pride

The first I knew of it was seeing the big shiny billboard in Camberley, the close-up of sweaty hips in a shiny thong. I didn't approve, not through any kind of general decency, more because the blatant sexualisation of those poor little lesbians - bless 'em, they just want to get along and here we are exploiting them for the benefit of hetero men.

Forgetting, of course, that straight guys aren't the only demographic in society who like watching girls make out.

The next thing I knew, my bisexual girl-who's-my-friend-type-girlfriend was telling me about watching it with her lesbian more-than-friends-type-girlfriend and I was searching YouTube for The L Word back episodes and, despite not falling into either of the demographics in question (I am, as far as I can discern, neither a lesbian nor a straight male) LOVING IT.

Shit, I thought, I actually really like this show. Boy was my face red.

Despite my embarassment, my recent boyfriends haven't seemed to mind, in fact they've seemed practically euphoric about having a girlfriend who postively encourages them to watch what they see as girl-on-girl porn with them.

But I was starting to wonder. As my third term at uni began to take an undeniably butch turn (what with the haircut, the steel capped boots, that picture of me kissing Catherine), a supposedly straight girl staying up late to download yet more of season 2 off of YouTube became more and more suspicious.

Unfortunately, Philippa, Tim and everybody else who thinks I'd look good in rainbow stripes - I wasn't experiencing a change of heart. Much to my surprise, it wasn't the sex that kept me watching, it wasn't even my not entirely honorable crush on Sarah Shahi that kept me watching. Turns out I was in it for the gay. The absolute, loud and proud, unashamed gayness of it.

You end up watching some sexed up TV show and suddenly there's butches and femmes and bitches and benders and transgenders and men who don't want to be women, just lesbians - and how do you go about being a liberal then, when you can't help but flinch because you know you really should disapprove? Because someone once said you should disapprove.

I used to just skirt around it. You know, 'it', the gay thing. On the one - the things I'd always believed about tolerance and freedom. On the other - everything that church said was right. Everything that everyone around me seemed to think was right. Tricky, huh?

I remember two men at church, stood before the congregation with entirely straight arms around each others' entirely straight shoulders, proclaiming that they could not, would not support the appointment of John Jeffrey, the first openly gay bishop. It was that word, 'openly', that got me. Finally someone had the stones to stand up and come out in the clergy and he was being denounced.

No one had ever denounced me that way. With all the history I brought along to church with me I had never once even considered that these beautifully accepting people could actually say, gently and with no malice, that the way this person was made was just not suitable.

I did what everyone does when they can't handle the facts and went into pious, evasive denial for three years, which is how long it took me to realise that I didn't believe this, I couldn't pretend to and I was sick of being told to.

For me, it's the flinching. Greer wrote that you can't truly know your own femininity until you've tasted your own menstrual blood. When I read that the thought of it made me flinch, because she's talking about a deeper, more primal view of womanhood than the sterilised mass media will ever let girlies see.

And when I watch The L Word, which, let's face it, is barely scratching the surface of alternative identities and lifestyles, I flinch. I flinch when I see the transgender doing his moustache and binding his chest, I flinch when I see the butchest middle-aged woman dancing with the skinniest femme because these are so far beyond my experience thus far.

Trust me, that doesn't make me glad, or righteous. It shames me. This androgyny, this diversity, this is just another kind of peopleness. Another little bit of humanity that I have so little understanding of because of the alternating fear, pity and disdain that has been bred into me for people who do life differently from us.

It makes me flinch because it's alien, not because it's wrong, and at some point during this infatuation of mine I started to feel real anger for the first time. Not the generalised, I'm angry because it's wrong anger that I used to have, but a real fury that there are people who still seek to say that diverse is less, that difference is wrong.

Because it's not just about gays and straights, it's about every different kind of person and lifestyle, about trying to prescribe one way of being above another. And it's not just Christianity either. It's the American dream or British stiff upper lip or anything that tells you that there is a certain person you have to be to be accepted.

If you watch it, if you can get past the lady-on-lady antics and the frequent and lusty swearing, maybe you'll only disapprove, but that's fine. It's not really about the show, it's about a whole new kind of epiphany, about the beliefs I'll stand behind, and the ones that I won't.

pause

He's falling asleep on the sofa, doing that twitching thing as he drifts off on his own. It's warmer here than it is there but I get the sudden urge to go and write this down, to try and chronicle this feeling.

Now he's up, heading for a cigarette and then to bed, and I'm here alone, tapping away on Craig's laptop, the Stereophonics telling stories of boys who died too young. And all his friends lay down the flowers, sit on the bank for hours, talk of the way they saw him last, local boy in the photograph. And it's funny, sitting here, how we've talked about feeling happy, how this evening, the candles and the food and conversation feel so good. We talk about ancestry in the semi-dark, take pictures of each other, cushions on the floor.

It doesn't even feel like we tried that hard. These good times just keep on happening, whether we ask for them or not. And that's a good feeling for tonight. Content, I guess.

It's something in the way I don't want to wake him as I leave the sofa and come over here to write this, how slowly I move without even realising, til one song has become another and he breathes on. I want to write the perfection of this moment, to step out of it and try to keep it here to come back to. If I could bottle it, share it, breathe it.

I feel happy, right now, happy, and it's so beautiful, but something wakes in me and sends me to the computer because I guess I'm frightened that if I don't pin at least a part of this down on the page I might never find another moment like it. And that's worth pausing for.

this is cool

I'm sitting down to force myself to blog. I promise nothing, but at least it's something.

*****

Est just txted me to ask if I want to audition for the RAG pantomime tonight. At last count I've auditioned for only two plays since I've been at uni and performed in none. This, for a drama student, doesn't look good. But here's the thing, it's a big thing and the thing is that I don't actually think if I got into a play I'd be able to hack it. At the moment I have only 8 hours of lectures a week, plus rehearsals, and then 15 hours at work, but I'm shattered. It feels sometimes like that's all I can handle. And that makes me feel pathetic, but it also makes me loth to waste even more of the little time I have here doing nothing at all.

*****

Catherine and Sam came home from France for the weekend sounding relatively unchanged in terms of accent. I don't know how I'd convinced myself that they'd pick up accents when all they're speaking is English with English people and French to French people, but still. I think I'm really gonna need to hear that Franglais twang.

Cat and I sit in the union looking terribly chic, listening to a man with a lovely voice, nursing drinks and cigarettes. Perhaps to compensate for the fact that we fancy ourselves rotten, talk turns to the important things. The God things. And I say that I'm not ruling it out, I'm keeping it at a distance. That if I'm wrong, so wrong about how I'm living my life now then I'm gonna have to wait for God to come to me. Because when I went searching for him I just got lost, so to speak, and there were too many tears for my liking.

Back at the house we talk verses, and the bit in Hosea - it's funny how quickly the numbers have left me - that Tracey gave me at the end of last year, and that was given to Catherine as well.

I will lead her into the desert and speak to her there, I will win her back and she will give herself to me as she did when she was young.

And it's a comfort, but a strange kind of comfort, because I don't know how happy I'd be about being won back.

*****

I promised Catherine and Steph that I'd blog more often, so I'm going to. I have broadband in my room again now, which is wonderful, so I really have no excuse except for the horrendous block that appears in my head when I open up blogger.

So I've decided to resurrect my part in that was cool, Becci's project for the appreciation of the simple things. I don't think I have very many big things to say so the little things seem like a great place to start.

If you're wondering, I keep it
<-------over there.

boo hoo

So Kate's moving out, and as much as I love (like last night) emerging from my room to see a lounge full of boys I don't actually know, I'm pretty pissed. See, four of us agreed to live together and now, all these months later, two of them and the two who would replace them and now Kate have all found better offers. What can I say, 9 days out of 10 it's actually pretty funny that yet again I'm waiting for 'somebody' to show up and move in. I enjoy it, the not knowing who the hell it's gonna be.

But today I'm in self-pity central. I've torn a muscle in my back. It's not gonna heal for six weeks and in the meantime I have a very important performance to do, three days a week of work at Help the Aged to do, tidying my room to do, laundry to do, leaving the house to do - all kinds of activities that involve being able to move. Plus, I have flu, and as much as I love Craig and Christoph, I suddenly feel very very alone. You know, there's really not much else I can do but sit and watch tv in my bedroom.

It's made a little bit harder by the fact that I'm doing this all unmedicated. I took myself off Citalopram a few weeks ago and, while I did it gradually and managed to avoid too much withdrawal, I'm feeling the difference. Really, badly feeling the difference.

These things come in cycles, right? I'm in the bad place now but I'll be in the good place soon.

Yeah, fucking right. You know I don't even care?

emphasis on living

I hate being dependent on a drug. Hate it more than I can say. But if the alternative is a proud stoicism in the face of sorrow accompanied by prolonged and unspeakable despair -- well, I'll take dependency.