User Profile

You're Most Yourself When You're Not Trying to Be Anything

Identities make the world crazy. When something you identify with is questioned, you naturally feel threatened--something that you think of as "you" is under attack. And threatened people become really hard to reason with. Sometimes they do horrible things. People have killed just to prove that they really are Christian, or American, or straight, or a man. And people have killed because they've identified someone else as a faggot, a terrorist, an infidel, a traitor. Playing with identities is one of the tricks that the powerful use to control the rest of us.

But I'm offering some identities for myself here, anyway, because they make a good shorthand as long as you remember they're crude categories that could be easily rearranged or picked apart.

Queer - I like guys. And I am a guy. It took me about a decade of sexual awareness and a move to San Francisco to admit that to myself. I like the word "queer" because it opposes an identity that makes people particularly crazy: "normal."

:: Not Another Queer Manifesto : not perfect but good enough until I write my own
:: Read This Before You Come Out to Your Parents : written by bloodless liberals, but still worth your time

Anarchist - The burden is on powerful people to explain why we have to let them control us. If they do a bad job of explaining why we can't do things in a more equal way, we should take their power away and distribute it as evenly as possible.

:: Theory : The Anarchist FAQ
:: Practice : what anarchists do

Witch - I practice magic, drawing from folklore. I try to make things happen, holding my practice to the standards of a craft (like carpentry) rather than those of a science (like geology,) or a religion (like Wicca or Catholicism.) I don't have any particular beliefs. Most of my magic is asocial, not anti-social, but not beneficial to my communities, either.

:: Lucky Mojo : one of the few good magic sites on the net that wasn't linked from the late Why Wiccans Suck, for which I will have to find a replacement to post here.