Stories from a man who fails to meet media expectations of what it means to be gay:
white, frivolous, over sexed yet sexless, shrill, single, stylish, a clown, unimportant, et al.

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My eyes hurt after the meeting from forcing them open for so long

The presentation started to bother me a bit, so I decided to analyze why to keep focused and to keep from falling asleep. My mental list grew from simple basic things as the dry subject matter to more hypercritical things such as how the discussion moderator was obviously unused to being miked, because you could hear his heavy breathing throughout the presentation. Staring at the screen, and hopefully fooling my superiors who were there that I was actually paying attention, I realized that one of the things bugging me was that nearly everyone on screen was white. More so, nearly everyone on screen was white and male.

There was one lone African American woman on stage, an expert in something or another, who appeared to be the only person of color there. Of the 20 or so people who were at the meeting, both experts and representatives of various agencies and companies who made up the live audience for the question and answer section, it looked as if only a handful were women.

I looked around the room I was in and of the 30 or so people there, a little over half were women, and ethnicities ranged all over the place from Nigerian to Costa Rican. There were only three white men present (I�m tempted to write �but they are all nice guys,� except that�s demeaning sounding and false�two are nice guys).

I related my breakdowns of race and sex at the meeting to a couple of friends of mine. One told me that from her experiences traveling around the country for business, Southern California is NOT the rest of the nation, which is why she lives here, and another friend told me that had it been a corporate meeting as opposed to a government one, there�d probably had been even fewer women.

In the past the mere mention of race here has tended to result in the loss of readers. So will the gauche act of mentioning rooms full of white folks cause a drop in the stats? We�ll see I guess.

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� 2000-2007