Two Months

RT @imjustanerd: @JaredofMo your gay is showing and I love it!

— Jared Davis (@JaredofMo) April 9, 2012

So, it's been almost two months since I realized I'm gay, and yeah, I've been reading and looking for information.

A lot of people online say that lines are starting to bleed when it comes to whether you can tell someone's gay or not. Being gay is not about being like the opposite sex, it's about being true to yourself. For me, dressing or acting like a woman was never appealing. I'm a guy who enjoys being a guy, and I like guys.

My dress sense has adopted a few changes. I used to wear sweats or my slacks from work, now I wear jeans. (My sister is really proud of me for doing that.) I bought a lot of new shirts, but a lot of them weren't appropriate attire when we got a heatwave that struck our area.

I haven't tried to keep my sexuality a secret, but on the other hand, there's no point in yelling "HI! I'M GAY!" everywhere you go. As a result, I don't think a few of my coworkers picked up on it. I did tell my store manager flat out, and the assistant manager knew. (But now they've both found new jobs and left.)

Audrey, Shaun, and Gen (my younger sister, her husband, and our even younger sister) came up from Texas two weeks ago and I got to visit with them and they all noted I was feeling more confident than the last time they'd seen me.

It's crazy what people think about gay people. First off, they assume it's all about sex, to which I have to wonder how sick are you to think about other people having sex so much? Sexuality is defined by the attraction you feel. What defines a person is their personality, and yes, your sexuality can play a part in this.

Gay people get stereotyped as flamboyant because those are the most noticeably different people. More and more, people who aren't flamboyant, like me, are opening up about their same-sex attraction. It is becoming more well-known that the average looking guy picking up tools at Home Depot might be going home to his boyfriend.

Another thing I keep seeing people come up with is that gay people want to force their lifestyle onto others. For me, I don't see this. I'm a normal guy, aside from the fact that I like other guys. Furthermore, if someone doesn't have a same-sex attraction, I don't think they should be gay. I'm pretty sure a lot of other people feel this way, too.

There's a scientific theory about why some men are gay: the more boys a woman has through sequential pregnancies, the more likely they are to be gay due to antibodies trying to feminize the fetus, mistaking it as a foreign object. I have two older brothers. My two younger brothers have a few feminine touches in their face (Audrey noted my baby brother looks like her), and to be honest, I really hope that's all they got if this theory is true.

It's not that gay people are trying to force their lifestyle on others, it's that they are being oppressed and are standing up for their rights. In the past, being gay was enough to get you arrested, and less than 20 years ago, a landlord could evict you based on your sexual orientation. This current election season has seen a lot of focus on gay people, with Michele Bachmann's insane stances on homosexuality, Rick Santorum, and now Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who has even gone on record as saying that he doesn't think gay people should have jobs.

When a country founded on the basis of freedom wants to take away rights from certain people just because of something they can't control, something is seriously wrong. Needless to say, despite my having voted Republican in the past, my vote will be going to Obama this year. It's not so much that I agree with the Democrats as much as I'm finding myself completely disagreeing with the Republicans.

It makes it all the more disgusting that people often pull out a faith card to justify this, and it is here I see for the first time ever the need for a separation of church and state. When we are using a faith supposedly based on the principles of love and the value of all people to deny other people rights, then something is seriously wrong in how religious values are being applied to law.

Enough with segregation! Being gay or straight should not be being on one side or another. Supporting a certain political party should not mean you're taking one side or another. Race should not mean taking a side. If we're not looking past these labels, what good are we to each other? United we stand, but if we let differences divide us, we aren't united.