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Yesterday we had the vote as to whether to keep the gay marriage law or repeal it. Before we left work the news was reporting 80-some-odd-% in favor of keeping gay marriage in Maine, and many of my coworkers were jubilant (the others were quiet). This morning we find out that when all the votes were finally done being counted gay marriage was repealed. Argh!
I posted this on my bi group the other day (and got NO responses - ha, what do I expect?) although I'm editing this slightly for readability. I did not do that great a job writing it the first time.
When I was 12 my cousin, who was 22 at the time, came home and announced that he was gay. The general consensus around the family seemed to be that he wanted attention and so the response had to be low key so as not to give it to him. A few years later he found a nice girl from away and got married and had kids, but still he'd blazed the trail for me - I now knew it was okay to be gay and that my family wouldn't pitch a fit over it.
Some time after that he broke up with the first wife and eventually married a very strictly religious woman from small town Maine, and now he's insisting that marriage is only between a man and a woman. My brother tried to reason with him, pointing out that at one time laws restricted marriage between Catholics and Protestants, or between white and other races, but the Cousin did not get the parallel at all. He's stuck in a place right now where he apparently feels the need to be smarter than anyone younger than him, and lumps my younger brother, 14 years younger than him, in with his own kids from his first marriage (who he talks down to) therefore refuses to listen to any reason from him.
Oddly enough, his mother is voting against the repeal of the marriage law - or perhaps not so oddly. She probably actually started researching stuff about gay people after he announced he was gay, which he apparently never bothered to do.
Another very odd thing the Cousin said to my brother was that if we allow gay marriage it will next become illegal to get counseling to not be gay. My brother and I were both baffled by this. All we could construct from it was that maybe it would be illegal to force teenagers to get counseling to make them not gay, but then again that should be illegal anyway because it's abuse.
And IF my cousin thinks that one can get counseling to make them not gay, maybe that means he did that? Maybe he actually thinks he was gay and was 'cured?' This is so pathetic. I've always thought that he was effectively bi if he could go from being into guys to getting married to a woman and having kids, but apparently he's convinced himself that he was actually gay?
Lord this gets me wound up. I don't even know how I'd get through to him at this point, and maybe I don't want/need to even bother, I just wondered if anyone else has had similar experiences with people.
I posted this on my bi group the other day (and got NO responses - ha, what do I expect?) although I'm editing this slightly for readability. I did not do that great a job writing it the first time.
When I was 12 my cousin, who was 22 at the time, came home and announced that he was gay. The general consensus around the family seemed to be that he wanted attention and so the response had to be low key so as not to give it to him. A few years later he found a nice girl from away and got married and had kids, but still he'd blazed the trail for me - I now knew it was okay to be gay and that my family wouldn't pitch a fit over it.
Some time after that he broke up with the first wife and eventually married a very strictly religious woman from small town Maine, and now he's insisting that marriage is only between a man and a woman. My brother tried to reason with him, pointing out that at one time laws restricted marriage between Catholics and Protestants, or between white and other races, but the Cousin did not get the parallel at all. He's stuck in a place right now where he apparently feels the need to be smarter than anyone younger than him, and lumps my younger brother, 14 years younger than him, in with his own kids from his first marriage (who he talks down to) therefore refuses to listen to any reason from him.
Oddly enough, his mother is voting against the repeal of the marriage law - or perhaps not so oddly. She probably actually started researching stuff about gay people after he announced he was gay, which he apparently never bothered to do.
Another very odd thing the Cousin said to my brother was that if we allow gay marriage it will next become illegal to get counseling to not be gay. My brother and I were both baffled by this. All we could construct from it was that maybe it would be illegal to force teenagers to get counseling to make them not gay, but then again that should be illegal anyway because it's abuse.
And IF my cousin thinks that one can get counseling to make them not gay, maybe that means he did that? Maybe he actually thinks he was gay and was 'cured?' This is so pathetic. I've always thought that he was effectively bi if he could go from being into guys to getting married to a woman and having kids, but apparently he's convinced himself that he was actually gay?
Lord this gets me wound up. I don't even know how I'd get through to him at this point, and maybe I don't want/need to even bother, I just wondered if anyone else has had similar experiences with people.
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This is horrifying to me on multiple levels. The idea that he sought counseling, that he thinks he may be cured (...I know that you know that it's possible for bi people to have very happy opposite-sex relationships!)... but also that there *are* "counselors" out there who are focused on curing is horrible. I just... I don't even --- terrifying and actually somewhat baffling.
Not quite the same as your situation, but I keep having people ask me if I'm cured because I'm in a serious relationship with a man. No no, I'm still bi, just dating a guy. Why is that so hard to grasp?
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