Queer by Choice

I decided to convert from heterosexuality to bisexuality one Sunday evening in the spring of 1992, when I was 15. I'm the founder and owner of the QueerByChoice.com website, the QueerByChoice Mailing List, and the queerchoice LiveJournal Community.

I'm the primary person responsible for a year-long daily letter-writing campaign that finally succeeded, in November 2000, in persuading PFLAG to abolish their 11-year-old international policy which had previously stated that "sexual orientation is not a choice." I've occasionally been interviewed for neat little newspaper and magazine articles like "Queer by Choice?" by Kim Ficera in May 2000, "Choosy Gays, Selected Straights: Are Erotic Tastes Willed?" by Jim D'Entremont in July 2001 in the now-obsolete Canadian gay magazine The Guide, and Queer by Choice: Gay Forum Question Puts Spotlight on Politics of Sexual Orientation" by Dyana Bagby in August 2007, as well as in radio interviews such as "Queer by Choice" with Dr. J. Hughes in October 2001 and on the Derek & Romaine Show on SiriusOutQ Radio in June 2003. My website was also reviewed in the June 2003 issue of Curve magazine and mentioned in the article "The Unbearable Lightness of Choosing" by Jon Spayde in the June 2003 issue of Utne Reader.

I also created the Yuba-Sutter Wiki and wrote the majority of the content for it, but unless you live very near me, that probably won't interest you.

I have a cat named Stardust and a dog named Boston. I also have a California native plant garden and an interest in the birds, insects, and occasional other wild creatures that visit it.

I have a boyfriend named berialpha. He is very, very pretty, and also great in all sorts of other ways.

Things I like are listed in my interests list. Things I don't like include the following:

• violence (including war; genocide; rape; torture; corporal punishment; self-injury; failure to institute national health insurance; and carving up the sex organs of boy babies, intersex babies, and third-world girl children)
• environmental destruction (including global warming, deforestation, the introduction of invasive species, and pollution of all kinds)
• prejudice (including ableism, ageism, classism, heterosexism, nationalism, racism, sexism, and sizeism)
• beauty standards (including pressure to add or remove hair or weight, change shape or color, wear makeup, wear high heels, or get cosmetic surgery)
• censorship (there can be no democracy without the free exchange of information - and by the way, capital punishment is a way of censoring people too!)
• majority votes on minority rights (including votes about same-sex marriage, affirmative action, and immigration)
• binary concepts of consent (the fact that a person will let you do something to them does not mean it is automatically perfectly fine for you to do it to them; the person may not be freely giving informed consent because the person may not be aware of or have access to other, more desirable options)
• religion, pseudoscience, and superstition (I believe that it's important to weigh the actual evidence for your assertions)
• nihilism (there may be no objective purpose to your existence, but if you care about any of your fellow human beings then there is a plenty important subjective purpose, and I see nothing inadequate about that)
• endless repetitions of arguments I've already heard before (if your argument is something that might be addressed on my website, please just go read my website instead of expecting me to individually retype everything on it for the 5,000th time)
• green vegetables (chlorophyll does not taste good)
• noisy vacuum cleaners (my cat and dog and I are in perfect agreement on this one)

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Please note: I do read every entry by everyone on my LiveJournal friends list. I do not filter any of them out.

Also, if you really want to be added to my LiveJournal friends list, you can be! I always add everyone to my friends list who has joined my QueerByChoice Mailing List in addition to adding me to their friends list. If you are a member of my mailing list who has added me and I have not added you back, then I am not aware that you are a member of my mailing list. Please do tell me that you are - I want to know about it so I'll know to add you!

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