My Gay Life

It has been a really busy, yet really not busy week for me if that makes any sense. Although I really have not done a lot this week the few things that I have done have been very big. They have not taken a lot of time, they have just been very big.

To start the week I accepted a job offer with a new company and resigned from my current job that I have been doing for the past 4.5 years. I am very excited about it, but very nervous at the same time. It is a great opportunity to do what I really want to do, as opposed to my current job where what I am doing is really tangential to what I enjoy.

However, my current company had to make it really hard for me though by turning around and offering me a lot of money on Tuesday. This made for a hard day as I had to decide if I wanted to give up doing what I really wanted to do for a significant chunk of change or should I give up the money to do what I enjoy. Ultimately I turned down the money, but I still hear it calling to me occasionally.

So, I spent all week working on transitioning my current work to new people and filling out paperwork for my new position.

The only thing I have done all week not relating to my job is carve pumpkins. When I do something for a holiday, I go all out. For Christmas I hang close to 10,000 lights. For Halloween I carve a bunch of pumpkins. I also do not carve the generic pumpkins that everyone does. I carve TV and advertisement characters that take me 2.5 hours per pumpkin. This year’s list is:

• M&M Men (back from last year by popular demand)
• Captain Crunch
• KoolAid Man
• Harry Potter
• Woody from Toy Story
• The Tow Truck from Cars
• E.T.

Pictures will of course come next week after I finish carving and light them all up.

Although none of my readers have ever asked me, I frequently ask myself why do I continue to remain anonymous on this blog. I started thinking about this a lot more after the Girl in Damascus Hoax. If I post anonymously as Chris instead of revealing my full name does it impact the value of my writing?

I always come down to from a journalistic perspective it would be much better to reveal my full name. However, from a personal perspective this would not be the best decision. There are a few reasons I say from a personal perspective revealing my full name is not in my best interest.

First and most importantly, I sometimes post some opinions that can be very controversial. I fully stand by these opinions, and if I count you as a friend you know I hold these views. However, in the best interest of my career I do not wish for my employer or potential employer to view these opinions. One way to prevent my employer from being aware of these views is to remain anonymous while I post them. I am not willing to whitewash my views in order to allow me to post under my full name.

Secondly, despite employment discrimination based on sexual orientation being illegal in the state of Colorado, being publicly out to a potential employer still has consequences. A recent Harvard University study found that people who out themselves on their resume get fewer calls than people who do not. I am not at a position in my career where I can comfortably say I will be with my employer for a long time and not need to worry about finding a new job.

Also important is my privacy in general. Although I share a lot on this blog, there is still a lot I do not share. There are things I do not want to share, and right now my full name is one of them.

What are your thoughts on acting online under your full name? Is it the only way to have credibility?

Today, I have changed the background color of My Gay Life to purple in honor of Spirit Day. Are you wearing purple today?

WHAT IS SPIRIT DAY?

Millions of Americans wear purple on Spirit Day as a sign of support for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) youth and to speak out against bullying. Spirit Day was started in 2010 by teenager Brittany McMillan as a response to the young people who had taken their own lives. Observed annually on October 20, individuals, schools, organizations, corporations, media professionals and celebrities wear purple, which symbolizes spirit on the rainbow flag. Getting involved is easy — participants are asked to simply “go purple” on October 20 as we work to create a world in which LGBT teens are celebrated and accepted for who they are. Learn more & go purple at www.glaad.org/spiritday.

For the past couple months I have been planning to come out to my parents when I go home for Thanksgiving. I had my plan all figured out where either Tuesday night or Wednesday during the day I was going to sit them both down and tell them at the same time. I was going to be prepared to leave and go to a hotel if necessary and skip the Thanksgiving dinner, although I was really hoping this would not happen and had 80% confidence it would not happen.

Well my dad came out to visit this past weekend and completely blew this plan to pieces. I remembered just how conservative my dad is and how poorly this is likely to go over with him at first. On his first morning here he was reading the newspaper and saw that the Gay and Lesbian fund is closing their office in Colorado Springs. He made the comment “Great! The Gay and Lesbian Fund is closing.” This felt like him taking a dagger and stabbing me with it.

Throughout the rest of the weekend I got constant subtle reminders about how conservative he is both financially and socially. This made me realize if I come out to both of my parents at the same time it is not likely to go well as my dad may not give my mom a chance to accept it and a chance for us to talk. I think my mom will be accepting, but it will be hard, and it will take some time and talking.

So, I have now come up with plan B. My new plan is what I really did not want to do as it is not fair to my mom. I am now planning to come out to my mom a day or two before I come out to my dad. This way my mom and I can talk, she can understand, and not have to fight my dad while she does this. I do not think it is fair to her to ask her not to tell my dad, but I do not see any other option. I also am not sure only giving her a couple days between telling her and telling my dad is enough, but I cannot live in the closet any longer. I have to do this and I have to do it now. I cannot wait until after Christmas, I cannot wait until after Thanksgiving. In fact for a while I was considering flying home in September just to tell them.

I wish I did not have to come out to them this way. I wish I was not scared about how my dad is going to react. I really wish that I felt comfortable enough to come out in high school. But I have to do it now for my own sake and hope for the best.

So after asking myself who is behind a political movement I ask myself what the political movement stands for. The media very deliberately portrays them as an unorganized mob. But even from my research into who is behind them they appear to be extremely organized. What they are looking to be changed may not be organized, they allow diversity in their tactics, and their living situation seems unorganized. But as a collective the Occupy Wall Street movement has been very carefully organized and orchestrated.

Even their platform has become more organized, but the media will never tell you this. On September 29, the NYCGA released their first Declaration of Occupation, which reads a lot like the Declaration of Independence in that it is a long list of grievances perpetrated by the system.

I have read their Declaration and although I am oversimplifying I think it really boils down to one thing. Corporations do not care about people, their employees, honesty, or anything else beyond greed and money. These are the same issues that led to the labor movement years ago.

Since 1990 corporate profits have increased 200%, yet employee compensation has only increased 20%. I am not saying that employee compensation should have increased 200%, but it is clearly greed that is allowing companies to make billions and giving none of that money back to their employees that made it happen, and increasing employee healthcare costs to allow them to increase their profits even more.

It used to be that having good employees was important to the company. Providing good service was critical. Now it is all about providing the least service possible using the least expensive employees possible and the company is willing to lay you off at the drop of a hat. Now, who cares if you cannot understand them when you call the companies helpdesk on a warranty issue. IF you cannot understand them that means they are cheap and there is an increased likelihood you will give up and not cost the company any money by forcing them to fix the defect.

In my interpretation these protests are about telling corporations that we are not going to allow them to look at us as just dollar bills anymore and want to be treated with dignity and respect. It is about telling politicians that catering to the corporations and super wealthy is not catering to the American people and we are sick about it. Are we all guilty of causing the country to end up where it is today? Yes. We allowed Walmart to lower wages, force small businesses out of business, all in the interest of corporate greed. We allowed Dell to outsource their call center to India in the interest of corporate greed. Many are allowing Bank of America to charge them $5 a month for their debit card in the interest of corporate greed.

That is why these protests are occurring. They are telling the corporations that we are not going to put up with it anymore. That we are not just a dollar figure. We are people and deserve to be treated with respect. And that is something I can agree with.

After a brief hiatus of relaxing I am back. Over the next however long I will be talking about Occupy Wall Street and my opinions. When I form an opinion of a protest the first thing I always ask is Who/What is behind it? This is not who/what are protesting. What/what organized and funded the protest?

When it comes to Occupy Wall Street this is a difficult question to answer. The organizing body of the protests is the NYCGA (New York City General Assembly). The NYCGA website contains blog posts going all the way back to early August. It is quite apparent from these early posts that the organizers are highly organized and there are quite a few of them. Going all the way back to August 12 the Food committee had at least 5 members and they were already considering the food needs this far back. To me, this is indicates that the organizers of these protests at the very least have significant prior protest experience. A first time organizer is not likely to consider the need of food for the protesters.

There are also indications of an internet committee and a legal committee going this far back, but no indications of how many members there were of these committees. In addition, on September 1st the protesters did a test camping on the sidewalk overnight. They were ultimately arrested, but based on video of this incident there were at least 7 people involved here. Based on this evidence on September 1st I would say it is a very conservative guess that there were at least 20 active organizers.

So now the question becomes who are these organizers and how did so many of them get so organized? Going back to meeting minutes on August 23 there appears to be some international backers of this protest. They indicate coordination with an international group n-1.cc. It also clearly indicates that the NYCGA website nycga.cc was owned by someone in Sweden or Ireland at the time. This to me, confirms my suspicion that there is a large activist body behind the Occupy Wall Street movement.

So what is this activist body, and what do they generally stand for? That is where my research hits a wall. N-1.cc asserts itself to be some type of community built social network. Based on the text on the site I can translate from Spanish to English it seems to be an activist social network, although that is not what it calls itself. However, determining additional details has not born fruit as many of the links on the site do not work.

So my next approach was to try to identify the Whois information for the Occupy Wall Street websites. Unfortunately all of the websites directly related to the NYCGA and Occupy Wall Street use a privacy service that does not show their information. So what about n-1.cc? Looking up n-1.cc revealed that it was owned by Manuel Roman who also happens to own a site manje.net. So I finally found a site with some information. This site contains a “Universal Declaration of Rights of Citizens of the Third Millennium” (Link contains both Spanish and English declarations).

Reading this declaration it seems to say that government has failed, individuals should govern not corporations, everyone has a right to do with their body as they wish, and we need to change our political system to fix this. That is probably not doing justice to the declaration and you really should read it here.

So I still do not have a definitive answer of who or what group is the organizing body behind the NYCGA. I also cannot say that the organizers endorse the statements made on manje.net. But there is definite evidence that the organizers were part of some organization and had at least some financing in organizing these protests. Although, this financing appears to be minimal and may just be money they were able to scrounge up out of their own pockets.