Giving Thanks for Links

Just wanted to shout out thanks to those who have linked me this week:

• Richard at Proceed at Your Own Risk – I am truly honored
  
• Jared at Completely Naked (I prefer the past name In Puris Naturalibus – Latin has so much more class) – Many thanks Bro
• Paul at Bedtime Stories – Your stories are so much hotter than mine (drooling)

All’s well here at Fair View. So, here I am minding my business, posting my manuscript and adding my links to gay blogs and such, when my husband looks over my shoulder and says, “How do you expect to your book to be taken seriously when you are linking to all of these gay blogs?”

Quickly I remind him that Oscar Wilde was jailed because he was gay and later died, and he was a truly great writer; greater than I will ever be. It is unfair that I be ostracized and not taken seriously just for linking to gay blogs. He replied that he is not put off by the gay part, but the titles of some of the blogs, such as the Great Cock Hunt, which sound pornographic and that literary readers may be also. So, I took that one out and just put Alex and changed Completely Naked to In Puris Naturalibus (though I am sure literary readers will still know what it means - maybe they will just be into it, teehee). Sigh. What a girl has to do these days to keep the peace! He doesn’t even read my damn blog!

He informed me that my site is what parents’ worry their children will find on the internet. I guess that’s true. As a pro forma, I told my sister that her 13 year old daughter should not read it, even though my niece naturally wants to read her auntie’s site.

That leads to an interesting question. Why do I, a str8 woman, like reading gay blogs? It all started one day when I was Googling for Hunter from the old tacky Manhunt TV show (read eye candy) when the scuttlebutt was that he was a stripper. Of course Towleroad came up first in the search and had a post on it; I bookmarked Andy’s site and started reading it daily. I liked it because it was smart and liberal and covered all of the headline news. At that point I had stopped watching the TV news completely (too depressing) and only watched the Daily Show with Jon Stewart and started noticing similarities between what Jon and Andy were covering.

Then I noticed the links on the right hand side of Andy’s page and started to explore them. At first I enjoyed the eye candy and lascivious stories (read: free porn), but as I went along I found that I liked blogs where the writers were intelligent, wrote well, had a great sense of humor, had liberal views like me, and a certain je ne sais quoi. I also appreciated that so called “salty” talk was acceptable whereas it usually is not for women. I was raised to use such vocabulary and can not use it in mixed society at all. I have linked only to the sites I have read and enjoyed for quite some time.

But, that does not explain all of the sites I visit daily. After many years of traveling across the country monitoring clinical trials for pharmaceuticals to treat HIV I have seen homophobia across our nation. So, I have a soft spot for those who are not accepted by society because they are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered or intersexual and an interest in those who are “coming out”. There is a serious unmet need for youthful individuals trying to discover their sexual identity in many areas of our country, especially if they become foster kids; which is why I have volunteered to work with an organization here at home. So, I read some blogs of youthful gay individuals and of people who live with AIDS/HIV.

There’s probably more reasons I read gay blogs, but it is a complicated answer, as you can see.

Then again, we all have this liking dick thing in common too (thanks Oh La La Paris for the pic).

I appreciate being accepted into the gay world as a str8 woman because at first I felt like an intruder into your world. Thanks for letting me in.