How to Be a Person (9 page)

The people at the clinic (almost certainly women) have met many people like you before, and they are trained in just the right ways to be nice to you and help you to stop freaking out. They will sit you down and talk to you about your feelings and your options. You will have the choice of either a medical abortion (pills that cause the unwanted clump of cells—it is not a baby—to detach and fall out) or a surgical abortion (sedation and a vacuum-type apparatus). The medical kind, where you take the pills, is easier, but either is totally fine. To repeat: You will be FINE.

People might tell you all kinds of things about your abortion: They might tell you that you are a bad person. They might tell you that you’ll be traumatized for the rest of your life. They might tell you it’ll be horribly painful. They might tell you that chunks of tissue the size of lemons will fall out of your vagina. Of course, everyone
is different and everyone’s abortion is different (like a snowflake!), but in general, the reality is that YOU WILL BE FINE. Your heart will recover. Lemons will not come out. No lemons. If lemons come out, call the doctor, and THEN you will be fine. And if you are a bad person, it is not because of your abortion.

Lastly, congrats! You now have carte blanche to make abortion jokes for the rest of time. Use this power wisely.

A Note on Polyamory

Oh boy! See
So I’ve Been Thinking About Polyamory
.

4. HOW TO BE GAY

BY CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE AND MADELINE MACOMBER

What to Do If All Your Life You Have Secretly Wanted to Have Sex With Someone With the Same Private Parts as You

Y
ou have this really big secret that you’ve spent years hiding (not easy—congrats!). You’re religious, or your parents are religious, or your best friend has a thing against gay people, or you’re not wild about the gay characters you’ve seen on TV, or you just have the very common desire to be “normal” and the idea
of other people talking about how you’re “different” makes you want to die.

That feeling that you have in your chest is your heart telling you that it’s time to come clean, but your head is trying to stop that from happening, because what if … [
insert horrible thing that someone could say or do to you
]. That thing you’re trying to stop from happening is called
coming out
, and it’s super important, for at least three reasons:

1.
Being gay is not something you can change. It’s not something you chose. It’s like being brown-eyed. You can pretend to have blue-colored eyes with those blue-colored contact lenses, but those don’t fool anyone, and the sooner you get over trying to fool people, the sooner you can start to have a happy life.

2.
People who are “against” gay people are fucking idiots, and often secretly gay (or curious about experimenting) themselves—in other words, hypocrites—and the last thing you should be doing is molding your life to make idiots and hypocrites happy. Idiots and hypocrites may try to convince you that being gay is “wrong” or “disgusting” or means you’ll “burn in hell forever,” but those people are undereducated religious fundamentalists who believe evolution is a sham and dinosaurs are a liberal conspiracy. You should relish the chance to flip these morons the finger.

3.
Statistically, the people most scared of gay people are the people who don’t know any gay people. The more those people realize their neighbors, brothers, moms, roommates, cousins, nieces, coworkers, veterinarians, and mailmen are gay, the less scared they’ll be. By
coming out, you’re doing a great favor to all the other gay people out there who don’t fit the stereotype either. Keeping quiet only helps the assholes who want to stereotype and marginalize gay people because it serves their own twisted purposes. Don’t let them get away with it.

A Note About Anti-Gay Bigots

Studies have shown that anti-gay people often turn out to have secret gay desires themselves. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, since the psychology is so simple: They hate themselves, and they don’t want this thing they hate about themselves to be discovered. If this is news to you, Google “gay sex scandal” plus “Larry Craig” or “Bob Allen” or “George Rekers” or “Ted Haggard” or “Catholic priest.”

How to Come Out of the Closet

You might want to do it while driving. After all, if you’re reading this, it probably means you haven’t come out yet, and if you haven’t come out yet, it probably means you’re having a hard time imagining looking into someone’s eyes and saying, “I’m gay,” and the great advantage of doing it while driving is that you have to keep your eyes on the road.

Or the other person does, if they’re driving.

And then it’s out there.

You’re done.

You don’t have to do anything else.

The other person’s response is their business, and it will depend entirely on them. If you are coming out to your mother and she is religious and quaint and easily fooled, she might be floored, might be hysterical, and may even start to hyperventilate. She may demand you pull the car over and let her drive, even though you’re on the freeway. Since hyperventilation and the safe stewardship of a moving vehicle are incompatible, you are fully in the right to deny her request, and by the time you are off the freeway she will have collected herself (true story).

Your friends, if they are good people, will say, “I’m so glad you told me. I just want you to be happy.”

If your friends are of the slightly annoying variety, they will say, “Why’d it take you so long?” or “I knew before
you
did.” Don’t be offended—this friend of yours is just trying to get over the offense of not being trusted with this information sooner. The human urge to respond to news by pretending to have known all along is as old as the hills and has nothing to do with you.

For a lot of people, especially if you were raised in a conservative environment, coming out is the process of admitting to earlier dishonesty—admitting you were dishonest with your friends in high school, possibly even admitting you were dishonest with yourself. Many people are taught in sex-ed that same-sex attraction is a phase that will pass, and they assume they’re still just in that phase and it hasn’t passed yet, and for them coming out is the self-realization that it isn’t a phase and isn’t going to pass. Other people are legitimately attracted to people of both sexes, and coming out means admitting to being bisexual.

Here’s what you don’t realize: No one worth your time actually gives a flying fuck. It seems like they do, but they don’t. They don’t care if you’re gay, they don’t care if you’re bisexual, they don’t care if you’re straight. They care if you’re being dishonest with yourself and the people around you. Telling the truth will make you feel so much better, and you’ll gain surprising insight into who your real friends and family are. There is no way of knowing how people will respond. But the good people, the morally superior people, the ones whose opinion you should care about—they’re gonna be fine with it.

Where to Go to College If You’re Gay

You’re going to want to avoid Brigham Young University, that university that Jerry Falwell started, and anything with “Christ” in the name. You’re going to want to avoid the South and a lot of the Midwest. You’ll be fine in Chicago, Illinois, or Madison, Wisconsin, but in general you want to head for the coasts. Whatever you do, avoid those schools with beautiful architecture and nothing but fields for hundreds of miles; if you’re already at one of those schools and the atmosphere is ridiculous and suffocating, transfer somewhere better as soon as possible. The bigger the city, the happier you’ll be. You need to be introduced to the full spectrum of what the world has to offer, and you need to be around other gay people so that you can figure out this side of yourself and so that you can find someone to kiss.

The History of Gay People in a Few Paragraphs

There have been gays as long as there have been people. There have also been gay bees as long as there have been bees, gay penguins as long as there have been penguins, gay dolphins, gay seagulls, gay killer whales, gay bison, gay raccoons, gay elephants, gay moths, gay lions, gay caribou, gay turtles, gay cheetahs, gay lizards, gay fruit flies (rim shot!), gay dogs, and gay cats. A disproportionate number of People Who Changed the World are believed to have been gay. (Back before being gay was okay, the gays had lots of time on their hands for changing the world.) The guy who broke the Nazi code to lead the U.S. to victory in World War II was a homo, and so was the guy who came up with Keynesian economics, and so were Plato and Socrates and Sappho and Alexander the Great, to say nothing of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo and Gertrude Stein and Eleanor Roosevelt and the Indigo Girls.

The gay civil rights movement started in 1969 in New York City, shortly after Judy Garland died, when a bunch of homos harassed by the cops at a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn decided they weren’t going to take shit from the cops anymore. They chanted funny slogans and did chorus-line kicks. “I remember thinking this was going to be the first funny revolution,” says Edmund White, who was there. Sometimes it wasn’t that funny. The first openly gay politician elected to public office in the United States was San Francisco’s Harvey Milk; he was shot and killed shortly thereafter.
Then came AIDS, a word Ronald Reagan refused to say or do anything about, leading to tens of thousands of deaths in the ’80s and ’90s, and nearly wiping out a generation. HIV, which causes AIDS, is still a serious disease, but with expensive treatment it can usually be managed. Still, not worth it. (Wear a condom, okay?) The discovery of treatments to keep people with HIV alive are largely thanks to activism in the lesbian community—the men were so busy dying that if it weren’t for the women, gay acceptance and gay health wouldn’t be where it is today.

Politically, liberals/progressives/Democrats are generally friendly to gay people and gay equality; Republicans, not so much (see also
How to Know If You’re a Republican or a Democrat
.) Some Republicans with mainstream support continue to describe gays and lesbians as fundamentally immoral. Feel free to mercilessly hate these people for their fundamentally un-American stance on your rights. The Constitution clearly says that everyone shall be treated equally.

On Gay People Sleeping With Straight People

Actually falling in love (or even strongly in like) with, say, a straight person if you’re a gay one is stupid, but sleeping with them is awesome—you get to see them adorably nervous, you get to be part of a big secret, you get to brag to your gay friends that you slept with a straight one. But again, it’s stupid and you shouldn’t
make a practice of it. If the stars align and you somehow get the right straight person drunk on the right night, you might feel like you’re conquering that which you were most frightened of in high school (the straight person), but the truth is you’re just setting yourself up to be conquered by them in a whole new way—defeated by their inevitable disinterest. Sexuality being a spectrum, almost every person is a little bit interested in those of their same sex, but making too much of that, assuming a little experimentation is more than just a little experimentation, puts you in the path of embarrassment and rejection. Sleeping with a straight person can be flattering, leading you to think you’re special, that the rules don’t apply to you, but rules always have their way in the end: Straight people want to be with straight people. Bisexual people who seem straight usually want to continue to seem straight.

How to Have Sex With a Man If You’re a Man

A man puts his penis in another man and gay sex is born. But seriously: Unlike the exaggerated depictions would have you believe, many gay people never have anal sex, preferring instead to stick to making out, stroking each other’s dicks, and oral sex. You should do likewise at first with any new partner you have. Making out with someone while stroking each other’s dicks is safe and intimate and fun. Some STIs can be transmitted simply through contact, so you want to make sure you know and trust someone
before you go there. Once you feel like you can trust someone, you’ve asked about their sexual history, and you’ve asked if they have any STIs (if anything looks iffy, don’t go there), you can graduate to doing more.

HOW TO HAVE ORAL SEX

What feels good to a man varies from man to man, but the general idea is to put your hand around the dick, cover the head with your mouth, and move your hand and mouth up and down together. Tell him to let you know before he comes or you might get a mouthful. If you want a mouthful, tell him that, too, but keep in mind that HIV is transmitted through semen, so if you have any cuts or canker sores, you’re putting yourself at risk (if a low risk).

HOW TO HAVE ANAL SEX

When you’re ready for anal sex—never have anal sex on a first date—you’re going to need a condom, a lot of lube, and a lot of time. You don’t want to rush it. Terminology lesson: The guy doing the fucking is the “top,” and the guy getting fucked is the “bottom,” no matter what position you do it in. The top will need to use his fingers to get the bottom excited and warmed up. One finger at first, then two fingers … then check in with the bottom and see if he’s ready for your dick. Then roll on a condom, cover it in lube, cover the hole in still more lube, and go slowly. The bottom will be in pain until his muscles learn to relax and accept the sensation. It will take time. And still more lube.