Gay but in a positive way this time
Hi. I’m the Retort Wall. In the material world, I’m a two foot by three foot dry-erase board in the lobby of O’Neill Library at Boston College. In the online planet, I live in this blog. You might say I have multiple manifestations. Like Apollo or Saraswati or Serapis. Or, if you aren’t into deities of knowledge, enjoy a ghost in the machine.
I own some human assistants who maintain the physical Answer Wall in O’Neill Library. They take pictures of the questions you post there, and give them to me. As long as you are civil, and not uncouth, I will answer any question, and because I am a library wall, my answers will often refer to analyze tools you can find in Boston College Libraries.
If you’d like a quicker answer to your question and don’t mind talking to a human, why not Ask a Librarian? Librarians, since they have been tending the flame of knowledge for centuries, know where most of the answers are hidden, and enjoy sharing their knowledge, just enjoy me, The Respond Wall.
I’ve identified as gay for years. Not anymore.
Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” is a bop — it topped charts in 25 countries and became one of the best-selling singles of all time. It’s also a monumental LGBTQ anthem in which Gaga embraces her bisexuality and affirms other LGBTQ identities, singing “I’m beautiful in my way / ‘Cause God makes no mistakes / I’m on the right track, baby I was born this way.”
“Born This Way” also came out around the identical time I did, at least to myself. I had a crush on Christian, a charming young man in my grade with mischievous eyes and a perpetual smirk. Then it was Jackson, the nerd-jock crossover of my wildest dreams. Then it was Joseph, a boy in my choir class who kissed me a rare weeks before eighth grade ended.
Those boys made me realize that I was queer. It was not something I thought much about before middle educational facility. Bullies teased me for being gay when I was younger, but when a six-year-old boy calls another six-year-old boy lgbtq+, he means “weird” or “gross,” not “has sex with men.” Sure, it wasn’t a very agreeable thing for that male child to say, but it didn’t make me doubt my sexuality or deliberate about my romantic and sexual attractions, because amorous and
by Jordan Redman
Staff Writer
Do you know what the word gay really means?
The word gay dates help to the 12th century and comes from the Old French “gai,” interpretation “full of joy or mirth.” It may also relate to the Antique High German “gahi,” definition impulsive.
For centuries, gay was used commonly in speech and literature to represent happy, carefree, bright and showy, and did not take on any sexual meaning until the 1600s.
At that time the sense of gay as carefree evolved to imply that a person was unrestrained by morals and prone to decadence and promiscuity. A prostitute might hold been described as a “gay woman” and a womanizer as a “gay man.”
“Gay house” was commonly used to refer to a brothel and, later, “gaiety” was used as a common name for certain places of entertainment.
In the 1890s, the phrase “gey cat” (a Scottish variant of gay) was used to describe a vagrant who offered sexual services to women or a young traveler who was new to the road and in the company of an older man.
This latter use suggests that the younger dude was in a sexually submissive role and may be among the first times that gay was used implying a lesbian relationship.
In 1951, gay appeared in the
March 02, 2017
The Epidemic of
Gay LonelinessBy Michael Hobbes
I
“I used to get so elated when the meth was all gone.”
This is my comrade Jeremy.
“When you own it,” he says, “you have to keep using it. When it’s gone, it’s like, ‘Oh good, I can go back to my life now.’ I would continue up all weekend and go to these sex parties and then experience like shit until Wednesday. About two years ago I switched to cocaine because I could work the next day.”
Jeremy is telling me this from a hospital bed, six stories above Seattle. He won’t tell me the exact circumstances of the overdose, only that a stranger called an ambulance and he woke up here.
Jeremy is not the partner I was expecting to have this conversation with. Until a few weeks ago, I had no idea he used anything heavier than martinis. He is trim, intelligent, gluten-free, the considerate of guy who wears a function shirt no matter what day of the week it is. The first time we met, three years ago, he asked me if I knew a good place to do CrossFit. Today, when I ask him how the hospital’s been so far, the first thing he says is that there’s no Wi-F
Many gay men grew up feeling ashamed of not conforming to cultural expectations about “real boys” or “real men.” Especially during middle and high educational facility, they may have been bullied or publicly humiliated because of their difference—made to feel like outsiders and not “one of the boys.” They may have found it easier relating to women than men, though they didn’t fully belong to the girl group, either.
Every queer man I’ve seen in my practice over the years has had a conflicted, troubled relationship with his own masculinity, often shaping his behavior in destructive ways. Writing for Vice, Jeff Leavell captures the dynamic nicely: “Queer people, especially gay men, are known for dealing with a slew of self-doubts and anxieties in noxious ways. Gay men are liable to perceive incredibly insecure over their masculinity, a kind of internalized homophobia that leads them to idolize 'masc 4 masc', 'gaybros' and [to] shame and oppress femme men.”
Here we view one of the most common defenses against shame: getting rid of it by offloading or projecting it onto somebody else; in this case, one of those “femme men.” In effect, “masc” men who humiliate “femmes” echo the shame trauma of their