Avoid The Trend

Your prejudice is like a bad trend, acid washed jeans or scrunchies, yet you wear it with pride. I hope you look back one day and realize just how stupid you appear. Though acid washed jeans never hurt anyone...

A guy puts up a picture of himself and his friend. In the picture, the two guys are passing a flower pen to each other via mouth. The guy loses friends over this picture.

True story.

I don't know what's worse: the people who try to push him to "come out," because he's a Theater boy so he must obviously be gay or the people who walk away from him because of a picture of two friends goofing around. If he were gay, would that make this picture any less controversial for the people who saw it? What bothers them? Two guys playing around or the assumption that he must be gay and seeing a picture presses the thought further into their minds?

Honestly, who gives a shit? Have we not evolved enough to get the fuck over non-issues? Thirty years ago, and in some places even now, the problem with the picture would have been that one guy was black and one guy was white. But everyone knows thats so outdated. It's all about the new trends. Got to keep up.

Sadly, a high majority of the people I know have faced their share of prejudice. Explaining oneself and attempting to kill the stereotypes. Yes, I'm Hispanic. No, I'm not Mexican. Yes, I was born in this country. No, I'm not illegal. Yes, I have a job. No, I don't have an apartment with seven relatives and all of my kids waiting for my welfare check. And that's just on a visit to the grocery store. But even facing that on a regular basis, I still feel pretty fucking lucky.

I can't fathom the thought for one second of having people question me on who I love or how I fuck. No one will ever associate my love for Theater with my enjoyment of giving head let alone the color of my skin. I will never have to sit the people I love down and say..."hey...I'm Puerto Rican. Please continue to love me. No, it wasn't a choice. I was born this way. No, it's not a defect and no, nothing happened in my childhood to "change" me from White to Spanish."

My RL friend has a battle to face. To decide how he's going to deal with the ignorance of others. But, and I will say this with great pride, he has yet to take down the picture. People have left him ugly emails and even stopped talking to him altogether and yet, he lets that picture stay up. He's not trying to make anyone feel uncomfortable. He's trying to show that there is nothing to feel uncomfortable about.

I don't care who he likes, as long as it is a consenting adult human being. Love is love. And the heart knows no color or gender. And it was a pen for crying out loud. It's not like it was the guys dick in his mouth...and if it was...suck on brotha!

FTN! to ignorance. No, it is not bliss. It is the demise of our world.