{"id":149,"date":"2013-01-17T15:45:34","date_gmt":"2013-01-17T15:45:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bisexualwombat.wordpress.com\/?p=145"},"modified":"2013-01-17T15:45:34","modified_gmt":"2013-01-17T15:45:34","slug":"gayville-and-straight-town","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/2013\/01\/gayville-and-straight-town\/","title":{"rendered":"Gayville and Straight Town"},"content":{"rendered":"

Once, a very drunk man in a pub referred to the friends I was with and me as lesbians.\u00a0 I explained how wrong he was, we got talking.\u00a0 He told me he was of a generation that recognized only gays and straights, really.\u00a0 I nodded; this is hardly new to me.
<\/span><\/p>\n

He got drunker and told me his great idea about gay towns and gay schools and straight towns with straight everything, different everything for gay people than for straight people. <\/span><\/p>\n

I tried to appreciate where he was coming from: how much sense gay schools would make to people who lived through Section 28, how even if he didn’t remember homosexuality being illegal, he would have grown up in a culture where it hadn’t long been decriminalized. <\/p>\n

But my brain loves taking surreal ideas to their absurd conclusions, so my attempt to be charitable didn’t last long.\u00a0 I couldn’t help wondering where I’d fit in. Would I have to live in Straight Town with my straight husband?\u00a0 I’d miss my queer friends!\u00a0 A lot of them, if judged on a relationship they were perceived to be in, would have to abruptly move house at odd intervals.\u00a0 What would happen when a child in a Gayville school realized they were straight?\u00a0 Imagine the weird but necessary fostering programs.
<\/span><\/p>\n

I felt a little sad for this guy, that he thought that’d work, that the world cleaves neatly into gays and straights.\u00a0 No edge cases, nothing outside the binary, no problems.
<\/span><\/p>\n

Even compared to that convoluted utopia, the world I am aware of is more complicated, marginalized, chaotic, misunderstood, and amorphous, but also capable of a kind of beauty that wouldn’t be possible withotu that complexity <\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Once, a very drunk man in a pub referred to the friends I was with and me as lesbians.  I explained how wrong he was, we got talking.  He told me he was of a generation that recognized only gays and straights, really.  I nodded; this is hardly new to me. He got drunker and […]\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":1211,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[158],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-149","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-i-reject-your-reality-and-substitute-my-own"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=149"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}