Adam Sunny Flanders

The elections are now over and while here in Maine we’re still waiting for the outcome of the close race between Cutler and the homophobic LePage, the rest of the political landscape has changed considerably. The GOP has taken control of the House and even though the Tea Party was not as powerful as was speculated, they still had an apparent effect in this highly unpredictable election. Despite being primary targets of the Tea Party, both Harry Reid and Barney Frank were re-elected. In California, Democrat Jerry Brown defeated Meg Whitman, who spent $142 million of her own money in a desperate attempt to buy the election. Without Meg in office to defend Prop 8, we may see it die before any chance of appeal, as it should! Here in Maine both Democratic incumbents for the House, Chellie Pingree and Mike Michaud, were re-elected. In fact, Mike Michaud is Maine’s longest-serving congressman, now going into his 5th term. So much for the power of the Tea Party. As Maine goes…

I am not especially concerned about the GOP taking control of the House. The Tea Party has based its platform on smaller government and drastically lowered taxes. Now is their chance to put their money where their mouth is. In the next couple years I predict Tea Party supporters will be just as disillusioned as die-hard Obama supporters have been in the past couple years. I am disgusted by the hyberbole surrounding the Tea Party campaign, but I was equally disgusted by that of the Obama craze, especially among my college-aged peers. My vote for Obama was nothing more than a vote against Palin.

Unfortunately in this highly polarized political climate, we are often forced to vote for lesser evils. Almost nothing has changed since Obama took office two years ago; we are still at war in the Middle East and our troop numbers have only increased, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell still stands and it looks like it’s not going away for a long time, same-sex marriage hasn’t budged, and the nation has not become any less racist. The kind of change politicians talk about, whether Obama or the Tea Party, takes a long time and rushing to make a decision for the sake of making a decision more often results in disaster. And I wouldn’t worry about hope, either – the general trend is that things stay the same. Lately the choice between candidates is really like choosing chocolate or vanilla – no matter what flavor you choose, you’ve still got ice cream, or perhaps tea in this case.

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The Coming Out Week Halloween dance was pretty awesome. Tons of people showed up – I didn’t expect so many, with such awesome costumes! The gold fabric I bought for my Egyptian costume kept falling apart when I was sewing (it was like tinsel), so I gave up and bought a gladiator costume, which worked out really well. It got pretty hot, so I had to take the tunic off, but it was cool – there were several cute shirtless guys, some gay, some straight, hehe. It was only one part of what made this year’s Halloween so fun!

Below is me in my costume, in front of the mini haunted house that was set up. The little kids really enjoyed it. The free food was really good, and the Bear’s Den was serving drinks for those of us 21+. I was impressed with the large variety of costumes. My favorite was definitely Zero Suit Samus from Metroid. I posted a pic of her and some of my other favorites in my Flickr account, so check ’em out! Thanks to everyone who made Coming Out Week so great this year. I’m kinda sad I won’t be living in Maine next year.

Update: WABI TV5 removed their video, so I posted it to YouTube:

Today WABI-TV5 came to UMaine to report on the Coming Out Week events. They interviewed some of us, including me, and it was great to come together as a community in this way and promote the message that it gets better. I’m proud of my fellow Wilde Stein members and our GLBT and Allies community here on campus! We hope our statements become part of the larger message spreading across the nation, in direct opposition to homophobia and anyone who proclaims homosexuality is unnatural or sinful. It does get better; being gay is completely healthy, natural, and good.

If you’d like to view the clip, you can see it here: UMaine Students Rally In Support of GLBT Students and University of Maine Celebrates Diversity

Coming Out Week has been going great so far. Among other events today, the Eastern Maine AIDS Network (EMAN) offered free HIV testing. We encourage everyone to get tested regularly, gay or straight. The 20-minute OraQuick tests offer nearly instant results so you can have peace of mind. We always promote safe sex and offer condoms and other safe sex resources in the Rainbow Resource Room, as well as a full library of GLBT literature and film. My test came back negative, as always (I get tested at least once every year, as everyone in a non-committed relationship should). It was good to see lots of students taking advantage of this resource.

Saturday night is the Coming Out Week dance. I’m going as an Egyptian. I’m sewing my costume just like I did with my Max costume last year, but this won’t be nearly as difficult as the polar fleece I used for Max. Then Sunday is Halloween. Probably going to Styxx, the gay bar in Portland, like I did last year, staying with some friends.

On a separate note I got two gerbils Monday night. They are both very cute and I will probably post pics later, but right now they are getting accustomed to their new home and I don’t want to do anything to stress them out. Because they are in my apartment, and the apartment has a no-pet policy, I am required to point out that these are are Emotional Support Animals and approval required a process with Disability Services and medical documentation.

Coming Out Week at UMaine starts today and continues to Saturday with the Coming Out Week Dance. Below is the calendar and the t-shirt design, which I helped make. You can click on calendar and t-shirt below to get full-size images of them. I haven’t colored my t-shirt in yet…

Many people have been creating “It Gets Better” videos in an attempt to encourage GLBT youth to be strong and maintain hope, specifically due to the recent youth suicides resulting directly from homophobia. I can personally say that it does get better. I was heavily harassed and discriminated against when I was in high school, by both my peers and some teachers. When I came to UMaine, everything was different and it was homphobic individuals who were in the minority. The rainbow Pride Flag is has been flying all week and Coming Out Week begins this Monday. I’ve nearly got my undergraduate degree and I have no doubt things will get even better.

I know what it’s like to want to kill yourself, to have so much internal emotional pain and feel like you can’t talk to anyone about it, or feeling like nothing will change. High school was my world for a short time and I falsely believed it was the world, and always would be. But I was wrong, fortunately. The world is not like that at all. There are opportunities and happiness you should be here to see and be a part of. I’ve been out since middle school, so about 10 years now. I’ve suffered with major depression and I’ve been hospitalized for suicide attempts because I believed something was wrong with me. But I am so glad that I am here today, to be able to write this and tell all of you that it does get better, a lot better. For the first time in American history, we have a president who agrees and wants you to know this…

Just wanted to let you Internet Explorer users know that my design website, Seashore Design, is now compatible with your browser. There was an issue with image alignment with the bubbles, but I replaced the alignment tags with CSS, and that seems to have fixed it. It’s difficult for me to test IE compatibility because I have a MacBook. I’ve verified that it works with all the major browsers. W3schools.com reports every month on browser usage. This is for the month of September 2010:

It seems Firefox is winning the race nowadays, though IE still has one-third of the market. I’m in with the 3.7% that uses Safari as my primary browser. I highly recommend Safari and Chrome. Please let me know if you have any issues viewing Seashore Design or any of my other sites. Thanks!

Yesterday evening countless people across the nation participated in the You Are Loved chalk message project. The purpose is to raise awareness about GLBT suicides and in doing so, help prevent them. As many of you know, at least five gay youth committed suicide in the past month for no other reason other than that they are gay. All of them faced bullying and harassment for being gay.

At UMaine the Counseling Center, Student Affairs, and Wilde Stein organized the campaign on campus and this morning the campus was covered with messages of love, hope, and affirmation for GLBT individuals. I posted some pictures below. You can also learn more about the event here: Bangor Daily News and WABI TV

There’s been four gay youth suicides in the past month. I’m writing this in their memory, and the memory of others like them, because I was almost one of them, and it sickens me that our culture still fosters to the attitudes that allow this to happen.

When I was in high school (Belfast Area High School), the vice principal Bruce Mailloux told me to stop being so gay and suspended me for a week for wearing a gay pride t-shirt. I was harassed every day – a group of guys used to hang outside the lunchroom and as I passed, they’d yell, “Faggot!” “Asspacker!” “You’re going to Hell!” and a whole lot more. It was literally every day and a lot more. Things were written in my locker and when I got a lock people stuck hateful notes in my locker. The bathroom stalls were littered with statements like, “Adam Flanders is a fag.” I got shoved around at times. My humanities teacher Ms. Verney told me that my being gay (I came out in 8th grade middle school) was just a phase and that same-sex couples were incapable of true love and affection – she even incorporated it into an exam question, which I obviously answered “wrong,” though now I know it is she who is wrong. When my French teacher, Lila Nation, witnessed another student call me a fag, she said to me, “What do you expect? They hate you.”

These kinds of people need to be held accountable, and ever since my junior year of high school, I’ve been doing my best to make sure they don’t get away with this shit: you can visit my Activism page here. I know what it’s like to want to kill myself for being gay. During high school I attempted suicide for that reason and the harassment I experienced in high school and elsewhere in life exacerbated my depression and anxiety, something I still deal with today. We often forget the impact such statements can have on people, let alone teenagers just beginning to establish their identity. I have absolutely no tolerance for homophobia and neither should our society. Kids as young as 13 are killing themselves, and just as horrible, their peers are killing them as well, and I don’t mean that figuratively.

Two years ago, 15-year-old Lawrence King (California) was shot and killed by his 14-year-old classmate. Why? Because Lawrence was gay. More recently 11-year-old Tyler Wilson (Ohio) was bullied so badly that his arm was broken, just because his classmates perceived him to be gay because he is a cheerleader. And now there’s been at least four suicides in just the past month alone!

13-year-old Seth Walsh (California) hung himself. 13-year-old Asher Brown (Texas) shot himself. 15-year-old Billy Lucas (Indiana) hung himself. 18-year-old Tyler Clementi (New Jersey) jumped off a bridge after his college roommate outed him. Living right on the coast in Belfast, Maine, I had several times considered similar action on our bridge spanning the Passagassawakeag River, the bridge I had to cross every day to get to school.

Ellen, just as heartbroken as the rest of us, has offered an important message about gay youth, tolerance, and what we can do to help:

We have sick individuals in this world promoting homophobia. Michigan’s Assistant Attorney General Andrew Shirvell has been publicly and unashamedly harassing out University of Michigan student Chris Armstrong. Mr. Shirvell should be fired and I wish he could be criminally charged. He’s in company with an unfortunately long list of hateful people that includes a number of politicians and other public figures. 50 Cent recently Tweeted that gay men should kill themselves to make the world better. The Republican gubernatorial candidate here in Maine, Paul LePage, who recently stated that Obama can “go to Hell,” has also committed himself to overturning the anti-discrimination law that I helped pass in 2005 – a law that makes it illegal to discriminate against Mainers based on sexual orientation, in all major aspects of life such as education and employment. Then there is the Catholic Diocese, the Christian Civic League of Maine (which has specifically targeted me as well as other gay youth), and countless others. These people have no place in our society, no voice, and their time is ending.

If you have ever made a homophobic comment or believe it’s a “sin” to be gay, or maybe just passively allowed others to get away with anti-gay harassment and discrimination, I’m pointing my finger at YOU! These kids who died needlessly – their blood is on YOUR hands, you who promote intolerance, you bigots of the world who fear anything different from your own narrow definition of the world. You should be afraid, but not of the gay youth you killed, but rather people like me, the survivors – we remember what you did, what you continue to do, and we’re making sure everyone else knows. The end is near for homophobia and its proponents.

A Supreme Court ruling in favor of same-sex marriage is right around the corner. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell will be repealed any day. Both the Federal Employee Non-Discrimination Act and the Student Non-Discrimination Act have approval in the House and it won’t be long before they become a reality. Obama already signed into law the Matthew Shepard Act, making it a Federal Hate Crime to target someone because they are gay. Earlier this year President Obama issued a presidential proclamation declaring the month of June to be Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month. We have the overwhelming support of countless celebrities, artists, and the media as a whole. The tides are turning.

I just wish it would happen faster. For individuals like Lawrence, the change came too late. I want to thank my family, especially my mom, for always being here for me and making sure I always knew that I was loved. When I came out way back in 8th grade, she told me that she and my dad and everyone else in our immediate family love me no matter what. Sure enough, all three of my grandparents assured me they didn’t care who I loved. Even my great-grandfather, who was over 90 at the time, understood that a person’s character has nothing to do with who they love. I believe that kept me alive, and it breaks my heart to say this may be a rarity among parents of GLBT youth. Today my parents often attend Pride with me, and my little sister sometimes comes along as well. I am incredibly fortunate and grateful for all of them.

Why do some people feel the need to harbor hate, to encourage it in future generations? Why do some fear something that has no effect on their life? For years I have tried to put myself in the shoes of those who yell “faggot” or work tirelessly to deny me equal rights and I have yet to understand what manifests this sort of attitude. It needs to end. It will end. It is ending, albeit one small step at a time. Words do hurt. Sometimes “sticks and stones” are the least of our concerns. Parents – the attitudes and values you pass on to your children have a profound influence on their attitudes and values, and makes the difference between a child being friendly and understanding, or bringing a gun to school and shooting their 15-year-old classmate in the head. While the hearts of millions of Americans are breaking, I hope those of you who practice intolerance at least learn from the past month. This is an opportunity to walk a new path that won’t make you an accomplice to these tragedies. And it’s also a warning.

I’ve been so busy with school lately, I haven’t had much time to blog. Plus, I’m working two jobs part-time and helping plan for Coming Out Week at UMaine! My family and I went on the annual National Audobon Society trip this weekend, out of Bar Harbor, Maine. The boat left at 5:30 AM so we had to get up super early. We didn’t see any whales, but there were dolphins, which I filmed (see below). I posted some pictures in my Flickr account as well, so check ’em out.

Over the Summer I created a website for Stockton Springs Community Church. We just published it today! You can check it out by clicking here: SaveOurSteeple.com – I’m really happy with the results and it’s an excellent example of my work. I’m glad to have the opportunity to help them restore their steeple and promote their community spiritual offerings. If you haven’t already, please check out my company website, SeashoreDesign.com – there are extensive examples of my web design, graphic design, and editorial photography.

This semester is off to a great start. I haven’t missed a single class yet, despite the everyday 8am classes. I’m currently working on a website for the university lab I work in, studying plant genetics. I’m also working another job campus with GLBT services, something I’ve been part of since I first came here. I can’t believe I’ll be getting my BS in Biology in only 8 months! I still haven’t decided if I’m moving to Florida, California, or out of the US, but I’ve got time. Hope you all had a great Summer!