A 13-year-old girl at a high school south of Brisbane, Australia, received a failing grade for declining to write a term paper. The assignment, meant to elucidate what it’s like to be in the minority, called for students to imagine being a straight person in a mostly gay colony on the moon. The girl refused, due to her religious conviction that homosexuality is a sin.
She may not want to do this assignment, but I’m all over it.
Okay. I’m living as a heterosexual on the moon. I don’t know which is the greater stretch.
No, not so. I lived straight for a lengthy period. I just need a few moments to get into character — it’s been a while.
All right, I’m ready to talk about my life as a straight woman here on the moon colony of New Castro.
In some ways it’s completely like earth. We have banks, hospitals, post offices, grocery stores, houses of worship and intramural sports leagues. In some ways it’s actually better. For instance, we have so many hairdressers that price wars break out; you can get the works at a salon for the cost of a moon rock.
It certainly is weird, after earth, being in the sexual-orientation minority. I’m pleased to say that there is no open discrimination against us. Of course, occasionally someone on the street or shuttle pad will hiss “Breeder!” at a straight person, but I think those are just stubborn, bitter gays who can’t deal with how attitudes have changed.
Things used to be different in our colony. Much different. I remember flipping my pronouns at work so nobody would catch on I was straight. To convince my landlady she had a lesbian tenant, I decorated my apartment walls with Georgia O’Keefe paintings. A friend of mine got beaten up outside a bar after kissing her male date. She still has nightmares of her attackers yelling, “We don’t want any of that freaky hetero crap here!”
Then came Spacedock. The police, as usual, were harassing the patrons of the Spacedock Tavern, a straight bar, when the worm turned. The patrons fought back. For hours frat boys and debutantes battled the cops. The straight liberation movement had begun.
Fortunately little time elapsed between Spacedock and the granting of full equality for straights on New Castro. We didn’t have to wait nearly as long as gays on earth did for their rights, largely because people realized making the same mistakes on the moon was extremely silly.
I personally discovered that my company had caught up, too. My boss used to hit on me, over and over. She said that if I slept with her, I’d never go back to men. Talk about an ego! She wouldn’t leave me alone and I considered moving to Jupiter to get away from her. But, I filed a sexual harassment claim with my company and the last I knew of my former boss, she was working in space sanitation.
Thanks to straight lib and the good sense of our gay government, we straights can marry. I didn’t think I’d see that day until I was in New Castro’s Old Crater Retirement Home.
These days, the only complaint I have is some gay men around here feel too free to give me unsolicited fashion advice.
Well, I do have another complaint. Back on Earth single straight women often complained that when it came to men, all the good ones were either taken or gay. Here in my lunar colony, they’re often both! For a middle-aged straight woman looking to date and mate, the demographics are a horror show. Even the man in the moon is gay. |
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