Creating Yourself with Words

Diriye Osman (photo by Darren Bonello)

There’s a brilliant quote from Kurt Vonnegut’s A Man without a Country that always makes me feel hopeful about the future. “Practicing an art,” he said, “no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”

There’s a renegade thrill to Vonnegut’s wisdom. Going into the arts as a career can render you into fiscal dreck, but the act of producing art, particularly writing, will endow your interiority with a sense of plenitude, of satisfaction that is hard to replicate.

I started writing my short story collection, Fairytales For Lost Children, as a way to humanize myself. I had been told over the years by my family and community that my experiences as a gay Somali were invalid, insidious even, and I had digested this malevolent narrative like manna. I became a walking cavity filled with self-loathing. Fairytales For Lost Children, which focuses primarily on the lives of LGBT Somalis, is a corrective to that poisonous conversation that is still happening across the world with regards to the queer experience. The endpoint of that conversation is a question that always rebounds back on the queer individual whose personhood is under investigation. “Does your life matter?” To which the only reasonable response is a resounding yes.

Toni Morrison said it best: “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” This is exactly what I did. No-one was writing the stories that I wanted to read so I went and created these stories myself. The result is a collection of short fiction that takes an intimate look into the lives of Somali children, teenagers and adults who are either gay, lesbian or transgender, and how their futures are shaped by their faith, families and pursuit of personal freedom.

By writing this book, I was engaging in an act of self-invention. I had always been timid as a child but when I sat down to write I gathered a sense of strength, courage and clarity that I didn’t know I was capable of. I’m still testing my creative parameters as a writer but the goalposts have shifted since I published Fairytales For Lost Children. I’m now no longer using the act of writing as a lifeboat to anchor my dreams. I now write simply because I love telling stories. I love playing with language. I get a buzz from the beauty of discovering new ways to toy with syntax. This is writing as pleasure, as joyful expression, but I’m aware that I began this process as a way to externalize my greatest fears, hopes and ambitions. I began writing in order to eke out a defined outline of who I was and where I was coming from.

Zadie Smith once said, “The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.” This is no longer how I feel about my work, but I understand fully what she means.

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Diriye Osman is the Polari Prize-winning author of Fairytales for Lost Children (Team Angelica), a collection of acclaimed short stories about the LGBT Somali experience. You can purchase Fairytales for Lost Children here. You can connect with Diriye Osman via Tumblr. He will be performing at The Huddersfield Literature Festival, The Polari Salon and The London Short Story Festival.

www.huffingtonpost.com/diriye-osman/creating-yourself-with-wo_b_6390202.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay+Voices

Straight Guys Dish On Their Favorite DILFs

Gay men and women aren’t the only ones who have a special place in their hearts for DILFs, according to the latest Buzzfeed video examining the same-sex attractions of male hettys.

Consider the pursuit of human knowledge one step furthered.

Here’s some highlights:

“Have you seen the guy without a shirt? Cut. From Marble.”

“Wicked hot.”

“That man has a jaw line that is regal like the fucking Rockies.”

“He’s cool. He’s talented. He’s just not hot.”

“If he’s your hot dad and Jazzy Jeff’s your crazy fun uncle…what a fucking life you live.”

“Not hot.”

“Brad Pitt’s been consistently hot for decades.”

“No one looks hotter eating than Brad Pitt.”

“Ten out of ten.”

“Not the guy I’d spend my life with. He’s the bouncer I’d take home from the bar.”

“This is the guy you hook up with when you’re out of town somewhere and you’re like “oh, I’ll never see this person again…and then they’re at your front door.”

“Hot dad.”

“He’s not that hot.”

“He has a tremendous level of swag.”

Watch the full video here:

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Dan Tracer

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Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel's Holiday Message to Troops Features Gay Sailor Proposing to Boyfriend: VIDEO

Kyler Geoffroy

www.towleroad.com/2014/12/hagel_holiday.html

WATCH: Does Anderson Cooper Lust for Mark Consuelos?

Playing Plead the Fifth on Andy Cohen’s Bravo show, Cooper faced a choice of sex partners including guest Kelly Ripa versus her husband — and Madonna versus Cher.

read more

Dawn Ennis

www.advocate.com/politics/media/2014/12/29/does-anderson-cooper-lust-mark-consuelos

What's In a Name?
In every culture, the naming of something or someone is a powerful act. It is an act of responsibility to both the namer and the one being named. Personal histories have been made and re-made with a name change. Many religious and cultural celebrations like weddings and christenings involve the giving and taking of a name. Most parents take great care in selecting names for their children.

When our first son came home, he was 3½ months and had already been named by his birth mom. I’ll admit we were not in love with the name and had the ability to legally change it. However, to honor her place in his history and that time of his life, we kept the name as his first name. We added two second names and gave him my husband’s family name. In total, he has four names on legal documents. Not exactly bubble form friendly, but it celebrates his unique adoption story in a memorable way.

With our second adoption, long before we began to be matched with birth moms, we selected names for either a girl or boy. For a boy’s name, we choose Jacob. It was my paternal grandfather’s name and so we let my parents know to gauge their reaction. My usually stoic father, a retired pastor, was visibly moved that we’d honor a man he never got to know as he died when my father was only six months old. We also chose Sophia for a girl’s name, the name of one of my grandmothers. By choosing these names, we hoped we’d connect our adoptive family to our biological family’s history.

When we were matched with our birth mom and learned she was expecting a boy, we let go of Sophia, the girl’s name we had chosen. Although we were very careful not to refer to him by Jacob because of all the things that could still go wrong, I’ll admit we began to think of the unborn boy as our son.

After a very tough couple of weeks with our birth mom, quagmired in the unavoidable bureaucracy of adoption and being snowed under the brutal winter of 2013-’14, she emailed me with a simple request: Could she name the baby she carried for nine months? As I read the email to my husband, we both knew that we could not refuse her. With all she was prepared to give to us, we could not deny her the honor of naming him. He gently reached for my shoulder and asked, “Are you okay with letting the name go?”

I lied and said, “Yes.” I emailed her immediately and explained how we named our first son and the meaning of his four names. I wrote that we’d be honored if she’d name him and asked her what name she had in mind. Quite honestly, I read and re-read the email a dozen times. I didn’t want her to sense my disappointment or sense of loss. I hit the send button and said goodbye to Jacob and went downstairs to get a glass of water and grieve a little. Yes, it was a selfish and petty grief.

While I was sipping my water, an alert notified me of a new email. I saw it was from her and with a deep breath I opened it. She had written a lengthy email, explaining her choice of name, but in all honesty I scanned past it all and my eyes settled on the simple combination of consonants and vowels that would become my son’s name. When I arrived at it, my heart burst.

She asked if we could name him Jacob. Despite living over a thousand miles away, coming from a different cultural and ethnic background and being in a completely different stage in her life, she choose the exact name we had chosen. Yes, I know it is a common name; in fact, the year before he was born, it was the most common name for baby boys. But still, I found it cosmically uncanny. When I told him, my usually stolid husband was visibly moved. We knew that it was a sign that he was meant to be part of our family. Our birth mom said it best when I told her we had chosen the same name. “Well then, it was meant to be,” she said peacefully.

Biological parents have that moment when they see their baby’s ultrasound or feel their baby kick in the womb. That moment, I felt my son’s heartbeat for the first time even though he wouldn’t be born for another six weeks. Despite the lessons our adoption journey had taught us, I gave myself the gift of hope and secretly I began to refer to him as Jacob.

We would have many more twists and turns ahead of us before Jacob would come home with us, but I carry that moment with me every day since. It has become interwoven into the myth-truth of my son’s homecoming. Its significance would only be rivaled by the moment when my father baptized my son with my grandfather’s name. And the usually unemotional men in my life were visibly moved by the power of a simple name tying four generations of my family. For those of us who rely on science, logic and hard facts to understand our world, moments like these are truly humbling.

Wherever you are in your voyage, whether your child grows under your heart or in it, know this: What’s meant to be will find a way of happening in its own time. You may not even know when it’s happening but that which is named cannot be unnamed.

This post originally appeared on GaysWithKids.com

www.huffingtonpost.com/christopher-thangaraj/whats-in-a-name_15_b_6378988.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay+Voices

David Geffen’s 20-Year-Old Ex-Boy Toy Athlete Is Stalking Him

Music magnate David Geffen is dealing with some serious relationship drama, guys.

According to new court documents obtained by TMZ , he’s being stalked by his ex-boyfriend.

20-year-old Jamie Kuntz has been accused of stalking the 71-year-old for the past several months. His behavior has included following, harassing and making a “credible threat” against Geffen sometime between September and November.

In October, Kuntz was arrested for violating the terms of a restraining order. He now faces felony and misdemeanor charges and is expected to appear in court later this week.

Kuntz and Geffen first hooked up when Kuntz was 18. In 2012, the teenager was kicked off his college football team after being spotted making out with the then 69-year-old billionaire in a press box. He told teammates Geffen was his grandfather. (The school maintains that he wasn’t removed from the team for being gay, but because he lied about the kiss.)

According to Kuntz’s lawyer David Wohl, his client and Geffen enjoyed a physical relationship, but when Kuntz caught feelings and it wasn’t reciprocated, Geffen filed for restraining order. Wohl insists Kuntz is not a stalker. He’s just misunderstood.

Geffen is worth an estimated $6 billion.

The moral of this story? We’ll let Countless Luann sing it for you:

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feedproxy.google.com/~r/queerty2/~3/j4juZJtJqZc/david-geffens-20-year-old-ex-boy-toy-athlete-is-stalking-him-20141229