So, I was quite literally awoken on Saturday by my boyfriend complaining about Dumbledore being gay. Dumbledore, for those of you that refuse to read Harry Potter, being a character in, yes, Harry Potter. As most of you likely know, J.K. Rowling mentioned on a tour stop at Carnegie Hall on Friday that Dumbledore is actually gay. Despite website claims that “Millions suspected it,” very few outside the crazy world of fanfiction shipping actually thought so, and I think that’s a credit to fact in general.

I think this is great - first of all because I just like Dumbledore’s character, and this makes him that much more awesome. But most importantly, Rowling and Dumbledore have become role models for millions of children, and someone’s role model saying that being gay is ok - in fact, that the greatest wizard of all time is gay - will do a lot for the general acceptance of gay characters into mainstream media. Which inevitably follows with the acceptance of gay people in mainstream life.

A lot of gay rights groups have applauded Rowling for outing Dumbledore, but they’re also lightly criticizing her for A) waiting until the series was over to announce it, and B) for not elaborating on it in the books themselves. I, for one, think waiting ’til now and not elaborating on it at all is the best way this could have happened. This way, Dumbledore is just an incredible character that “happens to be gay.” It’s not a central part of his life at all, and shows that gay characters don’t have to be “gay.” Plus, overprotective/homophobic/crazy parents that wouldn’t have let their kids real Harry Potter if they knew a central character were gay (and you know right wing groups would have protests at book and movie releases) lost their chance to keep the books away from their children.

But elaborating on the crazy right wing groups for a moment, can you smell the reigniting of censorship flames by those that brought you the slogans “Pikachu is Satan” and “God Hates Fags”? Ahh, yes. The sweet scent of humanity and compassion going up in smoke…

Anyway, I thought this deserved a trip to Photoshop:

Just a small rant: As I’ve been listening to the radio lately, I’ve heard a few commercials that involve background noise of horn honking. There will be people in a drive thru, or a busy intersection, or just some random ambient noise, that includes an angry driver honking. Is it me, or is this an incredibly bad idea? If I’m driving down the road, listening to the radio, and all of a sudden I hear a few cars honking, what am I supposed to think? I freaked out the first time I heard one of those commercials - “Did I cut someone off? Should I be worried? Is there an accident?”

This is Charlottesville, not New York - honking doesn’t happen all that often (comparatively), and it should mean something when it does. Something more than, “Oh, I should stop by Burger King on the way home…”, that is.

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Now to the actual post: I’ve been hit with some dilemmas lately. When I was at Governor’s School almost three months ago (has it really been that long?), I met a guy. Let’s call him, “Felix” (actually, that’s his real name; well, the name he goes by, anyway… let’s move on). Now, because Governor’s School lasted for just a month, and everyone lived hours and hours away from each other, it’s likely you’d never see the friends you met there again. And in many cases, that went the same for any relationship you became involved in. It brought up some interesting thoughts for me: mainly, the incredible suspension of disbelief high school students have to undertake in order to stay sane in a relationship. They all know that, come the end of high school (or Governor’s School, as it may be), they’ll be going off to different places and it can become almost impossible to keep seeing each other. And it seems weird to me that kids are able to carry on relationships, knowing that there can’t be any long-lasting future in them.

So I was really nervous about becoming emotionally involved with someone at Governor’s School. I went along with it for a little while, until it got to the point where I was thinking more about life after Governor’s School than anything else, distracted from being able to enjoy the time I had left. At that point, I sat down with Felix and tried to figure out what would happen after that short month was over. After a few moments of silence, he said to me, “If it’s meant to be, we’ll find a way to make it work.” And it’s true: it’s not that it’s impossible to continue a relationship from afar - just much more difficult.

It worried me a lot when I first got back from Governor’s School, wondering whether it really was, “meant to be” (I’m just using that as a quote here - that wasn’t meant as a sappy comment). A few weeks went by - and then he came to visit me. Then he visited me again. A few more weeks. I drove down to visit him. Another few weeks. I drove down again. True, it’s hard not being able to see the person you’re dating for weeks at a time, but somehow we made it work. And it is working - very well, in fact. In a lot of ways, I appreciate the time we have together much more now.

So maybe I was a bit harsh in deeming that all high school relationships required a suspension of disbelief. Because, if there’s anything I’ve learned in the past three months, it’s that that suspension of disbelief doesn’t have to be there - the problem doesn’t have to exist at all. Perhaps I’m a bit weird (or rather, weirder than we all thought), but I can’t comfortably keep a relationship going, knowing there’s a definite end point in sight (graduation being the most common case). And yet, now I know that there doesn’t have to be an end point after all - not even in high school. Even in college, when the distance might be much greater, I know that, “If it’s meant to be, we’ll find a way to work it out.”

And it’s nice knowing that we’ve already crossed the first hurdle.

Oh, and because I’m a egomaniac and love seeing putting my picture on my website…

Today’s the 1 year anniversary of me coming out to my friends at school. I remember it well - I’d told a close friend of mine, then my family, then debated for a few weeks about whether I wanted to come out to everyone or not. And then, after realizing that the school as a whole liked me too much to care whether or not I was gay, I told another one of my friends (who, as predicted, spread the news like wildfire to everyone else that night). I never came out on my blog, though - it even took me a few months before I mentioned it there.

This trip to past really got me thinking about all the records computers hold of our pasts. The first place I looked was iTunes, and the Last Played tag on each song. Sorting by date, I went back and saw a bunch of songs that I played on September 22nd, 2006: “Show Me” (DJ Encore), the Monk theme song, “Welcome to Paradise” (Green Day). It’s weird to think that, the last time I played those songs, almost no one knew that I was gay. Fast forward to today, where most of my teachers know (either through essays or, surprise surprise, this blog). The last time I heard those songs, I was a different person living in a different world.

I actually went through my entire song collection, sorted by the last time I’d listened to each song. Kind of like traveling back in time, to some extent… I found myself remembering events and important dates throughout the past few years, all reflected in what music I decided to listen to on that day. Then I moved on to my Gmail account, and relived my life again vicariously through email headers. I even dropped in on a few emails and read the first few exchanges of words between myself and people I now consider to be good friends. That one page of 50 archived emails Gmail gives you really is a snapshot of the past…

Unfortunately, sometimes reliving the past simply makes you regret it…

I was driving home from school last Friday, when I decided to stop by the Giant on Pantops to pick up some food (by “food” I of course mean ice cream). So I park my car and begin the exhausting walk up an entire row of the parking lot - there was a big truck parked at the head of the row, taking up a bunch of spaces and forcing everyone else to park further down. As I got closer to the truck, I realized that it was a blood donation truck from Virginia Blood Services - that annoying jingle from their radio advertisements immediately entered my head.

I gave a sigh of semi-disgust as I walked by the truck and towards the sliding doors of the grocery store. But then a woman stops me before I can reach the safety of the air-conditioned produce isles; “Do you want to give blood today?” she asked.

I struggled for an excuse not to give blood… Ah, my age! “Sorry, I think I’m too young.”

“Oh, are you seventeen?” I nodded. “Well that’s not too young!” the woman exclaimed with a smile.

Damnit, I should have said I was sixteen… You see, despite my becoming increasingly extroverted over the past few years, I still felt it a tad bit extreme to reply with, “Well, I may not be too young, but I am too gay.”

Guidelines that the Food and Drug Administration have set down to blood collection centers seem to have a problem with homosexuals. Virginia Blood Services, in particular, will not let “any man who has had sexual contact with another man, even once, since 1977″ donate blood. This provision was added in the 1980s to combat the growing HIV epidemic, and in the 1980s, I may have been understanding of it. But all blood donated in the united states is now tested for HIV.

To put this in perspective of how discriminatory this really is, let’s look at some of the people who are allowed to donate blood: people who have had syphilis or gonorrhea (as long as it was over 12 months ago); oh, and people who have sex with prostitutes, given that it’s been at least 12 months since they’ve done so. In other words, someone who has had sex with 50 different prostitutes can donate blood, as long as they wait a year, whereas a homosexual male who has had sex with his long-term partner, even if they used protection, and has never had an STD, could not.

People, that’s utter crap. And collection centers know it. But even VBS hides the language about gays under a section called “Lifestyle choices.” So despite all the advertisements the Red Cross and other centers put out there about how important it is to donate blood, how you could save a life - they’re excluding a fifth of the population over assumptions of promiscuity (I’m sorry, do we need to review how people who have sex with prostitutes are still allowed to donate, or blood drives in the sexual hotbeds that are high schools?).

Well, if you guys don’t think our blood’s worth it, go ahead and bar us from donating. But don’t complain about blood shortages when you could have had ours.

I’m sitting here in the library of the University of Richmond - the heat index is 105 degrees, and the air conditioning inside this building is a bit less than adaquate. And it’s only going to get worse as the month goes on, I fear…

But let’s talk about more pleasant things - like the proportion of guys to girls here. In the visual and performing arts program (which I’m in), there are 202 people total, and only 69 of them are guys. Then, you have look further and realize that this is the visual and performinc arts program, so the real question is how many of the 202 people don’t like guys. 20? 30? Eh, something like that.

We have two basic classes that meet every day here at governor’s school, and my second class is all about forbidden things. Essentially, we debate for the entire 90 minutes every day about various topics. If you read the last paragraph, then you’ll understand why the topic of same-sex love and AIDS seems to sneak its way into every debate. Heck, I’m guilty of it, too - my final project in that class is about the reluctance of schools to educate about HIV/AIDS, and how that’s changed over the past 25 years. Fun fun.

*sigh* I’m afraid my writing ability is a bit compromised at the moment due to the heat and the fact that I’m listening to “Over the Moon” from Rent. I need to get out of here and see Harry Potter…