Last week, while most of you were probably still reeling from Bachelor Jake’s tragic decision to try to turn a ho into a housewife, a touching and long awaited moment happened for one of our favorite starts of “Will & Grace.”

Shelley Morrison, lifetime actress best loved for her truculent turn as Karen’s maid Rosario, came out as a Latina.

Never having answered any questions about her race to members of the press, she was often criticized by the Latin American community for her reticence.

We hear the words “I knew I was gay since…” fall from the mouths of friends and lovers – sometimes from our own reflective lips—and we never even think to question the authenticity of such statements. “…I was five…the 7the grade…high school.” Sometimes these words are spoken in retrospection as we remember the way we couldn’t keep our eyes off Molly Ringwald, or the way our heart hurt when the captain of the football team made fun of our stonewashed Levi’s, but sometimes these reflections aren’t about hindsight. Sometimes they demonstrate 110% clear, confident knowledge of a lifetime of same sex sexual attraction. You remember wanting to kiss your science lab partner on the mouth, you fantasized about locker room hand-jobs. In either case (uncertain longing for a friend, or a clear cut hotness for a person of the same sex) most of the time there was no hook-up. Maybe by the time high school rolled around, more likely it was freshman year of college, but the lack of actual fooling around never negates your gayness. We don’t need to answer the awkward parental coming-out question, “But, how do you know?” because most of the time, you just do.

Unfortunately, this trust in the inherent nature of sexuality isn’t really shared with folks who identify as bisexual.

(…) For all of that, I’m convinced that there is an appropriate place for heedless, aggressively pornographic, employment-jeopardizing narrative ejaculation. Say, the kind of place where a community of differently-minded queer people come together in solidarity to exchange interesting ideas about sex, sexuality, culture, and identity on a flashy and well-managed internet forum to figure out, at the end of the day, what the fuck to do with their freedom. In a place like this, I think that another, even more basic ethical demand comes into play.

Blogging of the kind that we get up to on TNG shouldn’t be confused with autobiography. In blogging, we don’t tell stories about ourselves, as if some stable, self-contained subjectivity with interesting things to say about Japanese sexual subcultures or with hilarious poop jokes to tell is reporting, neutrally and transparently, on thoughts and experiences it pulls out of its stream of consciousness. In blogging, we tell stories that become ourselves, configuring emotions and ideas, memories and hopes, pasts and futures in a way that orients us in the world and, finally, keeps us sane.

As adults, we feel more comfortable swearing, telling potentially inappropriate jokes, and risking offending our peers, but in a classroom, educators have to responsibility to provide a learning environment free from fear and hostility.

Schools should be safe spaces. And I believe that homosexuality should be discussed openly and honestly in schools. This doesn’t mean talking about “gay sex” or about young people engaging in sex at all. It means that should not stigmatize gay parents of students, students who feel they may be LGBT, or students who support the equal rights of gay people, by keeping the issue quiet, unspoken, shameful.

If there is one stereotype of lesbians I’ve always hated, it’s the vegetarian one. I am very, very proudly not a vegetarian. I was a vegetarian all through high school (though primarily used as a dieting technique, not really a stance on animal rights) but quickly went back to my meat eating ways after my first rugby match in college. Also when I realized that if I wanted to eat in my college’s dining hall and didn’t want to eat tofu, it was going to be time to start eating meat again. After depriving myself for four years, I realized that meat was glorious. I made a few attempts to stop eating meat after that, but I would just quite literally forget that I was a vegetarian.

My name, as in indicated on my birth certificate, is Zachary David Rosen. I usually introduce myself as Zack. Some of my closest friends and family will use the long version of my name on occasion. I spent a brief stint in college as “Z-Roz” and occasionally “ZDR.” But I guess sometime after I moved to DC it got changed, because now I frequently get addressed as “she,” “her,” “Mary, ” “Girl” or a million other feminine monikers that I don’t really understand.

Bears, wolves, and dolphins are widely known and just as widely loved. But what about those alternatively follicular fags whose whorls and whiskers are underappreciated in a culture of overwhelming Mammalmetaphornormativity? Don’t they too deserve cute shorthands to describe their hair patterns, however far outside the mainstream or underwear line they range? For their sake, and for the sake of fellow fur aficionados everywhere, I venture these bold steps.

Fighting for the rights of women isn’t unfair to men because of the institutional belief that “male” is normal and “female” is other. “White” is norm and “Black” or “Asian” equals other. It’s a simple case of privilege in this world and in this country more specifically. I try to be cognizant of the privilege I carry because I am Caucasian, because I come from the middle class, because I have been afforded good education, because I can read, because I have clean drinking water, because my very survival is not the first question posed to me when my eyes open each morning. Unfortunately, my awareness of these issues carries from the depths of issue-driven political stances and seriousness to the lighthearted and stress free moments of play in my life. It’s not the play itself; it’s the constant realization retailers separate “normal” and “other” in perpetuity.

I am a radical queer. I have tattoos, piercings, and a mohawk. I use dental floss to sew patches on my clothes and I even silkscreen my own patches. I am an activist and I organize. I fight for freedom from oppression, peace, and equality. I am an anarchist, against all marriage, and against assimilation.

I know mainstream culture has begun to use “queer” as a synonym with “gay/lesbian” with such shows as “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” and “Queer as Folks” but they really aren’t. It’s like asking the difference between a cappuccino and a latte – to the untrained eye there’s no difference but there really is.