Violent homophobia, TV style

This week my Favorite thing Ever is gay marriage, by way of a ramble through Fame, Glee and the laugh-riot topic of gaybashing. It’s a bit of a weird essay, perhaps; I had mixed feelings about season two of Glee even before they embarked on a certain Kurt storyline.

Glee has so many great things going for it, and the events of “Furt” are very Toobworthy. I don’t care for very special episodes and one thing that’s good about this storyline is it isn’t some self-contained boo boo kiss. McKinley High has been bully heaven since the show hit the airwaves, and Kurt was always the target of choice for its scariest thuggizens. I like that nobody pretends that teachers or school boards or parents can fix the part of human nature that makes mean kids prowl around seeking out weak kids and selectively terrorizing those least likely to get support or sympathy.

This is also why I admire the It Gets Better videos that are popping up on my Facebook and Twitter feeds with such regularity; the soul-destroying abuse of queer kids in schools is on people’s minds and that is great, totally amazing.

My friend Jay Lake, as many of you know, has a stunningly honest and revealing blog about his life and, lately, about his battle with cancer. I admire Jay’s openness, but I don’t aspire to it. Oh, I’ll happily post images of every square inch of Vancouver or anywhere else I happen to go. I’ll tell you about writing, and reading, and teaching and other bits and pieces. But I conceive of and then discard a stunning number of posts that deal with the nuts and bolts of my day to day life, because I suspect a lot of it of being kinda dull, and because I am a fairly private person.

That said, I don’t have much use for closets or coyness. I’ve been always been out online, made it known that I’m proudly queer and genderqueer, and I’ve even occasionally made reference in my blog to having been gay-bashed in my teens. I do this because there’s a difference between privacy and pretense. While I almost never go looking for big conversations or comment streams full of virtual hugs, I’m not gonna lie to avoid ’em.

So, anyway. The part of the Glee episode “Furt,” the bit that poked my gaybash button, was the vivid depiction of one kid causing another to live in abject abject terror. Wow. That was so my life for awhile! Complete with the thing where you forget for a second, and let start feeling something other than fear, and WHAM!

I haven’t ever seen the mirror held up, on a TV show, with such clarity. There was heebie and jeebie, folks.

Then it passed, and instead I got to thinking about the yay of my marriage to Kelly, and that’s what led to this Favorite Thing Ever post. And next week I will spin back to the Eighties and watch Sam and Al get their gay on for TOR.COM when I rewatch “Running for Honor”.

After that, who knows? Though there’s probably a 75% chance that a photograph of a bird will be involved.