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There are many other things I could say and many more stories I could tell about her. Some printable, and some, well, some a bit too ratchet for a person with a Ph.D to have floating around the internet. Since she may decide to run for president of La Raza or some shit some day (and since I don’t necessarily have the best handle on the line between appropriate and inappropriate), I won’t share any others.

Why am I bringing this all up today? Well, some time this afternoon, Gem of The Ocean, aka Gem Jones, aka my Ace Boon Goon, will officially go from being a Ph.D candidate to a person who actually has a freakin Ph.D, and I want to return the love she’s given us. I couldn’t be happier for her and prouder to call someone my friend.

As is the case with most celebrity news that has absolutely no impact on my life (and by “most celebrity news that has absolutely no impact on my life” I mean “all celebrity news“), the tone of the conversations sparked by Frank Ocean’s “coming out” have proven to be more interesting than the news itself.

For instance, a quick glance at some of the comments sections attached to the articles discussing Ocean last week shows discussions diverging into numerous sub-topics more about Frank Ocean™ than Frank Ocean. Some of these peripheral conversations were semantics-based (“Since Ocean isn’t a rapper, can he really be considered to be the first known African-American male hip-hop artist to come out?“), some dubious (“It’s interesting that this news breaks a week before his album drops“), and some questioning the story’s relevance (i.e.: “Wait. Who the hell is Frank Ocean, and why should I care about him coming out?“)

To me, though, the most interesting Ocean-related tangent has to do with how his “coming out” has been a virtual Rorschach test for our feelings about sex and sexuality. There aren’t many people who wouldn’t consider a man who has exclusively dated and slept with men for his entire adult life to be gay. But, when things aren’t as cut and dry — and, with Ocean, they’re definitely not — there seems to be more questions about appropriate labels — and the appropriateness of even having a label — than answers.

If the presence of male-on-male sex is your way of measuring whether a man is gay, how would you describe a man who claimed to have fallen in love with another man if they never actually had sex with each other? What if this man was the only man he felt this way about? Basically, what if he wasn’t into men at all but just one particular man? What if he was a teenager when this all happened?
Début de l'événement 22.11.2021
Fin de l'événement 22.11.2021