Oh, MOCC, how I love you. The six annual Minnesota Out Campus Conference is being held in St. Cloud Minnesota. I came up for my second time in attendance. Last year at this time I had shut down the blog because I felt it was a waste of my energy. That and I was self conscious that I was a terrible writer. As far as self consciousness is concerned, I haven't changed much. So I curse and bless my good friends who have been with me over the year and am also thankful to the ones who keep coming into my life.
The first evening we went out to eat and we opened up one of the most memorable conversations of my life. We went around the table and shared our dating lives past and present. With that, parts of our coming out stories intertwined with our young and naive dating stories. A sense of affirmation was passed around the table as we politely filled our starving college faces with pizza, salad, bread, and for myself, a caesar chicken wrap with fries.
As I told my newly found friends about my crushes and my past relationships, a sense of relief took the weight of being an oppressed gay male off my shoulders. This feeling of community was shared and my share of heavy weight lifting, measured in subjective emotion, was worked out. Where someone would say to me "he is leading you on and you should ask him out", I would have to come back and say "that is so cute and I am so happy for you." And it was just something as simple as a conversation that made all of that baggage dissipate.
As Max from Well I gotta say, Being gay is would say, "At the University of North Dakota, we just hide our gay for the week and spill when we meet for our GSA meetings. That's when we let all the gay out."
The challenged posed to the activists and advocates is to get from that world where we hide all our colors and get to a world where we rejoice every color of the rainbow.
Once we get to a world where everyone can talk about something as harmless, special, and loving as our relationships without worrying about having a job, having a place to live, having accepting friends and family, and having safety and security across all layers of society, the "queer" community wouldn't have to live in a world clouded statistically by issues such as depression, anxiety, sexual promiscuity, drug addiction, STIs, homelessness, etc. (That's probably the best long sentence I have ever constructed.)
The experience at MOCC is just a momentary taste of that equality which obliterates the results of societal constructs that oppress. It is my goal to gather as much of this positivity I possibly can and bring it back home to my friends, family, and peers to share, spread, and change the world we live in.
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Jacob Woods
Jacob is gay. He eats, breathes, and sleeps lgbtqia issues. He is a psychology major currrently working to educate the simpletons. He attends college in the Twin Cities.
Sunday, November 6
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8 comments:
Amen! Well said!
That must have felt really great.
That was a pretty good long sentence. (Despite the fact that I think our relationships with other guys should not include having sex) it really would be a better world if people didn't have to worry about all those things, and could just be themselves openly without repercussions. (But please no PDA, regardless of orientation. LOL)
Other than the religious take on the matter, why shouldn't a man's relationship with another man never include sex assuming they are gay?
Other than that, or an ethic which reasons itself to the same conclusion, no reason at all.
BTW, one sort of ethic which would conclude, independently of religion, that gay sex is wrong would be one based on teleology. It would begin from a premise that things should be used for their purposes, and it is wrong to use them in ways inconsistent with that purpose. It would then develop the point that the purpose of the reproductive system is reproduction. It would conclude that the use of the reproductive system in ways inconsistent with its reproductive purpose is a misuse (or an abuse) of the system, and therefore wrong.
Like a rock being used as a hammer so to speak is fundamentally wrong even though it gets you to the point. This can't be seen as an abuse though because sex is a good thing and there is proven to be a fundamental purpose for sexual relations beyond procreation. The purpose of sex, as we find, is not strictly a way to make babies but a way to emotionally bond with one another, to relieve sexual build up, etc. But, coming from the view point of religion, these options aren't discussed as the purpose of man and women is just to make babies. Which is really a shallow way of looking at sexuality in midst of all the knowledge that is available to us.
Actually, it's more like a hammer being used as an axe or a screwdriver.
And that's not what religion says.
To explicate my previous response a bit:
I don't deny that there are good purposes served by sex beyond procreation. But the an ethical position could hold that the procreative purpose of sex should not be excluded. IOW, achieving emotional bonding through a sex act which excludes procreation would be an abuse. The benefits other than procreation are add-ons, not substitutes.
And this view point does not have a strictly religious element.
Furthermore, the religion I'm familiar with recognizes the benefits of sex in addition to procreation. Pope John Paul II extolled the expression of love in marital intercourse as part of the bodily representation of God which is meant by saying that we are created in God's image and likeness. Indeed, he saw the loving sexual embrace of husband and wife as the highest physical expression of that likeness.
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