Monday, January 09, 2012
Short Gay Storyline in Downton Abbey. I caut the first episode of the second season of the PBS blockbuster Downton Abbey last nite. I liked the first season, short tho it was, a mere four episodes as broadcast on my local PBS station (tho elsewhere as eight). This second season is to be eight episodes long, but might also be telescoped into four by WNET (a Newark, NJ station stolen by New Yorkers and moved to NYC without any objection by the FCC, which still shows WNET to be a Newark station). A third season is to start production soon.
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In any case, one of the male servants in the household, the footman Thomas, was shown in series 1 to be of strikingly bad character. In series 2, he is recruited into the British Army during World War I. He is afraid of being killed, so, at nite, when no one in the trench with him can see, he holds up a candle in his left hand, hoping to be shot, so he will be returned to Britain and not have to come back to the trenches. It works. He is wounded in the hand, and then, thanks to a favor by the aristocrats of his former employment, is posted to work in the hospital the family supports.
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The episode descriptions at the International Movie Database suggest in two places in the first season's episodes, that Thomas is gay. But it's subtle.
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In the rehabilitation hospital, Thomas meets a soldier who has suffered blindness from being exposed to poison gas. Thomas reads to the young blind man and tries to buck him up about possible recovery of his vision, or at least of having a life worth living after he recovers as much as he can recover. At one point, Thomas says something about the other soldier being able to have a good life despite being different. The blind soldier picks up on that seeming reference to Thomas himself as being different, but the servant escapes a direct answer as to precisely how he is different.
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In short order, it emerges that the blind soldier and injured servant have become emotionally involved. The soldier is shown placing his hand firmly on Thomas's knee.
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But the crowds of people in need of rehabilitation in that facility force a decision to move the blind soldier to a distant facility, far from his new friend / boyfriend. That nite, the blind soldier slits his wrist and dies before his act is discovered. Thomas sobs uncontrollably.
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This is the most we get of this homosexual love story. The episode description at IMDb says only that Thomas "begins to learn some humanity" thru his duties in the rehabilitation hospital.
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Tho Downton Abbey is a modern production, it is faithful to the attitudes of the age, even in its vague treatment of love between men, and the insistence that any such plotline should end tragically.
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Decades ago, ONE Magazine (a gay magazine out of L.A.) published a short story about a love affair between two men. The story ended badly, so I wrote a letter, which I think was published, asking 'Isn't it time we had a happy ending' to gay love stories? Here we are, over 40 years later, and we still don't have happy endings to gay love stories in major media.
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The connection the servant made with the blind soldier ennobled Thomas. He really cared about helping him. Perhaps for the first time in his life, someone else was more important than himself. So of course the man he loved had to die. Of course. Not.
+
In any case, one of the male servants in the household, the footman Thomas, was shown in series 1 to be of strikingly bad character. In series 2, he is recruited into the British Army during World War I. He is afraid of being killed, so, at nite, when no one in the trench with him can see, he holds up a candle in his left hand, hoping to be shot, so he will be returned to Britain and not have to come back to the trenches. It works. He is wounded in the hand, and then, thanks to a favor by the aristocrats of his former employment, is posted to work in the hospital the family supports.
+
The episode descriptions at the International Movie Database suggest in two places in the first season's episodes, that Thomas is gay. But it's subtle.
+
In the rehabilitation hospital, Thomas meets a soldier who has suffered blindness from being exposed to poison gas. Thomas reads to the young blind man and tries to buck him up about possible recovery of his vision, or at least of having a life worth living after he recovers as much as he can recover. At one point, Thomas says something about the other soldier being able to have a good life despite being different. The blind soldier picks up on that seeming reference to Thomas himself as being different, but the servant escapes a direct answer as to precisely how he is different.
+
In short order, it emerges that the blind soldier and injured servant have become emotionally involved. The soldier is shown placing his hand firmly on Thomas's knee.
+
But the crowds of people in need of rehabilitation in that facility force a decision to move the blind soldier to a distant facility, far from his new friend / boyfriend. That nite, the blind soldier slits his wrist and dies before his act is discovered. Thomas sobs uncontrollably.
+
This is the most we get of this homosexual love story. The episode description at IMDb says only that Thomas "begins to learn some humanity" thru his duties in the rehabilitation hospital.
+
Tho Downton Abbey is a modern production, it is faithful to the attitudes of the age, even in its vague treatment of love between men, and the insistence that any such plotline should end tragically.
+
Decades ago, ONE Magazine (a gay magazine out of L.A.) published a short story about a love affair between two men. The story ended badly, so I wrote a letter, which I think was published, asking 'Isn't it time we had a happy ending' to gay love stories? Here we are, over 40 years later, and we still don't have happy endings to gay love stories in major media.
+
The connection the servant made with the blind soldier ennobled Thomas. He really cared about helping him. Perhaps for the first time in his life, someone else was more important than himself. So of course the man he loved had to die. Of course. Not.
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Oral History (You Should Pardon the Expression). My friend and fellow gay militant John Lauritsen foned a few weeks ago to say that he had bought a videocamera and wants to interview me as part of an oral-history project he is undertaking, to record the memories and observations of significant people in the Stonewall Era. I am one of those people, having founded a militant gay men's organization on April 1st, 1969, almost two full months before the Stonewall Riots. Homosexuals Intransigent! was not replaced by new organizations after Stonewall, but continued to contribute to the development of the post-Stonewall mentality of gay liberation (lowercase G and L).
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John had become all too aware that the pioneers of the modern gay-rights movement are now in their 60s and 70s, and beginning to die off in significant numbers. We've already lost the men who were in their 40s or older in 1969. John wants to make sure that those of us still alive don't die without leaving some kind of record of their existence and contributions.
+
I had mentioned to John something I have thought to do, which is to have some of us oldtimers put together, in a book, their thoughts as to what we want most for younger gay people to learn from our experience. The tentative, working title for such a book of memoirs and advice is "Before We Go", with some subtitle like "Advice for Today's Gay Men [or Gay Men of the Future] from 20th Century Gay Pioneers".
+
HI! was the ONLY organization in the United States that permitted membership only to gay men. John, who has studied earlier gay movements in Europe, said there were some male-only organizations in Europe before the Stonewall Era, but I'm not sure any survived into and beyond the Stonewall Era, much less to today.
+
I have always been appalled and astonished that almost all 'gay' organizations are organized heterosexually, men-and-women-together-now! That never made the slitest bit of sense to me. But, then, I'm only a genius (near-genius? — in IQ-testing terms). How are gay men and lesbians supposed to press the case that they are entitled to refuse heterosexual sex if they accept heterosexual forms of organization?
+
How can (gay) men and (lesbian) women march TOGETHER to assert the right not to be pushed at each other? It's insane.
+
And how are gay men supposed to be able to talk about their deepest, sexual feelings about men, in the presence of women, whom they do NOT want in their sex life in any way — not physically, not as eavesdroppers on their conversations and confessions?
+
The utter insensitivity of the organizers of 'gay' organizations — or gay and lesbian, or LGBT, or LBGTQ, LGBTQI, or any other crazy, artificial groups — to the need of gay men to be with their own kind and be able to confide their 'darkest' secrets to other men, has always astonished me. How do people who sometimes get haughtily indignant about how 'repressed' in dealing with their feelings straight men are supposed to be, absolutely and brutally ignore the need of their own kind for privacy from women and others unlike themselves? Well, people in general are stupid, I suppose, but it's a special kind of WILLFUL stupidity to create organizations in which the members cannot feel themselves to be among people like themselves, with whom they can relax and be open about their feelings, feelings about which they have had terrible guilts for the bulk of their lives.
+
In any case, John and I may meet sometime after the weather warms up, either in New York, to which he would travel from Boston, or in Boston, to which I would drive to be interviewed and to have him show me around one of the Nation's great and historical cities. Boston is the Nation's second-oldest major city, after New York. My city, Newark, is third-oldest, right after Boston. I can get into Midtown Manhattan (oldest major city in the Nation) by car in little more than a half hour, or by public transportation in less than an hour, so meeting John there would be little problem.
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I spent three days in Boston in 1964, working most of the time, and seeing almost nothing outside of work. China detonated its first nuclear device during those three days, and I thought, playfully, that I should never leave town (NYC, at the time) if this kind of thing is going to happen.
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I told John that I was comfortable with waiting till warm weather, since I don't feel in imminent danger of dying. My mother died at age 90, from a medical mistake, absent which she might have lived years longer. My father's mother died at 96, tho her mind was not in good shape in her last years. My father died at 79, and his father at 81, both from cancer. I'm only 67, as of last week, so I think I'll make it to the spring. Were I superstitious, I might say "iN-shah, Allah" or the English equivalent, "God willing". But I'm not.
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I have put onto the Internet many of the things I wrote or edited on behalf of Homosexuals Intrasigent! and other groups I organized, in the period 1969-1975, or a bit later. Some of those materials are on a free website that will not vanish in a month due to nonpayment of webhosting fees, if something should happen to me. Rather, they will remain online for years. I have other materials to put onto those websites, but have not yet done so because there's a lot of typing, and thus time I don't have, involved in doing so (plus creating hyperlinks within and between publications and websites).
+
I recently investigated whether there is any free speech-to-text program I could use for this task. I found one, thru C/NET, but it requires a lot of "training" of the program before it can work well, and I haven't yet found the time to do the training. Worse, I also recently developed laryngitis, as too frequently happens with me during the winter. (This mostly keeps me from singing, which I ordinarily do quite well (I spent years in choruses, within and outside school) or shouting at my (three) cats. I can speak, for at least brief periods, tho not always comfortably.) Thus, speaking to add materials to gay websites might not be easier than typing them.
+
Memories are curious things, and not always reliable, esp. at a distance. For instance, in recent years I had forgotten that a formal "second" was required for my proposal that the weekend of events to be publicized by the organizing committee for the first march commemorating Stonewall be called "Gay Pride Weekend" rather than "Gay Power Weekend". I saw only in reviewing materials from 1971 that a guy named Jerry Hoose, whom I cannot even picture (tho John remembers him), seconded my motion, before the committee overall voted approval without discussion.
+
So perhaps I should read some of the things I and others wrote during the Stonewall Era before I venture to Boston for my date with a videocam.
+
I have, within the past three years, been contacted by two men I was crazy about in the 1960s. One was my only "lover", tho we lived in separate cities — and countries (U.S. and Canada) — and saw each other only a few times in the few months we considered each other lovers. Normand (French form of the name "Norman") was born in Bathurst, New Brunswick (a French-speaking area of Canada), and lived for a while in Montreal before he decided he wanted to move to Vancouver, BC. We met in Toronto, as he was making his way west. I was just doing the gay-tourist thing from my home in New York City. He then dallied in Toronto for a couple of months longer than he had initially intended, and visited me in Manhattan before we broke up and he resumed his journey west. He has lived in Vancouver all these years. We reconnected in early 2009, and spent a weekend together (socially) in Montreal in July 2009. I never stopped loving him, in a fond rather than sexual way; and he apparently always held me in fond memory too.
+
The other man from my youth who has contacted me did so only a few weeks ago. We went to college in Manhattan together, and I was crazy about him, but he was functionally heterosexual, so I put him out of my mind. It turns out that he later had homosexual "encounters", and is keen on a straight guy of his own, in Toronto! — who is as unavailable to him as Dana was to me.
+
I guess I make quite an impression on some people, to be sought out more than 40 years later. It would have been nice if we had been able to get together and stay together all this time instead of reconnecting after decades of distance.
+
In any case, I don't know how John Lauritsen will use the materials he creates for his oral-history project. Perhaps he can create a website at which these videos can be watched, perhaps even downloaded for the use of scholars and ordinary gay men. Perhaps he will find a way to create transcripts by machine, or thru volunteer typists, to create a written record from oral interviews.
+
I just hope John gets to the people he wants to 'immortalize' before they croak. (Ribbet, ribbet.)
+
John had become all too aware that the pioneers of the modern gay-rights movement are now in their 60s and 70s, and beginning to die off in significant numbers. We've already lost the men who were in their 40s or older in 1969. John wants to make sure that those of us still alive don't die without leaving some kind of record of their existence and contributions.
+
I had mentioned to John something I have thought to do, which is to have some of us oldtimers put together, in a book, their thoughts as to what we want most for younger gay people to learn from our experience. The tentative, working title for such a book of memoirs and advice is "Before We Go", with some subtitle like "Advice for Today's Gay Men [or Gay Men of the Future] from 20th Century Gay Pioneers".
+
HI! was the ONLY organization in the United States that permitted membership only to gay men. John, who has studied earlier gay movements in Europe, said there were some male-only organizations in Europe before the Stonewall Era, but I'm not sure any survived into and beyond the Stonewall Era, much less to today.
+
I have always been appalled and astonished that almost all 'gay' organizations are organized heterosexually, men-and-women-together-now! That never made the slitest bit of sense to me. But, then, I'm only a genius (near-genius? — in IQ-testing terms). How are gay men and lesbians supposed to press the case that they are entitled to refuse heterosexual sex if they accept heterosexual forms of organization?
+
How can (gay) men and (lesbian) women march TOGETHER to assert the right not to be pushed at each other? It's insane.
+
And how are gay men supposed to be able to talk about their deepest, sexual feelings about men, in the presence of women, whom they do NOT want in their sex life in any way — not physically, not as eavesdroppers on their conversations and confessions?
+
The utter insensitivity of the organizers of 'gay' organizations — or gay and lesbian, or LGBT, or LBGTQ, LGBTQI, or any other crazy, artificial groups — to the need of gay men to be with their own kind and be able to confide their 'darkest' secrets to other men, has always astonished me. How do people who sometimes get haughtily indignant about how 'repressed' in dealing with their feelings straight men are supposed to be, absolutely and brutally ignore the need of their own kind for privacy from women and others unlike themselves? Well, people in general are stupid, I suppose, but it's a special kind of WILLFUL stupidity to create organizations in which the members cannot feel themselves to be among people like themselves, with whom they can relax and be open about their feelings, feelings about which they have had terrible guilts for the bulk of their lives.
+
In any case, John and I may meet sometime after the weather warms up, either in New York, to which he would travel from Boston, or in Boston, to which I would drive to be interviewed and to have him show me around one of the Nation's great and historical cities. Boston is the Nation's second-oldest major city, after New York. My city, Newark, is third-oldest, right after Boston. I can get into Midtown Manhattan (oldest major city in the Nation) by car in little more than a half hour, or by public transportation in less than an hour, so meeting John there would be little problem.
+
I spent three days in Boston in 1964, working most of the time, and seeing almost nothing outside of work. China detonated its first nuclear device during those three days, and I thought, playfully, that I should never leave town (NYC, at the time) if this kind of thing is going to happen.
+
I told John that I was comfortable with waiting till warm weather, since I don't feel in imminent danger of dying. My mother died at age 90, from a medical mistake, absent which she might have lived years longer. My father's mother died at 96, tho her mind was not in good shape in her last years. My father died at 79, and his father at 81, both from cancer. I'm only 67, as of last week, so I think I'll make it to the spring. Were I superstitious, I might say "iN-shah, Allah" or the English equivalent, "God willing". But I'm not.
+
I have put onto the Internet many of the things I wrote or edited on behalf of Homosexuals Intrasigent! and other groups I organized, in the period 1969-1975, or a bit later. Some of those materials are on a free website that will not vanish in a month due to nonpayment of webhosting fees, if something should happen to me. Rather, they will remain online for years. I have other materials to put onto those websites, but have not yet done so because there's a lot of typing, and thus time I don't have, involved in doing so (plus creating hyperlinks within and between publications and websites).
+
I recently investigated whether there is any free speech-to-text program I could use for this task. I found one, thru C/NET, but it requires a lot of "training" of the program before it can work well, and I haven't yet found the time to do the training. Worse, I also recently developed laryngitis, as too frequently happens with me during the winter. (This mostly keeps me from singing, which I ordinarily do quite well (I spent years in choruses, within and outside school) or shouting at my (three) cats. I can speak, for at least brief periods, tho not always comfortably.) Thus, speaking to add materials to gay websites might not be easier than typing them.
+
Memories are curious things, and not always reliable, esp. at a distance. For instance, in recent years I had forgotten that a formal "second" was required for my proposal that the weekend of events to be publicized by the organizing committee for the first march commemorating Stonewall be called "Gay Pride Weekend" rather than "Gay Power Weekend". I saw only in reviewing materials from 1971 that a guy named Jerry Hoose, whom I cannot even picture (tho John remembers him), seconded my motion, before the committee overall voted approval without discussion.
+
So perhaps I should read some of the things I and others wrote during the Stonewall Era before I venture to Boston for my date with a videocam.
+
I have, within the past three years, been contacted by two men I was crazy about in the 1960s. One was my only "lover", tho we lived in separate cities — and countries (U.S. and Canada) — and saw each other only a few times in the few months we considered each other lovers. Normand (French form of the name "Norman") was born in Bathurst, New Brunswick (a French-speaking area of Canada), and lived for a while in Montreal before he decided he wanted to move to Vancouver, BC. We met in Toronto, as he was making his way west. I was just doing the gay-tourist thing from my home in New York City. He then dallied in Toronto for a couple of months longer than he had initially intended, and visited me in Manhattan before we broke up and he resumed his journey west. He has lived in Vancouver all these years. We reconnected in early 2009, and spent a weekend together (socially) in Montreal in July 2009. I never stopped loving him, in a fond rather than sexual way; and he apparently always held me in fond memory too.
+
The other man from my youth who has contacted me did so only a few weeks ago. We went to college in Manhattan together, and I was crazy about him, but he was functionally heterosexual, so I put him out of my mind. It turns out that he later had homosexual "encounters", and is keen on a straight guy of his own, in Toronto! — who is as unavailable to him as Dana was to me.
+
I guess I make quite an impression on some people, to be sought out more than 40 years later. It would have been nice if we had been able to get together and stay together all this time instead of reconnecting after decades of distance.
+
In any case, I don't know how John Lauritsen will use the materials he creates for his oral-history project. Perhaps he can create a website at which these videos can be watched, perhaps even downloaded for the use of scholars and ordinary gay men. Perhaps he will find a way to create transcripts by machine, or thru volunteer typists, to create a written record from oral interviews.
+
I just hope John gets to the people he wants to 'immortalize' before they croak. (Ribbet, ribbet.)
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
[This post is a duplicate of a post on another of my blogs, "Newark USA"]
Boycotted Panel on "Queer Newark". Madness has seized control of the Robeson Center at Rutgers-Newark. Its staff permitted a one-day conference to be held on its premises that was called, insanely, "Queer Newark". Let me make clear, for people who just don't know, or have been misled by the propaganda of bizarre gay and lesbian self-despisers, that the word "queer" is the exact equivalent of "nigger". It is profoundly and permanently offensive to the great preponderance of people for whom it is intended. It cannot be "rehabilitated" or "reclaimed", but will always be absolutely unacceptable in polite company. It must NEVER be used by straight people — EVER. If Rutgers-Newark would not smile upon a symposium titled "Nigger Newark", it should never have approved of even a one-day program called "Queer Newark".
Moreover, how do you compensate for long-term, indeed historic refusal to recognize the contributions of gay or lesbian Newarkers, as the materials for the "Queer Newark" program spoke of doing, by means of a ONE-DAY program?
Here is the text put online about this program by Newark Pulse:
The website actually uses the insane term "LGBTQ" — for Lesbian [which must always appear before "Gay", because gay men are second-class citizens in their own "community", even tho they constitute the great majority of all members], Gay, 'Bisexual' [a mythical, nonexistent creature], 'Transgender' [another mythic, nonexistent creature], and 'Questioning' [people so moronically un-self-aware that they don't know what the heck they are]. Relatively few gay people, be they teenagers or grownups, do not know full well that they are gay, but all the organizations adjust around the few, maladjusted losers who at least pretend not to know what they are. My friend and fellow gay militant, John Lauritsen, has used the term "synthetic insanity", which refers to people who PRETEND to an insane stance they do not in fact believe but cleave to because it is politic in this demented age to do so. They pretend to think they are women, when they are actually men and know full well they are men, because society has been persuaded that it is biologically possible for someone to be other than what one's genes mandate. It is not.
There is in fact no such thing as an "LBGT...etc." community. The different constituent groups of that preposterous, synthetic "community" have nothing to do with each other. Gay men do not crave being surrounded by lesbians, but do not generally feel comfortable saying aloud that they don't want anything to do with lesbians, but want to be alone with men. Lesbians do not want to be surrounded by gay men. Fortunately for them, given the bizarre double standard that straight society has, regarding men's rights and women's prerogatives, generally do not hesitate to say they want men to leave them alone. No gay man or lesbian wants anything to do with "bisexuals", but hold them in contempt. And all well-adjusted gay men are puzzled by "transsexuals", who pretend to believe that they are not what biology, and their eyes and hands, tell them very plainly they absolutely and unequivocally are. Sometimes "transgendered" people make themselves entertaining in their flamboyant make-believe, but they are basically seen by everyone on Earth as tragic lunatics. Madness is not a form of happiness. Quite the contrary, the insane are almost uniformly miserable, and we do them no favor in pretending to believe that they are sane but the world is mad.
People in straight society have been so misled about the entire issue of homosexuality and/or lesbianism that they tend to believe whatever they are told by "LGBT[Q...I...you-name-it]" organizations. Little do they know that such organizations are, for the most part, headed by self-despising losers who were raised to be heterosexual and have NEVER been able to overcome that early training. As each generation of would-be activists, who start out with good sense enuf to be indignant at the way they have been treated, enters those organizations, they accept what they were told, first by straight society, then by the insane organizations that have themselves been unable to repudiate that heterosexual training. Only later, by years, do they grow beyond such nonsense, and realize that the things they were required by those organizations to say, are nonsense, then leave those organizations of sad, psychologically deformed losers.
Still, they don't denounce the b.s. that the organizations they belonged to inflicted upon society, to correct the record. Rather, they just leave those maladjusted, ridiculous organizations. Alas, that leaves the organizations always under the control of maladjusted losers, and always spouting antihomosexual b.s.
To attend a conference called "Queer [Anything]" would 'confer' legitimacy upon the use of that despicable term, and THAT, I will not do, so I refused to attend.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, gay men had many discussions, in many forums, about which terms were acceptable, and which unacceptable, and why. In addition to "homosexual", "gay", and "lesbian", there were other terms for gay men, lesbian women, and businesses, publications, organizations, and such intended for such audiences, some of which were then and are now generally regarded as disparaging ("fag", "faggot", "fruit"; "dyke", "bulldyke", "lez"; etc.). There was NO agreement over whether "homosexual" could apply to both men and women, nor whether terms like "homophile" (for organizations and publications) were self-assertive or self-denying.
In time, a general agreement, tho not unanimous consensus, emerged. "Gay" is OK; "lesbian", for women, is also OK; "homosexual" has a medical sound to it, but is not offensive. But terms like "fag", "faggot", "fruit", "nancy boy", "poof[ter]", "fem", "dyke", "bulldyke", "lez", "drag queen", "tranny" (which is, in any case, ambiguous; does it refer to "transvestites", people, even heterosexuals, who dress in the clothing of the opposite sex, or "transgendered" people, lunatics who wish they were the sex they're not?) — and "queer" — were irredeemably offensive. There is no such thing as a "gay woman", any more than there is such a thing as a "lesbian man". Nor is there anything bizarre ("queer" in its original meaning) about homosexuality, which is extremely commonplace, much more than, for instance, lefthandedness. Dictionary.com defines "queer" thus:
Lesbians have NEVER been called "queer" by straight society. The embrace of the term "queer" for themselves by some lesbians is grotesque in every way.
If reality controlled, I would have to be recognized as the single most important gay figure in Newark, not just now but in this city's entire history, for having put forward the term "Gay Pride" as it is now used, in the committee that organized the first, annual gay (and, alas, lesbian) march commemorating Stonewall — which was a gay MEN's bar of which I had been a regular customer, not a "gay and lesbian" bar as it has now been recast. Homosexuality had, before then, been regarded as profoundly shameful, "the Love that dare not speak its name". The power of the term "Gay Pride", thus, was in completely reversing the assumption, from shame to pride.
"Gay Pride" moved the goalpost, in a good way: closer to the great preponderance of people, who understand the importance of self-respect, and who respect themselves, so expect other people to respect themselves. "Pride" is one of various terms for "self-respect", or "self-esteem", a feeling that educators in recent decades — and most especially since 1970, when I put forward "Gay Pride" — have made plain to society at large is quintessential to a person's healthy functioning and future success.
"Gay PRIDE" went beyond defending against assertions that gay men should be ashamed of themselves. It asserted that we are entitled to feel good about ourselves and what makes us, us. It tells gay men that homosexuality is ennobling, and that it's a very good thing not just for ourselves but also for society that some men see other men not as dangerous competitors we must vanquish, no matter how much harm we might do to others in order to vanquish them, but primarily as a source of esthetic, emotional, and physical pleasure.
The term "Gay Pride" has, thus, been transformative in a way that the title for the weekend of events we were organizing among host-city organizations and wanted to unite under a single title, might NOT have been if we had gone with the original thought, "Gay Pride Weekend". My thinking was that "power" is something that depends upon numbers and outside forces, but "pride" is something that depends upon nothing but yourself, internally. You could be in a gay community of a million in a great metropolis like the NY Tristate Metropolitan Area but still not be confident in yourself nor proud in your feelings about men.
Conversely, however, you could be proud of your nature, and your feelings for men, in total isolation from other gay men, hundreds or even thousands of miles from the nearest gay bar or community center. So gay "pride" was a much better term for a movement intended (remember, it was 1970, and we were inventing all of this) to make gay men feel good about themselves, than gay "power", which for most gay men, all around the Earth, would then, and still, to this day, be unattainable. Despite the nonexistence in most places of even the tiniest shred of gay "power" in their locality, every single gay man, in India, Cameroon, South Africa, China, Brazil, and every other place where there is not so much as a single gay bar or organization, could feel pride in their feelings for men if they understood themselves and how ennobling those feelings can be in a man's life.
Mind you, not every feeling that some people attempt to force upon gay men, or seduce them into, is wholesome, and gay men are often pushed to embrace insane and ugly attitudes, such as sado-masochism. Gay Pride is at once an antidote to the ugly, vicious, and insane misrepresentations of homosexuality that straight society's antigay propagandists promote, and to perverted, sado-masochistic attitudes that sexual degenerates proselytize for gay men to embrace — but which we must refuse.
I reject the entire idea of "loving yourself", which is sometimes used as justification for autoerotic self-absorption, as lunacy. No, love comes from one person and attaches to another, not himself. Esteem yourself, respect yourself, yes, to be sure. But "love" yourself? That's freaky.
Newark is large enuf a city to, in most places on Earth, be a center of homosexual in-migration. But Newark is also the second city of the greatest city of the entire world, and largest city of the United States, New York. Newark and Jersey City, in NJ, cannot compete with Manhattan for in-migration of gay men — unless we find something unique by which to distinguish gay life, present or future, here.
In speaking of preferences as to terminology, I am not just talking here of my own viewpoint, without evidence as to how other men feel. I long ago placed upon my "Mr. Gay Pride" website a poll of visitors, which currently shows this result:
If you add up the votes that favor the term "gay", you will find that they amount to 74% of responses.
If importance to changed perceptions of homosexuality were the criterion, I should always be among the first people ever thought of when gay groups think of a Grand Marshal for a "Gay Pride" Parade — which wouldn't even have that name were it not for me. But in fact I have never been invited to be Grand Marshal of ANY "Gay Pride" Parade. Nor, however, would I consent to lead off a heterosexually organized march that repudiated the very concept of Gay Pride, in insisting that men and women "belong together". No thank you. I reject the idea that men and women "belong together" — not in bed, and most assuredly not in a march for the right NOT to be compelled to be heterosexual.
I'm used to being overlooked, ignored, and actively disregarded when other gay people (or fictitious "LGBTQ...I...", etc. people) are honored. You see, I am a gay MAN, and refuse to identify with nor bolster lesbians, with whom I do not in any way nor to any degree identify. Oddly, that seems to have annoyed a lot of lesbians, even those who insist upon women-only organizations and events. All-female is fine; all-male, a crime against humanity!
I also actively object to the idea that gay men are not entitled to a unique identity but must always subsume their identity into an all-gender (i.e., non-gender: castrated, emasculated (for gay men) or de-feminized (for lesbian women)) identity. Biology — that is, actual science — permits of only two genders, or sexes: male, marked by an XY chromosomal configuration, and female, marked by an XX chromosomal configuration. Anything and everything else is ANTI-scientific nonsense that society needs actively to suppress.
There are no chromosomal "mistakes". That is a kindly, scientific way to address the crazy idea that God — 100% infallible God — somehow "made a mistake" and put a woman into the body of a man, or the other way around. Kindhearted people have wanted to accord logical and scientific credibility to the notion that "transgendered" people could indeed exist — but on the basis of what scientific theory?
Why are so many people desperate to accommodate insane renunciation of biology? Society does no favor to lunatics by pretending to believe they are right in their insane beliefs — be it that a modern-day, 6'7" man really is Napoleon Bonaparte, or that a confused, self-despising 20-year-old man is really a woman. Yes, all of society, all of science, reason, and reality is wrong, but YOU who say God made a mistake, are right. NO! Stop this nonsense! Society must tell lunatics that they are out of their mind, and need to let go of their insane delusions and embrace reality.
No one really believes that "Chaz" Bono is a man. Not one single person on Earth really believes that a person who has no male sexual organs and every single cell in whose body bears the XX chromosomal configuration is a man. Not one single person on Earth. So why are we endlessly assailed by lies from media that Chastity Bono, after a double mastectomy and being pumped full of male hormones, is a man, always referred to as "he"? Are all those women who had double mastectomies because of breast cancer now men? No, they are not, and Chastity Bono is not, no matter what she may call herself.
Chastity Bono is "collateral damage" to a Castration Conspiracy designed to destroy gay men surgically because society refuses to accept the masculinity of men oriented to men, even tho there is nothing more masculine than sex between men, in which there is no woman present. Gay men do NOT regard themselves as a kind of woman, but fully as men. WE don't have pink shower curtains, with pantyhose drying over the shower bar; nor duvets nor dust ruffles nor a dozen pillows on the bed. Quite the contrary, we have to question the masculinity of heterosexual "men" who consent to be emasculated by super-feminine decorating. Nor should anyone else ever think gay men less than men, but always as ONLY men. In the same way, no one should ever think of lesbians as anything BUT women. (That is not to suggest that I speak for women, but only that I imagine that lesbians resent the suggestion that they are somehow less than women.)
In promoting the idea that lesbians are men born in the wrong body, Ms. Bono is an enemy of lesbians, for telling the world that lesbianism is fake heterosexuality and gender confusion, and of gay men, in telling the world that homosexuals would be much happier and better off if they would just let the doctors chop off their genitals and pump them full of female hormones.
I received, this week, an email from a gay writer in NYC, Perry Brass, that purported to list the ten most important gay activists of all time. I was not on that list. That is, alas, same-old, same-old. Mind you, I did NOT, for the most part, participate in typical "activist" actions, demonstrations and sit-ins. But I did help organize the first annual march of the type now generally termed — because of me — "Gay Pride" parades, and did march (an activist activity, in anyone's judgment) in at least two of the first three such parades in NYC.
More to the point, my linguistic activism, "Gay Pride", has affected the perceptions of at very least a BILLION people in the First World, and possibly as many as, or even more than, THREE BILLION people all around the world. What other person on that list has had nearly that impact? No one.
People who have seen historic footage of the first few marches may have seen me there, near the front. I think that in the first or second march I was wearing a white, long-sleeved shirt, of ("pirate") puffy sort, and may also have been wearing a floppy straw hat against the sun. Such fotos or videos as I have seen do not, alas, record me in verbal clashes with pushy lesbians who felt that gay men had no right to be anywhere near the front of the march that gay men organized.
It is not, mainly, my purpose here to complain about the craziness of New York City "gay" marches, community centers, or anything else — nor of the Gay Men's Chorus's always having a female soloist, because all GMC concerts must be heterosexual in form — so much as to encourage gay men in Newark to REFUSE to let lesbians impose upon them in any way, but always to be proud to be MEN attracted to and, if we are lucky, in love with MEN who love them.
I do not resent lesbians' being lesbians, but only their insisting that gay men identify with lesbians and let them dominate The Movement. Gay men and lesbians have nothing intrinsically in common. Gay men must stop letting outsiders define them, but must refuse pressure to identify with the opposite sex and to give up their masculine purity to accommodate people who are nothing like them. My defense of gay men's right to an all-male identity is of necessity also a defense of lesbians' right to an all-female identity. Why don't lesbians see that?
I do not expect Newark to have a major parade on Broad Street each "Gay Pride" Day, even tho the term as it is now used does derive from a current Newarker (altho I lived in Manhattan when I put the term forward). I reject the idea that gay men have some special bond to lesbian women, so must always organize with and march with them. How supremely bizarre this notion is, that men and women must march together to assert the right not to be pushed at each other.
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Rather, I hope that gay men in Newark will learn to think of themselves before they think of anyone else, and see themselves as the norm before they EVER compare themselves to anyone else. We must be the men we are. Love the men we love. Crave the men we crave. And never apologize to anyone for being who we are.
Regular readers of this blog [meaning, here, "Newark USA", from which this post was copied] will know that I rarely discuss gay issues, largely because there is almost nothing for gay men in Newark (otherwise I would include gay items regularly, since gay events are part of the world I report on) but also that my capsule profile at top right always includes mention that I put forward the term "Gay Pride" as it is now used. I would, however, be seriously remiss in not objecting to antihomosexual bigotry — albeit unintentional — by a major Newark institution, such as the Robeson Center of Rutgers-Newark. And now, ladies and gentlemen, I will step down from my soapbox, hoping that straight people among my readers will have learned something that no one else will tell them.
Fotos today are from the little Gay Pride march up Halsey Street into a litely attended gay (and lesbian) festival in Washington Park in late June 2010. I was a little late arriving (what else is new?), so the first few fotos show marchers from the back. I am not protecting their identity, and they were marching openly. I didn't get to this year's event — there's only one of me, and I can't get to every event in the busy New Newark — so don't know if it grew any.
Boycotted Panel on "Queer Newark". Madness has seized control of the Robeson Center at Rutgers-Newark. Its staff permitted a one-day conference to be held on its premises that was called, insanely, "Queer Newark". Let me make clear, for people who just don't know, or have been misled by the propaganda of bizarre gay and lesbian self-despisers, that the word "queer" is the exact equivalent of "nigger". It is profoundly and permanently offensive to the great preponderance of people for whom it is intended. It cannot be "rehabilitated" or "reclaimed", but will always be absolutely unacceptable in polite company. It must NEVER be used by straight people — EVER. If Rutgers-Newark would not smile upon a symposium titled "Nigger Newark", it should never have approved of even a one-day program called "Queer Newark".
Moreover, how do you compensate for long-term, indeed historic refusal to recognize the contributions of gay or lesbian Newarkers, as the materials for the "Queer Newark" program spoke of doing, by means of a ONE-DAY program?
Here is the text put online about this program by Newark Pulse:
Date: Saturday, November 12, 2011
Time: 9am-5pm
Location: Paul Robeson Center - Rutgers - Rm 231
Cost: Free
Rutgers-Newark partnered with community leaders to present "Queer Newark: Our Voices, Our Histories," a free, full-day, oral history conference examining gay life in Newark. It will be followed by an evening of entertainment at The Coffee Cave from 6-9 p.m. Newark Mayor Cory Booker will welcome participants and guests.
"The city of Newark, New Jersey has a fascinating and well-documented history. There are studies of its rich cultural, musical, and literary legacy, its educational system, political life, religious life, immigrant roots, and history of racial conflict," said Prof. Beryl Satter of the Federated Department of History at Rutgers-Newark and conference co-chair, "yet, there is one group whose undeniable contribution to the city’s life has rarely been the subject of historical or academic study -- Newark’s LGBT community. The Queer Newark conference is a way to rectify this omission."
This is the front of the march. Two white people, both female? Why is that? Do white gay men have to sit in the back of the bus, in their own march, in Newark?
Three generations of LGBT Newarkers will be on hand to reflect on their lives as LGBT people in the city of Newark. Panelists will discuss everything from childhood experiences to religion and spirituality during the moderated discussions. Community members, historians and scholars of Newark history and LGBT history and studies are encouraged to attend.
Is that an unusually broad-shouldered woman? Or not? If not, why is he wearing women's clothes? Perhaps a white patch of fabric on her hip makes this actual woman look like a "drag queen", in visually narrowing her hips. I am among the many gay men who have never had the problem of being gender-nonspecific. My proportions, chest hair, facial hair, etc., have always plainly marked me out a man. I feel very sorry for gay men who have been tempted to conceal their manhood because they could. Very sad — but nonetheless contemptible. Other people may not see you naked, but you do, and you know what you are. Be what you are!
According to Darnell L. Moore, former chair of the City of Newark’s LGBTQ Advisory Commission and conference co-chair, "This conference will be the beginning of a larger, ongoing project that we hope will foster an intergenerational discussion of LGBT life in Newark. It will also be the foundation of an archive on LGBT Newark that can be used by historians and by future generations. This is a major first step towards preserving the history of LGBT Newark and bringing these voices and experiences into Newark’s broader communal history."
More Info: http://queer.newark.rutgers.edu.
The website actually uses the insane term "LGBTQ" — for Lesbian [which must always appear before "Gay", because gay men are second-class citizens in their own "community", even tho they constitute the great majority of all members], Gay, 'Bisexual' [a mythical, nonexistent creature], 'Transgender' [another mythic, nonexistent creature], and 'Questioning' [people so moronically un-self-aware that they don't know what the heck they are]. Relatively few gay people, be they teenagers or grownups, do not know full well that they are gay, but all the organizations adjust around the few, maladjusted losers who at least pretend not to know what they are. My friend and fellow gay militant, John Lauritsen, has used the term "synthetic insanity", which refers to people who PRETEND to an insane stance they do not in fact believe but cleave to because it is politic in this demented age to do so. They pretend to think they are women, when they are actually men and know full well they are men, because society has been persuaded that it is biologically possible for someone to be other than what one's genes mandate. It is not.
There is in fact no such thing as an "LBGT...etc." community. The different constituent groups of that preposterous, synthetic "community" have nothing to do with each other. Gay men do not crave being surrounded by lesbians, but do not generally feel comfortable saying aloud that they don't want anything to do with lesbians, but want to be alone with men. Lesbians do not want to be surrounded by gay men. Fortunately for them, given the bizarre double standard that straight society has, regarding men's rights and women's prerogatives, generally do not hesitate to say they want men to leave them alone. No gay man or lesbian wants anything to do with "bisexuals", but hold them in contempt. And all well-adjusted gay men are puzzled by "transsexuals", who pretend to believe that they are not what biology, and their eyes and hands, tell them very plainly they absolutely and unequivocally are. Sometimes "transgendered" people make themselves entertaining in their flamboyant make-believe, but they are basically seen by everyone on Earth as tragic lunatics. Madness is not a form of happiness. Quite the contrary, the insane are almost uniformly miserable, and we do them no favor in pretending to believe that they are sane but the world is mad.
People in straight society have been so misled about the entire issue of homosexuality and/or lesbianism that they tend to believe whatever they are told by "LGBT[Q...I...you-name-it]" organizations. Little do they know that such organizations are, for the most part, headed by self-despising losers who were raised to be heterosexual and have NEVER been able to overcome that early training. As each generation of would-be activists, who start out with good sense enuf to be indignant at the way they have been treated, enters those organizations, they accept what they were told, first by straight society, then by the insane organizations that have themselves been unable to repudiate that heterosexual training. Only later, by years, do they grow beyond such nonsense, and realize that the things they were required by those organizations to say, are nonsense, then leave those organizations of sad, psychologically deformed losers.
Still, they don't denounce the b.s. that the organizations they belonged to inflicted upon society, to correct the record. Rather, they just leave those maladjusted, ridiculous organizations. Alas, that leaves the organizations always under the control of maladjusted losers, and always spouting antihomosexual b.s.
These beautiful young men, carrying between them a banner with the term I offered in 1970, are exactly the kind of thing that makes me very proud to be homosexual. They are stunning, and proud to proclaim to the world that they are gay. Alas, there are in Newark no gay bars, coffeehouses, or ANYthing in which gay men might meet each other to "hook up" and perhaps even fall in love. Yes, men do fall in love with each other. Powerfully, manfully. But even if we don't fall in love, we sure do like to 'get busy', and make each other physically, if not also emotionally, happy. Why can't we state that plainly, in a society in which sexual crudity of all kinds is all over the tube? You can't tune into a single CBS sitcom, or some NBC sitcoms, without being hit in the face by heterosexual obscenity — all the while straight society pretends to be pure, and glowing, and noble, not ever hot for sex for the sake of sex. Truth be told, a lot of straight men would love to have, with women, the fast-and-loose, sex-for-the-sake-of-sex (which is good enuf) twos, threes, fours and mores, and when-it's-over-let-it-go—easy,-without-recriminations attitude of casual gay sex. Gay men have no problem with sex as recreation, which may lie behind the vicious denunciation of homosexuality by so many straight men, because they are ENVIOUS of gay men's not demanding more than sexual reciprocity in order to give sex on demand.
To attend a conference called "Queer [Anything]" would 'confer' legitimacy upon the use of that despicable term, and THAT, I will not do, so I refused to attend.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, gay men had many discussions, in many forums, about which terms were acceptable, and which unacceptable, and why. In addition to "homosexual", "gay", and "lesbian", there were other terms for gay men, lesbian women, and businesses, publications, organizations, and such intended for such audiences, some of which were then and are now generally regarded as disparaging ("fag", "faggot", "fruit"; "dyke", "bulldyke", "lez"; etc.). There was NO agreement over whether "homosexual" could apply to both men and women, nor whether terms like "homophile" (for organizations and publications) were self-assertive or self-denying.
In time, a general agreement, tho not unanimous consensus, emerged. "Gay" is OK; "lesbian", for women, is also OK; "homosexual" has a medical sound to it, but is not offensive. But terms like "fag", "faggot", "fruit", "nancy boy", "poof[ter]", "fem", "dyke", "bulldyke", "lez", "drag queen", "tranny" (which is, in any case, ambiguous; does it refer to "transvestites", people, even heterosexuals, who dress in the clothing of the opposite sex, or "transgendered" people, lunatics who wish they were the sex they're not?) — and "queer" — were irredeemably offensive. There is no such thing as a "gay woman", any more than there is such a thing as a "lesbian man". Nor is there anything bizarre ("queer" in its original meaning) about homosexuality, which is extremely commonplace, much more than, for instance, lefthandedness. Dictionary.com defines "queer" thus:
If Dictionary.com knows that the use of the term "queer" for homosexuals is "Disparaging and Offensive", why doesn't the Robeson Center of Rutgers-Newark? Definitions 2 and 4 are also offensive, so why on Earth would anyone rush to EMBRACE "queer" for themselves?
1. strange or odd from a conventional viewpoint; unusually different; singular: a queer notion of justice.
2. of a questionable nature or character; suspicious; shady: Something queer about the language of the prospectus kept investors away.
3. not feeling physically right or well; giddy, faint, or qualmish: to feel queer.
4. mentally unbalanced or deranged.
5. Slang: Disparaging and Offensive.
a. homosexual.
b. effeminate; unmanly.
Lesbians have NEVER been called "queer" by straight society. The embrace of the term "queer" for themselves by some lesbians is grotesque in every way.
If reality controlled, I would have to be recognized as the single most important gay figure in Newark, not just now but in this city's entire history, for having put forward the term "Gay Pride" as it is now used, in the committee that organized the first, annual gay (and, alas, lesbian) march commemorating Stonewall — which was a gay MEN's bar of which I had been a regular customer, not a "gay and lesbian" bar as it has now been recast. Homosexuality had, before then, been regarded as profoundly shameful, "the Love that dare not speak its name". The power of the term "Gay Pride", thus, was in completely reversing the assumption, from shame to pride.
"Gay Pride" moved the goalpost, in a good way: closer to the great preponderance of people, who understand the importance of self-respect, and who respect themselves, so expect other people to respect themselves. "Pride" is one of various terms for "self-respect", or "self-esteem", a feeling that educators in recent decades — and most especially since 1970, when I put forward "Gay Pride" — have made plain to society at large is quintessential to a person's healthy functioning and future success.
"Gay PRIDE" went beyond defending against assertions that gay men should be ashamed of themselves. It asserted that we are entitled to feel good about ourselves and what makes us, us. It tells gay men that homosexuality is ennobling, and that it's a very good thing not just for ourselves but also for society that some men see other men not as dangerous competitors we must vanquish, no matter how much harm we might do to others in order to vanquish them, but primarily as a source of esthetic, emotional, and physical pleasure.
The term "Gay Pride" has, thus, been transformative in a way that the title for the weekend of events we were organizing among host-city organizations and wanted to unite under a single title, might NOT have been if we had gone with the original thought, "Gay Pride Weekend". My thinking was that "power" is something that depends upon numbers and outside forces, but "pride" is something that depends upon nothing but yourself, internally. You could be in a gay community of a million in a great metropolis like the NY Tristate Metropolitan Area but still not be confident in yourself nor proud in your feelings about men.
Conversely, however, you could be proud of your nature, and your feelings for men, in total isolation from other gay men, hundreds or even thousands of miles from the nearest gay bar or community center. So gay "pride" was a much better term for a movement intended (remember, it was 1970, and we were inventing all of this) to make gay men feel good about themselves, than gay "power", which for most gay men, all around the Earth, would then, and still, to this day, be unattainable. Despite the nonexistence in most places of even the tiniest shred of gay "power" in their locality, every single gay man, in India, Cameroon, South Africa, China, Brazil, and every other place where there is not so much as a single gay bar or organization, could feel pride in their feelings for men if they understood themselves and how ennobling those feelings can be in a man's life.
Mind you, not every feeling that some people attempt to force upon gay men, or seduce them into, is wholesome, and gay men are often pushed to embrace insane and ugly attitudes, such as sado-masochism. Gay Pride is at once an antidote to the ugly, vicious, and insane misrepresentations of homosexuality that straight society's antigay propagandists promote, and to perverted, sado-masochistic attitudes that sexual degenerates proselytize for gay men to embrace — but which we must refuse.
I reject the entire idea of "loving yourself", which is sometimes used as justification for autoerotic self-absorption, as lunacy. No, love comes from one person and attaches to another, not himself. Esteem yourself, respect yourself, yes, to be sure. But "love" yourself? That's freaky.
Newark is large enuf a city to, in most places on Earth, be a center of homosexual in-migration. But Newark is also the second city of the greatest city of the entire world, and largest city of the United States, New York. Newark and Jersey City, in NJ, cannot compete with Manhattan for in-migration of gay men — unless we find something unique by which to distinguish gay life, present or future, here.
In speaking of preferences as to terminology, I am not just talking here of my own viewpoint, without evidence as to how other men feel. I long ago placed upon my "Mr. Gay Pride" website a poll of visitors, which currently shows this result:
If you add up the votes that favor the term "gay", you will find that they amount to 74% of responses.
If importance to changed perceptions of homosexuality were the criterion, I should always be among the first people ever thought of when gay groups think of a Grand Marshal for a "Gay Pride" Parade — which wouldn't even have that name were it not for me. But in fact I have never been invited to be Grand Marshal of ANY "Gay Pride" Parade. Nor, however, would I consent to lead off a heterosexually organized march that repudiated the very concept of Gay Pride, in insisting that men and women "belong together". No thank you. I reject the idea that men and women "belong together" — not in bed, and most assuredly not in a march for the right NOT to be compelled to be heterosexual.
I'm used to being overlooked, ignored, and actively disregarded when other gay people (or fictitious "LGBTQ...I...", etc. people) are honored. You see, I am a gay MAN, and refuse to identify with nor bolster lesbians, with whom I do not in any way nor to any degree identify. Oddly, that seems to have annoyed a lot of lesbians, even those who insist upon women-only organizations and events. All-female is fine; all-male, a crime against humanity!
I also actively object to the idea that gay men are not entitled to a unique identity but must always subsume their identity into an all-gender (i.e., non-gender: castrated, emasculated (for gay men) or de-feminized (for lesbian women)) identity. Biology — that is, actual science — permits of only two genders, or sexes: male, marked by an XY chromosomal configuration, and female, marked by an XX chromosomal configuration. Anything and everything else is ANTI-scientific nonsense that society needs actively to suppress.
Kids were playing in another area of Washington Park at the same time as the Gay Pride Festival was running. Newark is very adult about these things, and doesn't worry that gay people are out to molest children, a favorite, wicked slander from the Radical Right.
There are no chromosomal "mistakes". That is a kindly, scientific way to address the crazy idea that God — 100% infallible God — somehow "made a mistake" and put a woman into the body of a man, or the other way around. Kindhearted people have wanted to accord logical and scientific credibility to the notion that "transgendered" people could indeed exist — but on the basis of what scientific theory?
Why is there this big portion of Washington Park without grass? It cannot be because events are held there, so the grass would be beaten down. Grass is one of nature's most resilient plants, and thrives on beat-downs you might think would kill it.
Why are so many people desperate to accommodate insane renunciation of biology? Society does no favor to lunatics by pretending to believe they are right in their insane beliefs — be it that a modern-day, 6'7" man really is Napoleon Bonaparte, or that a confused, self-despising 20-year-old man is really a woman. Yes, all of society, all of science, reason, and reality is wrong, but YOU who say God made a mistake, are right. NO! Stop this nonsense! Society must tell lunatics that they are out of their mind, and need to let go of their insane delusions and embrace reality.
No one really believes that "Chaz" Bono is a man. Not one single person on Earth really believes that a person who has no male sexual organs and every single cell in whose body bears the XX chromosomal configuration is a man. Not one single person on Earth. So why are we endlessly assailed by lies from media that Chastity Bono, after a double mastectomy and being pumped full of male hormones, is a man, always referred to as "he"? Are all those women who had double mastectomies because of breast cancer now men? No, they are not, and Chastity Bono is not, no matter what she may call herself.
Chastity Bono is "collateral damage" to a Castration Conspiracy designed to destroy gay men surgically because society refuses to accept the masculinity of men oriented to men, even tho there is nothing more masculine than sex between men, in which there is no woman present. Gay men do NOT regard themselves as a kind of woman, but fully as men. WE don't have pink shower curtains, with pantyhose drying over the shower bar; nor duvets nor dust ruffles nor a dozen pillows on the bed. Quite the contrary, we have to question the masculinity of heterosexual "men" who consent to be emasculated by super-feminine decorating. Nor should anyone else ever think gay men less than men, but always as ONLY men. In the same way, no one should ever think of lesbians as anything BUT women. (That is not to suggest that I speak for women, but only that I imagine that lesbians resent the suggestion that they are somehow less than women.)
In promoting the idea that lesbians are men born in the wrong body, Ms. Bono is an enemy of lesbians, for telling the world that lesbianism is fake heterosexuality and gender confusion, and of gay men, in telling the world that homosexuals would be much happier and better off if they would just let the doctors chop off their genitals and pump them full of female hormones.
This was one of the PERVERTED parts of the Washington Park 'gay' festival, a table at which dozens of CONDOMS were offered, but which table was staffed by a woman, probably lesbian. Truly grotesque. But this is what happens when gay is equated to lesbian, such that lesbians intrude upon gay men's sexual privacy. Disgusting. Truly, truly revolting.
I received, this week, an email from a gay writer in NYC, Perry Brass, that purported to list the ten most important gay activists of all time. I was not on that list. That is, alas, same-old, same-old. Mind you, I did NOT, for the most part, participate in typical "activist" actions, demonstrations and sit-ins. But I did help organize the first annual march of the type now generally termed — because of me — "Gay Pride" parades, and did march (an activist activity, in anyone's judgment) in at least two of the first three such parades in NYC.
It's more than a little annoying when even straight allies in defending gay rights send women to gay events. Alas, since gay men refuse to tell lesbians to get their own events, and gay men will stand on their own, always, straight organizations cannot know how offensive it is to gay men to be treated as lesbians.
More to the point, my linguistic activism, "Gay Pride", has affected the perceptions of at very least a BILLION people in the First World, and possibly as many as, or even more than, THREE BILLION people all around the world. What other person on that list has had nearly that impact? No one.
Wide view, from the far side of Washington Street outside the Newark Museum, of the setup for the gay festival in Washington Park.
People who have seen historic footage of the first few marches may have seen me there, near the front. I think that in the first or second march I was wearing a white, long-sleeved shirt, of ("pirate") puffy sort, and may also have been wearing a floppy straw hat against the sun. Such fotos or videos as I have seen do not, alas, record me in verbal clashes with pushy lesbians who felt that gay men had no right to be anywhere near the front of the march that gay men organized.
It is not, mainly, my purpose here to complain about the craziness of New York City "gay" marches, community centers, or anything else — nor of the Gay Men's Chorus's always having a female soloist, because all GMC concerts must be heterosexual in form — so much as to encourage gay men in Newark to REFUSE to let lesbians impose upon them in any way, but always to be proud to be MEN attracted to and, if we are lucky, in love with MEN who love them.
I do not resent lesbians' being lesbians, but only their insisting that gay men identify with lesbians and let them dominate The Movement. Gay men and lesbians have nothing intrinsically in common. Gay men must stop letting outsiders define them, but must refuse pressure to identify with the opposite sex and to give up their masculine purity to accommodate people who are nothing like them. My defense of gay men's right to an all-male identity is of necessity also a defense of lesbians' right to an all-female identity. Why don't lesbians see that?
This statue of Seth Boyden, a Newark-based inventor whom Thomas Edison (whose first laboratory was in Newark) called the greatest American inventor, stands in the incomprehensibly barren area of Washington Park. There should be grass there as much as anywhere else in the Park.
I do not expect Newark to have a major parade on Broad Street each "Gay Pride" Day, even tho the term as it is now used does derive from a current Newarker (altho I lived in Manhattan when I put the term forward). I reject the idea that gay men have some special bond to lesbian women, so must always organize with and march with them. How supremely bizarre this notion is, that men and women must march together to assert the right not to be pushed at each other.
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Rather, I hope that gay men in Newark will learn to think of themselves before they think of anyone else, and see themselves as the norm before they EVER compare themselves to anyone else. We must be the men we are. Love the men we love. Crave the men we crave. And never apologize to anyone for being who we are.
Regular readers of this blog [meaning, here, "Newark USA", from which this post was copied] will know that I rarely discuss gay issues, largely because there is almost nothing for gay men in Newark (otherwise I would include gay items regularly, since gay events are part of the world I report on) but also that my capsule profile at top right always includes mention that I put forward the term "Gay Pride" as it is now used. I would, however, be seriously remiss in not objecting to antihomosexual bigotry — albeit unintentional — by a major Newark institution, such as the Robeson Center of Rutgers-Newark. And now, ladies and gentlemen, I will step down from my soapbox, hoping that straight people among my readers will have learned something that no one else will tell them.
Thursday, September 01, 2011
"Chaz" Bono, Carson Kressley on DWTS. AOL yesterday hilited a story about "Chaz" Bono being cast in Dancing with the Stars. I left the following comments.
There is no such thing as a transgendered person, only someone who is terribly confused and has been monstrously victimized by a society that somehow, bizarrely, finds it easier to accept a biological impossibility -- a person "born into the wrong body" -- than a person who is not heterosexual. This DWTS thing is part and parcel of a widespread Castration Conspiracy targeted mainly at gay men to emasculate them first psychologically and then surgically, but which has as collateral damage victimized some lesbian women too. Legislatures need to pass laws that state plainly that gender is biological, not psychological, fixed, not subject to whim. And media have got to LEAVE the Castration Conspiracy and accept gay people for what they are: fully normal as to gender, just a minority as regards orientation.
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You think "transgendered people" are HAPPY? They are MISERABLE, and cannot ever be at peace with their nature by denying their nature.
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You consent to be castrated, do you? Why not, if a woman can be defeminized, why not a man emasculated? That's what it's all about. "Chaz" should be paired with a WOMAN, and Neil Patrick Harris or some other gay-male star should be paired with a man. He should not have to be castrated to be paired with a man on DWTS. YOU are the enemy of gay men, in consenting to the bigotry that says that anyone attracted to a man must be a woman -- and be made, surgically, to look like a woman -- and anyone attracted to a woman must be a man, and chemically if not even surgically altered to look like one.
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Fine, let 'Chaz' dance -- with a MAN, if heterosexual pairing is compulsory.
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There is no God. If gay people wrote the Bible (a work of self-vaunting fiction), God would be gay. Straight people wrote it, which is the only reason their God is straight.
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Cortez and Columbus did NOT murder millions. You subvert your point thru preposterous overstatement. Millions of American Indians died from DISEASES they contracted from Europeans, and that would have happened if they had arrived merely as traders, not colonizers. The deaths from forced labor/slavery and warfare were trivial by comparison with the toll from simple biological contamination. As for "accept[ing] people the way God made them", Chastity Bono was made a girl, to grow to be a woman. An intolerant society prefers to pretend she is a man than that a woman can want a woman.
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The problem is that Chastity Bono cannot accept her lesbianism.
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Do you really think Jesus would bless gender confusion, castrating gay men, giving women double mastectomies and pumping them full of chemicals, to deny them their actual gender and force them to be something they were not born? I don't.
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Carson Kressley is a disgrace. He and Lance Bass should NEVER have consented to dance with women, and that both have[,] shows they are both antigay losers. Disgusting.
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Alas, you have it exactly backwards. In having a lesbian, Chastity Bono, [touted as a man and] paired with a [wo]man, and a gay man, Carson Kressley, paired with a woman, society is NOT accepting homosexuality nor lesbianism but FORBIDDING both. This is a show of extreme bigotry, not acceptance in the slitest.
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God didn't create "sex-change" quackery. [Chastity Bono] has caused a lot of other confused people to contemplate irreversibly mutilating their bodies. THAT'S the harm she has done.
Monday, May 23, 2011
The Good Fite vs. Bad Fites. I occasionally receive emails from Billy Glover, a gay man in his 70s who was part of the early gay-rights movement on the U.S. West Coast. Sometimes he talks about today's issues. Too often, however, he replays old quarrels, mainly those that broke up the early organization ONE into ONE and the Homosexual Information Center ("HIC") decades ago. Let it go!
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I sent him this reply to the last email of his carrying on this pointless fite among backers of one side as against backers of the other side in this ancient quarrel over who deserves credit for what.
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I sent him this reply to the last email of his carrying on this pointless fite among backers of one side as against backers of the other side in this ancient quarrel over who deserves credit for what.
Is it already too late to establish the truth about the early days of the U.S. gay-rights movement? In the materials you have sent, there are starkly different portrayals of the infiting between ONE and HIC, and between individuals whom younger people have never heard of. Since that all transpired on the West Coast, and I have always resided on the East Coast, I am in no position to say who is right in that intramural squabble. I can say, however, that I am hostile to some of the notions of people who fought not for openness but for "privacy" (shame), and who advocated the silly notion that homosexuality is only a point on a "continuum", and related notions that we must not 'narrow' ourselves to gay-only, but must always see ourselves first and foremost as "human" -- oh? what ELSE would we be? Plainly the people who assert such things believe that homosexuality rules them out of the human race, because they internalized the antihomosexual nonsense they were taught as children by family and society. Of COURSE we're "human". So what? That's a meaningless base point.
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What gay men are NOT is lesbians. But somehow the insane notion has arisen that gay men and lesbians are the same thing. Oh sure, and black and white, blue and yellow, day and nite, Communist and capitalist, are all the same! How did "opposite" become "the same"?
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In any case, I do not care to hear any more about the ONE/HIC squabble. I do want gay materials to be preserved, and if sending them off to academic libraries in the general society is the only way to do that, so be it. I have some materials of my own that I will want preserved after my death -- assuming that happens at some point. As odd comic Steven Wright has said, "I intend to live forever. So far, so good." But who would REALLY want to live forever? The same crap, day after day, for millennia?
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I have always been on the side of openness and seeing one's sexuality as enormously important in personal identity and mental health. I participated in the 1969 ERCHO meeting (Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations) that created the annual march to commemorate Stonewall, and even offered an amendment, that was accepted, that the march should not impose a dress code. Little did we know that not wanting to force men to wear jacket and tie, and women, skirts and sweaters or such -- the dress code of many earlier "homophile" demonstrations -- would be interpreted as license to go absolutely naked, or wear drag or only a codpiece or s&m garb, turning what was intended to be an assertion of pride into instead a freak show on which hostile straight media would focus all attention. I served on the committee that organized the first march, in NYC, and offered "Gay Pride" as the unifying title for the weekend of events around the first march. I have always been indignant at people like Johnny Mathis, Elton John, and others hiding their reality, even pretending to be "bisexual" because they just couldn't admit to being "homosexual", and have been all for people in the closet being "outed".
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We who favored public admissions have been proved right, over and over. Each time someone prominent "comes out", be it Clay Aiken, Neil Patrick Harris, or Ricky Martin, public attitudes shift in our direction. To this day I resent prominent gay men way-back-when for NOT coming out. The Johnny Mathises and Rudi Gernrichs and Tab Hunters and Rock Hudsons could have moved us to TODAY'S public acceptance DECADES SOONER, had they not been worthless cowards. They could also have created films and music for US. But even the "out" gay men aren't creating music or film or TV for us. Why the hell not!?
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I have equally always been indignant at Communists trying to drag our good name thru their mud -- ignoring antihomosexual behavior of Communist countries, including, for instance, an internment camp on Cuba's Isle of Pines. The insistence of some Communists on forcing the Gay Movement to toe the Communist line destroyed GLF and other gay groups, as did constant personality conflicts of, I'm sorry to say, some very petty people. I tried to stay away from that but fell afoul of the unfortunate personality defects of all too many gay men -- in HI!'s case, a con man worked his way into a position of trust, set member against member, then skipped town with our small treasury, leaving the organization not just broke but broken. It never recovered.
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I hope Private Manning is KILLED for massive espionage. It is not for him or any other private individual to decide what should and should not be classified as Secret. I'd be honored to throw the switch to chop his head off by guillotine (so his body might be chopped up for parts for people on transplant waiting lists). He's cute, but that is no excuse for treason and putting people's lives at risk out of ARROGANCE and alienation.
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As for Gay Studies, I am very certain that much of this "scholarship" is shoddy, fraudulent, even knowingly fictitious -- as is a lot of the 'scholarship' in Black Studies. And the notion that somehow we know about the lives of non-famous gay men, centuries past, is pure bull. I am not so arrogant as to pretend to know the unknowable.
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Merle Miller gave my organization, Homosexuals Intransigent!, active encouragement, even tho I never quite managed to meet him. As for Edward Sagarin, he was a professor at City College/CUNY when I was trying to form Homosexuals Intransigent! as a student group there. I had heard the rumor that he was "Donald Webster Cory", so asked if he would serve as our (required) faculty advisor. He refused -- the bastard enemy. Also gay enemies are all those people who insist on using "queer" for gay men -- and esp. for lesbians!, who were NEVER called "queer" even by the heterosexual culture. "Queer" is the EXACT equivalent of "nigger". It cannot be sanitized, but is always ugly, Ugly, UGLY antihomosexual propaganda that asserts in itself the dishonest claims that homosexuality is both rare and bizarre.
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As for early activists consigning themselves to lifelong poverty, there is much to that. I recently found out that my brother regards me as a "failure", because I devoted my early years of college and after college, to trying to change public attitudes and, more importantly, the attitudes of gay men themselves, toward homosexuality. If you don't get a good start on a career early on, you may never catch up. Besides, I had other causes to pursue, even after I shifted much of my attention away from gay rights and self-esteem, leaving my early writings on a website (www.mrgaypride.org or http://mrgaypride.tripod.com) to remain as ongoing advice and activism to this day.
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Lies about 'Chaz'. Media have got to stop calling Chastity Bono a "man", and stop giving publicity to her madness. David Letterman and Jimmy Kimmel both, in recent days, have had that lunatic on their shows and referred to her as "him". They should be corrected, and told that what they are doing is contributing to gender confusion in more people, gender confusion that could also result in their sexual mutilation — and that is a crime against humanity.
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I left the following comment after an online story about Jimmy Kimmel's asking Chastity about a penis transplant (not presently possible, thank goodness).
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I left the following comment after an online story about Jimmy Kimmel's asking Chastity about a penis transplant (not presently possible, thank goodness).
Chastity Bono is a woman, period. She isn't an intersex, chromosomally, but all-woman. Every single cell of her body has the XX chromosomal configuration that makes a person female, and there is no surgical mutilation that can change that. She is an enemy of the WORLD, promoting sexual confusion as a positive good. NO court should be allowed to recognize a woman as a man. No court has any justification for issuing any papers to "recognize" her as a man. Laws must be put in place to ban such craziness, and to forbid "sex-change" surgery on pain of death to the lunatic who asks for it, and to every member of the surgical staff that commits that crime against humanity. We would have executed "Dr." Josef Mengele if we had managed to capture him. We should as well execute every medical practitioner who commits these modern-day atrocities. Media have got to stop lying, and stop participating in the Castration Conspiracy against gay men, and Mutilation Conspiracy against lesbians. Calling a woman a man is an insult, to the woman, to society, to sanity. It's got to stop.Chastity Bono is an evil, evil woman who should be executed for promoting surgical mutilation of gender-confused people.
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Hideous ABC 'Comedy', Happy Endings. ABC is running a truly awful sitcom that includes among the main characters a 'straight-acting' gay man who spends ALL his time with straight people. He goes to their houses (apartments, supposedly in Manhattan) and to straight bars and restaurants with them. He spends NO time with other gay men, tho he refers occasionally to having spent the nite before with another man. How? Where did he meet that other man? When? He spends all his time with straight people.
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He is a token gay person who acts straight and tolerates being surrounded, 24 hours a day, by straight people. He even has a straight roommate. So here we have, again, the ever-popular ploy of dividing gay men in two. It's alrite to be gay as long as that doesn't entail sex between men, and gay men behave like straight people, completely immersing themselves in the straight culture at all times. I say "No thanks" to that, and no thanks to that hideous sit"com", which is rarely to never funny even on its own, deformed terms.
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I have given it a more than fair chance, having watched it several times, tho I have had to turn it off mid-episode at least twice. When, in last nite's episode, the white woman married to (living with?) the black guy throws a bag of straight-from-the-restaurant Chinese food into the trash so she can drag him out on the town, I turned that repulsive show off in a rage for the last time. NO ONE ON EARTH would do such a wastrel, selfish, disgusting thing as throw away perfectly good restaurant food rather than simply put it into the frij, not in this economy, not on a starving planet. That act is a perfect example of the self-absorbed, mindless, banal evil of that loathsome show, and I have no desire whatsoever to have ANY of those people in my house, not in person, not on television. As for the 'gay' character, get a life — a GAY life, not an imitation-straight life.
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He is a token gay person who acts straight and tolerates being surrounded, 24 hours a day, by straight people. He even has a straight roommate. So here we have, again, the ever-popular ploy of dividing gay men in two. It's alrite to be gay as long as that doesn't entail sex between men, and gay men behave like straight people, completely immersing themselves in the straight culture at all times. I say "No thanks" to that, and no thanks to that hideous sit"com", which is rarely to never funny even on its own, deformed terms.
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I have given it a more than fair chance, having watched it several times, tho I have had to turn it off mid-episode at least twice. When, in last nite's episode, the white woman married to (living with?) the black guy throws a bag of straight-from-the-restaurant Chinese food into the trash so she can drag him out on the town, I turned that repulsive show off in a rage for the last time. NO ONE ON EARTH would do such a wastrel, selfish, disgusting thing as throw away perfectly good restaurant food rather than simply put it into the frij, not in this economy, not on a starving planet. That act is a perfect example of the self-absorbed, mindless, banal evil of that loathsome show, and I have no desire whatsoever to have ANY of those people in my house, not in person, not on television. As for the 'gay' character, get a life — a GAY life, not an imitation-straight life.
