Getting to class on time is tricky. Dodging, ducking and ferociously karate-chopping one’s way through the hand-holding heterosexual couples blocking the narrow sidewalk is a skill too rarely used by the denizens of our fine campus. And on Wednesday, their numbers will swell into a veritable horde of blissfully ignorant twosomes that we will all have to either trample over (with varying degrees of satisfaction) or risk being late for class. Personally, I’ll be wearing my hiking boots.
The miserable rantings of a perpetual bachelor, you diagnose. You prescribe a trip to the love shack, stat! Medical metaphors and allusions to trite 80’s songs aside, I am neither miserable nor a bachelor. I am a man in a relationship that appreciates its man-on-man action. And every V-Day, I cannot help but stumble around in a quandary, dazed and confused, wondering: where is all the man-on-man (or other LGBT-on-corresponding-LGBT) action?
The truth is that many members of LGBT society today are rejecting Valentine’s Day. Every gay man remembers growing up and having to emotionally remove himself from many forms of hetero-couple cultural traditions as a coming-out rite of passage. Some of this was done happily: we do not marry if one of us becomes pregnant, for example. Many of us have likely decided to never get married or have children, too. Though there are certainly many similarities between the LGBT couple and the hetero-couple, the norms that divide or classify LGBT relationships have caused many couples in our society to self-identify as the “alternative couple.” Part of this alternative ideology is about rejecting the picture-perfect (hetero) couple evoked at the thought of Valentine’s Day.
None of this is to say that we do not celebrate V-Day, but rather that we’ll celebrate it in our own way. Some will choose to stay closer to the conventional “wine, candlelight, music and nooky” plan, while others will go to Fly and watch the drag queens enact a Titanic-meets-Nightmare on Elm Street skit set to a Britney Spears remix for the occasion. Check out the inside cover of Fab for other gay parties going on during V-day weekend.
What’s most important for LGBT and heterosexual couples alike is to remember that the “love” this holiday is based on is only an ideal. The other forms of love we encounter are just as meaningful, and more realistic. As long as we are celebrating in the true spirit of V-Day, the way we celebrate doesn’t need to follow any kind of convention.
