The Gay Lifestyle

I’ve been holding onto this for a couple weeks but it strikes me as appropriate today.)

Average Weekday:
5:30 AM – Wake up to the sound of door opening and little hands nudging my face.
5:45 AM – Stop imagining A is going to fall back asleep.
5:50 AM – Leave R to sleep and pour three bowls of cereal, two glasses of OJ, and one glass of milk.
6:30 AM – Start getting the kids ready for the day, waking up R who then takes over.
7:30 AM – Kiss and hug all goodbye.
8:00 AM – Arrive at work.
8:00 AM to 4:00 PM – Work, with blogging breaks :-). Beakers, magnetic stirrers, transducers, and so on… many carcinogenic chemicals that keep me alert.
4:30 PM – Arrive at home and take the kids and dog for a walk, or on errands in these winter months.
5:30 PM – Eat a delicious dinner, the sort one would find at the finest restaurant or from the most long-suffering Mormon matriarch.
6:00 PM – Light saber duel/ Monster hunt (playing the role of the monster)
7:00 PM – Read books with very simple vocabulary, wind down. Watch TV or go online.
8:00 PM – A twenty minuet going to bed ritual, involving the brushing of teeth, more reading, the finding of the correct stuffed animal (Note: changes nightly in a seemingly random pattern), and the specially choreographed scratching of the backs.
9:00 PM – back to bed.

Tuesday nights – Leave R and take A or B out alone, as R takes the other (switch each week). Dinner, ice cream. It’s our family-not-home evening :-).

Friday and Saturday nights – Go out? No way. You ever try to wait an hour to get into a crowded restaurant with twin toddlers? Eat at home; in bed at 9.

Sunday – Breakfast out, Costco, family dinner with the grandparents.

Anyway, I just wanted to clear up how one lives the gay lifestyle.

I probably shouldn’t have because I hate it when straight people take on the gay lifestyle too. Don’t they call them metrosexuals or something? Sheesh, get your own lifestyle.

In some seriousness, it always strikes me as odd that the actions of a life may be the same as your neighbors, or 100% boring and more traditional than tradition every was in reality, but the fact of a person’s anatomy, not their actions, not the actual “style”, all the sudden makes it “thee gay lifestyle”. In actuality, gay men married to women are living a gay lifestyle; I’m living a gay lifestyle; the leather-clad lad on Castro is living a gay lifestyle. I’m also living a right-handed lifestyle, and a brunet lifestyle.

Too often “gay lifestyle” is used to paint us with a broad brush. It’s come to mean something--we all know what--but not what the words strictly mean. The words tell you nothing about what the gay person actually does; it’s as descriptive as “right-handed lifestyle”. Instead it often (not always), meant or not, carries a detailed insult, and descriptive pre-judgment of its focus’ imagined actions that can be conveniently denied if pressed. (If it's not meant, then please forgive me if it sets me off)

This brings to mind a public debate I was once in and my opponent kept calling my life “the gay lifestyle”, and I only wish the antipathy with which those words were colored could be conveyed in a font. But she knew nothing about my lifestyle, only our sex. I did know though, as she was quite a public figure, that she had some familial failings in her history, which I must assume is “the straight lifestyle,” right? :-)