Author Archives: Joel Derfner

December 1, 2010

Gay marriage is bad for America.

I mean it; I think gay marriage is a terrible idea, and I want nothing to do with it.

Evan Wolfson, founder and director of the marriage-equality organization Freedom to Marry, argues that the term “gay marriage” suggests we’re asking for special privileges—privileges that straight married people don’t have. Me, I take the opposite view. As I see it, any adjectival or nominal qualification can only limit the idea of marriage, can only make it less than just plain marriage and all it encompasses. A menu is a menu, but a kids menu is a very particular kind of menu, sharing some but not all of the qualities of other menus. Soup can be refreshing in any clime on any day of the year; chicken soup can’t. “Marriage” is marriage, and offers a host of possibilities. “Gay marriage,” I think, offers fewer.

(If we need a noun, I offer “marriage equality.”)

If you had told me on May 4, 1993, that in a decade and a half I would be desperately researching waiting periods for marriage licenses in Connecticut and Massachusetts because otherwise my boyfriend was going to drag me to his home state of Iowa to get married (“But corn is fun!”), I would have laughed in your face. Then, if you are a boy, I would most likely have asked you out, since that’s what I spent most of my sophomore year of college doing, and you would have said no, since that’s what the boys I asked out spent most of my sophomore year of college doing, and I would have gone back to my dorm room to cry.

But the next day, the Hawai’i Supreme Court ruled that denying same-sex couples the right to marry probably violated the state constitution, and everything changed. I mean, the boys I asked out still said no, but the possibilities of what they were saying no to had been cracked wide open, so I cried much, much harder.

Seventeen years later (though, extraordinarily, I seem to have aged only five), I have at last found a boy I was able to trick into proposing to me. After getting engaged two and a half years ago, we’ve made a few attempts at planning a wedding, but none of them have come to fruition, mostly because the damn rules keep changing. “Honey, let’s go to Massachusetts and get married! Oh, wait, now we can only get married in Massachusetts if we live there. Okay, well, let’s go to California and get marri— whoops, we weren’t fast enough. Never mind California. Wait, maybe we can still go to California! Nope. Um . . . oh, crap.”

Since May 17, 2004, when a Cambridge city clerk pronounced Tanya McCloskey and Marcia Kadish married under the laws of Massachusetts, same-sex couples have followed their lead in the United States — over 150,000 all told in Massachusetts, California, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont, Iowa, Washington, D.C., and the Coquille Indian Tribe (within the boundaries of Oregon).

And that’s the thing: McCloskey and Kadish, and the multitude of other married same-sex couples—theirs wasn’t a gay marriage. It was a marriage.

When Roman soldiers, forbidden in the first and second centuries A.D. to take wives, were finally allowed to wed, they weren’t military marrying; they were marrying.

When former slaves freed by the Emancipation Proclamation stood before clergymen and spoke their vows, they weren’t getting black married or freedmen and -women married; they were getting married.

When Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter said “I do”—they were the interracial couple whose victory in the Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia made it illegal in America to prevent mixed-race couples from wedding—they didn’t get interracial married; they got married.

Same-sex couples today are in no different position. I don’t want to get gay married.

I want to get married.

Posted on by Joel Derfner | 9 Comments

November 30, 2010

This is going to be a very boring post, I’m afraid. I want to be amusing but I’m simply too frazzled.

Because I’m going to be on a reality show.

Technically speaking, it’s not a reality show; it’s what’s known in Hollywood, I understand, as a docu-reality show, because it’s not fake enough to be a reality show.

For some months early this year, a Sundance Channel camera crew followed me and my friend H., collecting footage for a show called Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys about the friendships between straight women and gay men. We were one of four couples whose stories the show would tell, over the course of eight half-hour episodes.

Well, the first two of these are a week from tonight at 10:00 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. ET/PT.

They haven’t shown us the episodes, though the first one is apparently available On Demand for people with Time-Warner Cable.

If you want to read more about the show or see clips of me and H. or of the other three couples, you can do so here.

I’m just praying really hard that there are no shots of me picking my nose.

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Posted on by Joel Derfner | 5 Comments

November 19, 2010

Okay, I just watched the Green Lantern trailer, and I can’t even begin to express how very excited I am. Of course I think that Ryan Reynolds is sex on legs—what can I say, I’m a clichéd gay guy—but what’s really making me happy is that there’s a movie about the Green Lantern in the first place. He was always my favorite member of the League of Justice, always to my mind the truest ideal of a super hero, always left everybody else in the dust, and it was all for one very good reason:

He knew how to accessorize.

I mean, come on. Batman? A walking Project Runway disaster—talk about overdoing it with the styling. Superman? No decoration at all, not even a bracelet or a mask; he might as well have been a lesbian farmer in Omaha.

But the Green Lantern . . . he had taste. My idol knew how to do so much with so little.

So I’m really psyched for summer 2011.

Posted on by Joel Derfner | 6 Comments

November 16, 2010

Jeff Sheng’s extraordinary photography exhibit Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell:

Posted on by Joel Derfner | 1 Comment

November 10, 2010

I’ve been thinking lately about the term “fag hag.”

I don’t like it.

But: while it’s easy to refer to a straight woman who’s best friends with a gay man or who spends a lot of time with gay men as a fag hag, it’s also a little careless, because “fag hag” has, throughout its brief history (it seems to have arisen in the middle of the twentieth century), almost always had negative connotations.

In the ’40s and ’50s, a fag hag was a straight woman who hung out with gay men because she was lonely, because she couldn’t get a date, because she needed the attention. She was a pathetic figure, deserving of both pity and scorn, and her gay male friends gave her more than enough of both. She hung out with them because she was an outcast from straight society; gay men were the best she could do. They in turn were aware of their status as the dregs, and in justified resentment kept her on the fringes of their company, never fully accepting her, but never fully rejecting her wither, because they knew what it was like to be outcast from straight society.

(Note, please, that I am making explicit the connotations of a term, not describing actual people.)

In the ’60s and ’70s, the meaning of “fag hag” shifted and the term came to describe a woman who was in love with an openly gay man or who only fell in love with openly gay men. Her feelings would never be requited, and she knew her feelings would never be requited, and so once again, though for different reasons, she was a figure of pity and scorn. It’s human nature to feel some measure of contempt, however slight, for somebody who loves you more than you love him or her, and here was someone who was not only always on the wrong side of that equation but also evidently unwilling to do anything about it. And yet, since the men she was in love with, like gay men today, were also all thirteen-year-old girls inside, they felt keenly the pain of unanswered longing. So once again the fag hag was kept on the edge of gay society, never in, never out.

In the ’80s and early ’90s, people began to subvert the meaning of “fag hag” in much the same way they had begun to subvert the meaning of “queer.” They—we, I should say, since by this time I had come prancing out of the womb—took the term “queer” from our oppressors and transformed it into something positive and defiant; once we welcomed the word it lost its power to hurt us and our enemies were left with one weapon fewer. “Fag hag,” too, took on a provocative connotation, denoting a woman happy to flout society’s standards and spend her time with unacceptable people. Both “fag hag” and “queer” came to mean, essentially, “Yes, I’m that thing you’re calling me, and you’re simply too limited to see that it’s a thing to be celebrated.”

“Queer” has pretty much stabilized by now, somewhere in the intersection of sexuality and sociopolitics. It can mean “gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, intersexual, asexual, and/or pansexual”—that is, “not straight”—or sometimes simply “disobedient to sex and gender rules”—and it has become very useful, especially as our understanding of sexuality broadens.

But here’s the thing that “queer” has going for it that “fag hag” doesn’t: “queer” is and has always been a term that separates us from them. The us and the them have changed over time, but what has stayed the same is that it’s a word that divides.

We’re no longer looking for, however, a term that divides gay men and straight women. If “fag hag” had been appropriated by straight women in the face of sexism and other forms of oppression by gay men, it would be one thing, but that’s not what’s happened. Instead, we’ve tried to change it from a term that separates us into a term that unites us—and I’m not sure that’s possible. A knife can be used as a weapon for good or ill, but no matter what something’s going to get cut apart. I can’t hear “fag hag” without feeling division, and that in fact is exactly the opposite of what I think we want here. Because what we’ve realized is that there’s an affinity between gay men and straight women that often makes us each other’s strongest allies, and that’s a force that invites not defiance or subversion but celebration.

So I don’t know what the right term is. It’s certainly not the unpronounceable “gwlbwlb” (girl who likes boys who like boys). We can’t use “fruit fly,” which has its own distinct meaning, problematic in its own distinct way, of “a straight man who hangs around with gay men.”

I guess for now I’ll use “friend,” but that’s woefully insufficient too.

Cross-posted to Facebook and to sarahandjoellikeboys.com.

Posted on by Joel Derfner | 14 Comments

November 9, 2010

Oh.

My.

God.

This is from the Christian Broadcast Network website, posted late in 2008:

In January of this year, Cindy Jacobs was in a worship service when the Lord spoke to her, “Cindy, the strongman over America doesn’t live in Washington, DC—the strongman lives in New York City! Call My people to pray for the economy.”

This word so shook Cindy; she knew she had to call the people of God to converge on New York City the week of October 29 for an emergency prayer rally to cry out against economic collapse in the midst of shaking.

The Lord further said, “October 29 was Black Tuesday, the day the stock market crashed, and Satan wants to do it again.” We must be proactive in prayer. At the beginning of the year many intercessors began to hear from the Lord that without divine intervention, a major shaking was coming to Wall Street. This would spread until there were food shortages. Some think that 2009 would be worse than 2008. Of course, it goes without saying that this would affect markets around the world.

Many people are fasting and praying for the upcoming elections, Cindy says. We don’t want to let up in this final press, we need to P.U.S.H. (pray until something happens) to avert financial judgment. On September 29 last month, the US stock market went down 777 points in one day. Cindy says it was no coincidence that this happened on the first day of the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah.

“This is so severe in the economic area because we are facing judgment from the actions, not only for our stance towards Israel, but our blatant sin against Him in passing laws such as the one allowing homosexual marriages,” Cindy said.

NO MORE BUSINESS AS USUAL

In early August in her prayer time Cindy heard the Lord say, “There will be no more business as usual.”

Little did she know the scope of what this meant on a worldwide scale. God is on the move. She and many others have taken this as a major point of intercession. She believes that just as there came a time when God judged the gods of Egypt, He is now judging the god of mammon. Nations are standing on the cusp of history that will determine their course for generations to come. God is judging the ideologies of nations. He is moving to put the fear of the Lord not only on His church; but upon the nations of the world.

For these and other reasons Cindy is calling for a Day of Prayer for the World’s Economies on Wednesday, October 29, 2008. They are calling for prayer for the stock markets, banks, and financial institutions of the world on the date the stock market crashed in 1929. They are meeting at the New York Stock Exchange, the Federal Reserve Bank, and its 12 principal branches around the US that day.

“We are going to intercede at the site of the statue of the bull on Wall Street to ask God to begin a shift from the bull and bear markets to what we feel will be the ‘Lion’s Market,’ or God’s control over the economic systems,” she said. “While we do not have the full revelation of all this will entail, we do know that without intercession, economies will crumble.”

Cindy is encouraging prayer groups to intercede for banks and financial institutions in your area. Cindy says each of us has to be accountable to the Lord.

“Don’t think you’re going to be in sin and that God will take care of you in these hard economic times. Holiness is key,” Cindy said. Each of us has a part to play and should not think that God will indiscriminately bless us without us dealing with personal areas that are wrong. We must repent of any misuse of money, think before we spend, get out of debt, etc., and allow God to do a course correction for us.

And here is a picture of the event.

bullprayer2.jpg

THEY ARE WORSHIPPING A GOLDEN CALF.

THEY ARE LITERALLY WORSHIPPING A GOLDEN CALF.

I can’t even come up with something funny or clever or even halfway elegant or insightful with which to end this post. I’m just blown away.

THEY ARE WORSHIPPING A GOLDEN CALF.

Oh, my God.

Wait, I mean not my God.

Jesus Christ.

Posted on by Joel Derfner | 3 Comments

October 28, 2010

Well, I’m back from my honeymoon trip, which was a cruise to the Caribbean. It was a magical trip, full of joy and romance:

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Eventually, however, I realized it would never work out between us, and I went back to E.S.

Posted on by Joel Derfner | 1 Comment

October 27, 2010

Okay, this makes me very, very happy. This guy, whose boyfriend is deaf, has been teaching himself ASL. Not completely safe for work, I suppose, but it’s just so damn cute.

Posted on by Joel Derfner | 4 Comments

October 25, 2010

In my last post I discussed an RSVP to my wedding that read as follows:

Dear E.S. and Faustus,

Thank you for your invitation. As you know we are Catholic and we believe in our religion and its teaching. We will not be able to accept but want you to know we love you very much and wish the very best for you always.

Love,

G. & Y.

Here is the reply I sent (on handmade Nepalese paper, no less):

Dear G. and Y.,

Thank you so much for your kind note. We understand why you can’t attend. We felt our wedding wouldn’t be a true celebration, however, without you, so we made donations in your honor to Freedom to Marry and to SNAP, the Survivors’ Network of those Abused by Priests.

We hope you’re well and we look forward to seeing you some time soon.

Sincerely yours,

Faustus and E.S.

Sometimes even I am impressed by my evil genius.

(Let this be a lesson, by the by, that etiquette is neither “stupid rules about which fork to use” nor “just about making people feel comfortable.” Dinnerware and social lubrication do indeed find themselves under the umbrella of etiquette, but they are joined there by techniques for smiling sweetly at your enemies as you cut their hearts out.)

Posted on by Joel Derfner | 21 Comments

October 9, 2010

How to decline an invitation to the wedding of a same-sex couple:

“Mr. and Mrs. S. regret that they are unable to accept the very kind invitation of E.S. and Faustus for October 10, 2010.”

How not to decline an invitation to the wedding of a same-sex couple:

“Dear E.S. and Faustus,

“Thank you for your invitation. As you know we are Catholic and we believe in our religion and its teaching. We will not be able to accept but want you to know we love you very much and wish the very best for you always.

“Love,

“G. & Y.”

And yet which one do you think we got in the mail today?

I’m a little bit in shock.

Posted on by Joel Derfner | 23 Comments