I really wish Alisa the best – we all have stuff we are trying to figure out personally, and she’s no different. Revealing herself, and her struggles, to the world will only help her career. Second-guessing herself, and then trying to cover up what she said before, will only hurt her. Sometimes revelation is scary and painful (trust me, I know); however, the reward is that people connect with you – and those are the people you focus on. Not the haters.

Alisa, if you are reading this: just stay true to yourself, and don’t worry about the consequences. You’re not the poster child of all that is wrong with our society, and my posts were more that you were another example. My writing “voice” tends to be overly-strident, and I have been unsuccessful in toning that down so I have to live with the consequences. That’s the only way to go. You’re too smart and intelligent to screw up your career by coming across as disingenuous, when you don’t mean to do so. I wish you the best.

I suppose there’s a bit of narcissism in my love of Johnny. After all, we have a lot in common. He’s Cuban American, a Globe writer, a novelist. I’m Cuban American, a recovering Globe writer, and a novelist. He’s gay, I’m bisexual.

This last bit might surprise some of you, because I don’t talk about it much. I don’t talk about it much because there is so much ignorance and hatred out there, I can’t bear to be thought of as some kind of pervert by idiots. Bisexuality is a hard thing to talk about in our culture, because straight people hate you and gay people hate you; both groups think you need to just “make up your mind,” which, if you are somewhere in the middle like me, is impossible. But I figure it’s important to be honest about it, because the ignorance of others is nothing for me to be ashamed of and because I can’t leave folks like Johnny standing there all alone. Plus, it it’s good enough for Angelina Jolie and Frida Kahlo (and many others) it’s good enough for me.

That said, I’m in a committed relationship with the same man I’ve been with for the past ten years, so it’s unlikely I’ll ever live as a lesbian. But if I’d met someone like this or someone like this or this or especially this (and if by some weird chance any one of them had dug me in the slightest) instead of the right man things could have ended differently. (For the record, I have met Rebecca Walker and Nelly Furtado both. Neither knew I was bi or interested, which is probably good considering I was interviewing Furtado and Walker was involved with Me’Shell NdegeOcello, who definitely looks – and sounds – like she could kick my ass.)

Anyway, after getting an email from Johnny not too long ago, I sent him a list of questions and asked him to answer them for my blog readers. He fired back answers the same day. This is what I mean. He’s fast. Anyway, here’s the Q&A. Please, if you haven’t read the book yet, go out and buy it. It’s wonderful.

I read Graydon Carter’s editor’s letter in Vanity Fair, and in it this stuck out to me:

The absence of shame (and its corollary, accountability) appears to be a uniquely American problem.

That really sums it up for me. Carter was talking about far greater problems from this issue than AVR that have plagued us these last eight years:

When U.S. intelligence ignored warnings of 9/11 and incorrectly assessed the W.M.D. situation in pre-invasion Iraq, C.I.A. chief George Tenet was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and a $4 million book contract from HarperCollins. By comparison, when terrorists stormed Mumbai in November, killing nearly 200 civilians, India’s home minister resigned, saying that he took “moral” responsibility for the massacre. After the Zurich-based investment bank UBS announced huge first-quarter losses last year, its chairman and four members of its board of directors tendered their resignations. The top three executives at France’s Caisse d’Epargne stepped down last year in the wake of steep losses. And the head of the Royal Bank of Scotland offered his resignation when its losses caused its stock to decline by 91 percent since 2007. Nowhere in all the malfeasance on Wall Street this past year has the senior officer of a major bank publicly accepted responsibility for his actions and tendered his resignation. Even the man who was the official Wall Street watchdog through these troubled times, Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Christopher Cox, still has his job.

I see all of this, including AVR, connected into the bigger issue that was mentioned in Graydon Carter’s first quote.

Thanks for blogging this. Interesting.

http://www.afterellen.com/2009/2/visibility-matters