You go men!

I remember the first serious crush I had, well okay, the first serious crush on a guy whose name did not start with a Tony and end with a Blair. One night we went for a romantic moonlit walk and as I turned toward him, my adoration welling up inside, he said he had something to tell me. Oh how my heart soared and then the words came,

“You are such a wonderful friend, we are so close, I feel like I can tell you anything and there is something I have been wanting to tell you for a while…I am gay.”

My only response was, “Oh that’s funny because I was just going to ask you out.” This crush went on to date an earlier crush, who is also gay. This is why I believe sexual orientation is not controllable because if it were than I am a guaranteed gay-maker.

So many girls have that same old-new story, love-interest-turns- out-to-be-gay-winds-up-as-shoe-shopping-partner. And I constantly hear these girls lament the fact that the only good guys are gay guys. Yet, on the opposite side is a lesser-known old-new story, straight males never getting the girls because people think they are gay. The New York Times ran a story this week on Meterosexuals, straight men who are deeply in touch with the feminine. And they are flipping their carefully coiffed hair and saying, “If someone's going to judge me on what kind of moisturizer I have on my shelf, whatever." I say, you go men!

I have long nursed a theory that there is a lot of white male discrimination occurring in our fluid mosaic of genders and identities. This is propelled by the fact that it is like scratching a retina trying to convince my friends that there are straight men that do not continually masturbate, enjoy looking at porn and watch sports center all the time. They refuse to believe that my Abercrombie and Fitch wearing, Ace of Base loving brother, who has better hair than I do and treats his girlfriends like queens, is actually straight. A friend of mine calls the man I am dating a woman, merely because he is kind and thoughtful, importing Cherry Lime-Aid (or nectar of the god’s as I like to call it) for me all the way from Texas to Minnesota. These men are men in the truest sense of the word, a word that has become so distorted and shifted our of focus that we forget what Rudyard Kipling wrote,

If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And--which is more--you'll be a Man, my son!

I think what these metrosexuals and Kipling are telling us is that your manhood is so much more than your hair gel or lack thereof.

Article Author: Lyz Baranowski

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