Study Abroad Warning

While looking for a public health internship for the summer (and I'm still looking, so feel free to leave tips in the comments), I was scanning through a list of internships offered by a U.S. Government office that has operations internationally.  All the placements were either in Washington D.C. or Uganda.

Uganda, I thought.  Isn't that the place where homosexuality is about to be punishable by death?

The email I got from the career services people made no mention of the danger, and neither did the website of the program.  If I didn't keep up with gay rights news, I might have applied to intern in a country where my bisexuality made me guilty of a capital crime.  When applying to study or work abroad as a queer person, I am the only one responsible for guaranteeing my safety.  Although Yale restricts travel according to State Department guidelines, there are no additional warnings for students who may belong to groups in acute and specific danger in certain regions.

Yale certainly can't cover every contingency -- I doubt they should warn everyone that students with albinism should stay out of Burundi and Tanzania -- but it would be great if the careers office had a one-sheet handout of known dangerous countries for out students and some links to reliable, frequently updated gay travel guides.

Until Yale offers support, it's essential to do research and make sure queer friends working or studying abroad have done their homework.  A bisexual friend of mine was planning to spend this semester studying in a fairly progressive Middle Eastern country.  I asked her if she planned to closet herself on facebook, and she told me she had decided to leave her data up, and see how it went.

The country where she had planned to study was Egypt, so the point turned out to be moot, but it was important that someone bring up that danger to her early in the planning process.  It would be great if the warning came from Yale.

Sometimes I just miss my mom...

A couple of years ago, around the same time I started dating women I stopped talking to my mom, a lot.

Before I actually "took the plunge" and actually got the guts to ask girls out, I had tested the waters with my mom, so to speak. I asked her questions about what she thought on the topic and quite frankly I never received a very positive response to say the least...

When I actually went for it, the girl dating part, I didn´t tell my mom, in fact I was very careful to hide it from her. I was afraid of her rejection and her criticism, she can be quite harsh at times.

This went on for a while, eventually she started getting suspicious, and our relationship plummeted at an accelerated rate...

I realized that keeping things about my sexuality not only meant that I couldnt tell her who I was dating, but also I couldnt tell her about the parties I went to, the people I hung out with, I couldn't explain certain political interests I have, heartbreak, joys, worries about questioning girls in my life....

I came out to her a couple of months ago. She didn't take it well. It disgusts her. My girlfriend is banned from my house. I can hardly tell her half the things I do here because half of them have to do with my queerness. I feel attacked by her.

I miss her. I wish we could talk like before. When I was younger, when I was still what she "wanted".

I know she loves me, but she disagrees with so much of who I am.

Sometimes though, I really just want her back. It´s strange to want someone in my life that both hurts me and loves me at the same time. She´s bittersweet to me.

Sometimes i just miss my mom...

Being an Ally to a Queer Person of Faith

This Wednesday, I went to a panel discussion sponsored by the Chaplain's office on "Being an Ally to a Queer Person of Faith." Although all the panelists were cheery and supportive, I felt that the discussion sidestepped the pertinent issue. For the most part, the advice that was being given (be supportive, let people have time to adjust, etc) was the advice that you would give to a queer person struggling to come out in any community, religious or not. The panel seemed to be hoping that, given enough time and support, any community that cared about a person would eventually come around.

The posters for this event pushed this idea of eventual harmonization. A typical poster for the event read: "Bisexual Baptist? What if somebody told you that your identity was a contradiction?"

Yeah, well, what if somebody was right?

Religious groups make truth claims about homosexuality, that are, at times, impossible to divorce from the truth claims they make about the nature of god and the appropriate form of worship. In these communities, it is completely plausible that there will never be acceptance of 'practicing' gays. In these cases, being an ally requires us to help a queer people of faith to make a choice between acting on their orientation and maintaining their religious faith.

The panel seemed to be considering religion primarily in a cultural or social sense, but it is important to remember that religious faith makes demands on people. It is when we recognize that a faith is making unreasonable demands in that we make judgments about a religion's ability to distinguish true claims from false. Wednesday's panel should have recognized that, when we start telling the truth about ourselves, that change may force us to recognize that sexuality was not the only sphere of our life in which we have been living a lie.