What do we mean by Love(=Love)?

In the LGBT community, we love the phrase Love=Love. It’s plastered everywhere—from outside the Center to shirts we distribute to the entire campus. But I can’t help but wonder what message people are actually receiving. After all, Love=Love seems to be more than just a trivial tautology, else there would simply be no point.

While loveis an unfortunately vague and overused word in the English language (e.g. Mean Girls),judging by the art on the T-shirt, which includes gay and straight couples holding hands, I don’t think we’re talking about my love for Italian food or God’s love for humanity. We seem to be talking specifically about romantic love, and I think most people interpret the shirt as meaning gay/lesbian romantic love=straight romantic love.

That seems simple enough. However I think that many people, upon seeing this shirt, draw more than this. Consider the application of this to political rights, where we might want to say gay romantic love=straight romantic love, therefore gay marriage. However, the only rights that we can really derive from the statement gay romantic love=straight romantic love are those which are guaranteed solely in virtue of romantic love. And, thus, I am left asking what does romantic love in and of itself entail.

I feel that in our culture we are taught that love justifies pretty much anything (note how we’ve lost the “romantic” part--though it's still implied). While the hopeless romantic in me loves Disney movies, there is a recurring message that love solves everything; Hercules literally becomes a god through romantic love. Or what about romantic comedies, such as Made of Honor, in which Patrick Dempsey does everything he can to break up his best friend’s wedding because he is “in love”with her? Made of Honor ends up with Patrick Dempsey happily on his honey moon with his now-wife. No regrets. No mention of the now-ex-fiancé who was literally rejected at the altar.

How often dowe try to use love to justify things we normally would never even consider? How many times have you seen your friend, once they have a boyfriend or girlfriend, disappear from your life to spend all their time with their boy/girlfriend—previous plans discarded? I once was told not to date during my Freshman year, because apparently love demands me to sacrifice my grades despite my education’s $59,900/year price tag. And sometimes, romantic love apparently demands we even violate others ’rights—what is it we say about those we love? That for him/her, we’d let the world burn? Dante once wrote,

“People in love cannot be moved by kindness,

and opposition makes them feel like martyrs.”

Once we are in love, we appeal to love to ignore the normal rules of kindness, and we start sacrificing others in devotion to love, and we hold ourselves up as somehow sanctified by our sacrifice. We start feeling not only justified in our actions by romantic love, but entitled through it.

And so we return to my original question—what we can derive from romantic love? It is so tempting for those fighting for LGBT rights to equivocate on romantic love and capitalize on the cultural primacy of love to try. Love=Love à{Rights} without clearly establishing what rights romantic love can actually give. Turning romantic love into rhetoric, however, makes us lose sight of how beautiful and valuable romantic love itself is. We must return to ask what exactly love is, and in determining what romantic love is—and is not—I suspect we will find it to be more than we even wanted it to be, even if not in the way we originally thought.

We consider ourselves a loving and accepting community, so let us figure out what we mean when we say that. Let us explore what love actually means.

Utah's Perfect Little Ally

So, Thanksgiving was pretty great. You don't hear this enough in the LGBT community, but I love my family so much. Yes, like all families, there was a bit of discomfort around the time of my coming out, but we've moved passed that. Whenever I'm home, I know I am around people who love and accept me for who I am. It is a rare occasion that people see pure, unadulterated Dan. But he rears his head quite often when I'm around my family. This is meant to be a short, uplifting post to help Us get through finals, and it goes out to my sister, Maddie.

Just a bit of background. When I came out to my Mom, I was an emotional wreck, and wasn't exactly quiet about it. Maddie overheard me telling my Mom some pretty earth shattering news. About 30 minutes later, I see a note slipped under my door:

"Dan. I heard what you told Mom. I'm totally ok with it. I still love you no matter what."

-Maddie

How adorable is that? She's pretty much the Greatest.

Do ya'll remember taking those required "comp-tech" classes in middle school? You know, the ones where they sit 30 kids down in a computer lab and try to teach kids about the Interwebz, when really all they are doing is trying to hack your site blocker and get onto addictinggames or facebook? Yeah, well Maddie is in one right now. One of their assignments was to make personal blogs. They were required to list some of the blogs with which they kept up and about 8 of her friends listed the BDU blog as their favorite. Yeah, thats right. Not only does Maddie (and my entire family for that matter, thanks Mom) read the blog, but her friends have started to read it too.

I brought her home a Love=Love shirt for a Thanksgiving present. Her eyes were beaming when I showed it to her. I could tell she couldn't wait to wear it around, not only repping Duke but repping LGBT equality. I also found out over break that Maddie has become a confidant to one of her LGBT identified friends, and I could not be prouder. My sister is pretty great.

I hope that the Duke loss and finals aren't keeping ya'll down. Put your heads down, #occupy Perkins, and power through. We're almost there.

The Common Thread

[Editor's Note: In addition to all of our awesome columnists who write under their own names, we also have some awesome anonymous columnists that for one reason or another must use a pseudonym. Details on anonymous columnists here. Without further ado, please welcome our newest blogger, Logan! ]

I’m going to tell you a love story. Or rather, several love stories I suppose. Because I feel as though that’s what our lives are ultimately about, right? This blog is a testament to the fact that we all approach this life from vastly different perspectives, and as such we come away with a very unique set of experiences. But no matter how different we are, we can always relate to one another through this most innate human experience—love as our common thread.

I saw her from across a crowded bar. She was wearing this really cool vintage-like, masculine jacket and a dark blue sweater with little white stars on it. Between her dark clothes and relaxed demeanor, she nearly blended right into the wall behind her. Never in my life had I felt so completely drawn to a person. To this day, I’m still floored by how absolutely certain I was that I needed to go talk to a complete stranger (especially given that I would consider myself to be a relatively quiet and reserved person). I think we have certain moments in our lives that we know immediately will be ‘significant’—this was one of mine.

Before I continue, I should back up and tell you that for me, coming to terms with my sexuality was a very long and a very slow process. It started out with little hints that something was…different. The problem was that I couldn’t figure out what it was that was different: I didn’t feel any different, and yet I just wasn’t the same.

These whispers eventually grew into a little lump in my gut. I wrestled for a long time with this little lump that seemed to grow bigger and bigger every day. When it finally became a tangible idea, I was glad that it was something that I could identify and label, but it still felt very foreign. I kept waiting for something to change, for me to feel different, for me to truly become this idea: gay.

I never experienced the blatant shift in my thinking or experience of the world that I so desired. I thought that if I was ever going to be certain about my identity then I would need to be able to tell the difference between my ‘straight’ life and my ‘gay’ life. But I think that what I actually experienced was so much better. That moment in the bar when I saw The Girl, something clicked for me. However, it wasn’t the ways in which I was different that clicked, it was the ways in which I was the same. I felt more like me than ever before—I felt my authentic self.

One day, a while after The Girl and I had started dating, I asked her if she ever struggled with her sexuality. I was still trying to understand how my world fit together, but quite frankly didn’t know where to begin. She sat there with a look of utter confusion, and responded with what may be some of the most honest words I have ever heard: “Well, no…I don’t think I do. I suppose it’s just normal for me…why would I struggle with it? It’s just who I am, why would I be bothered by it?”

This is the heart of the matter. Coming to terms with my sexuality had nothing to do with accepting the fact that I was ‘different’, and everything to do with accepting the fact that I was the same. I never felt a shift in how I experienced the world because there was nothing to shift to—I was already me. The key to understanding my identity was realizing that I could, and did, experience love and attraction in the same way as everyone else.

Now, my real love story comes later, but I think I’ll save that one for next time. I’ve found out that the fine print of loving authentically is that you also experience pain and heartbreak authentically— though, that’s a whole post in itself. I’ll leave you with a quote from Andrea Gibson, whose words make a lot more sense to me than the ones in my own head: I am whatever I am when I am it, loving whoever you are when the stars shine and whoever you’ll be when the sun rises.

Airport Attire

Sorry I haven’t posted in a while (read: the most uninteresting man in the world). I figured I’d post something relevant and something that I thoroughly enjoy doing. Traveling. I have spent a decent amount of time in an airport during my long trek to and from Utah for my brief vacation from Duke. One thing has changed about the way I travel since coming to Duke. I always wear my Love = Love shirt when flying.

Now, I’m not sure if it’s actually doing anything in terms of swaying public opinion about LGBT identified people. Most of the people I see spend as much time looking at me as I do them (about a half a second to make sure we don’t run into each other as I sprint from one terminal to another). But when I actually get to my terminal and realize that I have nothing to do but sit and wait for 30 minutes, or when someone is awkwardly standing over my seat waiting for everyone loading the plane to move back, the second, third, and usually fourth glance are pretty obvious. In fact, as I am writing this in the Detroit airport, every time I look up to check the gate status, I meet eyes with the portly man across from me and he quickly averts his gaze.

If people are judging me for wearing this shirt, it’s almost a good thing. Just my presence is making them think about LGBT issues. Whether or not this portly man was supportive, at least I was making him think. I’d imagine that most people who are unsupportive of LGBT rights think that all gays are flag waving, parade marching, gaga loving queens. Frankly these aforementioned queens are the most fun people in the world and I feel bad for anyone who doesn’t know one, but I digress. By wearing the shirt, I hope I am somehow showing that there are gays (the majority, in fact) who don’t fit the stereotype. I wasn’t causing a stir, I was just sitting there, in blue jeans and running shoes, listening to an iPod, just patiently waiting (the fact that I was listening to the Wicked soundtrack is irrelevant).

Here’s a funny little aside. While in the Detroit airport, I went to McDonalds. I walk up to the lady at the cash register and order, and she says, “I like your shirt.” I am so incredibly touched, and graciously thank her for being supportive. And then she goes and crushes all my hopes and dreams and says, “It means like man and woman only equals love, right?” #facepalm. No. No it does not. So I tell her she should look at it again. Upon second inspection she says, “Oh, never mind. Next.”

So yeah. There’s that. I hope ya’ll are enjoying your summer.