Before I got distracted by the worst and only professor of “World Political” Economy in the whole political world, I was trying to make a very important point about gender, one of the few useful things I learned in college outside of computer programming and French talking.

The French department at my school had a rather interesting plan for its students’ senior years. After learning plenty of grammar, and supposedly becoming orally proficient, we were to take two semesters in sequence studying basically whatever the hell a professor wanted to teach us.

The first of these I took under a departing gay professor who chose the forme épistolaire as his sujet. The import of it was lost on me and everyone else in the class, but I did learn to slough through seemingly impenetrable old French, which makes you feel like a romance language superhero who can read anything written in Latin characters.

My second French-potpourri course was about gender, centered largely around Judith Lorber’s English-language book Paradoxes of Gender. Turning this into a French class was a stretch, but the professor wanted it bad. We did read some texts in French, the class was administered in French, and our papers were in French. (My final paper won an award in the foreign language department, and was once available on the internets, but seems to have mercifully departed in a puff of awkwardly phrased French smoke.)

I was blindsided by critical thinkers on gender. While it’s a cliché for teenagers to question the religious, political, and cultural establishment, they somehow never get very deep into thinking about gender. We started the class with assertion that gender is a cultural construction, while sex describes human physiology. Gender is imprinted in normal child-rearing, and sex, for its part, isn’t nearly as binary as we’d like to believe. Once you accept those terms, it’s a one way ticket to crazy land. At least, from the rest of the world’s perspective.

Marriage? An ethically questionable institution that, you may have heard, was originally (and openly) a property transaction. Dating customs? A childish attempt to apply disneyfied fairy tales to our real lives, further corrupted by materialism and inevitably resulting in “drama.” These truths emerge easily in the abstract, yet our gendered society steadfastly refuses to accept them. No other course I took (except perhaps Algorithm Analysis) had a greater effect on my thinking.

If gender is a social construction, then “gay” is even more so. Gay is a culture with its own symbols, language, and icons, all brought together but not necessitated by non-traditional sexual relationships. Homosexual sex has been happening forever, but gay culture is a relatively modern invention. (One we are lucky to have.)

After graduation I assumed that, being gay and moving into the city, others around me would have experienced a gender-is-made-up awakening similar to my own. Yet I had grossly underestimated the power of the gender “virus”. Gays bizarrely cling to traditional gender roles as fiercely as straights, if not more so. Consider the trend of lesbians using hormones to grow a mustache. In the spirit of tolerance I would never suggest that nasty ‘staches be forbidden, but I can’t help but thinking it pathetic.

Those who dare to question gender are often accused of wanting everyone to be “the same.” To the contrary, we want everyone to be more different. Instead of two groups in stereotype, we imagine a society where everyone can be her own person regardless of sex. Where straight couples can enjoy the same freedom to chose their own role as gay couples, where old roles can be abandoned altogether and new ones dreamed-up daily.

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone, and remember: make it your own or it don’t mean shit. Kisses!