Four days ago, ABCNews.com reported that two senior girls at a San Diego high school had been awarded the titles of Homecoming King and Queen.

First of all, YAY FOR THEM!  And second of all, how cute are they? The adorable duo was crowned separately – Rebeca Arellano received her award at a pep rally and Haileigh Adams was crowned at the homecoming dance – but it says so much when this kind of thing can happen in an American public school.

According to the ABC article, after Haileigh won the crown, Rebeca posted the following on her Facebook wall:

I was happier than when I won, my little Haileigh has just been announced Homecoming queen and I couldn’t feel happier! Thanks to every single one of you! You guys made this happen and we are all part of something huge. I can’t fully express how grateful I am. I am in completely shocked that this happen [sic]. My girl looks absolutely flawless.

The article also mentioned that “the two girls told ABC News that they’re thankful for the abundance of support they’ve received from family, friends, and students and staff at the school. Arellano said one of her teachers told her, ‘Today school is a bit better because of you girls.’”

However, as is typically the case with happy couples, negative reactions came into play.

The LA Times reported that the high school received many disparaging remarks, mostly from parents, that, according to the principal of Patrick Henry High School, “[demonstrate] such a lack of tolerance and [present] such a negative role model for children with their hateful comments.” God bless that principal, let me tell you.

As her own (awesome) reaction to the negative comments, the ABC article also reported that Rebeca said:

For all the girls who think tradition should be continued, go back to the kitchen, stop having sex before you’re married, get out of school and job system, don’t have an opinion, don’t own any property, give up the right to marry who you love, don’t vote, and allow your husband to do whatever he pleases to you. Think about the meaning of tradition when you use it in your argument against us.

Amen, girls. And you’re welcome in Jersey anytime.

We lesbians are NOTORIOUS for getting attached immediately.  As the infamous saying goes, “first date sex, second date U-Haul.”  Unfortunately there is a whole grey area for stage-5 Clingers,  a term that’s used best to describe someone who gets attached too soon or in a someone creepy fashion.  It is immensely important to be on the look out for such, and there are some important warnings signs of which you should be aware when spotting a stage 5′er. 

Immediate jealousy. You have friends, and you’re going to want to hang out with them. But as soon as you start dating The Girl, she freaks out whenever you mention hanging out with your friends without her. Or you take her with you to hang with your friends, and she ends up crying in the corner because “yo-yo-you’re not paying enough attention to me!” It doesn’t matter that you’ve known so-and-so for fifteen years; clearly you want to sleep with them instead of The Girl. Give me a fucking break.

Blowing up your phone. You’ve been away from her for fifteen minutes, and your phone beeps. “I miss you already.” “What are you doing?” When you go out with friends, you get the standard, “Who are you with? What are you doing? How late will you be out?” She expects you to text her every few minutes when you’re not together, and manages to twist your responses into something much more sinister than they actually are. “OMG, why are you there with HER?” And so forth.

Her sole focus is you. Strangely, since you’ve been dating, you’ve never met any of her friends, she’s always free when you want to hang out, and she doesn’t want to talk about anything but you and “us.” She doesn’t seem to have any hobbies, any extracurricular activities … anything, really. She works a 9-to-5 job, and you can always predict a phone call at 5:01.

You have sex with her and she cries … every time. It’s extraordinarily hot when someone to whom you’re making love – not just sleeping with – cries on occasion when she has an orgasm with you. But when someone cries the first time you have sex with her … that’s another story entirely. And then it happens again. And again. That’s when things get weird. Sometimes, it’s just about the sex; you both have a craving, so you get down to business. It’s not always candles and soft music and mood lighting. Regardless of the setting, she always announces that it’s “the most beautiful orgasm I’ve ever had!” or “Nobody has ever touched me the way you do!”

She gets mad about practically everything.  You spend too much time at work – clearly you’re having an affair. You want to hang with your friends – clearly you’re bored with her. You take up a new hobby – um, again, the affair thing. No matter what you do, whenever you’re not around her, you’re doing something wrong. And she will take these insecurities she has out on you.

The most important thing you need to keep in mind with a stage-5 clinger is that they cry about everything. It’s not a case of them actually being upset; it’s more that lesbians tend to feel bad about tears, and therefore do whatever they can to make the tearful girl stop crying. It’s a ploy, people. It keeps you stuck in a spot in which, in the long run, you don’t want to find yourself.

Have you had any experiences with a stage-5 clinger?

There’s something that happens often within the lesbian community, and it’s called the “love-hate-love-hate-love-HATE” relationship.

This particular post has nothing to do with romantic relationships, though we all know the same label applies to those.

Once one has been caught in a particular web of a certain lifestyle, it’s extremely difficult to a) get over it, and b) get out of it. Let’s look back on the story of a friend of mine (let’s call her Jane, and if your name is Jane, that’s purely coincidental): Jane discovered the wonder of a certain gay Bar, and a certain gay community, shortly after a breakup, and was immediately sucked in. It was fun, it was free, and it was … dramatic. But the amount of drama didn’t hit Jane at first.

So Jane spent every night, for the next couple of months, hanging out with her new friends at the Bar. She didn’t have to think about anything – it was kind of a release after the stress of “real life” – and therefore neglected other things that otherwise would have played a large part in her existence, namely her old, dependable group of friends.

Jane moved to the same area as all of her new friends. She took a liking to its location and the fact that she could now party all the time, given that the Bar was less than a three-minute drive from her apartment. She started realizing the drama that the bar created, the anger and resentment and ridiculous arguments. She realized that people were not only talking about other people they knew, but they were also talking about her as well.

Jane was laid off from her job for three months – conveniently just in time for summer. Jane learned how to budget her unemployment money so that it paid for rent, bills, and booze, the only things she cared about at the time. And it worked well! Whenever she got bored after applying for many, many jobs, she would head over to the Bar and get tipsy by dinnertime. Afterwards, she would grab some fast food, head home, shower, and then head back to the Bar for the night. She would often have parties at her house after the Bar was closed, to which, thank goodness, cops were never called as her neighbor worked nights. She would invite the same people who talked shit about her, knowing that she herself had been sucked into the same “she said, she said” mold of the others.

Fast-forward a year later: Jane is in a comfortable, monogamous relationship, and lives over twenty miles from the Bar. She has a fantastic job and a very happy home life. And she has cut out all of the drama-filled, angry Bar friends in her life. But she still suffers the ramifications of being stuck in that mold for a long time: she has gained about thirty pounds, is still (in a weird way) intrigued by a lot of the drama (after all, she can find all the dirt on Facebook), and, when she’s bored at night, still thinks of the Bar.

I know a lot of us have very close-knit groups of friends, or at least groups of acquaintances, who are well-read, have good jobs, and can maintain a very interesting conversation about current events, social topics, and so forth. But there is a large number of lesbians whose sole purpose in life is to relish the thought of judging others, though their own lives, when looked at from “outside the bubble,” are hardly impressive and, likely, are just downright sad.

Am I preaching to the choir, or is Jane’s story common with most lesbians?

I have come to a conclusion.

Actually, I have come to many conclusions as of late, however they all stem back to the same central point. In fact, I’m not quite sure conclusion is the proper word for whatever this is, as I feel like it is not an end but rather a springboard to what will hopefully be a more enlightened state of being… at least for me. But, for lack of a better word… as revelation seems too lofty, and epiphany seems too personal… conclusion shall be the word by which I will be calling this occurrence.

“What might this conclusion be?” you are probably asking. Well, I have determined that humanity is entirely disingenuous. Shocker.

We have become a society of fools, where falsified identities are the norm and we are all actors playing to a more than receptive audience. The phrase I have heard most often thrown around is something along the lines of “you are who you associate with”. By choosing to interact with a group of individuals where the primary topics of conversation revolve around who was booted off Dancing With the Stars, who is sleeping with whom and how their respective exes feel about the situation, and who was that poor soul Wednesday night who got blackout drunk and embarrassed themselves all over Asbury, we are doing a disservice to our minds.

By continuing to perpetuate this cacophony of vacuous  discourse, I feel as if we are lost. Lost amongst the struggle for something more… anything more… to carry us towards tomorrow. We settle. We may find ourselves dressing a certain way, listening to certain music, going to certain parties, as to adhere to a certain standard of expectations as defined by the community. We assimilate.

I am not trying to say that I am innocent of this discourtesy, nor am I classifying this as the definitive way by which the myriad of acquaintances with whom I have interacted with in the past conduct themselves. I am just so intensely frusturated by this that I want to shout from the rooftops

“WAKE UP!”

It is easy to be complacent. It is easy to fall into a routine of mindlessness, blindly following the pack into the desert of uninspiring confabulation until you’re begging for an oasis with an iota of intellect… lest it be a mirage.

How do we release ourselves from this intellectual and societal serfdom? How do we go about reclaiming our true selves? Our genuine, enticingly passionate, irrefutably brilliant selves?

We stop asking permission to listen to NPR. We dress how we choose because it makes us happy, not anyone else. We stop making fools of ourselves in public. We start respecting ourselves and showing compassion and being whomever we are in the moment.

We start showing that we have no shame. We are SHAMELESSLY BEAUTIFUL WOMEN. We do not have to answer to anyone except ourselves… and it is time we start acting like it.

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” –  Kurt Vonnegut

It’s about that time of year again when everyone starts talking about Pride: which ones they are going to be attending, why they can’t go to others, and past prides to which they have been.  Personally, I have never been a “pride” kinda girl.  Every year, I actually find myself sort of dreading it, but let me explain.

The pros that I see are:

1. I get to see all the people that I haven’t seen since last year around this time.
2. I have an excuse to be on the beach all day (if I’m at NJ Pride).
3. I can listen to free music and eat state fair food.

The cons that I see are:

1. I get to see all the people that I haven’t seen since last year around this time.
2. It depresses me to no end to look around and see a mass of gay people conducting themselves in a way that I can’t possibly fathom has anything to do with pride.
3. I feel like it’s used as an excuse to take behavior that would normally be absolutely not tolerated and turn it into behavior that is deemed appropriate.
4. It usually ends with the same result: some of my friends leave feeling let down, some leave feeling angry and betrayed because the spirit of pride has convinced their significant other that it’s fine to make out with other people, some of my friends stay and continue to get so wasted that they forget what event they were attending in the first place, and some manage to find the true spirit, have a great time, and leave before it gets ugly.

Now I know that it is your choice what the terms of your own individual relationship will be when you’re at Pride, and that it is not for me to judge those terms.  Yet I can’t help but wonder what part of our culture thinks that a stable relationship can be built upon the basis that making out with other people is okay and won’t cause jealousy or pain.  I have never been to a Pride event where the two biggest common denominators weren’t drinking and sex, followed by a distant third of pride in being gay.  Again, not that there is anything wrong with either drinking or sex, but I think the way they collide during gay Pride events gives gays a bad name and causes a lot of confusion for those that are new to the culture.

Also, how are we supposed to be showing the world that we are normal and carry on normal lives when most of the people at Pride are looking for a quick hookup, or to get wasted and act like idiots?  Maybe we shouldn’t have to be better than the rednecks who attend monster truck rallies to be considered stable people capable of maintaining long-lasting, monogamous relationships that are going to provide children with a nurturing family … but when the world sees half-naked, fully sloshed, sex-crazed people running around waving rainbow flags and yelling about being gay and loving it, how are they supposed to see that we are capable of something a bit more mature?

There is too much hate in the world.

Everyone wants to be loved. It’s human nature. We are conditioned into blindly following popular persuasion; through listening to the “right” music, wearing the “right” clothes, being seen with the “right” people, being attracted to the “right” type of people. All it takes is one iota of peculiarity, one outlier… and the stares begin. The stares turn into whispers, the whispers into taunts, the taunts into malicious actions, and before we know it there is a child jumping off the George Washington Bridge.

What have we done? We have created a society where sticks and stones break bones, but words end lives.

We need to do better.

It is with that in mind that Outwordly Fabulous was birthed. It is a spoken-word show, crafted as a response to the the epidemic of queer suicides by poet Pandora Scooter. She breaks down bullying, ruminating on the societal conditions that have created our present culture where hate and homophobia are accepted norms, and both the bully as well as the victim suffer.

Outwordly Fabulous goes beyond promulgating a message of hope. Pandora brings the radical idea of self-love to the equation. There is always a way out, and it is not in the form of a noose or a bottle of pills or a blade or a gun. It is through being exactly who you are in the moment, no matter who that may be… and that person is beautiful.

Fresh off a week-long tour in California, Outwordly Fabulous is coming to New York City on May 13th. It is the release party for the Outwordly Fabulous CD, and Pandora will be performing. Tickets are $30, and not only will you receive a CD of the show, but also you will be helping to fund the upcoming Outworldly Fabulous tour through the Bible Belt. Help carry the message of love and compassion to Middle America.

Friday, May 13. 7-10pm. Nuyorican Poets Cafe, 236 East 3rd Street between Avenue B and C. Stand up for queer youth. Stand up to end the hate. Stand up for life and beauty and the motivation to keep fighting for one more day.

Presale tickets can be purchaced here.
More information on Outwordly Fabulous can be found here and here.