Turing it out

I really want an Alan Turing t-shirt but am thinking it might lead to more 'being asked a bunch of awkward questions' than 'gaining everyone's undying respect' (which is really the only thing I'm interested in).



The dude was a total DUDE though. (Morphogenesis? HOLLA! Breaking the enigma code? FUHGEDABOUTIT!) Might be my fav philosophical mathematician of all time (defo top 3 at least). Shame we are all such a bunch of homophobic fucks and he had to kill himself isn't it? (It is. Know that last sentence was pretty glib but that tends to be how I deal with my rage - just for your fyi).

This is amazing

Food seems to have a mysterious fascination for homosexuals. Many of the world’s greatest chefs have been homosexuals. Some of the country’s best restaraunts are run by homosexuals. Some of the fattest people in the world are homosexuals.

Speech. Less.

1969 y'all. Suddenly quite happy to be existing in 2010 instead.

Oy Vey!

This movie looks gay.



Rhymez AND lazy cultural stereotypes?!?!?!! I'M THERE!!!!!1!!!

It is nice that members of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy that are not Carson Kressley are still getting work.

Dear Diary...

Here's a sentence I never thought I'd write:

I hate Duncan from Blue an ounce or so less today than I did yesterday.

Saturday evening I went to bed having been soaked to the skin by lashings upon lashings of rain after watching an outside performance by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra in the walls of a castle. Pretty standard Saturday night stuff y'know? Nothing unusual about that*.

I unpeeled my wet jeans (akin to squeezing a sausage out of its skin), jumped in the shower, sang La Roux, put my hair in plaits and went to sleep. I dreamt of supermarkets and a fat Ronaldo Cristiano. It was nice.

The next morning I awoke (as I am wont to do) and went about my normal morning ablutions. Nothing about any of this seemed strange or unusal. Nothing about it suggested that today an event would occur that would change me forever. But then, but then, I glanced at the Sunday papers and read the following:

'Duncan James: 'I'm bisexual''

And a teeny tiny miniture mini bit of the hate I feel for the man slid away. This seemingly normal summer's day had become the 'dear diary' moment to end all dear diary moments. To understand why this is such a momentous occasion you first have to comprehend the unending years of repugnance I have solely reserved for this individual. The torrents of unrelenting loathing I have let flow his way (more so than the others from the musical outfit that has plagued me longer than I care to remember). Where Duncan from Blue is concerned, love and hate are not two sides of the same coin; the coin is made up only of hate in a wallet stitched together with revulsion and placed into a pocket of scorn.

But now? Not so much. I mean, I still hate him a lot but just not as violently as I did before.

I think this means I'm prejudiced against heterosexuals.

Having said that, the signs were there, anyone with frosted tips cannot be straight. That is a scientific fact. Do these boys scream aggressive heterosexuality to you?

[Via Videogum]

No, they do not.

They might talk the talk about how many 'ladieez' they have 'nailed' but I can assure you the height of their sexual prowess is awakened, not when faced with a woman's vagina, but when Mikey is tooling around in the showers and every now and then he'll throw a look, (not even a look, a passing glance), but a knowledge is shared, a secret is passed, and they glance away - embarrassed but not knowing why. It's not a feeling they'd ever admit to, they're not even sure they know what this feeling is exactly. They just know that sometimes the light will hit Mikey just so and they get this warm glow in their stomachs. Kinda like when they used to have to climb the rope in gym class.

Anyway, that means I'm in the market for a new (one-sided) celebrity feud. If you have any candidates in mind let me know and I'll get my PA to review them.

*Actually, although I'm being facetious, (for a change) the same thing happened on Tuesday when I went to see an outside performance of A Midsummer's Night Dream in the grounds of Winchester Cathedral. I'm so cultured I'm basically a big pot of natural yogurt at this point yo.

Is your dream to be gay?

Sometimes there ain't nothing for it.

You just have to buy the wolf sweatshirt.*



My brother and I have a thing about wolf t-shirts and sweatshirts. When you pass one of those stalls in the shopping centre that sell those dreamcatchers and shit (OBLIGATORY DEMETRI MARTIN QUOTE: 'A dreamcatcher works, if your dream is to be gay') and they always have at least some items with wolf pictures on them, there's always that moment where we go, 'shall we?' But then you have the issue of where does the joke stop and the real desire start? Do I want a wolf sweatshirt because I think it's funny or am I, deep down, the sort of person who just really wants a wolf sweatshirt?

I do have a cat sweatshirt so maybe I've already answered that question for myself.

*Actually, I didn't buy it. It was in Urban Outfitters and they charge £467 for something that cost them 89 pence from a charity shop down the road but still. Wolf sweatshirts are the best. Science.

Burn this motherfugger down

So here's a thing I learned today: the well respected medical institution John Hopkins closed down it's gender reassignment clinic because they didn't believe people who had had the surgery were any happier afterwards than they had been before. Apparently all the issues these people thought would be relieved by finally being in the 'right' body, remained and John Hopkins (in their infinite wisdom) figured that 'meh, what's the point of going through all that faff when it doesn't do any good?'


I may have condensed the actual decision making process that went into that quite considerably but that is, for the most part, for realz.

If we ignore the whole chunk of stuff about how our heterocentric society disregards any break from 'the norm' with, at best, suspicion and, at worst, outright hostility which may in fact maybe perhaps possibly still make life difficult after the op in similar ways to before due to secondary sex characteristics that aren't changed such as hand size ( I would be fine as a female-to-male transsexual thanks to my giant man hands, which is a small comfort should I ever realise this is an issue for me) then I think we can get to the core of something that is a universal problem. Not a problem in the literal sense of millions of people being born as the wrong gender (though there could be - I don't know, and am too lazy to look up, the statistics) but more the metaphorical idea that we all have to go on a journey to accept ourselves as we truly are - and do we do this to be 'happy' or do we do this because there is no other option?

Firstly, what is 'happy'? I would be interested to see how the John Hopkins crowd define it. Having done a psychology degree I know that a great many people interested in the human brain and behaviour have developed tests and score cards and the like in order to measure happiness. Nothing I ever saw in this regard ever struck me as defining happy in the way I understood it. For a start, 'happy' is a transitory emotion that we shouldn't expect to last any longer than any other emotion. Happy is me sitting in an audience watching Richard Herring tell jokes about wanking, but, for better or worse, I don't sit in an audience watching Richard Herring tell jokes about wanking on a permanent basis. Happy exists but somewhere along the line we've skewed the interpretation of it to mean something different. Just as sad is now a synonym for depression (one is healthy, one is not. One is transitory, one is not), happy has become a synonym for content. It's important we make the distinction because one state of being is achievable and the other isn't. If the John Hopkins people are looking for 'happy' post-op transsexuals they are going to find as many of them as they would find 'happy' non-transsexuals; not a lot. That has nothing to do with whether you cut their bits off or not.

Which, in turn, leads us to another point. Is it worth doing something if you don't experience pure positivity from doing it? And should that matter if, as in the case of transsexuals, it's surely not about a happy/sad dichotomy but is just people going on a very literal journey to become more of themselves than they were before? Is it not just an outward manifestation of what we all go through if we're to live our lives the way we want to. It's a painful, horrible, heart wrenching process but, in the end, you find out what and who you are. This isn't about 'happy' it's about living life the best way you can.

I've always been interested in this type of thing - the journey we take to become human. Physically we may be born as human but mentally it takes a lot of effort to get to where we need to go. Girls who were born boys (and vice versa) just have to deal with the physical and the mental journey to become human. The first step in all these journeys is destruction as a form of creation. We have to break apart ourselves and the world we've been led to believe exists if we want to put it all back together again in a way that suits us.

If John Hopkins think this is (or should be) a process ending in unwavering joy it would appear they've fallen into the trap that seduces a lot of us: the journey to become human doesn't stop, it's a continuing adventure with continuing pitfalls and indeed, continuing wonderment. It's only by taking step after step that we can approach anywhere we need to go. I am still learning this now but it's becoming more and more apparent the things I need to do to find contentment. In times past, having gone through the things I have gone through in the last few months , I would have allowed myself a wallow, a time-out from dealing with life.

I now know how useless that is.

What I have to do is engage, and keep engaging, with life. Whether that means writing every day, going to see a play, reading books, spending quality time with friends, painting a picture, doesn't matter. I know how to give myself a shot at contentment and it's not by doing nothing. It might not be easy engaging and doing these things that I do when I don't want to, or I'm too tired, or I'm feeling a bit poorly, but it's not meant to be easy all the time - you just have to keep doing it anyway. It's the only chance you've got.

I have been in love with both an alcoholic and a gay man. Although very different issues, both these things deal with the person in question facing up to truths that they would have ideally liked to ignore, or not to exist in the first place. They both continuously make allusions to this; one talks about how he will never have kids because he would feel bad when it's so hard growing up anyway to lumber him/her with homosexual parents (I think this is bullshit for all the reasons just stated - life isn't easy whatever and as long as you can give a child a safe and loving home then they're about ten steps of everyone else who haven't been given that luxury. There's a lot more in the latter category than we would like to admit), the other gave up completely because he just found it all too fucking hard. I have no time for that way of thinking anymore. It is hard being truthful, it is hard becoming human, but guess what; it's meant to be, and it doesn't suddenly become easy because of one event (whether that be having your gender reassigned to what it should be, admitting to yourself that your sexuality is one that doesn't comply with the norm, or very suddenly finding yourself coming to terms with the fact that your reliance on alcohol has got out of control). Life carries on after these events and it's your responsibility to keep living as truthfully as you did in that moment after your moment of clarity has passed. In fact, you now owe it to yourself even more - that is hard to keep up. But you fucking do it because taking the blue pill when you've already taken the red pill isn't an option.

So, basically what I'm saying is, fuck the John Hopkins psychology department. Burn this motherfucker down.

We're going backwards, not forwards

Doesn't this just make your blood boil? Doesn't it make you want to punch and scream and yell at how unfair the world is? Doesn't it just make you want to raise up as a collective consciousness and completely reinvent the way the world is run?

Because it does for me. Am I doing anything about it? No. In this particular instance I can't think of anything I can do. I don't live in California so I can't vote, I don't know anyone in California so I can't tell them to vote, I do remember being three years old and experiencing an earthquake in California but I don't think that's got much to do with this issue and nor does it allow me any voting powers. What I can do is write and let these words escape into the atmosphere. It won't change nuthin' but at least they'll be there nonetheless. (For those that didn't get the memo; words are very powerful).

Why do I even care? Well, let's see. Firstly, does it not scare you shitless that they ushered in this progressive act and the 'powers that be' are now threatening to take it away? It scares me SHITLESS. If it can happen in California then it can happen A-N-Y-W-H-E-R-E. I don't want to wake up one day and find I'm a character in a Margaret Atwood novel whose only purpose is to provide offspring to the upper classes with no rights over my own body and only having one choice about the way I live my life; be this person and nothing else. I don't want that, neither should you, neither should any free-thinking, right-minded person. But if this Prop 8 goes through then that takes a step along a path where that dystopian future lays. All these rights that women and minorities and homosexuals have now, have had to be fought for in the past. People have died to make sure we have more choices on offer. If this goes, what's to say everything else won't follow? These 'rights' we have now, and the laws that protect those rights, are not immovable objects. They are formed within and around the societies that created them in the first place. They reflect the state of mind of everyone that lives within the reality we all inhabit. They can be changed and they will be changed if everyone doesn't make a conscious decision here-and-now to keep chipping away at inequality and restrictions of freedom.

Allowing a step backwards, allowing a past equality to be overwritten TERRIFIES me. Even more than Amy Winehouse's crackface terrifies me (which is a lot).

Secondly, I don't understand homophobia and I mean I genuinely don't understand it. There are some concepts in this world that completely pass me by and other people seem to 'get' implicitly and this is one of them. I think maybe this can be filed under the kind of thing that makes me awesome and sucky at the same time. I simply DO NOT CARE what other people do as long as it doesn't affect me. Even if you are my bestest best friend in the world, unless you are stood in front of me crying or bleeding or begging for my help then... I don't care. I'm far too wrapped up thinking about me. I have a shitload of introspection and over-analysis on myself to perform. This is not to say I don't love my friends or family and I don't want them to be happy - because I do - but, I'm far to bothered about me to waste time bothering about you (so, you know, see above as to why this riles me so... It could, one day, affect me!) I mean, I'm being kind of glib and you shouldn't take this too literally but, there is a kernel of truth there; I just don't give a fuck a lot of the time. For instance, I am the LAST person in the world that the silent treatment works on because I just keep on living my life whilst you are quietly harbouring a grudge and tending to it and making it grow. I might wonder why someone hasn't been in contact if something reminds me of them but, other than that, out of sight; out of mind. I think a lot of the world's problems could be solved by that mindset. Why can't everyone just wish for everything to be awesome all of the time? Like, I want you all to happy and I will help you achieve that if you ask or if you are in front of my face crying or bleeding but, other than that, you worry about you and I'll worry about me. You go off and find your happy and I'll go off and I'll find mine and we'll have adventures and overcome adversity and all that shit and as long as getting to that happy doesn't negatively impact other humans then... just do it. Don't worry that this person whom you don't know is fucking this other person whom you don't know, they're consenting adults both off finding their own happy. You're finding your happy remember? It doesn't (shouldn't) matter to you what these guys over here are doing. And yeah, I know, they've fucked each other sufficiently to decide that they want to spend the rest of their lives dedicated to fucking each other and arguing about who is hotter in Gossip Girl and whose turn it is to wash up. And yes, I see they've stood up in front of all their friends and signed bits of paper making the fucking and Gossip Girl and washing up arguments official but that's got nothing to do with you or your happy. They've gone off and found their own happy by themselves. You were too busy observing all this from the safe distance of your judgy deck through the lenses of your accusatorial binoculars and forgot that YOU had your OWN happy to find. Jeez, that's super lame and I feel kind of bad for you but WHY ARE YOU STILL STOOD THERE JUDGING AND CARING ABOUT SOMETHING THAT DOESN'T REALLY AFFECT YOU?!

For seriousballs (this is my new favourite, very irritating, catchphrase) y'all... Explain it to me.

I do get that there's two general types of homophobics in this world; the first type are people who have this book written, however many years ago, within which it says that homosexuality is unnatural and even evil. They chose to believe the words written in these books as literal truth for a myriad of reasons and ok, that's fine. I've sort of come to an acceptance and peace with the idea of religion - religion and I have never got on but I've been furious with it for far too long. I'm letting it go. I'm even thinking that some of this stuff might be kinda, sorta, useful as a metaphor for the human condition (goooo Gnostics!) but you will never get me to understand why you follow one bit and not other bits. Why you think Roman 1:26-32 is worthy and Leviticus 19:15-17 is arguable I will never know. That's up to you I guess. I'm off finding my own happy. I suggest you do the same.

Then there are those who just find the idea of homosexuality abhorrent and disgusting. These people... I understand even less. Mostly because of, you know, the whole 'I don't give a fuck so why do rest of y'all' thing. This is where I start to fall out again with religion because if it wasn't for that then these people wouldn't have been conditioned to think this way in the first place. Although, having said that, I think that's a bit of a cop-out as I remember having a conversation with my mother when I was around 10 or 11 about this very topic (it just exasperated me that being accused of 'gaydom' on the playground was acceptable) and getting really riled up because she couldn't explain it to me. Why are people homophobic? Seriously? And she finally admitted that she sometimes felt uncomfortable being around this lesbian she worked with so she did kind of understand partly where the prejudice came from. This is a moment that stands out very clearly in my mind - not least because a little of the idolatry that I held for my mum died that day (don't get me wrong, I still think she's awesome and weird and funny and whatnot but this is actually quite an important step in anyone's development so, it's sad and vital all at the same time) but what mostly remains from that story is that I. Do. Not. Get. It. and everyone else seems to. Even brought up in a house where, even if prejudice wasn't championed exactly it was still something that existed, however undercurrent and non-verbalised that existence was - I'm not homophobic. So why are other people?

Equal marriage rights for girls who are boys who like boys to be girls who do boys like they’re girls who do girls like they’re boys just seems logical to me. The whole homophobia thing is just OLD now, I'm so bored of it. It's not logical or useful in any way, shape or form. People have been gay since people existed. Outlawing it didn't stop it from happening, giving marriage rights to all those that want them will NOT ruin the institution of marriage. Surely it only strengthens it? Makes it about love and life as we know it now rather than something that was invented to just strengthen family ties and solidify existing pacts between different families? It makes it relevant. It makes it something that we all have to accept even if some of us don't want to. You know what else? Genuinely, it KILLS me that Gay Boy said, when he first came out, that if he could choose he would be straight because it's easier. He is as perfect a person as you will ever find. Just reconnecting with him over the last year has made me a better person. Everyone falls in love with him wherever he goes (case in point: 15 out of 19 people ticked him on his first foray into speed dating! I mean, come ON!) and the world we live in has made him feel bad for this huge part of his identity! It made him feel so bad he felt required to hide it for 25 years. That shit? Is bananas (side note: 'Hollaback Girl' taught me how to spell 'bananas' at the first attempt which is something I was never able to do before that song. True story.) Identity is an intense interest of mine and I will talk your ear OFF about how 'coming out' is a great metaphor for accepting you as you and, if you load me up on a little vino rouge and ask me nicely, I will probably admit that I was a bit jealous of Gay Boy's coming out because he has this tangible thing that PROVES he's accepted himself and I have to make do with just adding bits and pieces to myself and my identity as I go along. There's no date stamp on me accepting me as me. But, you know, regardless, it all happened at the right time as far as I was concerned anyway because I was dealing with a different boy who was feeding me half-truths and illusions of honesty and I had neared the end of my tether on it all and along comes this person who just sets the truth free right in front of my eyes. Once I saw how it was done I was able to go off and find my own happy which is something I, and he, continue to do. I cannot envision any way in which honesty - the good kind of honesty, the kind of honesty that sets you free - could be bad. For any of us. Life has very few guarantees but I truly believe that the more you allow people to be themselves (and that's all 'coming out' is - and why it works as a metaphor for coming to terms with your own self generally - he's now free to be more of himself than he was before), the better this world is going to be.

So why are they trying to deny the rights of people that want to celebrate honesty and love and being as much of themselves as they can be? How does that ruin anything? These are the tenents we should be teaching our kids to follow. Why go backwards (we've been there! It's well-chartered territory! It DOESN'T WORK!) when you can go forwards?