By Adya Vac:
Sex and love are two subjects that we can never seem to exhaust. But us humans, with our glib convictions and phony double standards, we laud love, the idea of it, but when it comes down to one of the deepest expressions of love, the act of making love, we condemn it; reducing it to an animal instinct of procreation. And this hypocrisy is the very reason for the phobia and disgust many of us exhibit towards love that doesn’t fit into our narrowly defined category of normal – the category of straight love.
I saw something inexplicably beautiful today but it made me sad, because it came with a question, and a painful one at that.
“Why is it that the quality of commercial imagery of the gay community less beautiful, than the fantastical illustration we see of romance for everyone else in popular culture and mass media?” – Braden Summers
When this particular loaded word is used, automatically, images, people, memories, start moving inside our heads; the emotions can be of endearment, of hatred, of loss, of despair, of longing, but the pictures are almost always of a man and woman. When we think of a kiss, sharing intimate secrets that can be understood only and only through a kiss, we imagine a man kissing a woman. When we think of a proposal, it’s a man down on his knees and a woman in tears of joy. When we talk about love that’s lasted half a century, we see an old bespectacled man and a frail woman. When we think of a baby coming into this world, we picture a man waiting by his wife’s or his girlfriend’s side, supporting her.
“Now what we do see of the LGBT community is often overtly sexualized and sometimes deviant.” – Braden Summers
And so, when we use the word love in connection with a couple who is not straight, the word is desecrated to mean nothing more than lust. And while I have no issue with the ideas of lust, to deny people this divine feeling of love, to paint them simply as hyper sexual, deviated human beings is in itself utterly heartless. We make assumptions and force them on everyone around us, assumptions that a man can never be in love with a man, that a woman can never be in love with a woman; that there can only be a perverted sexual desire of the same sex.
Braden Summers takes this conformist presumption, and turns it on it’s head, quite literally and bewitchingly. Here’s a link to his website, a short video and pictures that will, to put it in a cliched manner, take your breath away.
Nothing and no one gives us the right or the audacity to coerce someone else, physically or psychologically, to adhere to ‘our’ or ‘my’ model of happiness. Love is for you, for me, and for everyone. It’s not restricted to one particular relationship, and beyond any doubt, it can’t be chained down to our limited and controlled definitions of it.