's petty problems and trying to figure out who is right and who is wrong reminds me of watching an episode of Sex and The City. And I don't want to watch neurotic people discuss petty problems my whole life. Of course, most of the people I spoke to did in fact have real, serious problems, but they came in to complain about their neighbor who was lining garbage up on their front porch, not the fact that their children had been taken away by the state, or that their significant other had been beating them.

Today, for the first time in a few months, someone asked me, straight out, "Are you a lesbian?"

My gender identity falls under the slim category of "tomboy at a family function." I wear clothes I'm not necessarily comfortable in, that don't necessarily suit my personality, and that certainly don't suit my actions. What kind of girl wears a frilly pastel dress to jump fences and go jogging? Me, that's who.

Normally, I'm tickled pink when my sexuality is called into question-- on the queer side-- but today I got to thinking why it hasn't happened so recently. Is it because I'm passing? And what does my passing say to other queers and especially lesbians about gay sexuality?

I love PDA. Granted, if you're sitting in a room with two of your friends who just won't stop making out, it's rude. But stepping out on a liberal leftist limb for a second, twinged with the 60's flavored free-love agenda, what is so offensive about two people expressing themselves? I'm not discussing public sex, I'm discussing anything up to and including first base and/or a little over the clothes groping.

In the earlier part of the century, women who smoked in public were women of ill repute. Granted, smoking is bad for you, but I'm sure the thought that goes through a lot of minds is "What kind of a girl lets herself be touched in public?" A girl who is equal to her male counterpart. I was delighted to hear a male friend complain that PDA meant that a guy was whipped, because it finally acknowledges a simple truth: women (gasp shock horror) have sexual desire equal to that of men.