queerbychoice | Happy Weekendness

This has been a lovely weekend. I chatted with AlienDreamer, Arsenothelys, Asrai_D, Dlfke, Embryomystic, Jason M. from the queerchoice mailing list (s/he doesn't have a livejournal, but was using the chatname TransLiberation), MoistGrrlUK, RogueBear, SubtlyIronic, and Volsi all together in the #QueerByChoice chatroom on DALnet. We competed with each other to see who was wearing the most interesting socks (Arsenothelys won, by wearing mauve socks with yellow geometric shapes on them). And in the midst of all that . . . my LiveJournal permanent account finally got processed!!!!

I am happy now.

I also posted a Queerchoice Member Profile for Jason C. (not the same person as Jason M. mentioned above).

And go read this wonderful entry by Arsenothelys, who was responding to a homophobe, starting with the reply, "You're absolutely right. It's perfectly possible to 'be taught' to be gay; in fact, I taught myself to be gay! It's one of the best things that ever happened to me . . ."

There are so many nice brilliant loveable people showing up lately. I wonder where they've been all my life.

Now I shall go fiddle with my fancy new permanent account and see if I can figure out how to make it do anything fun.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

-was wearing socks with hippopotomi earlier-

hee, i'd join your list if i weren't so paranoid about people finding me. :p

Finding you?

Are you a fugitive from justice?

You don't get publicly profiled unless you want to be. There isn't any way that people can find you unless you want to be found.

i try not to join too many things that send me email, cuz i have a habit compulsively checking email even at school with people watching. people in my school = homophobic, i = way too obsessive about email and don't think about it until it's too late.

however, i recognize the sheer stupidity of that excuse, so tell me more about this list (how often does it go out, etc)? :)

Information about it can be found here and the place to sign up is here. It's an open discussion list and the volume of mail is really irregular (e.g., there might be no posts at all for three weeks and then suddenly 15 posts in one day), but if you sign up for the daily digest version then all messages posted in any given day will be compiled into a single email sent to you at the end of the day. Or you could also sign up for the "web only" version and then you don't get any email at all and you just use it like a bulletin board.

ooo, web-only i can do. i'm sandre42, a random name i've had for about 5 years and have no idea why i still use it.

you have to sign up on this page to get in though, to be allowed to read the messages. just check the box for a "web only/no email" subscription.

Are those of us who are queer but not by choice less nice, brilliant, and lovable?

The way you celebrate the finding of anyone espousing the ideals of fluid sexuality makes me wonder exactly how you feel about those who don't.

(This is more of a question than a confrontation, by the way. Um...have some bamboo!)

Haha, thanks for the bamboo. :-)

When I was in high school, two years (well, actually it was one year and eleven months) passed during which I was the only person I'd ever met who I knew was queer (queer by anything). During that time, the slightest mention of any queer person at all made me all excited and celebrative. When, at the end of my senior year in high school, I did finally start meeting other queer people, I celebrated each one of their existences excitedly and counted carefully on my fingers, "This makes three queer people I know of that I've met now during my lifetime!!!"

I don't know if you can relate to that or not, because from what you've said in your journal it doesn't seem that meeting other queer people was ever as much of an obsessive fascination for you as it was for me - and for people growing up with internet access, it's probably impossible to ever be nearly as isolated from other queer people as I was (since I didn't get internet access for the first time until college). But generally, if there's any characteristic of yourself where practically everyone you meet is terribly hostile to it and you've very rarely met anyone else who shared that same characteristic, then it becomes really overwhelmingly exciting to meet anyone else who does share that characteristic.

It's been a while since high school and I'm not usually totally obsessively fascinated every time I get to meet a Real Live Queer Person (TM) anymore. But queer by choice people are rarer (from what little data I have, they seem to comprise approximately 10% of the queer community), so I haven't yet gotten over my fascination and excitement about meeting them. Maybe someday I will; it makes sense that I would eventually. But it just hasn't happened yet.

That's okay though; you're still a nice, brilliant and awfully lovable panda bear too!

I think I'm bisexual both by choice *and* by nature. I've been attracted to both men and women for as long as I can remember having sexual or romantic feelings at all, but it took me longer to recognise what the feeling was with women, and the sexual part in particular is stronger with men. So when I figured it out, I felt I had a choice either to say "no, that's not who I want to be" and put it aside, or "yes, that's me and I'm going to take it seriously." I chose the latter :-)

These days, though, I don't think of being bisexual as any different from having brown hair or blue eyes or any of the other random things about me that aren't particularly significant. I'm much more interested in why I'm attracted to *particular* people, which seems to be something about the dynamic between us and related to gender presentation rather than physical sex. If I'm asked what my sexual orientation is, I now say "diaphorosexual", which is a word my sister-by-choice invented for me to mean "attracted to difference".

Happy Weekendness

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