I live the gay lifestyle, the gay lifestyle that is often mentioned by some Republican candidates for president. For those who are unfamiliar with the lifestyle, this is a typical day:

7:00 a.m. I wake up, and just as I have done every morning since puberty, I choose to be gay today. This will come as a great relief to my gay, homosexual, male lover who lies beside me. Because being gay is a choice, our relationship is a gamble day to day. Even though we have both chosen to remain gay and to be together every day for the past 16 years, we never take anything for granted. One of us just might throw in the towel one day and give up the lifestyle.

7:30 a.m. I take a gay shower and let the gay water rinse off my gay body.

8:00 a.m. I have a gay breakfast of cereal with milk, and a good, strong, gay cup of coffee. I am fortified for another day of ruining the fabric of American society.

9:00 a.m. I start my morning shift as a gay hospital volunteer. The hospital is not gay, just me. The patients are mostly normal people. But it is OK. The hospital has a rule that all volunteers must sanitize their hands before meeting with patients. This is to avoid spreading germs, but I think that hand sanitizer is also effective in stopping the transfer of my gayness to other people.

12:00 p.m. I return home, eat a gay lunch and take my gay dogs for a walk. Well, I am not sure if the dogs are actually gay. I have heard it said that homosexuality does not exist in the animal kingdom because it is not natural, so chances are that the dogs are not gay. But because they live with me and my gay, homosexual, male lover, they are perceived by others to be gay. I would feel bad about this, but the fact is that I need these dogs. They are the closest that I will ever come to having actual children, because, as everyone knows, gays should not (and cannot) have children. I push this out of my mind as I walk the dogs gaily through the neighborhood.

1:00 p.m. I teach classes at a small, prestigious, liberal arts college. I am a gay college professor. The college is not gay, just me. But some may view the college as way too liberal, because “sexual orientation” is listed within the college’s anti-discrimination policy. This basically means that the college turns a blind eye as I infect the impressionable students with my gayness on a daily basis. I do not teach anything particularly gay in my classes. I am a theater professor, which, for all intents and purposes, is gay to most people, anyway.

6:00 p.m. My gay, homosexual, male lover returns home from his job. Luckily, he has chosen to be gay today, too, so we can sit down and have a nice, relaxing gay dinner together. We are aware that our relationship is ripping at the seams of our heterosexual neighbors’ marriages, but we choose to ignore this. If we were normal people, the guilt might weigh on us heavily, but we are gay, after all, so we do not have consciences. We eat in peace.

8:00 p.m. We go gay bowling at our Suburban Gay Bowling League. There are quite a lot of us homosexuals who gather each week to bowl at our local bowling alley. This makes the normal suburban bowlers uncomfortable, but we do not care. Some of them are openly hostile to us. The more polite ones just stare at us. It makes us feel like we are caged, exotic animals in a zoo. But we count ourselves lucky because the alley owners have sold out. They allow us to bowl here because they are desirous of our ample, disposable gay income. Ah, the almighty dollar! The owners show mercy on the normal suburbanites, though, by putting a buffer zone of two vacant lanes between our gay league and them. We are respectful of this line, which we call the “edge of gayness,” and do not cross it. We try to tone down our gaiety and frivolity by focusing intently on our bowling. The normal suburbanites never venture past their side of the line, either, because it would be unimaginable to them to interact with us.

11:00 p.m. My gay, homosexual, male lover and I collapse from the weariness of the gay lifestyle we have been living today. All of this subversive loving, volunteering, working, eating, playing and socializing is exhausting. Some say the gay lifestyle is self-enslavement, but we just cannot think about that now. Before we fall asleep, we each take out our personal, leather-bound copies of The Gay Agenda. The Gay Agenda is our Bible. We do not look at the real Bible because we are gay and therefore have no religion or morality. We read and strategize how we can best destroy American society tomorrow. Sharing a good, hardy, gay laugh, we each fall into a sound, gay sleep.

I’ve answered this question in other places and at other times. I’ve recently decided, however, to stop answering it. If the only question you have after listening to me defend my family is about my sexuality, I’m afraid you’ve missed my point. Whether I’m gay, straight, or bisexual, tall or short, male or female, white or black, successful go-getter or slacker, is entirely immaterial. I happen to be a go-getter student-turned-activist speaking out in defense of his moms, but this isn’t—and shouldn’t be—the norm. Nobody wants to spend all of his or her time defending his family, and I’m looking forward to mine no longer needing defending.

Sloane says there is a clear democratic justice argument for having more women in politics, “which is that you have 51% of the population paying equal taxes, who are not equally represented when it comes to deciding how their money is spent … I don’t go for the argument that if you have more women around the table you wouldn’t have cuts that affected women. That’s not how politics works. But if you had more women involved, they’d be more likely to pick up those nuances at an early stage and bring their experience to bear, particularly locally, I think.” It was at the all-male coalition agreement talks that the idea of introducing pre-charge anonymity for rape defendants was brought up – when this became public, there was an outcry from women MPs of all parties, and the proposal was very quickly and embarrassingly ditched. “If there had been at least a couple of women in that room initially,” says Sloane, “they might have said: ‘Do you really think this is wise?’

The marginalisation of women, as with the marginalisation of any other group, means those who do put their head above the parapet are highly visible, and much more likely to be taken as representative of their entire sex. If a male comic performs badly on Have I Got News for You, he lets himself down. If one of the few women to appear performs badly, she’s proof that women just aren’t funny. (In series 40, 41 and the first four episodes of series 42 – all screened this year – 84.5% of the five people who appeared on the programme were men, while 15.5% were women. Eight out of 23 episodes featured no women. Twelve out of 23 episodes featured one woman. In series 10 of the panel comedy series Mock the Week – excluding the one compilation show, the same as Have I Got News for You – 92% of guests were male, 8% female. Out of 11 shows, five casts were entirely male, and the other six featured six men and one woman.)

Clearly there is an element of sexism – even if unconscious – on many TV shows. I spoke to one booker who said she still feels the key question that is often asked of women who will appear on air is “Are they fuckable?”, and she has been shouted down when trying to book women MPs for programmes, has heard them called yappy, “and yet the most slimebag male politicians wouldn’t get questioned or blocked at all”. Writer and broadcaster Bidisha says she was always struck by the “absolute unwillingness that would descend” when she suggested a female guest for shows she was presenting – she was once told a leading writer was only good for talking about “menstruating nuns”.

The survey of adolescents aged 12 to 17 years reveals that in total, 37 percent used alcohol or drugs in the past year, and 7.9 percent met criteria that would identify the teens as having a substance-related disorder. When separated by race, Native American teens had the highest level of drug use, with nearly 48 percent reporting having used substances in the last year. That group is followed by 39 percent of white teens, almost 37 percent of Hispanics, 36 percent of multi-racial adolescents, 32 percent of blacks and nearly 24 percent of Asians.

“There is certainly still a myth out there that black kids are more likely to have problems with drugs than white kids, and this documents as clearly as any study we’re aware of that the rate of … substance-related disorders among African American youths is significantly lower,” Dan Blazer from Duke’s Department of Psychiatry, a senior author of the study, told the Raleigh News & Observer.

Teens were asked to respond to questions about circumstances under which a man “has the right to have sexual intercourse with a woman without her consent.” Eighty percent said the man had the right to use force if the couple were married, and 70 percent if the couple planned to marry. Sixty-one percent said that force was justified if the couple had prior sexual relations. More than half felt that force was justified if the woman had led the man on. Thirty percent said it was justified if he knew that she had sex with other men, or if he was so sexually stimulated he couldn’t control himself, or if the woman was drunk. More than half the students thought that “if a woman dresses seductively and walks alone at night, she is asking to be raped.