Republican Lite

At the gym on Thursday, I declared my support for abortion in an extremely cavalier manner. I'm pro-choice. A mother is responsible for her child and should have the right to decide if she wishes to take on that responsibility. Of course, she can always put the baby up for adoption after it has been born, but why bring something that isn't wanted into this world? I honestly do feel that for a lot of starving, suffering children in Africa or India, they would have been better off not being born. Call me a cold, heartless person if you will, but if you really think about it and put aside all notions of religion and politically-correct nonsense, you'll see that it is a compelling argument.

Do I support gay marriage? The jury's still out on that. Does that surprise you? It surprises me somewhat. But then I think about my one (and perhaps only) principle in life - you make the decision, you live with the consequences. Of course, we don't CHOOSE to be gay. You don't wake up one day and decide that being homosexual is the new black. You don't decide to like Madonna and Mariah and Britney and Cher. You don't decide that you're going to have to start dressing well (and this may be a moot point really). However, you do decide to remain true to who you are, you decide that you are tired of living a charade, you decide that you want to be honest with yourself and your loved ones. So you live with the consequences.

I was going to write about my political leanings when it came to social and economic issues (with the sad, sad conclusion that I am really more Republican than Democrat), but then writing the paragraph above really set something ticking. How did I find out I was gay? In retrospect, the penchant for wearing my mum's (horrible 80s) dresses and (pitiful) 2 inch shoes , along with the inclination towards Polly Pocket, were probably the red flags. I was going to grow up to be a flaming homosexual (with a horrible sense of style to boot). At that point in my life though, none of that ever occured to me. I didn't even know what 'gay' meant.

In Primary 4 I was made fun of because of this rather unfortunate pose in a class picture, and I spent the rest of my primary school life with the unfortunate moniker 'Mary' irreversibly attached to me. It was very painful. Fast forward to the end of 1998, just before I entered secondary school. I was in Sydney and found myself strangely drawn to postcards of the beach (of which there are many) in the various tourist traps (of which there are many) in and around the city. It wasn't the blue sky or mesmerising ocean that caught my attention. Instead, I realised I was attracted to the muscular, semi-naked men frolicking in the waves and lazing around in the sand. I remember going "Oh...Ok...SHIT!", because before then I simply never realised that I was drawn to species of the same sex. I was like that deaf beauty queen in America who was run over by a train travelling in the same direction as she was. There was no warning.

In Secondary 1 I realised that I was the only guy in class who admitted to liking Days of Our Lives. I mean, some of my classmates watched it late at night when they had nothing better to do and laughed at the whole thing. I rushed home from school so that I could catch the afternoon screening. RING THE ALARM!

The year 2000, one of my favourite (and also most painful, but that's another story) years, largely because I spent 12 days in Manhattan. Unforgettable. Anyway, I was in Virgin Megastore at Times Square and that was when I purchased my first Britney CD, Oops!...I Did It Again. I also bought Don't Say You Love Me by M2M and Cher's Greatest Hits, which the security guard at Macy's discovered when I set off the detector and shared a good-natured laugh with a fat Caucasian at my expense.

The point of this damn grandmother story is that these inclinations appeared spontaneously. Which is why I resent any implication that I was somehow jumping on a pink bandwagon. I never chose to suscribe to this lifestyle in order to define myself as gay. These things just happened. It was never a conscious decision. I never forced myself to appreciate Sex and the City or Desperate Housewives or fucking Mean Girls. I just do. It's very irritating when people can't seem to understand that, good-intentioned though they may be.

Thank god I have friends who have gone through it all, the same struggles, the same sniggers and smirks from their classmates, friends who have the same obsession with shopping and the (generally speaking) same tastes in music and movies and TV. Don't judge others if you haven't walked in their shoes. It's a piece of cliche advice that we should all learn to heed more often. That's all.