Lip Service?

So, yeah. I'm making a really earnest effort to change my tastes in men. Not for me any more, the guys who're woefully too young for me. Not for me the nebulously straight guys upon whom I waste my affections. It's not really risking your heart, is it, when you're guaranteed to fail?

But, boy, it's hard to consciously change that to which you're attracted. There's a reason for attraction, I think. I don't know that I especially know what it is, but I know there's a reason for it. Maybe you're attracted to someone because of an abundance of a percieved deficit in yourself? Or maybe you're attracted to someone who represents -- at least in the little fantasy you make up of them -- what you ideally want to be? I dunno. I'm not that good at really piercing self-reflection. I skim the surface. I'm a deeply superficial person.

Amy told me the other day she'd been exposed to the phrase "straight acting" through Ira Glass' This American Life and how offended she is by this homo-on-homo prejudice. Which, of course, it is -- in the same way there's prejudice in the African American community between light- and dark-skinned blacks.

It's a form of internalized homophobia; some expression of self-loathing. But my problem with it is less about the fact that many men aren't attracted to "sissies." You're attracted to who you're attracted to (says the guy who sweears he's swearing off young men).

No, my problem isn't that. It's that men who only want "straight acting" men want someone who acts in the first place. How do straight people act, anyway? The appeal of the straight man --- or at least the myth of the straight man that so many of us have concocted -- is that they don't act. Their sexuality is enitrely unselfconscious. They just are.

So yeah. There's gay-on-gay prejudice.

"Hello kettle! You're black!"

Show me a world where people don't fall into cliques, groups, and fraternaties against "the other" and I'll show you a world where everybody's dead.

So yeah, there's gay-on-gay prejudice, and it's wrong. So's white-on-black. So's democrat-on-republican. So's male-on-female.

What is it that Edwin R. Murrow said? "Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them."

By the way: Happy National Teachers Day. I wouldn't have known it's National Teachers Day had it not been for the fact that Google changed its logo gif for the occasion. Where would I be without Google?

Okay, so I know I don't have crushes on straight guys anymore, but if I did, my current crush would be Josh Lucas. You should see Around the Bend.

I loved him in Sweet Home, Alabama and he managed not to fall into the black hole of suckiness that was the acting in The Hulk (don't get me started on that, by the way... I didn't think it was possible for Ang Lee to make a sucky film until The Hulk). You should also check out Undertow.