Saturday was the culmination of Pride Week: you may have starred or celebrated in a parade near you, or you may have, like me, spent the afternoon keeping the vomit bucket happy, hoping beer would squash your nausea long enough to allow for karaoke (it did, until five in the morning). (But in NYC, five am is, like, totally a normal time to come home. Everybody gets home at five in the morning. Five-ish.) (Nausea, for the record, was completely unrelated to the festivities.)

Let it not be said, though, that I do not, in some small way, celebrate too. Back at a college Student Leaders conference (a designation appointed by the poor judgment of the Dean of Students; I was as unsuited as I was uninterested), the head of the LGBSU (the only “leader” I spoke to at those god awful ego banquets) told me, “Oh, Lady Penelope, you’re misrepresenting the statistics. It’s not that ten percent of people are gay. It’s that all people are ten percent gay. At least!”

I didn’t hook up with a girl for Pride Day, if that’s what you’re thinking. I don’t actually think that everyone’s a little gay; would that this were the provable case, we all—Fred Phelps included—might have a little more empathy. We could be arguing about something other than gay marriage (a war, say), men could quit adding, “not that I’m gay,” every time they admit to something slightly less than full-on-combat-ready-holding-the-helmet-and-swinging-the-pistol manhood, fathers could pull their fingernails out from between their teeth when their sons chose Barbie over baseball. It’s because some citizens happen to be 100% gay (not 10%, not 95) that gay marriage becomes necessarily not an issue of morals or virtue but a straight-up civil rights case.

Empathy’s a great exercise. We don’t quite allow straight men to hypothesize on any latent homosexuality, at least not without a ribbing. As long as gayness symbolizes a lack of masculinity (a false definition, to be sure), we might as well shroud it in shame. Let’s celebrate (boys, I’m talking to you) Proud to Be Gay for a Day: if you were to bat for the other team, who would be your first pitcher? It’s silly, yes, but Jude Law’s a looker. For “the weaker sex,” the taboo’s not as dominant an issue: it’s much more socially acceptable for us to compare ourselves to men, and possibly because of that, lesbianism is vaguely threatening, decidedly erotic. But since I’m asking you to do so, I’ll play: I call Catherine Keener, and when I’m done with her I move onto Mary Louise Parker. And when she’s exhausted, that chick in Secretary will do. I’ll spank her hard.