Sunday, March 30, 2008

A Listener Figures it All Out

I read some of our listener survey comments on the show on Friday, and one that got a lot of laughs and email responses was an entry that speculated on the psychological motivations for LGBT support of Obama and/or Clinton -- or something like that -- going back to our difficult, queer adolescences. Indeed, one listener, Claude from San Francisco, asks in the comments here on the blog for me to post the entire survey comment, so here goes:


Obama! Hillary! McClurkin! I finally figured it out this week while listening to the show. We're all still in High School.

See, Barack Obama is the adorable A-student who's the captain of the debate team AND the baseball team. We all had a raging crush on him. Every single one of us. And unlike the other popular kids, he would actually talk to us. He'd walk with us to class and talk to us about our favorite TV shows and music groups. And he'd defend us against the bullies, even the ones that were his friends.

His smile was just so beautiful and honest, and once in a great while we'd see what almost looked like a wink when he was talking to us. "He knows, doesn't he? Did he just wink at me? Oh my god, does Barack feel the same way I do?" It was then that we asked him out. He smiled, gave us a little uncomfortable laugh, then got up and walked away to say hi to his other friends, without ever answering us. He rejected us without having the decency to reject us. And he'd still nod hello to us in the hallway, though he seemed to go out of his way to avoid talking directly to us.

Barack had a Spring Break party when his parents were out of town. We didn't really expect to be invited, and we told ourselves that we didn't care, but we did. We cared, and we cared deeply, because we still loved him. Then we found out that he invited that jerk Donnie McClurkin to his party. Donnie McClurkin, who dumped us and spread all those nasty, awful rumors about us. As much as we hate to admit it, at that point something just snapped. We couldn't believe that he would invite Donnie, who had done such awful things to us! That was it, that was the last straw.

We yelled and cried and screamed and cried, and cried some more. And who did we go crying to? Our older sister, Hillary. Hillary understood. She knew heartbreak. She knew what it was like to be madly in love with someone and have them rip our hearts out and stomp on it, then smile and pretend it never happened. And while she'd never hang out with us in public - she took us aside and gave us a big hug and a pat on the shoulder and told us that it would be ok. She glanced around again to make sure nobody was looking, but that never bothered us, and it certainly didn't bother us in our time of need.

When we say we support Hillary because of experience, we're fooling ourselves. When we say it's because Baracka can't win big states, we're outright lying; we all know full well Barack Obama is capable of winning the big states against McCain. No matter what we tell ourselves and each other about why we're supporting Hillary, it's all a lie. We support Hillary because we hate Barack. And we hate Barack because we love him, and he will never love us back - and he proved it by being so insensitive as to befriend that jerk Donnie.

We say it wasn't a "dealbreaker" but the only way it wouldn't have been is if Barack had asked us out, which deep down we knew he'd never do. It was a dealbreaker. Many of us will never admit this, but Barack Obama makes us sexually uncomfortable. He reminds us all of "that boy" that we all have in our pasts, the one we will never forget, and more importantly, never forgive. Because in our hearts, we're all still in High School.