Mr. Gay Pride: The Blog

ResurgenceCity@aol.com (L. Craig Schoonmaker) — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 21:56:00 +0000

Disappointed in Dr. Phil. I often try to watch the afternoon, psychologically-oriented television show Dr. Phil, but usually turn off after a few minutes because I'm not interested in the topic. Today, I watched long enuf (my computer was rebooting, so I had some time to 'fill') to see that one of his guests was a woman who took a very long time to accept her lesbian feelings. Also on that show was some woman from a foundation promoting or defending "bisexuality", whereupon I turned the sound down to wait for her to go away. I then watched the end of the show, turning the sound down again when that "bisexual" bullshit artist was shown again, and after it concluded, composed the following message, which I sent via feedback form at DrPhil.com.

There is no such thing as "bisexuality". Sexual orientation is about seeking out a partner with whom one can form a permanent, exclusive, sexual and affectional bond. A given person can have such a relationship with one person of either sex, but not with a person of BOTH sexes, because no one person is of both sexes, which means a "bisexual" would have to have TWO relationships, so could not be fully committed to nor satisfied by one. That is confusion, not orientation.
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It is also, for the most part, COWARDICE, the kind of cowardice your female-broadcaster guest was guilty of, for decades. Even after she stopped "self-medicating" with alcohol, it took her years to deal with her lesbian feelings. (And please, stick to "lesbian", not the preposterous "gay woman". There is no such thing as a "gay woman" any more than there is a "lesbian man". Lesbians have their own word. They should let ours alone.)
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FYI, I am the man who in 1970 put forward the term "Gay Pride" as it is now used (then, as the unifying title for a week of events leading up to the first annual march commemorating the Stonewall Riots): http://mrgaypride.org/AnniversaryIssue.html#origin. I have had decades of experience with maladjusted gay men who lose decades of their lives to shame, guilt, and cowardice, and frankly, I'm tired of it. You see the same crap year after year after decade, you get really disgusted. Gender confusion, self-hatred, inability to commit, inability to show interest in a man, emotional stuntedness — I'm TIRED OF IT.
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I'm also tired of "gay" being now almost uniformly represented in media as LESBIAN. There were NO GAY MEN on your show of December 24th. Why is that? The bulk of people attracted sexually to their own sex are men, but they are still treated by television like lepers, and the public face of "homosexuality" today is female. Perhaps straight society has an easier time dealing with the presumed dominantly emotional rather than sexual relationships of lesbians than with the intensely sexual relationships of gay men, but evading the issue of gay men's sexuality ends up falsifying the issues.
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Your program deals with lots of sex-related behaviors of heterosexuals, but does not ask viewers to confront the fact of male-male sex. So gay men are oppressed by invisibility, on your show in particular as in society in general, and gay boys are as isolated and alone as ever, feeling as freakish as they have ever felt, because they have aggressive sexual feelings and fantasies that, from everything they see around them, almost nobody on EARTH has.
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Perhaps Dr. Phil is himself uncomfortable about dealing with the topic of sexual and emotional attraction between boys when they are teens or men when they are grown. Perhaps he breathes a sigh of relief that both his sons turned out straight, and doesn't want to deal with the normality of sexual attraction between males, so is content to let gay boys ache in loneliness and feelings that there's something wrong with them, so wrong that nobody is willing even to talk about it out loud. Dr. Phil did mention suicide among gay kids, but shows no gay man nor teen boy on his show. Actions speak louder than words, and Dr. Phil's actions say several things to gay teen boys: you really are freakishly rare; there is no place for you on this show, nor in society at large; you don't count for anything, and never will. If these are not messages that Dr. Phil intends to send out via his program, he had better address the issue of sexual feelings for the same sex in boys and men.
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I know Dr. Phil's audience is predominantly female, and that commercial television is driven by advertising directed to women, who still, in this supposedly egalitarian and feminist age, do most of the shopping, for every type of consumer product. So if Dr. Phil sees his show as lite entertainment for women, that's fine. But if he sees his purpose in having a television show as being to HELP people with some of the complexities of the mind and human relationships, he has to step outside his comfort zone and that of his female audience now and then, to deal with topics that need to be addressed. In refusing to talk about sexual/affectional feelings between boys, or between men, Dr. Phil makes what should be understood to be ordinary and commonplace into instead something bizarre and unspeakable. I'd like to think Dr. Phil better than that, but, as I say, actions speak louder than words. Cheers, L. Craig Schoonmaker, Founder, Homosexuals Intransigent!, and webmaster, Mr. Gay Pride website (http://MrGayPride.tripod.com)

ResurgenceCity@aol.com (L. Craig Schoonmaker) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 13:07:00 +0000

Residual Love — and Resentment. Let me share an email I sent in August to someone I had a month earlier reconnected with, after more than 40 years. We met in a (gay) dance bar in Toronto. There was a seating area, and I found an empty spot alongside a cute little guy I hadn't seen before. The song "1-2-3" by Len Barry — which I loved — came on, and I wanted to dance. I was 1 guy who was 23. So (I found out later) was he. I didn't know anyone there, so I looked around, first to my left, and there was this cute little guy right there, so I asked him if he'd like to dance. He said no. I was a little startled, and maybe a little offended, but not much. If somebody doesn't want to dance with you, you ask somebody else (if you're an asker rather than a wait-to-be-asked-er; most of us have been both, but at least at that point, of that nite, I was the asker). I walked around, but did not find anyone else, because the guys inclined to dance had paired off and were already on the dance floor. So I decided to sit down again. There was no open seat but right back where I started, next to the guy who had refused to dance with me. I was adamant that that was not going to stop me from sitting.
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As soon as I sat down, he turned to me and apologized, saying that he had never danced with a man before, and he was shy and embarrassed. He did me the courtesy of telling me that, and I was no longer indignant, nor angry (the "How dare anyone refuse to dance with ME!" thing. We can be very arrogant in youth). We started to talk, comparing notes about where we were from (he: the Acadian (French-speaking) part of the Province of New Brunswick; I, from NYC (I don't know if I mentioned that I was really from NJ before I moved to NYC)) and that kind of thing. He was SO cute! I had thought he might be cute when I asked him to dance, from a quick sideways glance, but when, later, I looked into his pale blue eyes (I have medium-dark brown eyes, as had most of the people I knew), I knew that he was VERY cute. When another song came on that I wanted to dance to, I asked him again, and this time he said yes. We wrapped our arms around each other, during either that song or a later, slow song, and I knew there was something special about him, and about that encounter.
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I don't recall the specifics of how many days I was to be in Toronto (on that occasion) because I have been in Toronto on other occasions, and it was over 40 years ago. But at some point, we wanted to be together sexually, and he said he knew of an area of town that had cheap hotels, one of which we might check into. We found one, and did check in, without luggage. We got undressed and were happy to be together. There was a mirror on the dresser, and I tried to take a picture of us together, but it was dark, and I put the flash on, not realizing that we were so nearly head-on to the mirror that the flash as reflected would obliterate everything. This was The Olden Days when there were no digital cameras, and I didn't have a Polaroid with me, so we didn't know that our one foto together didn't turn out. I didn't find that out until I returned to NY and had the roll of film developed. (Remember film? How quaint!) We had, as I recall, a brass bed to share, and I love brass beds; did before, and especially did that nite. We spent a wonderful nite together, and felt after it that we didn't want to part.
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Geography was not with us. Nor was immigration law. I assuredly was not about to (try to) move to Canada, a both/and - neither/nor country for which I have now and had then no use. He was on his way to Vancouver, "British" Columbia (as stupid a name then as now) from Montreal, where he had lived for a while after leaving NB. But we didn't want to go our separate ways after only the one nite together. So we persuaded ourselves that the enthusiasm we had for each other after that short time together was love, or something so like it that it made no difference, and took each other's address and phone information to keep in touch.
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We actually did keep in touch. I don't know what he was feeling, but I felt I was in love. Maybe he felt that he loved me, or knew that he liked me, and contemplated living with me in golden Manhattan, center of multitudinous dreams, where I would be part of one of those dreams. I didn't know, and didn't ask. At first, I wouldn't have thought of anything but that he wanted to be with me. (I was adorable, did I mention?) Later, I wouldn't want to think that I was merely his means to achieve the end of living a Manhattan/USA dream.
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He put off his trip to western Canada, and remained in Toronto, so he could come down to see me. I remember him visiting me in Manhattan once. He says he visited more than once. What do I know? I didn't keep a diary, so can go only by what I remember. And I remember one disastrous visit.
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For some reason, I didn't have a regular mattress at the time, for having moved recently or something, so was sleeping on a makeshift pad of some devising. When you're 23 and don't have all the comforts of home but do have a place of your own, a mattress as such isn't the indispensable item it is when you're older. But Normand (that's his name, Normand, pronounced naurh.mónn, where RH represents the uvular (gargled) R of French and NN represents nasalization of whatever vowel comes before) had spent 10 hours or so on a bus to get to NY from Toronto, and insisted he needed a comfortable bed to recover in. My friend Paul R. (name withheld to protect the guilty) offered to let Normand stay with him 8 blocks up. That seemed a sensible solution to me, so Normand spent his first nite in NY at Paul's place. Only later did I discover that Paul, my friend, my buddy, my one-time sex partner, had made a move on Normand that Normand had accepted. So while I was sleeping alone, without my lover, my "lover" was playing around with my friend. I know that this is a very old story, but it wasn't for me at the time.
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The following nite, I had a party in my apartment for over a hundred friends, and friends of friends, and while I was trying to be the good host, Normand was playing around in my bathroom with several guys. His excuse later was that he had had very little sexual experience with men, and when so many offered themselves to him, he just couldn't resist. Had we been only friends, that would have been fine, and I'd have been glad that I had secured for him a number of guys to play around with. But he was NOT just my friend. He was supposed to be, I thought, my lover. And he shouldn't have been playing around with anyone but me. So we broke up. He went back to Toronto, then resumed his trip out west to Vancouver. I returned to thinking of myself as uninvolved, and resumed a life alone except for when I actually went out of my apartment to hunt for sex and find the men I could find, some of whom were very nice men, with whom, however, I never clicked as I did with Normand.
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On January 6th, 2009, out of the blue, I got an email from Normand to my MrGayPride email address (which is mainly for publications of the organization Homosexuals Intransigent!), asking "HOW DO GET IN TOUCH WITH LEE G SCHOONMAKER I MET MANY YEARS AGO", and giving his full name. I of course recognized him instantly, and emailed back to tell him he had found me.
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He was planning a visit back East to friends and, mainly, relatives, in Eastern Canada, and wondered if we might get together while he was in this general vicinity. After some back-and-forth and change of plans regarding whether he would come down to the NYC/Newark area or I would go up to Montreal, we agreed that since he had a lot of traveling to do from Montreal to the Province of New Brunswick and back to Montreal before he flew back to Vancouver, it would make best sense if I could meet him in Montreal. His sister, in whose apartment he would be staying for a couple of weeks, would herself be with relatives in NB during part of that time, so if I came up then, I could stay free at her place in Montreal, where Normand would also be staying (in a separate room). So we arranged that, I decided to drive to Montreal so I could see things along the way going and returning, and Normand and I would have a car with which to run hither and yon without waiting for public transportation, nor trying to figure out the best way to go, then waiting at each stage of a multi-leg trip.
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I arrived at his sister's place around 9pm on a Friday nite and left on Sunday a little before noon.
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We were both much changed, but recognizable. Over 40 years had altered us externally. How much of the us of 40 years earlier remained? I can speak only to what I felt, which is that Normand and I were not strangers. I felt at ease with him as we planned what to do on each of our two days together.
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Yes, we had communicated by email a number of times before meeting again, but I didn't react to seeing him as I might have to someone I had 'met' via email. I reacted to the Normand I remembered, from seeing and being with him in person, intimately, sexually, and emotionally. I remembered his body (then: slender; not slender now; same as mine, then and now). I remembered his voice. I remembered his sweetness and (relative) innocence. I felt older, but in fact he is about half a year older than I. That's pretty darned close for guys who meet in the unorganized, haphazard, everybody-together-in-the-same-bar situation we met in.
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We parted amicably this July, and I stopped in Saratoga Springs, NY, on my way home. I knew he was going to be traveling in eastern Canada for a couple of weeks after we had parted, so didn't attempt to contact him. (I have also traveled in his ancestral area, but years before.) Once I got an email from him that indicated that he had returned to Vancouver, I told him by email what I had felt on my return from Montreal. He has never replied, but it doesn't matter. Sometimes you need to express your feelings and not hold back because of concern that you might lose whatever you have in the way of a relationship. But Normand and I in 2009 had almost no relationship to lose. He was back on one side of the (North) American continent; I was on the other. We had no meaningful, ongoing relationship. It was time to be frank.
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If you read my email to Normand, below, consider what it arose from: that is, what I remembered 40 years later — and resented 40 years later. Human beings like to think that they are the only animal that benefits from the experience of earlier individuals of its species — that is, that learns from one generation to the next the mistakes not to make, the wisdom that one individual's experience can, by process of generalization, convey to others. Thus do I commend to you my words to Normand, below.

As I was driving home from Montreal, the old song "Still the Same" (1978) pushed into my consciousness — and not from the radio, because I wasn't listening to the radio most of the way (and there was only one station for over 100 miles, a religious broadcaster). The song "Still the Same" stayed in my head for HOURS. Once I got home, I looked for the lyrics on the Internet, and found not just the lyrics but also the original recording that I remembered. Its reference to gambling fitted very well, to my mind, into our two days together. Does anything from that song fit, to your mind?
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(By the way, this is, as you might realize from the scrollbar alongside this message, a long missive. If you don't have time to deal with a long email right now, please put off reading the rest till sometime more convenient.)
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You mentioned at one point that we sounded like an old married couple (squabbling, but not bitter nor viciously). I felt, as one only rarely does when meeting up again with people you haven't seen in decades, that we still had some kind of connection, however tenuous. You were not, it seemed to me, a stranger. So much had changed, but your eyes are still as pale-blue now as they ever were. People you have known for a long time but been nearby thru all that time are not the judge of whether you have changed. People who haven't seen you in a very long time are better at that, but then we get into the issue of distorted or lost memories. You and I have both assuredly changed greatly, outside. How much, however, have we changed inside?
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I felt that if we lived in the same city we might talk occasionally but might not be really close. (Did you ever go to see that friend in Montreal whom you found a little tedious?) After all, you did go off to Vancouver knowing my address in NYC but never tried to contact me there. I did NOT know your address in Vancouver, and I THOUGHT I had tried to look you up in the phone book during my couple of days in Vancouver in about 1990. You said you were listed, but then thought that maybe you weren't listed under your own name. In any case, I'm glad we got together this year.
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You have always been very special to me, and a disappointment to me, because I felt that I really loved you, and was disappointed when you played around with Paul R., something I did not expressly mention nor even make direct reference to in Montreal. (We won't talk about your behavior with other men in my bathroom during a party I had when you were visiting.) In that I had also slept with Paul (and I don't know if he's even still alive now; probably/possibly not, since he was much older than we were; and he and I ceased to be friends after that little incident, so I was never tempted to look him up), I knew what likely transpired between the two of you. Masturbatory sex with another guy is still infidelity, and tho I can be philosophical about it now, it stung at the time.
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In any case, pls listen to the song. You may not have anything like my reaction (it made me cry the first time I had something to drink[ ,] rum and cola once home, listening to it online). The premise isn't necessarily sad. You (Normand, not just some generic person) ARE still the same, in key regards. Maybe I am too. Indeed, I probably AM much the same. How, after all, is one to improve upon perfection? (Not serious.) Or imperfection. How, indeed, does anyone ever change or improve? And why, under what impetus, does one even try?
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(By the way, the main reason I did not stay near when you were speaking to the guy at the bar to whom you introduced me is that I could not hear any conversation at that distance, with music blasting. I have very great difficulty separating sounds, near from far, in-person vs. recorded. And I thought your friend probably spoke French and, as you know, I can only READ French, poorly. I certainly did not want to seem rude to him, or you, but it is hard enuf for me to converse in English in a unilingual noisy bar.)
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"Some things never change", as the song says. You found other men who wanted to be connected to you for months or years. I didn't. A few multiple, sexual repeats over the course of a few months, but nothing like a relationship.
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We were both cute, then, weren't we? I had crooked teeth, top-front, but we both had hair, then. We were adorable, separately, and were probably sickeningly adorable together, to other people. I'm very glad you had years of happiness with those other guys, and I'm very sad that one of them may die soon, much before his time, even tho you are no longer intimately connected. I'm sad for you, sad for him. I'm always sad when a good gay man dies.
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That's the only good thing about never having been involved in a long-term love relationship: you aren't traumatized to the point of barely surviving when someone dies. It's not much, but it does save terrible, terrible hurt.
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I'm very glad you said "keep in touch", whether you meant it or not. I know that I can be grating. One of my aunts (my (late) mother's (late) older sister — how do you indicate in French that someone you are referring to has died?), whom I never met but spoke with by phone a few times (unfortunately when I had been drinking, which is the only time I was inclined to call her) told me I came off as "abrasive", even tho I was talking to her in what I thought was a pleasant manner. Her son, Pete(r), my first cousin, is gay, and we met when I was in the San Francisco area (he lives in Marin County, north across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Fran). We met once, and he also apparently found me abrasive. Can't be helped. I am what I am. Some people will mesh with any personality; others will be alienated by the very same personality that others find [ ]intolerable.
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I have been drafting this message not in my email server (AOL) but in my word processor (WordPerfect) for fear of losing it if my connection to AOL should fail. When I went to store the draft before I was finished, I found that I had already opened a subdirectory ("folder") on my computer under the directory "Family & Friends" for "Normand ". I create subdirectories only when I expect to have a lot of things to store to it. But I certainly do not want to impose upon you an obligation to reply to emails you'd rather not get from me.
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No one really knows how he is either perceived or received by other people, because sometimes people are too polite to be blunt, and other times, people play games. Sometimes they are coy to people they do want to hear from. Other times, they lead on people they don't really want to hear from, to make them think they like them, just to gain their confidence, for whatever (nefarious) purpose. Sometimes an outsider can see no advantage to one person's leading another on, but what outsiders see is not the issue. A person can play games with other people's heads (that's a very 1960s-sounding phrase, but how else would one express the same concept?) for reasons that are not at all clear to other people. They may seem to have nothing to gain from it, but they do it anyway.
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I hesitated to push you to read this long message. But we're on opposite sides of a great continent, so what do I have to lose in offering to you info you may actually want to see? If you aren't interested in what I'm saying, that's fine. I have an audience for my thoughts in other forums, including two blogs, one political and one specific to Newark. [At that point, I was not updating this third blog, about gay issues. Now I am, but only occasionally.]
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I am involved in a very small group trying to organize a 50th-year reunion of my high-school graduating class (of 1962). Once we leave school, we tend to lose connections to people our own age, but are thrown into the chaos of general society. The problem with that is that we may lose the benefit of talking to people who are going thru the same thing we are, at the same time. We in the organizing 'committee' (not yet called that, however) of my impending high-school reunion want this reunion to be more thoughtful than prior reunions have been. They were dinner-dances, on one evening, with music so loud that it was hard or impossible to talk. We didn't communicate for any significant amount of time, about anything significant in our lives, even tho many of us were going thru exactly the same kinds of things at exactly the same time.
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You and I are within about six months in age. If there's something you are thinking about, a lot, that you can't talk to anyone you are now close to, maybe I can serve as sounding-board and adviser. I'm a pretty smart feller (that is an oblique reference to a 'confused' comedic reference to "fart smeller"), so you could do worse than confide in me thoughts about, for instance, an elderly parent, thoughts of one's own mortality, or a loss of physical or mental acuity (for instance, tonite I actually went thru a red lite — first time I ever noticed this particular problem — because I saw a green left-turn arrow as a green lite to go straight ahead. That could have been very serious, if not from the point of view of causing an accident, then in terms of getting an expensive traffic ticket; fortunately, no cop saw my mistake. But I did, and an indignant (black) female driver shouted at me for being "stupid". She was not out of line, tho I might prefer "insufficiently attentive and discerning". My reflexes are still very fast, and not just for my age (because I am ordinarily faster at a green lite than almost everybody else at the same lite). It's a brain-function thing, and I have been blessed/cursed with an unusually good brain and thus a high and fast brain response. But I wasn't, somehow, expecting a green left-arrow (even tho I had been at that same intersection a number of times), but only a green lite, indicating that it was alrite to go in any direction, and as soon as my mind took in the green lite, I stepped on the accelerator pedal. It could have been disastrous, and it never would have happened 20 years ago, or even 5 years ago.
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I had hoped to hear from you since I left Montreal, and did not know (or is it only "remember"?, if you told me) how long you would be in the East before returning home to Vancouver. I will not abuse the polite "keep in touch" clause in your latest email, but I did want to convey to you, tonite, some things that struck me as important. You might also like not just the "Still the Same" webpage but also some of the many songs linked to in the table at the bottom of that webpage.
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I have always known that part of me still loved you, and always been sad that your behavior and the attitudes of our respective governments kept us from forming a long-term relationship. Seeing you again confirmed that there is, from my point of view, something special about you, whether you feel the same about me or not. The ravages of time have made plain, if ever I was confused on this matter, that my feelings for you are emotional rather than physical. I don't know if every one of the men you had relationships of consequence with has told you that no matter what has happened, part of them will always love you. Maybe they have all made plain to you that that is the way they feel. Whether I am the only one or am just one of a group of ex-lovers who feel this, I want you to know, and always to be secure in this, that I really did love you, then, and still do love you, in a residual, fond, way now. I even dare think, in that you did finally contact me after these many years, that part of you will always love me too. You can correct that, if it is a misimpression. Truth trumps kindness, always. You contacted me for your own reasons, not necessarily including some kind of residual love. If it was only curiosity, I can deal with that. But it doesn't matter what you felt for me before you contacted me, and it doesn't matter what you felt when we were together in Montreal, or what you felt immediately after I left, or feel now. (A (black) woman friend of mine wondered to me in email how I could have stayed beyond my welcome if I was in Montreal for only two days. I didn't say that when you haven't seen someone in 40+ years, you dare not assume that three days wouldn't be too much.)
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You have always been special to me, before we reconnected, during our brief time together in Montreal, and after. I want you to feel free to feel special. Meeting you was very special to me. Connecting with you was very special. Sleeping with you was very special. It wasn't that it was my first time, because it WASN'T my first time. But it was special.
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When I looked into your eyes this year in Montreal, and heard your (silly) accent (really, now, you've had 40 years to lose your accent, but you have chosen to maintain it), everything came together. We were 23 years old again. Young, beautiful. And in love. Oh, yes, of course I knew, as you knew, that we lived hundreds of miles apart, and there was very little chance that we would spend the rest of our lives together. But you were so hot,so adorable, that it didn't matter. I wanted you, I got you, I adored you (a matter of sexual and affectional enthusiasm), I loved you, and when we kissed and hugged, I felt loved. It doesn't matter whether I was deluded, and you were just going thru the motions. I FELT that you loved me, and I felt honored and privileged. I would not, of course, have held back even if I didn't feel that. I held you, and hugged you, and kissed you -- and the rest -- because I felt it, and wanted you to feel it too. I feel lucky that we got together, all those years ago, even tho we couldn't manage, for all the obstacles, to stay together. And even if this email so embarrasses you because you don't know how to respond, especially if you never felt for me the intense emotions I did for you, I will never regret sending it to you. I don't want to sleep with you now, but I am very glad I did when we were young. Cheers.

Normand has not replied to my message, but I anticipated that that might happen. My words might nonetheless be of value to other people. There are things you forget, and things you never forget. Be kind to each other is always good advice, but there is a sharper message in warning people away from being unkind. Kindness and unkindness can both shape one's view of the world, so be careful how you deal each out. Sometimes you need to be hurtful to make a point that cannot be made any other way. That's the message of the 1979 song "Cruel to Be Kind". The other side of what happens when one is blunt is expressed in the 1968 song "Easy to be Hard" from the musical Hair, which is perhaps best known from the version recorded by the American band Three Dog Night. Normand thought about coming down from Montreal to the New York/Newark area while he was back East, knowing that a revival of Hair was running on Broadway. As it happened, however, he had so much traveling to do by bus to get to New Brunswick and back to Montreal that he begged off on venturing to my area, whereupon I offered to drive to Montreal, which I ended up doing.
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Far too often we edit or censor ourselves to avoid saying things that might embarrass others or ourselves. That can be considerate. Or it can be cowardly. It can spare other people's feelings, and save us embarrassment. But it can also leave so much unsaid that should be said that we end up concealing our feelings and not letting other people who might be important to us, know that they are important to us. Yes, sometimes it will embarrass another person to let him or her know that they are important to you. Other times it may be liberating, either in allowing them to express similar feelings or in letting them express feelings of their own about which they cannot know what reception they would find. There may well be some things that are better left unsaid. But how many they are, and which they might be, are two very difficult questions.
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You have to listen carefully, either to what someone else says, or avoids saying; or to your own heart, and what you need to say. If you HAVE listened, but haven't heard "No", and if what you need to say is more important than any embarrassment you might feel if you completely misunderstood someone else's behavior, then SAY IT. I did. Normand is 2,431 miles from me. He is not about to knock on my door to complain that I embarrassed him. What I said may not do him the slitest bit of good, but it has done me a world of good. Maybe you have someone you need to confront/tell something to. Do it. If you can't do it face-to-face, do it by mail, email, text message, voicemail, or suchever method that you get off your chest things that have been bothering you. If you record it in some permanent form, that allows you to review from time to time exactly what it is you said, so much the better.
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If you think my message above is a bit TOO direct, you should see the letter I sent my father to tell him I am gay. Hm. Now, where is that full text? I guess I should put that up on the Internet for young gay guys today to be able to point their own father to. It's a doozy.

ResurgenceCity@aol.com (L. Craig Schoonmaker) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:20:00 +0000

Note: I have not been keeping this blog going, in favor of writing in my two other blogs, one about political matters and the other a fotoblog about Newark, NJ. Recently, however, some things have drawn my attention again, so I will be updating this more like regularly.

Extended Conversation

An oldline gay activist, Billy Glover, sometimes sends out email messages to other long-time activists, who sometimes then reply, back and forth. Here is one such recent exchange, starting last Friday, October 16th with a message from Billy titled "What the homosexual community/movement really needs is not a 'leader'". Further steps in the conversation follow, in chronological order, oldest to newest.

Once again we hear voices, after the recent March on Washington, saying that the glbt community/movement needs a "leader." This seems to me to indicate a total lack of understanding of how this movement has been so successful in going from a single closeted organization in 1950, and a single lgbt publication in 1952 to the thousands of organizations and hundreds of publications and resources that we have today. The only question we should be asking ourselves is why there are so many glbt people who are unaware of just what this community and movement does have. There is lack of communication among the various elements.

It must be said that anti-gay bigots seem to know more about what is going on in this movement than we do. It is doubtful that many of us have actually thought about all the resources we have. I urge everyone to take a look at Gayellow Pages, the print verison or online version (gypages@gmail.com). Each group or publication is so busy trying to do the job it chose to do that they do not know what others are doing. It may be good that today we can have specialized resources, much as medicine now has "specialties," but we then face the same problem medicine is facing, a lack of general physicians, since everyone wants to "specialize" and have more influence.

But the reason we have been so wildly successful is that mostly we have all worked for the main purpose of gaining our civil/equal rights. Only in the last decade have we started specializing in having organizations for each of the areas, thus we have Lambda Legal and National Center for Lesbian Rights, GLAD, etc (as well as the ACLU) to work on legal issues. We have organizations for religious work, such as Dignity, Affirmation (Methodist and Mormon), Kinship (Seventh Day Adventist), etc. We have an organization working for youth, GLSEN, and there are groups for each profession; medicine, anthropology, law, journlism, etc.

And while most of our lgbt newspapers and magazine try to give coverage to all of our areas and groups, they don't always seem to do a good job. It seems that many editors and journalists think that we want to know more about the latest celebrity to come "out" than we do about what activities are going on in our community. How often do papers cover our libraries/archives? Do we know of the glbt book clubs? and the travel articles seem to think we would not want to know where the local gay center is in major cities, but only want to know where the closest bar and bathhouse or cafe is. We don't need a lgbt guide to tell us where a local museum is, general guides do that.

And too often when an issue is in discussion, a "specialized" group says they are not interested in it but only in their little domain-as if a religious organization has no interest in gay bars being attacked by police, or a legal organization has no interest in films that are pro or con.

There are a few efforts to get us informed on coverage of glbt issues. Daily Queer News (dailyqueernews@yahoo.com) tries to give us links to what is in the news that we should be aware of. For entertainment news there is Coming Out Support Weekly (onqyb@aol.com). There are others. But if we don't know about these resources they can not help build communication and cooperation within our movement. And thus the hundreds of good leaders working in various organizations, local and national, will not be able to support each other.

Celebrate our diversity. There is no competition among us except to se what we can all do to educate ourselves and the public on the truth about homosexuality. There is no reason to oppose a "march' or say we must only work on a federal/national level or that we must attack an organization that has chosen to work on only one aspect.

We must practice what we preach. We have to acknowledge that there are really gay Republicans as well as Democrats. That some of us are members of PLAGAL and are pro-life, while many of us are pro-choice. There are those who are allies and work with PFLAG, many of whom have lgbt children. And there is COLAGE, for children who have glbt parents.

There is no reason those who fear the lies of the religions can not work with those who choose to stay in the religious community and try to bring about better understanding and change.

We can be proud, of each generation that has added to our work, from the founders of Mattachine, ONE/HIC and DOB in the 1950s to those at Stonewall, and those who did the various "marches" and those who join us each day. THOSE WHO MARCHED Sunday will someday be pioneers. We are all pioneers, and we must have done something right, we are slowly but surely changing the world.

I replied.

You're certainly right about lack of communication. I didn't know anything about a march on Washington until I caught the end of a brief news story on TV. Yet, I have a website that has been up for years, and has an email address plainly shown and clickable!
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However, we have NOT been "wildly successful". "Don't ask-don't tell" is still in place, as is the Defense of Marriage Act. NJ still, despite a pledge from Governor Corzine to sign a bill after the 2008 election, does not have same-sex marriage — and his opponent in the current gubernatorial election has pledged to veto any such measure if it comes to his desk — even as NH, a much more conservative state overall, does have same-sex marriage. 45 states do not permit same-sex marriage at all. There are gay-bashings even in liberal places, such as a well-publicized case in NYC last week. But apart from the legalities and bigotries of straight people, gay men are still isolated, gender-confused, unloved, unloving, and self-rejecting for much of their lives.
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You are also wrong about religious organizations arising only in the last decade. The Episcopalian group Dignity, a Presbyterian group, and others, have existed for at least 35 years. And a Catholic group also called Dignity claims an origin in 1969!
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Anything that uses the word "queer" is the ENEMY, and you must not recommend it, nor tell gay men that they have an obligation to see themselves as grotesque.
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It is NOT POSSIBLE for gay men to work constructively with lesbians if to do so requires men to identify as women and take on women's issues — such as militant condemnation of pornography — that are diametrically opposed to what gay men want, sexual freedom. And it is NOT POSSIBLE to work constructively with gender-confused loons if to do so requires well-adjusted gay men to "accept" the "legitimacy" of their confusions, and identify with gender confusion and even PROMOTE it, as those loons do. Any engagement of well-adjusted gay men with gender-confused people should be to try to UNCONFUSE them and give them back their manhood.
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So I'm not sure what the purpose of your email is. There is no unified information source because each group has its own agenda, and most are anti-gay, in the sense of being hostile to gay men as MEN, and promoting self-hatred and confusion by promoting a "community" that does not exist, membership in which requires each real community to give up some of its own identity and take on the incompatible identity of the others. Confused losers who really do see themselves as "queer" — grotesque, bizarre, extremely rare and deformed — cannot teach anyone anything.

Billy responded:

It may not be easy, and young people sure have no idea of how it was, BUT I can testify that my life is much easier today than it was in the 50s when I grew up and the 60s on when I got involved in this civil rights movement. There is a scale, let's say, from 0 to 100 and I can tell you that I believe we are 60-% there, from 1950 which was 0.

That prompted an email from someone I don't know.

I understand Craig's points, but I think some of them seem cranky — except for the "Cheers" signoff, which I like. I agree with you, Billy, that we're at least at 60% if not a bit further. I also agree that there's too little awareness by the gay man on the street of the extent of the gay "community," even as the word "community" itself has become something of an unthinking cliché in his mouth.

Craig is right that the growth of specialized groups, including religious ones, began much longer ago than 10 years--though the Episcopal group is called Integrity, not Dignity. [Oops. I couldn't keep the -ity's 'straight' in my memory after decades.]

I think Craig is a little behind the times when lamenting feminist anti-pornography crusades. Their day is largely past, and many feminists today take a much more enlightened, sex-positive view of such matters — even though, of course, to the extent that the pornography industry actually does exploit women, they still decry it. I think, by and large, it's quite possible to work with feminists, even though too many of them take one look at a white male face and assume the worst. I also think that, even though most states don't allow same-sex marriage, the day when many more of them do is coming fast. I just got back from a nephew's heterosexual wedding in Dubuque, where even though it's in a notably conservative part of a rather conservative state (which paradoxically allows same-sex marriage), and even though part of my family is bigoted and religiously backward, other parts have been surprisingly accepting of me and my partner of 30 years.

Cheers--

Bill Kelley, Chicago

I replied first to Billy.

You are more easily satisfied than I. Even if one were to concede a 60%-of-the-way progress mark, I don't regard that as a great leap forward for 60 YEARS. 1% a year?

Then I responded to Kelley:

Feminists demand that gay allies endorse all (lesbian-)feminist demands, including abortion-on-demand, even if that means that women kill boy babies and if a test is developed that detects a "gay gene", women then selectively kill gay babies. Allying with people other than gay men imposes upon gay men an insistence that they compromise away their principles and identity. No thanks.

Kelley followed up.

Does this mean you favor abortion rights as long as there's no targeting of male or gay fetuses?

Or are you just against abortion rights generally?

Either way, there are feminists who will ally with people who support some feminist goals (for instance, an end to sexual stereotyping, or equal pay for equal work) even if they don't support other feminist goals (for instance, abortion rights).

I clarified:

There's no such thing as a right to kill a baby, whether that baby be "yours" or someone else's. No child's life depends upon his/her parents "wanting" them. That gay men, many of whom suffer child-hunger at some point in life, should feel themselves compelled to back abortion-on-demand, even of gay baby boys, as part of the crazy bargain to seek larger numbers for political purposes, is tragic and insanely contemptible. The im/morality of abortion becomes plain when one does a very quick check. Offer a compromise where black babies could be aborted on demand but not white babies. Would blacks regard that as being granted superior rights or as being an attack upon blacks? For gay men to be told that women have the right to kill their child, and gay men have to support that "right", is to say that the powerful have the right to kill the weak, which is a very dangerous stance for gay men — and lesbians — to take.

Wayne Dynes joined in, addressing the hazards of allying with feminist women.

I agree with Bill K. that we can, in principle, ally with other groups working for social change on an issue-for-issue basis. However, it takes two to tango. All too often the groups we seek to woo either ignore us or ask that we sign on he dotted line for all of their causes — that is, be auxiliaries.

Abortion is a good example of such a nonnegotiable demand. My own position, for what it is worth, is that under certain circumstances abortion is justified in the first trimester. Not after that, because one is clearly dealing with a human being. Both sides of course demand absolute obedience: either abortion a gogo, or never at all.

At a recent meeting commemorating GLF John Lauritsen recounted his experience in 1969 of being in a delegation to the local NYC branch of the Black Panthers to bring them some money. They reluctantly agreed to take the "faggot donation." Lauritsen rightly called them out on this. During the seventies I remember trying to work with lesbian feminists. All I got from this was a reputation for being a misogynist, which I am not.

In 1993 a leftist-feminist cabal brought down my Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, which has been out of print ever since. I understand that feminists have moderated. As a result of my experiences, however, I want no part of them.

I followed up.

MANY organizations were destroyed by lesbians, deliberately by malice, happenstantially by driving away men who wanted a place where they could be comfortable with men. Of course, there are many ways organizations are destroyed. The group I founded at City College in April 1969, Homosexuals Intransigent!, was destroyed by a pathological liar and thief who worked his way into a position of power, divided the membership, stole the small treasury (about $107, a bit more meaningful in 1972 but not a huge amount), and skipped town, leaving the group too shattered to recover. Another small group I founded, Homosexuals In Mensa, was destroyed when National Mensa said it would recognize only one National Special Interest Group around the issue of homosexuality, and pitted us against a West Coast group that permitted women and straights. My guys didn't want to fite, so I abandoned the group — and left Mensa. The West Coast group didn't do much, but since I left Mensa, I have no idea whether it is still going. (The founder, by the way, died young, of a brain tumor or something.)
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The fact that too few people seem [to] understand (tho they actually must) is that gay men are, for the most part — and especially young gay men, and boys in advance of adulthood — "damaged goods", severely maladjusted to their own nature by being pushed and pulled from birth to be something they are not. Too little recognition of their weak ego and insecure, frail identity is given by organizations that misconceive the purpose of The Movement to be gaining political power and political change. It doesn't matter if the laws change and even some social attitudes change if a person has been wrecked by years of trying to live up to expectations. Those expectations and assumptions will long survive any change in law.
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This is why my focus has always been on what I proposed for the weekend around the first march commemorating Stonewall: Gay Pride, not Gay Power. Because you can have pride without power, and power without either pride or happiness.
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I had an email exchange on this topic with a leading Liberal activist here in Newark, who had forwarded to me notice of an "LGBT" event (note, of course, that L is always first; gay men are second-class citizens in their own Movement) for possible inclusion in my well-regarded Newark fotoblog, "Newark USA": >>We are exactly a week away from Newark Pride Alliance's fundraiser: A Toast to Newark's Future: In Support of the Safe Spaces Initiative to be held on October 13th. All funds from the event will be used to support an after school program for LGBT youth, co-developed by The Hetrick-Martin Institute and Newark Pride Alliance.<<
I replied: >>I WHOLLY disapprove of compelling gay boys to identify as lesbians and gender-confused loons. In no way will I advance the corralling of gay boys in a demi-monde where their identity will be confused and they will be forced to regard themselves as freaks.<<
He then said: >>As a heterosexual I guess that I do not have a full understanding of all LGTB issues. It is my understanding the LGTB pride movement is akin to the freedom/civil rights movement.<<
To which I replied: >>NO, the comparison to a political movement in which the more people you can get, the better, is at best misleading. Even in political movements you have to be careful about whom you associate with, as the William Ayers tempest-in-a-teapot showed. In any political coalition there is risk of contamination of a movement by affiliation with an ideology that is inconsistent with or even antithetical to the base purpose of that coalition. And members of a political group from different ideologies can strive for primacy, and produce the splintering of the group. That would be bad enuf.
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But the other side of the movements among gay men, lesbians, and people who are tragically confused about what they are, is a support group, in which people find others like themselves, when they thought they were alone, and can share and get reinforcement, not subversion. When a troubled kid is thrown in with people who are completely UNlike him and told that they are in fact COMPLETELY like him and he has an obligation to identify with them, disaster can ensue. Kids who know they are NOT like, for instance, gender-confused losers who dress in drag and want their genitals chopped off and a slit sliced into their crotch, may have the good sense to leave that group before too much harm is done. Kids who do NOT know what they are or want may be drawn into a nitemare world of confusion that could cause them to have themselves castrated. This is a very serious matter, and a firm gender identity is the sine qua non to happy personal adjustment, and without a happy adjustment to their own reality, political power is worthless. Of what value is it to gain the right to marry if nobody wants to get married and you can't find anybody to marry because you don't know what gender you are and the people you encounter are as confused as you? There is no such thing as an "LGBT..." community, but there is such a movement, and that movement is the enemy of gay men.<<

That is how the conversation ended — pr at ;east stands as of late Monday.

ResurgenceCity@aol.com (L. Craig Schoonmaker) — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 07:59:00 +0000

Equality for Us, Not You. Amid all the celebrating over the election of a (half-)black man as President, only a relative few people realized that on Election Day 2008, bigotry won three big triumphs. Existing same-sex marriage was undone by the yahoos of California, and banned by other yahoos in Arizona and Florida. That would be bad enuf. Worse, blacks and Hispanics — no: niggers and spics; if they can be bigoted against us, we can retaliate in kind — joined in the bigotry, voting in large majorities to take away from gay and lesbian Californians, rights that they assert for themselves, and to keep people in Arizona and Florida from ever having equal rights. This is not, for gay men, "the land of the free and the home of the brave".
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So bigoted, at essence, is this country that you couldn't even hear that story until the second half hour of extended broadcasts of the network evening news on Wednesday, not even Tuesday nite. It did not even make it into the standard half-hour nitely newscast, because antihomosexual bigotry is of no importance to the straight people who control media, as they control government.
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Obama and Biden helped take away gay men's and lesbians' rights in California, and to keep them second-class citizens in Arizona and Florida, in forthrightly standing against same-sex "marriage". So how are we supposed to rejoice in their victory? They are a tad less bigoted than the Radical Right, but still bigoted. Their election is not a big advance for human rights. Where was their bravery, to stand against bigotry in this "land of the free and the home of the brave"? What do they care about our rights? They've got theirs. Our not having ours is not their problem.
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So much for brave words like "Freedom is indivisible", something we used to say in the Sixties. Who coined that expression? Here's a longer quote. You should be able to guess the speaker before you get to the end:

Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free. When all are free, then we can look forward to that day when this city will be joined as one and this country and this great Continent of Europe in a peaceful and hopeful globe. When that day finally comes, as it will, the people of West Berlin can take sober satisfaction in the fact that they were in the front lines for almost two decades.

All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words "Ich bin ein Berliner."
— Speech in Berlin (26 June 1963)

It would seem that Barack Obama is the poor man's JFK, not a "new, improved" version. He might nonetheless meet the same fate, as the alienated white people who voted 57% against him decide to "take back this country". They may have lost it by the ballot, but feel they can take it back by bullet. Should that happen, do not be surprised if gay men do not join in the wailing and moaning over the death of a man who wanted equality for black people but opposed it for gay people.

ResurgenceCity@aol.com (L. Craig Schoonmaker) — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 06:06:00 +0000

Logo's Militant Antimale Propaganda. Most people may not be aware of it, but there is now supposed to be a "gay" cable channel, called Logo. Unfortunately, Logo is, quite the contrary of what you might expect, viciously anti homosexual. Gay men are marginal to Logo's concerns. Most of its schedule is given over to women and "transsexuals", and the bulk of its programming about gay men shows them (well, us) as diseased and dying, or as murderers. Yes, you read right: murderers.
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While channel-surfing at 3:30 this morning, I checked Logo, and, once again, it is showing Swoon, a 1992 movie about the Leopold and Loeb case, in which two demented Jewish faggots in 1924 Chicago abducted and killed a little boy just to see how it felt. Oh, that's very gay, and gives us such a warm feeling about ourselves, doesn't it?
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Another Logo offering about gay men is a lovely little 1997 film called The Delta, which ends with a gay Vietnamese man in Mississippi luring a gay black man to a boat, then strangling him to death! Isn't that charming?
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Again and again, Logo shows gay men as peripheral to the "gay" (meaning "lesbian") world, dying from AIDS, and killing people. How on Earth did this happen?
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The 'people' responsible for Logo need to be beaten, preferably to death, or at the very, very least, sued for hundreds of millions of dollars for group slander against gay men. The picture of gay men on Logo is unrelentingly negative: we are supposedly confused about gender, shot thru with disease that kills us (rightfully, it would seem from Logo's endless focus on AIDS as "gay plague"), and filled with homicidal rage toward each other — not homosexual lust.
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I have tried to watch Logo, on average, twice a day every day since it started operations on June 30, 2005, but have had to turn it off in disgust, or rage, essentially every time, within at most 5 minutes. Typically, the first thing you see and/or hear when you tune to Logo is a woman. If there's not a woman onscreen that moment, there will be within three minutes. Never are men alone with men on Logo for more than five minutes. The commercials are essentially all straight. And Logo even shows HETEROSEXUAL commercials for "male enhancement", not just victimizing but also attacking gay men in trying to defraud them.
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Logo has ONE program for gay men on its entire schedule, Noah's Arc, which is all-black. White gay men have no place on Logo, even tho we are the bulk of the community.
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Queer as Folk, Showtime's odious Canadian "lesbigay" drama, takes up much of the time that is supposed to be devoted to programming for gay men, but it is heavily lesbian and heterosexual. Men's relationships with men are completely subordinated to the various heterosexual or lesbian plotlines, and, again, the longest that men are shown alone with men is approximately three minutes. Ever. The men (several, including the most central character, played by straight actors) are shown involved in various combinations of self-destructive behaviors, from smoking to using hard drugs: to quote Wikipedia, "(cocaine, methamphetamine, ecstasy, GHB, ketamine, cannabis)". But the AIDS developed by the drug-soaked "fast lane" homosexuals who used most of those drugs, in combination!, had nothing to do with the chemicals in drugs but only with sex. (Of course it did.) Some of the characters are effeminate. Some are airheads, even prostitutes (hustlers). Ah, so accurate a portrayal of our lives and loves.
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Not surprisingly, Wikipedia says:

The American version of Queer as Folk quickly became the number one show on the Showtime roster. The network's initial marketing of the show was primarily targeted at gay male (and to some extent, lesbian) audiences, yet a sizeable segment of the viewership turned out to be heterosexual women.

Certainly Queer as Folk is unfit for gay men's eyes and ears. It is horrible, horrible, antigay garbage that should be destroyed in every copy.
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Logo is a project of Viacom, one of the world's largest media companies, which, according to Wikipedia, comprises:

Film Production and Distribution: Viacom International, Paramount Pictures, DreamWorks, Republic Pictures, MTV Films, Nickelodeon Movies, Go Fish Pictures
Television Networks: Comedy Central, Logo, BET, Spike, TV Land, Nick at Nite, Nickelodeon, Noggin, The N, Nick Jr., TEENick, MTV, VH1, MTV2, CMT, MHD
Television Production and Television Distribution: DreamWorks Television
Video Gaming: Xfire, Harmonix, GameTrailers, Neopets

It plainly has the resources to create quality programming directed to self-respecting, well-adjusted gay men. The refusal to create such series or even TV movies speaks volumes about media hatred of gay men.
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If comparable, viciously negative stereotypes about blacks were aired by a cable network proclaiming itself "black", the Al Sharptons and Jesse Jacksons would be leading demonstrations in the streets. Gay men, almost completely absent from mainstream media, are expected to shut up and accept crumbs, even if those crumbs are laced with rat poison.
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Logo's sole real focus is lesbians and "transsexuals", who are praised explicitly and implicitly. Gay men are NEVER to be seen unless their presence is 'balanced' (overbalanced) by equal or greater numbers of lesbians, within seconds or at most a very few minutes. The idea of so much as a half hour being given over to gay men, WITHOUT women, is unthinkable. Again and again the message is sent: women with women is OK; men with men but WITHOUT women is just plain wrong, utterly evil and insane.
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Gay men who choose to keep their genitalia are viciously and repeatedly defamed, and encouraged to redefine themselves as women, then have themselves castrated to conform to the anti-gay, antimale prejudices of the lunatics who control Logo.
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A firebomb or three tossed into the executive offices of the subhuman scum responsible for Logo, at the height of the business day, could do a lot of good.

ResurgenceCity@aol.com (L. Craig Schoonmaker) — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 12:06:00 +0000

Saving a Senator. Idaho Senator Larry Craig is expected to announce his resignation today. I am trying to head that off. A few minutes ago, at about 7:20am, I sent the following message via feedback form at the Senator's website.

DON'T RESIGN; FIGHT BACK!
(Note to staff: I know that Senator Craig is not in Washington today. I'm not even certain anyone is in his office on a Saturday, altho this Saturday of all Saturdays, someone assuredly SHOULD be. PLEASE contact the Senator urgently, as by cellphone, BEFORE he makes any statement to the press, to convey to him the sense of this message, if not even to read aloud every single word or forward it to his email in Idaho. He needs to consider this.)
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IF SENATOR VITTER, also a Republican, wasn't forced to resign despite his illicit heterosexual activity, why should you resign over illicit homosexual activity? It's time for you to come out fighting. That means first, to "come out" and come clean with Idahoans about your biological need for sex with men, and second, to fight, not just for yourself, but for the right of all men to have sex with men in dignified settings if they so desire, and not be forced into the shadows.
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I am the man who in 1970 coined the term "Gay Pride" as it is now used. You need to listen to me. I'm on your side (assuming you really are sexually drawn to men; but, then, why else would you resign? Resignation constitutes admission, and no one will reach any other conclusion if you resign).
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Vitter admitted to involvement with prostitutes. You didn't pay anyone – except the State of Minnesota, which should be ashamed of itself for entrapping you and other men seeking consensual sex, and extorting money from you. There is a fundamental issue of equality here that you as a United States Senator must stand up for. You weren't caught "in flagrante delicto" in front of little children. You were arrested for tapping your foot! How on Earth does that rise to the level of an offense that requires resignation from the United States Senate?
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There's another public-policy issue I have not seen discussed. Is it really proper for a police department to release to the public the tapes of a police interrogation? Aren't there serious privacy issues involved here?
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Moreover, WHAT ABOUT entrapment? You raised the issue when arrested, and it is a HUGE issue. Surely in a country as filled with robbery, drugs, gangs, violence, and murder as ours, there are far better uses for police than entrapping men who are merely looking for trivial physical activity that gives pleasure to both participants. Give the cops hell. Tell Minnesota that if it has police to waste on entrapping homosexuals, then its police department is too large, and should be cut drastically in staffing and budget, as to save Minnesota taxpayers, gay and straight alike, from the obligation to PAY for police misconduct.
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What you pled guilty to was not a felony, not a crime against humanity, but little more serious than a speeding ticket. You must not resign from the Senate over a speeding ticket. Sex is TRIVIAL, and every adult KNOWS it is trivial. Say so, repeatedly.
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Why should men who feel sexual attraction to men go along with society's preposterous prejudices? Don't play their game. For once in your life, stand up for yourself. Because it's NOT JUST YOURSELF that you would be standing up for. You need to stand up for all men struggling with an attraction to men that they did not choose to feel and can do nothing to deny. You tried, didn't you? You lost. Because in a contest between your authentic self and the person others may want you to be, the authentic self can be suppressed only so long. Eventually, he's going to win out. And that's a good thing.
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Stand up for the kid just starting to wonder what's wrong with him. Stand up for the men entrapped, arrested, intimidated, robbed, beaten, even killed by bigots and opportunists. If you had stood up ten years ago, and done something to change social attitudes, people like Matthew Shepard in your neighboring State of Montana might still be alive. Conversely, however, if you let the bigots win, and run away from the challenge, there may be other men who will suffer death or psychic destruction at the hands of a society that doesn't mean to be monstrously intolerant, but is.
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I have been to Idaho, twice, and do not believe the people of Idaho in general are vicious bigots, tho of course some are. You need to give Idahoans the chance to show their true colors, as understanding human beings who can appreciate how difficult it must be for someone who was raised to be straight but finds it's just not in him, or as narrow-minded yahoos who can't accept the right of anyone to be different from themselves.
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I think you, and the Nation, might be pleasantly surprised by the decency and tolerance of the people of Idaho. What disgusts Idahoans, as it disgusts Americans generally, is not so much your need for men but your disgraceful hypocrisy. Disown the hypocrisy. Own up to being homosexual, and the revulsion people feel for your conduct will drop to manageable proportions. Yes, some people will be offended that you want sex with men. Most people will understand that everybody wants sex with somebody, and it's all pretty much the same.
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What matters is not whom you want but how you treat the person. If David Vitter can get away with kinky sex with female prostitutes, surely you should be able to get away with nonkinky sex with men, in which no money changes hands. It's all in how you handle it (the issue, that is). Do not accept the right of straights to be perverts yet remain in the Senate while gay men must resign just for being gay. Jim McGreevey, Governor of my State (New Jersey) did that. He could have served as the first openly gay governor of a State!, but resigned. You can serve as the first openly gay member of "the world's greatest deliberative body". (And stop the definitional quibbling, "gay" as against "homosexual". You want sex with men, you're gay. You're "bisexual", as provocative Comedy Central comic Carlos Mencía says, you're gay. The DENIAL is what infuriates people. Stop denying. Own up. Take responsibility. Be yourself. Then people will respect you. They may not agree with you, but they'll respect you. And that's a lot more than you've got right now.
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Idahoans can grow, to accept the otherness of others, but they need leadership. You're supposed to be a leader.
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To understand what homosexual boys and then men go thru in trying to cope with their different nature when surrounded by people unlike themselves, Idahoans need an actual person to sympathize with. You are a person.
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The Republican Party also needs to grow, and stop being the party of vicious intolerance and closed-mindedness. If the national party won't support you, shame them. They want to shame you. No. Shame them! People such as the present leadership of the Republican Party are the ones responsible for making your life miserable. They are the ones who made you feel bad about yourself, who forced you into a lie of a marriage, who forced you to say terrible things about people like yourself, in order to curry favor with them. You owe antihomosexual bigots nothing. You owe homosexuals everything, because they are you. And you have an obligation to you.
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You need to accept your nature and become champion for gay men. You didn't ask for this responsibility. It was thrust upon you. If you are not up to it, then, and only then, the fault will be in you. Be certain of this: if you resign, you WILL regret not accepting the challenge and fighting your best fight, for your best self.
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So apologize to everyone you have deceived. Apologize for the terrible things you felt you had to say to cover up your nature. But don't "go along to get along" anymore. Break with the past. Be a man— a man who needs men. There is no shame in that. There is, however, great shame in denying your nature, turning against yourself and your own people, and sending the wrong message. Resigning would send the wrong message: that gay men should be ashamed of themselves, and that there is no room in the highest levels of government for an open, self-accepting, yes proud, gay man.
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The press is expecting a resignation today, which would send the message that homosexual men have no right to be in the United States Senate. Surprise the bastards. Tell them that 62 years of trying to be something you're not is enough, and that it's time now for you to be you, no longer ashamed, no longer intimidated, no longer hiding and playing the game.
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You're not going to live forever. You have the right to some happiness before you die. You won't get it by caving in to the bigots, sticking to the lie, and hiding in shame until you die in disgrace.
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Thirty years from now, you can be a footnote or a giant. How do you want to be remembered?

Gay men have no Senators to champion their interests. Larry Craig could be our champion. Will he? I have done what I can to persuade him. If he is intent on getting this whole thing behind him as soon as possible, he may rush to do the wrong thing. Will he understand that, subconsciously, he brought this exposure upon himself deliberately, because he wanted to be forced to deal with being gay, and to assume his responsibilities as a gay man in a powerful, political position? Darn. I neglected to make that point above. Ah well, he's unlikely to hear what I tried to tell him before he meets the press today. When one has no influence, one has no responsibility. But I tried anyway. If he makes the wrong decision, it's not my fault.

ResurgenceCity@aol.com (L. Craig Schoonmaker) — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 06:59:00 +0000

Hypocritical, Puritanical Noise. Media have been abuzz the past couple of days about — heaven forfend! — sex. It seems a U.S. Senator from Idaho was arrested in the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport for soliciting sex in a men's room. Except of course he didn't actually DO anything. He didn't touch anybody, didn't expose himself, didn't say a word to ask for sex. In short, he did NOT commit anything that the law should regard as a crime, not ANYTHING.
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He was entrapped by antihomosexual police in a supposedly liberal state. That is both unexpected and outrageous. If the police in the Minneapolis area have so little to do that they have to induce gay men into approaching vice officers, then the Minneapolis police force should be chopped drastically in size and budget, so Minnesotans — including gay Minnesotans — can save some money on their tax bill. Are all parts of the Twin Cities crime-free? Or are police too cowardly to face off against real criminals, preferring to work the men's room while armed thugs victimize Minnesotans elsewhere, free of worry that they might be caught by cops who are busy harassing homosexuals in safe areas?
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The evil cops working to trap gay men should be transferred to the worst neighborhoods of America's cities, to face down the Bloods and Crips, and protect college kids from being murdered in cold blood in schoolyards. Send them to Newark, L.A., or the South Bronx. Let them earn their pay and actually protect somebody.
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Hoping to avoid public exposure, Senator Larry Craig (Hm, "L. Craig". Now, where have I heard that?) pled guilty to disorderly conduct and paid a fine of several hundred dollars. He also got a year's unsupervised probation. For tapping his foot in a men's room stall. Has this society lost its mind?
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We have murders all over this country that the police can't solve, and we're misdirecting police resources to arresting men for tapping their foot in a men's room. Senator Craig should be fiting such nonsense, not paying extortion to the state. But it's worse than extortion by criminals. The typical blackmailer doesn't take the money and then tell the secrets anyway.
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The self-righteous claptrap — an appropriate word, considering how much venereal disease there is in this Nation of Whores — about how 'disgusting' it is of some gay men to seek sex in public places, is nothing but bullsh*t. Straight people, various media commentators declaim virtuously, don't cruise lavatories for sex. Oh? And why might that be? Because men's rooms and women's rooms are separated, that's why. And why, exactly, is that? Because if both sexes shared the same lavatories, nobody offended by sex could use them much of the day and nite because straight people would be screwing around in them at all hours, that's why. Late-nite cable TV runs a commercial for a phone-sex line in which a man and woman come out of a stall in a public restroom. But that's just fantasy, right? And, of course, 'normal', so not disgusting. Are we to believe that heterosexual sex in public restrooms never really happens? Then how is it we hear stories about it? Because it does happen. And heterosexual public sex doesn't happen just in lavatories when no one's around. Straights have sex everywhere!
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The delicate, antisexual sensibilities we hear all over the media would be persuasive in the Islamic Republic of Iran, but not in the United Whores of America. In the typical year, 1.5 million babies are born out of wedlock (36% of all births in the United States; 64% for black women). 19 million cases of venereal disease (or "STD's", to use this week's fad term) are recorded each year. Millions of (heterosexual) marriages have been destroyed by infidelity, including on the part of at least one leading contender for the Republican Party's nomination for President. There's an awful lot of illicit sex going on among straight people in this country, and everybody knows it.
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So why are so many people in media feigning shock over sex among gay men in supposedly 'public' places (tho plainly not in public view)? Straight people are having sex all over the place, in movie theaters, airliners (the "Mile High Club" we hear so much about), parks, parking lots, "lover's lanes" — hell, in the car at the curb outside their girlfriend's house. Under bleachers, behind garages, in alleys, in bars and dance clubs, in sex clubs, in strip clubs. Babysitters and their boyfriends screw on the couch while the kids sleep a few yards away. What about all those lapdances in "gentlemen's clubs"? Porno videos offered by 'legitimate' video rental companies? Porn on cable TV that is shown not just in one's bedroom but even in public places? Straight porno theaters and peep shows? Legal prostitution in Nevada? Brothels in other places that the police take payoffs to let operate unfettered? "Escort" services? Hardcore and softcore heterosexual porn magazines available on publicly viewable racks at newsstands? Talk Sex with Sue Johanson on Oxygen TV? The repellant dwarf Ruth Westheimer? As long ago as 1992-96, Bob Berkowitz had a sex-talk show on CNBC. Where there's talk, there's action. (More talk than action, perhaps, but still some action.) TV takes ads for phone sex. And the Internet is filled with sexchat. What about that ad campaign from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas"? I don't think those ads are talking about sightseeing trips to Hoover Dam. And do we really need to point out that the Internet is filled with fotografic and video porn?
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On the Tonight Show this evening, a young man told of staying at his girlfriend's house overnite. The girl's parents put him and their dauter in separate rooms. After they had all gone to bed, however, he sneaked into his girlfriend's room. They thought they had got away with it until the following morning when the family dog sauntered into the kitchen during breakfast, with a used condom in his mouth. What a deliteful, charming story about today's upstanding youth. (That particular youth was Canadian (as is Talk Sex hostess Sue Johanson), but American kids sneak around in their parents' house too, to screw around very quietly while their parents sleep in the next room.) So why the pretense that gay men's looking for sex wherever they might find it is somehow outrageous, but heterosexual society's obsession with sex is completely unobjectionable?
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Straight society needs to admit that it is saturated in sex. Four-year-old girls dress up like sluts in kiddie beauty pageants and 12-year-olds gyrate suggestively in talent contests, their face painted like that of an aging $5 hooker.
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John McCain, the Superloon among the announced Republican candidates for President, has disgraced himself yet again in urging Senator Craig to resign from what is called "the world's greatest deliberative body" because he tapped his shoe on a men's room floor! The 'crime' of which McCain complained was a misdemeanor, about as significant, legally, as a speeding ticket. I've said it before and will probably have to say it again: John McCain is out of his mind. I don't know if he always was, or if the North Vietnamese destroyed his mind in the Hanoi Hilton. At end, it doesn't matter. He's nuts.
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Mormon candidate for President, Mitt Romney, member of a cult that has ruined myriad lives with its lunacy, forced Craig out of his campaign committee, apparently fearful of being 'tainted' by association with homos. Romney is more than a bit too goodlooking to be seen as comfortable with "faggots". I wonder about him. That's called "gaydar", and mine pings when I watch Romney.
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I am indignant and contemptuous of all this ridiculous posturing by imitation-righteous straight people that gay men are somehow depraved for looking for sex in public restrooms. Straight society makes it impossible for gay men to meet one another in the wholesome places straight people go to "hook up". We can't look openly at each other at a church social, PTA meeting, supermarket, laundromat, or (straight) bar, and strike up a relaxed conversation, to find out if we have enuf in common to investigate forming a relationship or even just take a quick roll in the hay. No, we're forced into the shadows, and then bitched at for living in the shadows!
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By contrast, this supposedly antisexual society pushes boys and girls at each other from a very early age. It not only countenances sexual activity that it supposedly disapproves of, but actually facilitates it. Prom nite is almost a required virginity-ender, and despite the best efforts of modern-day Puritans to promote abstinence, the age at which Americans typically lose their virginity is 17, and only 4% of Americans remain virgins their entire life. Presumably many of those people have serious physical handicaps or are in religious orders that forbid sexual activity (not that that stops everyone in such orders).
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Last nite, on MSNBC Live With Dan Abrams, the host and fellow rightwingers Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson all played very innocent, as tho a sexual thought never entered any of their heads. Carlson bragged about having fought back against a man who "bothered" him in Washington. The poor baby was so scared he had to run for help to a friend, then bring the friend back, throw the offender against a wall, and have him arrested. For what? Today he clarified why he reacted so violently, while denying the violence he had admitted the nite before:

Let me be clear about an incident I referred to on MSNBC last night: In the mid-1980s, while I was a high school student, a man physically grabbed me in a men’s room in Washington, DC. I yelled, pulled away from him and ran out of the room. Twenty-five minutes later, a friend of mine and I returned to the men’s room. The man was still there, presumably waiting to do to someone else what he had done to me. My friend and I seized the man and held him until a security guard arrived.

Several bloggers have characterized this is a sort of gay bashing. That’s absurd, and an insult to anybody who has fought back against an unsolicited sexual attack. I wasn’t angry with the man because he was gay. I was angry because he assaulted me.

Neither Hannity nor Abrams had ever had such difficulties, and gay men looking for sex are almost always easily discouraged by pointed shows of uninterest. If they persist, a firm "No" or "Hey, get away from me" suffices.
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Let me point out to these innocent babes in the sexual woods that WOMEN are harassed by heterosexual men all the time, everywhere they go. They are "hit upon" by men they have no interest in. They are whistled at and hooted at by men on the street as they simply go about their business. In bars, aggressive men crowd them, brush against them, say suggestive things to them, offer to buy them drinks (which would, the men think, indebt the woman to the man who treated them), put their hands on them, in innocent places and not-so-innocent places. If every heterosexual man who crossed the line with a woman were thrown up against a wall and arrested, our entire national budget would be spent on jails and prisons.
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So cut the crap. The little Mother Tucker was subjected to some of what women go thru every day, and it hurt his little feelings! Poor thing. That's the real issue here: heterosexual men's feeling threatened by being treated, to their mind, like women. That threatens their manhood. It shouldn't. A gay man's "hitting on them" proves not their lack of manhood but their masculine appeal, because gay men want men, not women. It is a compliment to his manhood that a gay man might be drawn to a (straight) man.
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Straight men need to get a life — and stick to it. That's the real problem, and the real reason there are police actions against homosexuality, even after the Supreme Court struck down sodomy laws on the basis that they violate privacy rights. So cops go out of their way to entrap gay men into public "lewd conduct".
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Straight men are terrified of their own homosexual thoughts and desires. They are afraid that if society doesn't keep them on the straight and narrow, they are going to find themselves in the arms (and other parts) of a man, because they know that they have all had thoughts about guys and cannot find men's bodies disgusting because they would have to find themselves disgusting. They may never have been tempted, yet, but, they think, that might just be because they haven't met the right man. Yet. Maybe there is a man out there, somewhere, with piercing blue eyes or a smile that lites up the room who would make their heart pound and other parts push them to contact.
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I'm the last person in the world to say it couldn't happen. But straight men are much more commonly tempted to heterosexual sex. That does not argue for them outlawing heterosexual sex or forbidding all situations in which temptation might arise. Where is the insistence that Louisiana Senator Vitter, who cheated on his wife with (female) prostitutes, resign? Nowhere, that's where.
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Senator Craig's real offense, and the reason people who should be sympathetic to a man who has sexual desires for men that cause him anguish, are instead indignant and out to "get him", is hypocrisy. He has made all kinds of antihomosexual noise, working to prevent gay marriage and otherwise promote antigay bigotry. We react to such behavior on the part of a man with overpowering sexual desire for men as we would to a "high yellow" 'black' man passing as white and becoming Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.
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The hypocrisy of straight society about opposing gay marriage allegedly out of concern over the sanctity of (heterosexual) marriage is detestable. The bulk of states in recent decades made marriage so trifling and the legal causes for divorce so trivial that they catastrophically weakened the institution long before gay men pressed for the extension of marriage to gay couples. Nevada, which could be regarded as Satan's home state, dares to pretend to be concerned about the sanctity of marriage, and inserted a provision into its constitution to define marriage as a legal union of one man and one woman. So all those legal prostitutes in Nevada surely must determine that a man is unmarried before having sex with him, right? No? If not, then Nevada isn't concerned about defending the sanctity of marriage at all, just in reserving some rights for straight people, including the right to have sex for money, there being no legal homosexual prostitution in that model of propriety. Dare one ask how many marriages have been destroyed by a spouse's calling upon a legal prostitute in Nevada? Or by compulsive gamblers' losing fortunes they could not afford, in Nevada, land of virtue? I think the gay movement should promote a boycott of Nevada by all progressives, to make an example of Nevada for hypocrisy, and show there are costs to antigay bigotry.
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As for Senator Craig's state, Idaho, I have been to Idaho twice, once to Boise (which is pronounced with an S-sound, not Z) on my own and once to Coeur d'Alene with several members of my family. As I recall, there was a tiny gay contingent in Coeur d'Alene's Fourth of July parade who were not booed or threatened. I don't think Idahoans in general are vicious or fascistic, despite Idaho's reputation (like neighboring Montana's) for welcoming Neo-Nazi, survivalist groups. I don't think Idaho is a toxic place or that the people of Idaho mean to damage young gay people's self-acceptance. But they do, as all areas of the world do that assume that every child will be straight, and thus raise everyone to be heterosexual, and never so much as raise the possibility that something else will happen. Never raising the issue, they lead their young people to think that what the larger society has apparently not thought about is thus unthinkable. That causes kids who do think about such things, to think as well that there must be something wrong with them; that they are grotesque, abnormal, evil, not just something that most of the people around them haven't much thought about. Or admitted to thinking about.
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Senator Craig's story is hardly unusual. He was made to hate himself by an oblivious, intolerant, and insecure society that seems to feel that if homosexuality is given free rein, it will wipe out heterosexuality and the human race will disappear because, they fear, homosexuality is preferable to heterosexuality! Is the human race really in danger of disappearing from too few children? Or is the prime threat to our survival not depopulation but grotesque overpopulation? I don't really have to answer that, do I?
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If, as seems certain, Senator Craig is sexually drawn to men, he could still make the claim that he is not "gay", because he does not want a lasting, loving relationship with a man, and actively wants not to identify as gay. He is assuredly not "gay" in the ordinary sense, happy and carefree, which may be how he justified his denials. Bill Clinton was able to persuade himself that he wasn't really lying when he said he "did not have sexual relations with that young woman", because he played a definitional game in his head: "sexual relations" meant coitus. Senator Craig says he's not "gay". He may be able to say that with clear conscience because he has internally defined "gay" to mean wanting something more from men than sex, something emotional, something as to lifestyle and self-identity, and he doesn't want that (or so he may have persuaded himself).
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Senator Craig toed society's heterosexual line rhetorically, and may actually have believed what he said when he said that homosexuality should be proscribed, perhaps out of the misguided notion that if he didn't have the internal strength to fite off his homosexual desires alone, society's prohibitions could strengthen his will and keep him in line. He internalized the antihomosexual crap he was raised with and then publicly fed it back to an appreciative audience, just as a parrot — or perhaps more appropriately, parakeet — delites people around by making noises that sound just like meaningful words, when they are to the bird only imitative noise.
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Everything we hear from antigay activists is meaningless, empty noise. They have absolutely no basis for their hostility. They may, or may not, have reasons for any insecurity they may feel about society giving them, personally, too much freedom, freedom they can't handle. But temptations of many kinds are all around us. We find out, when first this ban is relaxed, then that, who has internal strength and who has not.
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When Prohibition was ended, some people became alcoholics. When states legalized various forms of gambling, some people with weak wills and addictive personalities became gambling junkies. Some ghetto kids who became sports stars saw all kinds of barriers drop, and they promptly fell into drug addiction, sexual abuse, and other outrageous vices, even dogfiting. It is not the availability of alcohol that makes an alcoholic, nor the legality of gambling that creates a gambling problem, nor the presence all around us of dogs that makes a person descend into staging dogfites and then killing poor performers. It is not what is outside us that is responsible for our internal feelings, nor our actions.
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Faithful people defeat temptations to infidelity, from any source, homosexual or heterosexual. People in love aren't interested in sex with strangers. And, most important always to remember, sex is TRIVIA. This country has got (literally) to grow the f*k up.
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Senator Craig should 'fess up and ask forgiveness. If he needs sex with men, he should be forthrite about that. If he really loves his wife, he should just control himself, just as he would if he were attracted to another woman. But if he married only because society demanded he play the game, and he would really be happy only as a gay man, he should apologize profusely to his wife, get a divorce, and live the rest of his limited days happy, as a genuinely gay man, in every sense. As Shakespeare put it in Hamlet, "To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man." Then Idaho would have an honest man as its senior Senator.

ResurgenceCity@aol.com (L. Craig Schoonmaker) — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 23:32:00 +0000

Antigay Vandalism — By the Superintendent of Newark Schools! My friend Gaetano sent me links to two blog mentions of a Star-Ledger story yesterday about Marion Bolden's ordering the defacing of a yearbook to black out with marker what she termed an "illicit" foto of two boys kissing. The foto itself appears in the Star-Ledger, along with this information:

While the students waited, staff members in another room blacked out the 4½-by-5-inch picture from approximately 230 books [which cost $85 each; that's vandalization of $19,550 of private property by a public official; a felony?].

"I don't understand," said [Andre] Jackson, 18 [one of the two students shown kissing, who paid $150 for that page in the yearbook]. "There is no rule about no gay pictures, no guys kissing. Guys and girls kissing made it in."

East Side's is like most high school yearbooks. About 80 pages in the roughly 100-page tome is dedicated to class photos, formal shots of seniors, candids and spreads dedicated to a variety of sports teams and academic clubs.

The back of the book is a collection of tributes where students designed pages filled with pictures depicting them with their families, girlfriends and boyfriends, and friends.

Rules for publication of the pages prohibited shots of gang signs, rude gestures and graphic photos, said Benilde Barroqueiro, an East Side senior graduating with Jackson.

"You know, it couldn't be too provocative. No making out, no tongue," she said.

Students were surprised when they opened their books and found Jackson's picture had been covered with marker, Barroqueiro said.

"He purchased the page and fell under the rules," she said. "If they want to kiss, that's their page. If you don't like it, don't look at it."

It seems a teenage girl has more sense than a middle-aged woman.
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Note that this offense occurred during the runup to the 38th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, to be marked tomorrow, less than ten miles from East Side High, by the annual Gay Pride March in Manhattan that attracts hundreds of thousands of marchers and spectators. I was on the committee that organized the first such march, in 1970, and the term "Gay Pride" rather than the original "Christopher Street Liberation Day" attaches to that march because I offered that term in committee. Most of us on the first committee were scarcely more than kids, tho some were in their thirties. I was 25. Some of the stalwarts of The Movement have since died of the diseases of old age, never having lived a day without the discrimination we worked to end. Every now and then we think we've made progress — and then something like this happens.
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"Benilde" is a name I was not familiar with, so I researched it on the Internet:

Origin: Derived from the German and composed from berno- "bear," and hildjo, "battle, war," and means "who fights for the good."

Very appropriate.
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The first blog mention of this outrage I checked, carried a comment by someone who pointed out that the time to challenge a foto was before the money was accepted and the book printed, not after. That commentator also observed that some New Jersey employers are resisting the State's requirement that the partners in "civil unions" be granted the same rights as married people, which I had heard on TV last week. Such resistance must be crushed. It does, however, argue for converting the feeble "civil union" law into simple "marriage". That way, the simple box "Married" could be checked on forms of all kinds, and qualification for spousal benefits would be automatic. What do people who are 'civilly unioned' check? Hm. (By the way, I have seen both the awkward phrase "civilly unioned" and the more standard-English phrase "civilly united". I suspect those who use "civilly unioned" are making commentary on the awkward unnaturalness of that legal state. "Married" is so much more graceful, isn't it?)
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Alas, New York State may beat NJ to the punch in legalizing simple gay "marriage", which would reduce the advantage in attracting prosperous gay couples to New Jersey, people who would contribute to the community but make minimal demands upon government services, such as schools.
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I remarked to Gaetano:

DISGRACEFUL. If the objection was to the pose (with one guy behind the other, but fully clothed), the people in charge of the yearbook should have asked for a picture of the two face to face. If they didn't want to accept any foto, they should have said so before the guy paid for it, so he could either accept that and withhold his money — or sue the bastards, because antihomosexual discrimination is ILLEGAL in NJ. Marion Bolden should be ashamed of herself — and removed from office for violating the NJ Law Against Discrimination (LAD). There is no place in the Newark public schools for antihomosexual discrimination.

The second blogger, from Newark, rightly compared the discrimination in this incident to racial discrimination.

It's been noted that the bias seen today against homosexuals has parallels to discriminatory policies of the past. Consider if the administrators had blacked out a photo of an interracial kiss, and read the comments again. It's the same attitudes, by the same sorts of people, just in a new era. We've made a lot of progress on the civil rights and tolerance frontier (this couple is probably not in danger of being lynched) but to continue making progress it's necessary to be aware of and condemn behavior like this.

I left the following comment at that blog:

The superintendent's behavior was not just rude. It was also ILLEGAL. The New Jersey Law Against Discrimination (LAD) bars discrimination on the basis of "affectional or sexual orientation". See this official webpage of the State of New Jersey: http://www.state.nj.us/lps/dcr/law.html#LAD. Superintendent Bolden said she did not review the entire yearbook. But she had a legal obligation to do so, in order to determine whether what she proposed to do was discriminatory. She could easily have ordered that every kiss in the yearbook be flagged so she could review all such pictures. She did not do that but chose to jump to suppress an image of two boys kissing. She violated the law and vandalized thousands of dollars worth of books. It's time for her to go. Everyone offended by this should write to Governor Corzine to demand her ouster: http://www.state.nj.us/governor/govmail.html.

I'll write to the Governor myself when I have time. I should also see if Mayor Booker has email. Bolden is a State appointee; Newark does not have control of its schools yet. But Booker can put pressure on the State to oust her — as might, incidentally, empower him to put someone of his own choosing into that key spot!
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Gay men have lifted marginal neighborhoods all over this country, and Newark could surely benefit from an influx of gay people. Shows of antigay bigotry by someone high in local government hurt the future of Newark, more than just the feelings of the students offended. At least the kids had the good sense to be offended. Do Newarkers generally?
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(This is borrowed from my Newark fotoblog.)

ResurgenceCity@aol.com (L. Craig Schoonmaker) — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 05:20:00 +0000

Different Perspectives. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Peter Pace is out on his ass, and two television worlds, news and entertainment, had two different reactions.
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The news commentators said not one word about Pace's antihomosexual public pronouncement of three months ago, but ascribed his firing (or failure to be renominated, however you want to put it) as being due solely to the failure of the Iraq policy he oversaw.
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Jay Leno, however, pointed out that Pace had made a very public stand against homosexuality as immoral. Mind you, a professional KILLER dared to describe homosexuality as immoral. "Make war, not love" is Pace's stance, whether he ever put it that way or not. Wikipedia's article on Pace quotes him thus:

In a March 12, 2007 discussion with editors of the Chicago Tribune, Gen. Pace said, "I believe homosexual acts between two individuals [how about among 6 or 7?] are immoral and that [the U.S. military] should not condone immoral acts ... I do not believe the United States is well served by a policy that says it is okay to be immoral in any way ... As an individual, I would not want [acceptance of gay behavior] to be our policy."

What an interesting perspective: mass murder good, sex bad.
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Why the sharp difference of perceptions between news commentators, not one of whom I saw mention Pace's antigay remarks, and entertainment commentators?
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The same week (day?), a star of ABC's medical drama Grey's Anatomy, Isaiah Washington, received the same news: his contract will not be renewed. Isaiah — I was going to abbreviate his name to just "Washington", but I do not wish to confuse the actor with the great man of U.S. history, so go with his first name; at least it's spelled right, unlike former basketball player Isiah Thomas's — Isaiah (W.) didn't take it well. Good. He tried to make amends, but everyone knew he was insincere and was just trying to save his job. Now he's out on his ass, just like the other antigay public figure . Good.
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It's all too rare that I see any good news, and regular readers of this blog will see my reactions to a lot of bad things that happen all around us. This is a nice change of pace — oops: Pace.

ResurgenceCity@aol.com (L. Craig Schoonmaker) — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 06:59:00 +0000

'Jersey' Madness. I was irritated to find on AOL's welcome screen for people from North Jersey yesterday a link to "JerseyPride.org" — not to be confused with JerseyPride.COM, a website that promotes respect for New Jersey. JerseyPride.ORG turns out not to have anything to do with pride in New Jersey but is instead an insane organization for "the LGBTI community". "I"? What on Earth is the "I" for? Don't tell me "Intersex". Yup: "Intersexed". Their website is headed "Jersey Pride, Inc. producer of New Jersey's Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered and Intersexed Pride parades." Unbelievable.
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There is no such thing as an "LGBTI community" any more than there is a single genius-retardate, evangelical-atheist, or any other single community drawn from mutually incompatible groups.
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As I note in the profile on the top left of this blog, I am the man who in 1970 offered the term "Gay Pride" as it is now used. June has in recent years been designated "Gay Pride Month" — or, in some antigay circles, "Gay and Lesbian Pride Month", since gay men are never entitled to anything to themselves. So this first day of June is an appropriate time to address the madness that has taken over and practically destroyed the gay-rights movement.
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I am appalled at what has happened. The Gay Movement, which is about a lot more than political progress, was always weakened by inclusion of outsiders and enemies, and has now been completely taken over by anti-gay, and especially anti-male, lunatics. It was bad enuf that from early on, the Movement in this country was shot-thru with lesbians, with whom gay men have absolutely nothing, intrinsic, in common; only outside disapproval, an extrinsic and largely extraneous matter in the lives of gay men once they have fought their way out of the closet.
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Hell, gay men and lesbian women disapprove of each other fully as much as straight society disapproves of either!
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There were even occasional heterosexual intruders, such as the odious Madolin Cervantes of the early New York Mattachine Society. Men just coming to terms with their attraction to men would go to a meeting of what they thought was an organization for gay men, and who should be at the podium but a heterosexual woman! Many of them were hugely embarrassed and offended, and never returned.
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Over the decades, various loons expanded, diluted, and self-confuted the Movement by incorporating "bisexuals" — that is, confused people who so hate themselves and everyone else that they can never commit to anyone, of either gender; transvestites (called also "transgendered people") — utterly insane, self-despising losers who want the world to accept their astoundingly mad delusion that a person could be born "the wrong gender", that a man could be "a woman trapped in the body of a man", and vice-versa; and then, in some formulations, "Queers" (to form a presumably single, unified but actually nonexistent "LGBTQ" community). Never mind that "Queer" is the exact equivalent of "Nigger". In the case of "Jersey Pride" (Pride? It is to laff!), they decided to include the "Intersexed", people who are neither here nor there. Never mind that there are very few genetic intersexes (Wikipedia says the best approximation is 0.018% of the general population, or about 1,584 people, of all ages, in New Jersey), and some of those that do exist are sterile and retarded, because distinct gender is fundamental to human functioning.
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So gay men went from being linguistically only half of their own movement, and second at that (it's almost always "lesbian and gay"; men are second, forced to sit in the back of the bus in their own movement), to 1/5 of their own movement. They are to be lumped in with, and their interests subordinated to those of, people with whom they share nothing.
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What happens when an organization incorporates not just extraneous causes but mutually antagonistic groups and purposes into itself? It destroys itself, that's what. In the quest for larger numbers of participants in events, the Gay Movement has destroyed itself. It is now an Everybody Movement, which is of course also a Nobody Movement.
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Why stop at Intersexes — that immense 0.018% (eighteen thousandths of one percent) of the population? Why not incorporate every conceivable "sexual minority": pedophiles (LGBTQIP), asexuals (LGBTQIPA), antisexuals (LGBTQIPAA), castrati and eunuchs (LGBTQIPAACE)? If you really want to grab for numbers, you obviously have to incorporate heterosexuals (LGBTQIPAACEH)! Indeed, since there are more heterosexuals than all the others combined, you'd have to put them first in the list (HLGBTQIPAACE). How about sex addicts (HLGBTQIPAACESA)? Sado-masochists (HLGBTQIPAACESASM)? Bestialists (HLGBTQIPAACESASMB)? Fist-f*kers (HLGBTQIPAACESASMBFF)? Foot-fetishists (HLGBTQIPAACESASMBFFFF)? Rapists ((HLGBTQIPAACESASMBFFFFR)? And on, and on thru all conceivable variations and distortions of the sexual impulse.
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Heck, why stop at sexual groups? If you really want to widen your potential membership base, why not bring in more groups now on the outside of society? Alcoholics (HLGBTQIPAACESASMBFFFFA)? Drug-users (for simplicity, we won't break out such people by type of drug used, be it heroin, cocaine, meth, marijuana, OxyContin, etc.) (HLGBTQIPAACESASMBFFFFADU)? Shoplifters and kleptomaniacs (HLGBTQIPAACESASMBFFFFADUSK)? And on and on thru all the various groups of the demi-monde. Wouldn't that make for a parade!
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What an interesting concept: in striving for a larger membership and thus more political clout, expand beyond all reason and destroy internal cohesion. What a great idea! Let's extend this to its 'logical' conclusion. How about increasing numbers for each group by merging the NAACP and Ku Klux Klan: NAAKKKCP. Merge Mensa and the Association for Retarded Citizens (MARC). How about a single political party for the Republican, Democratic, Green, Socialist Labor, Socialist Worker, and Communist Parties, plus independents (with independents placed first, of course): the IRDGSLSWCP?
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How about merging Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, Mormonism, Sunni Islam, Shia Islam, Buddhism, Taoism, Unitarianism, atheism, and agnosticism into a single religion/nonreligion/antireligion, the Universal Communion of Believers and Nonbelievers (UCBNB)? It could hold services in Pig Latin.
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Small sports concerned about their lack of enthusiasts could join with other sports organizations to increase their visibility. Instead of an NHL for hockey, USSF for soccer, MISL for indoor soccer, AFL for arena football, USL for lacrosse, etc., they could all merge with each other and with the (outdoor) NFL, Major League Baseball, and NBA to create one big, happy sports family: the NHSAFLOFBBA.
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Snap out of it! Organizations that dilute themselves to increase numbers at the expense of internal cohesion are doomed to failure, and deserve to fail. Thus it is that 55 years of gay activism in the U.S. have produced legal same-sex marriage in one state of fifty. One.
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The solution to small impact of separate organizations is not merger but coalition. Separate organizations retain their separate memberships but form ad-hoc alliances for specific purposes, and only for specific purposes. In every other area they retain full independence and are not bound to any other group's stances or purposes they do not share. That way they retain their internal cohesion but still get to affect public perceptions and politics.
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But be very careful what coalitions you join, and who else is part of those coalitions. Gay organizations should be particularly concerned about being tainted by groups like NAMBLA (North American Man/Boy Love Association) and Eulenspiegel (sado-masochists). Alliance with such groups not only reinforces perceptions by the wider society that gay men are child molesters and self-hating, violent degenerates but also tells gay men that they should consider child-molestation and self-despising sexual violence as normal.
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Gay organizations need desperately to recognize the confused state that almost all gay boys start in, and steer them to wholesome and self-reinforcing, not self-subverting, attitudes and behaviors. Gay boys cannot learn to be gay men by seeing themselves as lesbians, "bisexuals", "transsexuals", "queers" (not normal, but queer, bizarre) or "intersexes". They need to identify solidly and solely as gay males, first boys, then men, and not ever anything else.

ResurgenceCity@aol.com (L. Craig Schoonmaker) — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 06:59:00 +0000

>One Step Forward, Two Steps Back. 38 years ago today I founded Homosexuals Intransigent! as a student organization at the City College of the City University of New York. The Stonewall Riots of the same year did not happen until almost two full months later. Each anniversary of the founding of Homosexuals Intransigent! I do a cursory mental review of how far we've come, or how far we've retreated from the ideals we held in the pre-Stonewall and immediate post-Stonewall era. I'm not sanguine.
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On the one hand, a state actually has enacted same-sex "marriage". One state. Out of 50. My own state, New Jersey, which gave rise to a number of prominent gay-rights leaders, enacted this year a discount, bargain-basement, "irregular" version of Massachusetts' proud landmark marriage act, same-sex "civil unions". New Jerseyans must not let things rest there. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, why not just call it a duck: "marriage"? I have no use for cowardice, nor different shades of citizenship, first-class for straight people, second for gay men and lesbian women. Would blacks be content if white people could enter into "marriage" but blacks only into "civil union"? I don't think so.
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Almost two years ago I spoke here about a cable channel for gay men and lesbians, Logo, that media giant Viacom had just premiered. In the intervening time I have tried to watch it at least 2,000 times, but almost always had to turn off in disgust within a few minutes, because Logo is profoundly, aggressively antihomosexual. Logo endlessly tells men and women that they belong together and must always be together. Everything on Logo is male-female, men-and-women-together-now! garbage. The announcer for almost all its promos is female: Logo literally speaks with a woman's voice. How are gay men supposed to feel welcomed or reflected in a (dis)"service" that speaks with a woman's voice? Logo is 70% female, 10% AIDS, 10% "transgendered", and only 10%, at most, gay. And part of that 10% for gay men is reserved to blacks. The "Logo original series" Noah's Arc is all black. Blacks are perhaps 15% of the gay-male population. There is no show about white men, the great majority of the gay male population.
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About the longest men are ever alone with men onscreen on Logo is five minutes. Then women are intruded, as tho well-adjusted gay men always surround themselves with women and spend all their leisure time with lesbians or faghags. Of course we do. Sure. Right. Logo insists that we SHOULD spend all our time with women. We should LOVE women and crave their company. Where have we heard that before? Oh, yes: from shrinks, from the law, from the church, from every part of straight society for hundreds of years.
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For a brief moment, in 1969-1975, there seemed hope that we could break from that and the world would accept that we don't WANT to spend our entire lives with women, we don't want to be surrounded by women; we don't want to hear that we have to love women and that it is abnormal not to crave endless immersion in women's lives. We don't want to be told that simply wanting to be left alone with each other is wrong. But every single day, in every conceivable way, Logo says all those things. Worse, Logo is an enthusiastic member of the Castration Conspiracy I spoke to Friday.
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Logo devotes considerable time to promoting castration of confused gay men so they can pass as women, and to hormone-replacement in lesbians so they can grow beards and pass as men. Logo presumably also favors creation of artificial penises for women who want to be men so they can fool real women into lesbian sex they think is straight. Logo is, in short, The Enemy. There are no words strong enuf to express how awful Logo is, nor how horrendous an enemy its endless antihomosexual propaganda makes it. Because it poses as our friend but tells us that as a condition for its friendship, we have to change our most fundamental nature to conform to its Neo-Heterosexual agenda: you can love and even have sex with men as long as you do it in the dark, and every second you are in public immerse yourself in the straight world and show your total love for and devotion to women.
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Logo's management is so stupid that it doesn't even think about the obvious solution to how to deal with two separate audiences with separate interests, gay men and lesbian women, who actually want nothing to do with each other: separate programs, either on separate services, say, Logo Men and Logo Women, or separate DAYS for the separate sexes, say Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday for gay men, and Monday, Friday, and Saturday for lesbian women. (Gay men tend to go out on Fridays and Saturdays, to be with each other in person in the bars.) Instead, Logo is rigid in its insistence that gay men and lesbian women must be together, except of course when women want to be alone. And then, of course, they will be given all the alone time they want. But gay men may never be alone.
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Logo created a "lesbian and gay" comedy festival, "Outlaugh", in which gay men are supposed to listen carefully to lesbians' lives, Margaret Cho's heterosexual obscenity, and drag queen self-despising 'humor' as tho that somehow has a bearing on their own lives. And we're even supposed to laff at such repulsive things. What demented fool thinks gay men want to hear about lesbian sex? and why are we supposed to regard as our own, men who hate themselves and their manhood so intensely that they disown their manhood and dress as women? Does any of that help us accept ourselves? And if we don't accept ourselves, how in the world are we ever to be happy?
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But, you see, the concern today is not with our internal happiness or self-acceptance. It's with acceptance by straight society. And if in order to be accepted you have to pretend to be something you're not, fundamentally to falsify the nature of homosexuality to approximate heterosexuality in every particular except for 'one little thing', that's a price the 'people' behind Logo and those in charge of the 'LGBT Movement' are willing to pay. Sell out cheap and win faint acceptance of a false version of your nature. All you have to do is stop being yourself and you can be accepted, for as long as you play straight society's game. That's living!
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Logo shows music videos we are supposed to be interested in, all of which are basically heterosexual. All the lyrics of all the songs are heterosexual or neutral. A pair of gay brothers formed a 'gay' group and then made a straight video to promote it to straights as well as gay men. It starts with a man looking raptly at a guy in a bathing suit by a pool, and ends with the two brothers going off in a convertible with two girls. Very homosexual. Thank you so much for betraying us, you worthless pieces of sh*t.
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Logo has also effectively told the straight world that it is perfectly acceptable, perhaps even required now, to call gay men "queers". And, yes, even lesbians are "queer" now, if they choose to be called "queer", which they never were in the supposedly Bad Old Days. So, at a time when some black groups are working to end the promiscuous use of "the N-word", the Q-word is being actively promoted by Logo and various other antihomosexual forces posing as our friends. What next? Call us fag, faggot, fruit, nancy boy, fairy, and various sex-act-specific terms, to our face, as "acceptance"? I can do without that kind of acceptance, thank you very much.
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If you are straight and don't know what to call a homosexual man, "gay" is always safe. "Queer" or anything else is going to offend somebody, especially coming from a straight person. Don't EVER call anybody "queer" as a 'harmless' equivalent of "gay". Think of it, instead, as the exact equivalent of "nigger".
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So where do we stand, 38 years after Stonewall? Gay men have retreated from the idea of living their own lives by their own lites, and substituted the goal of an "acceptance" by straight society that requires them to accept every single value of the straight culture and spend as much time kowtowing to feminist sensibilities and surrounding themselves with women as do straight men, but without any of the benefits. No marriage. No sons. No social respect nor standing in the community. Exclusion from the military as a career choice. Being careful never to mention anything on a job application that might cue the Human Resources Department to your nature. Being too ashamed, and fearful, to walk hand-in-hand with the man you love. Being unable to find a man to love because you are constantly surrounded by women and required to pay more attention to women than to men. (Gay men are expected to take women into men's bars and then spend all their time talking to those women, ignoring the men they presumably went in there to be with.) Toeing the feminist line and spending a maximum of a few hours a week being homosexual, hidden away in the dark somewhere. That is not what gay men organized for in the early and mid-Sixties and rioted for at the end of the decade. But that is what we have 'won'.
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There is more pro-gay imagery and more accurate depictions of homosexuality on straight TV, by far, than on Logo. But even then, it's as tho nobody in Hollywood has ever met a gay man. From supersissy Ross the Intern to loathsome Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and tattooed sado-masochists wearing assless chaps, TV's depiction of gay men is rarely more than a parade of stereotypes, the sexual-politics equivalent of Stepin Fetchit and the happy, singing, dancing slaves of yore.
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38 years after Stonewall, there is no gay music. Every song in every gay bar is straight. Every lyric is straight, men singing love songs to women or women to men. Every mental image that every song is supposed to produce is straight. Every video is straight or neutered.
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There is no gay art. Stunningly, there is no gay dance!
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What passes for gay literature focuses on three extrinsic themes: coming out, AIDS-as-gay (an absurd lie, of course, but one that some maladjusted faggots cling to as 'our special thing', our very own cross to bear), and dealing with straight society. In the real, gay world, coming out occupies a tiny, tiny fraction of our lives. Why is it the main concern of so much 'gay' literature? Where are the stories about our lives after that blip? Forget about coping with straight society. Where are the stories about our internal emotional lives, vis-a-vis each other? the stories and poetry that help us appreciate our lives and find our way to permanent and loving relationships? Where is the wisdom, hard learned, about how to get past the first 'date' and turn a one-night stand into a lifelong love affair? Where are the portrayals of fidelity and examples of success in making a life together? Where are any of the meaningful themes that have filled heterosexual literature for millennia and helped straight people learn how to be straight yet fully human? Nowhere, that's where.
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In the preponderance of today's gay lit, relationships among gay men are trivial, and a new stereotype, practically compulsory, has emerged: the female roommate and best friend. Tonite, Logo broadcast one such fiction, a movie (A Home at the End of the World) in which Colin Farrell plays a (straight) man who visits New York and falls in love with his gay friend's WOMAN roommate. Of course, we all have female roommates. Gay men all live with women. Oh, no, that's straight men. And gay men don't have male best friends. Of course not. Why might that be? Because gay men can't be trusted with one's confidences? Because gay men are callous and don't care about each other's problems and feelings? Or because all literature must deal with the relationships between men and women? It's the law.
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Does black literature insist that every black person's best friend be white? That blacks and whites be roommates? That blacks spend every hour of every day with white people? Does Hispanic literature insist that Latinos' best friends and roommates be Anglo?
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Imagine a heterosexual literature in which everything centered on homosexuals and straight people's having to deal with homosexuals. The dynamics between men and women are scarcely touched upon, ever. All the relatives are gay, all the children are gay, all institutions are gay, and straight people have to spend all their time coping with a world they don't fit into. That's not what heterosexual literature is about. It is about heterosexuality, not coping with homosexuals. And gay literature should be about homosexuality, not coping with heterosexuals.
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Gay musicians should be writing gay lyrics and singing gay love songs, men using "him" for the object of their affection. Gay dancers should be dancing pas de deux and modern moves with men they embrace gently but firmly. Gay everything should be about Us, not Them. We are the center of our lives, not Them. They have their own lives, and their own arts. We could learn from them. Just turn everything around, and that is probably how it should be. A mirror can tell us much, but it is all backwards.

ResurgenceCity@aol.com (L. Craig Schoonmaker) — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 23:42:00 +0000

Let Straights 'Die for Their Country', Without Our Help. U.S. Marine General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, announced yesterday that he believes homosexuality to be immoral and the military should not condone immorality. Hm. Doesn't the military KILL? Let's see how that rates on the scales of morality.
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The Jewish Ten Commandments, Sixth Commandment says "Thou shalt not kill" or, in more modern texts, "You shall not murder". Murder is unjustified killing of human beings by human beings.*
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Plainly the military does kill without justification. As made glaringly plain in the case of Iraq, the U.S. military invaded a country that had never attacked us, had no plans to attack us, and had no means by which to attack us. In carrying out that illegal and unjustified invasion, and maintaining an illegal occupation for years thereafter, the U.S. military has without question murdered many thousands of people, and continues to kill without justification — murder — essentially every day. The U.S. military even kills its own members and allies, in "friendly fire". (What a term!) So it is beyond question that the U.S. military, and every military, is immoral, and is in no position to lecture anyone about morality.
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What about The Golden Rule, commonly expressed, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you"? Do the people the military kills want to be killed? Not the overwhelming preponderance of them, no. So the military violates The Golden Rule every day too.
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By contrast, homosexual behavior exactly and precisely conforms to The Golden Rule, more precisely than can heterosexuality. Think about it. I don't need to be graffic.
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So Peter Pace is a murderer who lectures on morality. I'd just as soon listen to Charles Manson.
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The reaction of the organized "gay movement" — more typically referred to as the "GLBT" (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered) or even "GLBTQ" (add the noxious and offensive "Queer") movement, doesn't help matters by inventing statistics about homosexuals and lesbians — oh, sorry: lesbian and gay people; gay men must never be first, since lesbians are the be-all and end-all of the "lesbigay" movement — in the military:

"General Pace's comments are outrageous, insensitive and disrespectful to the 65,000 lesbian and gay troops now serving in our armed forces," the advocacy group Servicemembers Legal Defense Network said in a statement on its Web site.

There has never been a census of gay or lesbian members of the military, and cannot be until and unless discrimination against them ends. Even then, gay and lesbian people are notorious liars when it comes to their actual orientation. Last nite, an episode of the CBS sitcom The New Adventures of Old Christine revolved around precisely that fact. The title character's brother-in-law "came out" to her but asked her not to tell his brother, Old Christine's ex-husband. She goofed up and let the secret slip, whereupon the straight brother confronted his 'gay' brother, who then repeatedly denied it, lying to his brother's face again and again.
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When I founded Homosexuals Intransigent! as a student organization on April 1, 1969, I provided that no one could become a full (voting) member who did not pledge to tell the truth about his orientation if asked. That was unheard of then, and unheard of now.
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Lying subverts self-respect, and respecting oneself and each other is the most important thing gay men need to do to live complete and happy lives. Honesty is also the least that society expects of people who aspire to be accepted and even admired.
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Peter Pace is an honest bigot. He would doubtless deny that he is a multiple murderer (so dishonest there), and is thus not qualified to lecture anyone, much less society itself, about morality. But on this much he and I agree: gay men should never serve in the military (as long as it is hostile to homosexuality). Let straights fite their wars alone, without our help. Let every casualty, every death, be of a heterosexual bigot — because who else joins a bigoted organization but a bigot? There are no racially unprejudiced members of the KKK, who just joined for the benefits, and no sexually unprejudiced members of the U.S. military. Why should we help our enemies?
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Gay men have never caused any war. All wars are caused by straights, and always have been. Straights can't deal with respecting other people's space or rights or difference. Gay men are comfortable with equality and letting people live by their own lites. Not straights. Straights have to proselytize and convert people unlike themselves. They have growing families to support, so they justify taking other people's food, and land, and wealth as "necessity". Gay men don't have children they can't provide for, and it would never occur to us to steal from other people just because we're stronger.
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The evil world order that the U.S. military imposes and preserves is not one that gay men should have anything to do with. There isn't even any longer an advantage in entering the military to be surrounded by men, because the all-male military is no more. Women are pushed upon men everywhere in the Communized, Radical Feminist military of today, where men are ordered around by women on pain of being shot dead in the field for disobedience, and even the peacetime military is a super-nasty coed summer camp. Why would any gay man subject himself to that kind of imposition, humiliation, and danger, not least of exposure and dishonorable expulsion?
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No gay man should enlist in the military. All who made the mistake of enlisting in the past should leave at their earliest opportunity. Leave the bigots and bullies to die on their own. And good riddance to bad rubbish.
____________________

* By extension, the concept "murder" could be understood as encompassing unjustified killing of one's own kind by any species, but could not be applied to the killing of a different species, "justified" or not. Thus, should we ever come in contact with extraterrestrial aliens and they should kill us, our murder statutes would not apply. That's not, I concede, relevant to the present day, but something worth thinking about in terms of sci-fi moral questions and the forms of future relations with alien outsiders, should we ever make contact.

(This is duplicated from my political blog of this same date.)

ResurgenceCity@aol.com (L. Craig Schoonmaker) — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 14:41:00 +0000

More Slime from Slimegirl. When I addressed a gay issue yesterday, I could not know that mere hours later the odious Radical Right agent provocateur Ann Coulter would issue one of the more bizarre remarks so far in the 2008 Presidential race.

Ann Coulter caused quite a stir Friday night at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Coulter, who was asked to comment on former North Carolina Senator and Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, responded: "It turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word 'faggot,' so I'm kind of at an impasse — I can't really talk about Edwards," she said.

Her remark was met with approving lafter within the room, and no sign of disapproval from her Radical Right audience.
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Hm. I'm unclear as to what exactly that was supposed to mean. Is she suggesting that Edwards is a homo? He's a goodlooking guy, married to a markedly less attractive woman. Ordinarily, if one member of a heterosexual couple is strikingly less attractive, it is the man, women tending to care less about appearance than do men. If Edwards were covering up homosexuality, the appearance of his 'wife' wouldn't much matter, and a relatively unattractive woman might settle for a beautiful 'husband' as trophy, even if he is not really available to her.
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Or is Coulter merely suggesting that Edwards is impermissibly pro-gay? That seems unlikely, inasmuch as there would be no reason to single out Edwards for that, since there are a number of pro-gay candidates, including the Republican Giuliani. Coulter's attempt to calm the storm of criticism her remark raised was comparably muddled:

Coulter told the New York Times the remark was meant as a joke. "I would never insult gays by suggesting that they are like John Edwards," she said. "That would be mean."

But Ann Coulter is nothing but mean. She is a totally evil woman with not a shred of decency, the very picture of the perfect Radical Right woman.
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If Coulter was "outing" Edwards from some information she has that I don't, and Edwards is in fact gay, he should "come out", finally. I have no patience with politicians who hide in the closet. If he is not gay, he should say that expressly, in a statement along these lines:

Contrary to Ann Coulter's implication, I am not homosexual. If I were, I'd admit it, without shame. But I'm not. I don't need to make a show of my heterosexuality to disprove Coulter's assertion, and I certainly am not going to sue her for slander, since being called homosexual is not a slander, just a misstatement or malicious lie intended to harm me among an audience I don't much care about appealing to anyway. Since there's nothing wrong with being gay, there's nothing slanderous about being called gay. It would make no more sense to sue for slander over that than it would to sue if some demented bitch claimed I was black. That might actually gain me some votes, as would being gay. But I'm not black either.

I will be interested to see what happens. Will Ann Coulter be repudiated by every decent person now, as she should have been years ago? Or will she weather this storm as the odious Rush Limbaugh weathered the storm over his seeming hypocrisy in denouncing drugs and then becoming addicted to a prescription painkiller that he got illicitly? It seems the Radical "Right" (can't we find another word?) is far more forgiving of sins among their clan (sorry: klan) than people with integrity. Perhaps it will take a careless statement of contempt for the audience, as in the film A Face in the Crowd, for these vile beasts to alienate their crowd of yahoos. But they may be too clever to be caught. The Radical Right will, it seems, forgive anything, as long as the miscreant toes the line on basic bigotries. Witness Ted Haggard, the evangelical leader exposed as a homo , who begged forgiveness for his 'sins', and committed himself to a five-year moral rehabilitation. He emerged mere weeks later claiming to be "100% heterosexual"! Will he regain his place in Rightwing circles? Or does everyone believe he's just a liar who can't face the fact that he's a homo?
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Rightwingers need to be very careful about their bigotries/politics. It's one thing to hate blacks, because white guys are not about to change race. But when you take a stand against homosexuality or drug use and your heroes turn out to be 'queers' and druggies, you ought to have the integrity to turn against them, not overlook THEIR "sins" but continue to agitate against OTHER people for the SAME 'sins'.
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(This is copied from my political blog, The Expansionist / The Anti-Post, of the same date.)

ResurgenceCity@aol.com (L. Craig Schoonmaker) — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 21:43:00 +0000

Not This Film. I received today an email request that I cooperate in a student film:

... I'm a film student at the State University of New York at Binghamton. I am very pleased with your work and am hoping that you may be interested in mine.
This semester I'm starting a documentary project on GAY & AA in America. I am trying to explore & expose social issues tied into unfair prejudices toward GLBT individuals that may influence drug/alcohol usage. The documentary will consist of many participants in GAY AA meetings, as well as interviewing people who have interesting stories they may want to share about coming out, personal & social experiences, and the community's or society's role in such topics. I will be taking recordings & snap shots of gay clubs/bars in NY and the gay pride parade. And I will also be recording phone interviews from gay advocates around the world--hopefully some big names!!!
I was wondering if it might be possible to record a few phone interviews with you, or some of the advocates affiliated with you. Due to anonminity issues of sexual preference and/or alcohol/drug usage, interviews can be just vocal or written, if needed. I have consent forms for all those who are interested in participating!
So please contact me when you get a chance.
Thank you so much for your time, [name]

Tho I don't want to seem ungracious, this project ticked me off, so I replied thus:

I HAVE no contact with AA, and don't approve of either that program or the concept that people who have a weakness or vice can never act in moderation. That is contrary to good sense and the best interest of individuals and society. AA also tells people to put their trust in a 'higher power', but there is no 'higher power' to call upon except society, friends or family, and whatever it is AA calls people who rush to the 'rescue' of people tempted to drink.
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I highly disapprove of both the artificial construct "GLBT" and the assertion that well-adjusted homosexual men are for all practical purposes identical with maladjusted losers who can't choose a gender, either as objects of affection/desire or as their own identity. There is no such thing as a "transsexual"; "bisexuals" are just weak, bad people who misuse everyone and do themselves no favor; and lesbians and gay men have nothing intrinsically in common. There is no such thing as a "gay woman" any more than there is such a thing as a "lesbian man".
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To the extent that anxiety engendered by social hostilities influences some weak personalities to abuse alcohol (or drugs), that is a phenomenon that should be explored without any artificial link between people who have nothing in common except outside hostility. Your film is fundamentally misconceived.
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If you want to show the role of social disapproval in the abuse of alcohol, show it across all outre' groups, be they minorities (blacks, gay men, Hispanics, Amerindians, Orientals, lesbians, South Asians, Arabs, Jews, and on and on), or various types of nonconformists (bikers, people with multiple tattoos and piercings, artists, musicians, nerds, criminals, geeks, etc.), people whom the popular culture does not value or actively disapproves of. That might raise interesting issues, such as whether all outre' groups have similar rates of alcoholism (tho even establishing such a rate for gay men or lesbians, much less transvestites and "bisexuals", is impossible, since most members of those communities are, to this day, hidden, so no reliable statistics exist, only anecdotal evidence) or whether some groups seem inoculated against chemical dependency, perhaps by strong family relationships or by cultural values or peer pressure and similar controls within their own group.
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You don't say whether you are male, female; lesbian, gay, or straight; and my inclination is to tell outsiders to mind their own business and look into their own lives, not the lives of strangers. Gay men are not zoo animals.
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As you should by now [have] concluded, there is no way in hell I will cooperate in any such insulting and misconceived project. I am very tired of people telling gay men that what they are isn't good enuf, and they must identify with what they are not and let the preconceptions and values of outsiders control them and mold their identity. I will not personally consent to an interview; I will not solicit friends to do so; I will not put a notice on the Mr. Gay Pride website about your project; I will not in any way cooperate with any project that proceeds from what my friend John Lauritsen might call the "synthetic insanity" of a "GLBT community". No such community exists, any more than there is a single "Asian" community, and no sane person believes for a moment that such a community exists. Cheers.

There is no special relationship between gay men and lesbians, gay men and "bisexuals", gay men and nonexistent "transsexuals". "The GLBT community" is a lie and an insult to well-adjusted gay men. It has no more validity than the idea of a "nonwhite community", as tho all nonwhites in this country are somehow the same because they are not white, rather than that they are what they are in themselves. The fact that blacks and Japanese are not white is not the most important thing in their world, and the idea that they should somehow regard their lack of whiteness as impelling them to identify as each other would be seen plainly by everyone as insane. Yet gay men who know what they are and love what they are, are supposed to identify with insane men who are so ashamed of what they are and so incapable of accepting their nature and fiting for their own place in the sun that they would rather have their bodies ripped to shreds with scalpels and then pumped full of chemicals that can cause lethal cancer than accept the fact that they are men who want men, need men, have got to have men, and they will live their life as they choose, as homosexual men.
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And gay men who know what they are and what they want are also supposed to identify with "bisexuals" who pretend to be unable to decide, because "it's all good". To the extent such people exist, which is highly questionable, they are infantile users of people who can never love anyone because there's always someone else out there that offers some physical something the one they are with at the moment cannot supply. But the reality is that "bisexuals" are just homosexuals without guts.
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Gay men are also supposed to identify with lesbians (if there is such a thing, and I'm not persuaded that lesbianism is much more than gender confusion in women). What exactly do gay men have in common with lesbians? They are not men. They (supposedly) don't want men. They start as the opposite sex and look in the opposite direction. How are gay men and lesbians alike? It's insane.
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Yet the wholly artificial "GLBT community" imposes upon people who have nothing in common not only the obligation to socialize and mix, when they never have any reason to be together but very good reason to stay apart, in order not to be confused about what each is (well, the B and T members of that "community" are confused in general, and don't want to become unconfused because that would require them to 'fess up to their actual nature, which they will go to great lengths to avoid). There are actually bars and dances in which people who have nothing in common and want entirely different things from life are supposed to spend all their time together! It's like the Black Panthers and KKK holding joint dinner dances because "they're all racists" so should love each other's company.
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The special group gay men need to identify with and spend their spare time with is gay men. Period.
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There's a very simple test for whether someone is gay. If any two gay people have sex together, that sex is homosexual. If someone claiming to be "gay" having sex with any other gay person would be having heterosexual sex, they are not gay. Thus, there is no such thing as a "gay" woman, because a "gay" woman having sex with a gay man would not be having "gay sex", but heterosex. It's really not complicated in the slitest.
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Gay men do not need lesbians to live a full, rich life. They do not need lesbians to weaken bonds in organizations and incite dissensions, as an organization attempts to reconcile irreconcilable interests. (For instance, lesbians, as feminists, tend to condemn pornography as "exploitation of women". Gay men, as men, like porn, and our porn has no women in it whatsoever, so "exploitation of women" has nothing to do with it. And gay men's organizations thus have no reason to condemn pornography unless it involves violence or abuse of the people in it.)
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Lesbian feminists have repeatedly pushed into gay organizations outside issues that destroy the organization, and gay men are supposed to accept this "gay man's burden", to accept lesbian guiltmongering about "male privilege" even among men who are profoundly oppressed! The "GLBT" movement has been a monstrous failure in advancing the things that are really important in gay men's lives: self-respect and respect for each other; stable, loving relationships. Of what value is gay marriage if you can't find anyone to marry, because the gay world has been crushed nearly out of existence by the "GLBT" world, a world of madness in which everyone is confused about everything?

ResurgenceCity@aol.com (L. Craig Schoonmaker) — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 21:59:00 +0000

"Marriage" for All, or "Marriage" for None. The Legislature of my state, New Jersey, on Thursday passed "civil union" legislation that would grant all the legal rights but not the name "marriage" to same-sex couples. Not good enuf.
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Proponents of "civil union" for same-sex couples but "marriage" for heterosexual couples might cite Shakespeare's downplaying of linguistic distinctions:

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet."

But we know that language matters, hugely. Would these same legislators think it fine if New Jersey State Police addressed white men as "Sir" but black men as "Boy" or "Nigger"? I suspect they would not.
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So today I wrote to Governor Jon Corzine, with copy to State Senate President Richard Codey (who served for a time as a very good Acting Governor after our last elected governor, Jim McGreevey, announced he was a "Gay American", then resigned for no good reason), and the Assemblyman quoted in the AP story about that legislation:

"Love counts," Democratic Assemblyman Wilfredo Caraballo [of my city, Newark], a chief sponsor of the bill, said as the debate opened. "The gender of whom one loves should not matter to the state."

This is the text of my message.

"Marriage" for All, or "Marriage" for None. I am the man who in 1970 first offered the term "Gay Pride" as it is used today, for the weekend of events surrounding the first annual march commemorating the Stonewall Riots. I was born and raised in New Jersey, but left in 1965 because I felt I could not be free here. I spent the next 35 years in New York City, but returned to New Jersey in June 2000. I would like New Jersey to have the same courage as Massachusetts, and not wimp out on the word "marriage".
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Let's put the issue most plainly. Would you sign a bill that permitted white couples to "marry" but allowed black or interracial couples only to "enter into civil union"? If not, you must veto the present "civil union" bill and ask the Legislature to, shall we say, call a spade a spade, so same-sex legal unions that have the same characteristics as marriage are called, simply, "marriage". In the alternative, you must, to provide the equal treatment under law mandated by the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, strip the word "marriage" away from the legal unions the State of New Jersey affords heterosexual couples.
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People who see "marriage" as a religious sacrament that the state does not have the power to bless cannot object to all nonreligious unions being termed only "civil unions", "legal unions", or some other term. Conversely, of course, if the State of New Jersey confers "civil union" upon every couple and any church then blesses that union, then in that church's eyes that couple will be "married". The problem arises, however, of whether society, not just a given liberal church, recognizes committed same-sex couples as "married".
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Why cause such problems? If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it is a duck. Why call it a "generic waterfowl"? "Civil union" IS "marriage" IS "legal union". But "marriage" has all the power of legitimacy. All else is second-class.
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If you refuse to use "marriage" for same-sex legal unions, you must remove that term from heterosexual legal unions. Let's see how straight couples like the idea that they aren't married unless not just the state but also some church says they're married. I suspect they won't like it at all. If you think so too, save us all from confusion and division. Reject "civil union". Embrace "marriage". And let us all move forward in the 21st Century as equals. The world is watching (http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-6281233,00.html). Do New Jersey proud.

ResurgenceCity@aol.com (L. Craig Schoonmaker) — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 11:27:00 +0000

Gay Marriage May Bring Boom to NJ. My friend Joe in Belleville (NJ)emailed me a November 26th opinion piece in the New York Daily News titled "Gay rights could pay big dividends", in which Richard Florida and Gary Gates suggest that if New Jersey's Legislature enacts civil unions for same-sex couples, and especially if it authorizes gay "marriage" as such, a lot of gay people now living in New York could pick up stakes and move to New Jersey, bringing their talents, and money, to the Garden State.

This will be a big deal — not just for same-sex couples, but for New Jersey's economy.

Why? Because, despite some rumblings in Albany, New York is likely to be years away from allowing same-sex marriage or civil unions. That will give [New] Jersey a serious competitive advantage in attracting gay couples and the economic benefits associated with their calling a place home.

A forthcoming study by UCLA's Williams Institute finds that revenue from weddings and wedding tourism alone (if the [New] Jersey legislature approves marriage, not civil unions) would add nearly $103 million per year in business to the state for at least the next few years.

But the economic impact could go way beyond that. Our research on what makes cities and regions grow shows that urban economic vitality today turns on openness to new ideas, new people and different lifestyles. Artistic, technological and cultural innovators and the more than 40 million workers who are part of what we call "the creative class" are drawn to places that are diverse and tolerant.

And when they settle somewhere, these people, who tend to have disposable income to spend in restaurants, bars and coffee shops, attract more of each other and fuel all kinds of economic activity.

Manhattan has long atracted gay men from all over the world. I myself left New Jersey for Manhattan in 1965, and stayed there for 35 years until the crammed-jammed, frazzled existence of that overcrowded and increasingly expensive island propelled me back to New Jersey, where I have SPACE and TREES and FLOWERS in a semi-suburban part of Newark a half hour car ride from the Village. Now, in addition to the push of overcrowding and high expenses of all kinds in Manhattan, New Jersey could also benefit from the pull of a society even more tolerant than New York, where they can actually marry and enjoy the economic security of being able to pool their resources to buy a house (and guys, remember that I will soon have my real-estate license, so I can help you find a very nice house in a very nice neighborhood in Newark) and enjoy legal protection of marital assets.
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"Marriage" is the key, NJ Legislators. Massachusetts had the guts to call their same-sex legal status "marriage". New Jersey must not be less courageous. There's money to be made in courage.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,885 — for Israel.)

ResurgenceCity@aol.com (L. Craig Schoonmaker) — Sun, 26 Nov 2006 00:16:00 +0000

Leave Gay Men Alone. The world is always rife with lunatic notions. Among the most pernicious widely believed today is the idea that gay men are so free now that they don't need gay bars, but can dispense with places where they can be alone with each other. Nothing could be further from the truth.
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"Birds of a feather flock together." The human race has known that for a very long time:

Individuals of like character, taste, or background (tend to stay together), as in The members of the club had no trouble selecting their yearly outing--they're all birds of a feather. The idea of like seeks like dates from ancient Greek times, and "Birds dwell with their kind" was quoted in the apocryphal book of Ecclesiasticus. The full saying in English, Birds of a feather flock together, was first recorded in 1545. [Emphasis in original]

Why, then, do we have such trouble with this concept in the United States today?
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Endlessly we are lectured — indeed, practically pummelled — into accepting that we "should" ignore all differences among people and be friends with and spend essentially all our time with people with whom we share NOTHING. The ordinary course of human relationships rejects all such advice and compulsion. Decade after decade, century after century, people cling to their own kind. It's not rejection of others but simply affection for one's own.
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It's not evil. It's not conspiratorial. It's just simple human nature. Why can't we ALL accept that, and let people be with whom they want to be without making it into a humungous moral issue?
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Gay men are a pervasively (indeed astoundingly) oppressed minority, told by religion, (every) national culture, literature, television, and every other aspect of life in society that they are at the very least statistically abnormal and, at worst, "sick", immoral, and destined to go to Hell. It is not possible for gay men to immerse themselves in the dominant culture, which despises homosexuality, but still be well adjusted to their inner voice and personal needs. So, gay men must escape society's demands, to find a place where they can be alone, to themselves, and listen to themselves and each other, without all the dissonance of external voices and requirements.
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But straight people today won't let gay men be alone. Instead, straights insist that circumstances have so changed, and gay men are now so free, that they need no longer segregate themselves into a "gay ghetto", but can integrate fully into the straight world yet still be themselves. That fatuous assumption is born of ignorance (not to say "stupidity").
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Would straight people, were they an oppressed minority, gladly integrate themselves into a dominantly homosexual culture, or would they feel themselves perpetually and irreconcilably different and thus incapable of accepting second-class membership in (gay) society?
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If every television commercial that strove for "sex appeal" showed two men ogling, flirting, caressing, kissing each other, would straights be comfortable with that, translating it into their own terms to mean that whoever you are attracted to, this product will help you win him or her over? Or would they find themselves excluded and oppressed, utterly and absolutely incapable of seeing themselves in a gay couple?
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This is what naive straight people would have gay men do: see their own lives in straight relationships. Impossible! And everyone of any sense KNOWS it's impossible.
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Straights have no conception of how thoroughly, and, for us, oppressively, (heterosexual) society is permeated by heterosexuality. They don't see the kisses between men and women as anything but ordinary. They have never for an instant considered how they would like it if every time people kissed on television and film, it was two men kissing. Every single time, year after year, decade after decade. Would they get used to it and even smile upon it? Or would they find it distasteful every single time, not just because it's not something they want to do but because they hunger for images of men kissing women — which is NEVER shown?
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Would straight men regard still fotos and film or video footage of men kissing men as an acceptable alternative image to men kissing women? Would they feel all warm and fuzzy, and think, "Ah! Isn't that beautiful!" when they see men kissing men? Or would they be alienated and hostile, and turn away so they don't have to see it?
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Would heterosexuals gladly accept being surrounded and outnumbered by men kissing and leering at each other? Groping each other in public?
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Gay men are supposed to accept straight people carrying on in public. Even other straight people sometimes have to tell idiots, "Get a room!" What if everywhere around these straight individuals, men were grabbing at men, hugging and caressing men, kissing men? Would the straights compelled to witness this be blase about it? Or would they be endlessly offended, even disgusted, and possibly alarmed about losing their own sexual identity to an alien imposition?
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If straight people had to create special little places for themselves, "straight bars", and gather together in private, to be themselves, would they welcome gay men barging in and staring at them as tho they were zoo animals, and watch them as tho observing primitive mating rituals? Or would they deeply resent the intrusion and want to be left alone, to be themselves?
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Perhaps this gives you the tiniest bit of understanding of what it is to be homosexual in a dominantly heterosexual society. We need to left alone.
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We don't want 'understanding' or 'sympathetic' straight people in our places. We want to be alone with each other.
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We don't want lesbians (if there are such creatures, and gay men really, really doubt it) staring at us when we are trying to get sexual with each other.
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We don't want straight people, of either gender, or lesbian women, speculating about our sex lives and who is going to be "the woman"/femme or "the man"/butch if we manage somehow to get together despite being spied upon by The Enemy. Straights simply don't understand that no well-adjusted gay man is "femme" or a "woman", but is always and ever a man — that we never feel so masculine as when we are alone in sexual activity with another man. They just don't "get it". And it's foolish of us to think they do.
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Gay men go to gay bars or other gay places to meet, and possibly hook up with, other gay men. If we wanted to be with women or straight people in general, we would go to straight places. The simple fact that we go to a gay place means we want to be LEFT ALONE. Is that really such a difficult concept for straight people to understand? Well, it might be if all straight people were idiots. ARE all straight people idiots?
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If you are straight, do not EVER go to any gay place. Ever. Do not invade our space.
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If you are gay, and want to spend time with your straight/female friends, do so in a straight place. That's where it is appropriate for men and women to hang out together. Do NOT take women to a gay men's place. You may feel more comfortable there, but neither the woman you intrude there (who will be surrounded by men who want no part of a woman) nor the gay men who wanted to be alone with other men there, will be comfortable. Be considerate. Be intelligent. Be aware. Be sensitive. Don't take women to gay men's places. Ever.
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And certainly do not deride or criticize any gay man who objects to your invading and thus destroying a gay place by intruding women where they just plain do not belong. I repeat: The very least that "gay" means is "homosexual", and the very least that "homosexual" means is "same sex", that is, one sex, not two. Gay is like pregnant in that regard. There is no more such a thing as "slitely straight" than there is such a thing as "slitely pregnant". A place either is or is not homosexual: one sex.
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One sex = homosexual/gay. Two sexes = heterosexual/NOT gay. It really is that simple, and only a simpleton could fail to appreciate that.
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The disgusting reality is that everyone knows all this, instinctually, but a very large proportion of gay men still, to this day, 37 years after Stonewall, hate themselves and each other, so will do everything in their power to try, against insuperable odds, to resist their irresistible attraction to men, and place female bodyguards between themselves and the men they want but fear. They will loudly proclaim an "antidiscriminatory" intent, and their supposed belief that 'everybody should accept everybody'. But that's not what they really feel. What they do really feel is that men and women belong together; men and men do NOT belong together; and somebody must save them from their own perverted desires, even if it is "their [own] better selves".
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They make it impossible for themselves to cruise men, and thus avoid going off with men and 'sullying themselves' in 'immorality'. Alas, they then proceed to impose their own dysfunction upon others, and do everything in their power to keep ALL gay men from meeting each other and getting together. Why do we permit this?
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Alas, the laws are written by straight people, and they are so consumed by feminist-induced guilt about what they as straight men have been doing 'to' women that they displace onto gay men their own guilts. We are to pay for STRAIGHT men's lack of attention to and support of their wives or girlfriends. WE are to pay for straight men's refusal to clear the table or wash dishes, vacuum the rugs or change the baby.
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Leave us out of it! We have nothing to do with your debts relative to women. We're not married to women, and would not ever be married to a woman, under any circumstances, even if a gun were put to our head. Make your own amends for your own sins. Leave us out of it.
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If truth be told — tho the whole truth is rarely told in this country, in this age — gay men don't believe in lesbianism. Oh, we've been told it's real, that there are lots of women who crave sex with women. We just don't believe it. Our base question is "What can they do? Bump pussies?" We just don't believe it.
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We know that homosexuality (men-with-men) is real — very, very real. We know we get, hm, how can we say this in mixed company? "physically aroused" on SEEING a man we find attractive. We are irresistibly, powerfully, massively impelled to sex with men. And we love it.
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We do not for an instant believe that "lesbians" have any such powerful sexual feeling for women. There are no sex places for lesbians, no baths, no trucks, no parks, no rest stops on the interstate. Sex between women is a fraud, an urban legend. If it ever happens at all, it is an aberration, a rarity, a companion to an emotional relationship in women whose sex lives are empty.
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In gay men, by contrast, sex is primary, the top of everything. We want it, we look for it, we hunt for it, we get it. And if we don't get it, we are actively miserable. We can't go weeks or months without it just because we aren't "in love". Sex in itself is enuf. We love it, we want it, we've got to have it, because sex between men is so wonderful as to be inexpressible. Words fail us. THAT is homosexuality.
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We don't go to gay bars to chat. We go to look for somebody hot.
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It is as inhibiting to us to have a woman — any woman, "lesbian" (ha!) or straight — watching us as it would be for straights to try to hook up for casual sex in front of Father Murphy or Sister Mary Katherine. Even if Father Murphy or Sister Mary Katherine wouldn't actually step physically between us and our intended sexual conquest to stop us from going home with each other, their mere presence, intently watching what we do, would be powerful interference with our sex lives. Is that so hard to understand?
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The moral of this story is, (1) if you are straight, do not EVER go to a gay bar — ever; and (2) if you are gay, do not EVER bring women ("lesbian" or straight doesn't matter) or straight men into a gay bar or any other gay situation. There are many other hours of your day or life, when it is (reasonably) appropriate to mix genders and orientations. A gay bar is not the place; when gay men want to be with other gay men is not the time.

ResurgenceCity@aol.com (L. Craig Schoonmaker) — Fri, 12 May 2006 11:30:00 +0000

[The following appeared on my political blog this same date.]
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Wasting People's Time Innocently, or Hidden Bigotry? Most of us have seen those eHarmony commercials in which the founder of that computer-romance site, Dr. Neil Clark Warren, tells how his company can help people find "the love of their lives". What Warren and his website do not tell people is that eHarmony matches only men to women, not also men to men, or women to women, like most other computer-dating services. You can search with a fine-tooth comb thru the introductory materials on eHarmony's website without finding any limitation as to sexual orientation. Only after you have taken the time to complete their online "Compatibility Profile" do you find that you will be matched only to someone of the opposite sex!
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Why would they do that?
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It's not careless. After I got stung, I sent an email complaint saying I have no interest in meeting women, and insisting that eHarmony has an obligation to tell people up front that it is a service for heterosexuals only. So, they know full well that what they are doing is irritating at best and discriminatorily offensive at worst. Yet they have not responded to my explicit complaint by including so much as a footnote to warn gay men and lesbians not to waste their time.
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Even after I specified as the way to contact me, in the process of filling out their forms, the email address "MrGayPride@aol.com", they still started to match me to women. I had to go back into their site and tell them to stop sending me email!
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So the question arises, is eHarmony out to convert gay men to heterosexuality? What other explanation is there?
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Perhaps they're just duly ashamed of discriminating against homosexuals, and don't wish to draw attention to their systematic discrimination by admitting it in so many words. But maybe they're glad to waste gay people's time and raise their hopes of meeting someone right for them, only to dash those hopes afterward, because Warren and his employees feel that gay men "should" want to marry women, and if we don't want to, we should be punished by being induced to lose valuable time — and hope — to a service that has no use for us.
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Well, I have no use for eHarmony, and want all gay men to know that eHarmony holds them in contempt.
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Dr. Warren is entitled to dislike homosexuals — after all, we dislike people who dislike us — but he is not entitled to bait and (try to) switch us to heterosexuality. We're not interested in a heterosexuals-only computer-matching service. Just tell us that eHarmony is for straight people only. Don't waste our time.

ResurgenceCity@aol.com (L. Craig Schoonmaker) — Sun, 26 Mar 2006 23:11:00 +0000

Deathknell for Antigay Bigotry? Americans are adjusting much faster than almost anyone could have predicted to the arrival of gay marriage, and that has serious implications for the future of the Republican Party. The Associated Press reported yesterday:

The public backlash over gay marriage has receded since a controversial decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Court in 2003 to legalize those marriages stirred strong opposition, says a poll released Wednesday [3/22/06].

Gay marriage remains a divisive issue, with 51 percent opposing it, the poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found. But almost two-thirds, 63 percent, opposed gay marriage in February 2004. * * *

The number of people who say they strongly oppose gay marriage has dropped from 42 percent in early 2004 to 28 percent now. Strong opposition has dropped sharply among senior citizens and Republicans.

People are now evenly split on allowing adoptions by gay couples and six in 10 now favor allowing gays to serve openly in the military.

Uh oh.
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The Republican Party is counting on fury over gay adoption to turn out their base this November and win re-election for a Republican majority in both houses of Congress. They have placed initiatives against gay adoption on the ballot in a number of key states, hoping that they can distract the poor people of those states who have been screwed-over by Republican policies into voting against their own interests because the Republicans will protect them from them damned faggots! It might still work, this November. But how long can Republicans keep the poor white trash of the South from realizing that Republican policies are destroying them?
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The greatness of the United States is showing. The fundamental decency and devotion of the American people to "the pursuit of happiness" is winning out over fearmongers' trying to control behavior they don't approve of by making extravagant claims that letting people be themselves will somehow destroy our civilization. But their alarums and excursions are proving increasingly useless. People are realizing that the terrible things they were told would happen if faggots weren't kept down just aren't happening. The "homosexual agenda" isn't destroying the Nation. The sun did not explode when Massachusetts legalized gay marriage.
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The working slogan of this country is neither "E Pluribus Unum" nor "In God We Trust". It is "Live and Let Live".
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The Republican Party is on the wrong side of history, and history is moving fast. Consider that figure of people strongly opposed to gay marriage. It dropped by 14 points in two years! Two years! 14 points on a base of 42% is exactly 1/3, in two years! To put that in even starker context, the 28% that remains is only twice the 14 point drop in two years. Moreover, the drop in total opposition was 12 points in two years, to the edge of becoming a minority stance, just 51%. In two years! It took far longer than that to get gay men to favor gay marriage!
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Reforming marriage laws was one of the stances that my organization, Homosexuals Intransigent!, took very early (by February 1972), and we were criticized, if not even condemned, for being "hetero-imitative". The libertines in our crowd proclaimed that "sexual liberation" meant we must not be tied down to a single partner, because "monogamy is unnatural". Is any form of marriage, then, natural? Or is only sex with whomever one is attracted to biologically normal?
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Well, all societies are dominated by men, and all societies have marriage. Ergo marriage could not be unnatural, could it?
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What about polygamy? "Monogamy with exceptions" (affairs, "cheating")?
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Polygamy is common in past human history, but so is monogamy. After all, the sex ratio in the human species is too close to permit everyone to have more than one wife (and we are, for all practical purposes, talking about polygyny (more than one wife) when we speak of polygamy, because polyandry (formalized permission of a woman to have more than one husband) is practically unheard of.
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An essay on monogamy among animals and its implications for people appears on the website of San Antonio's Trinity University. In "Deflating the Myth of Monogamy", David P. Barash, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington, discusses monogamy in the sense of sexual exclusivity.
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Hilites (emphasis added):

[M]ales tend to follow a "mixed reproductive strategy," whereby they establish a mateship with a designated female (and perhaps assist in nest building, territorial defense, care of the young, and so forth insofar as those activities increase their reproductive success) while also making themselves available for E.P.C.'s ["extra-pair copulations", that is, adulterous couplings] with other females, whom they will not assist.

To be sure, males can be expected to be at least minimally discriminating, because there may be costs associated with too much sexual gallivanting: A careless Lothario might be attacked, for example, by an outraged "husband." Or, while seeking his own E.P.C.'s, a philanderer might be cuckolded by other males having similar designs on his mate, unavoidably left unguarded. * * *

For some species, notably certain lizards and insects, there appears to be a payoff in increasing the genetic diversity of one's offspring by copulating with multiple partners. For some birds, there may be an immediate benefit – such as being fed by one's lover. In many cases, the payoff appears to be more indirect, via genetic benefits accruing to the "out-of-wedlock" offspring. By mating with males who are especially fit and/or who possess secondary sexual traits that are particularly appealing to other females, would-be mothers apparently can increase the fitness as well as the eventual sexual attractiveness of their offspring. ...

The anthropologist Sarah Hrdy [sic; Czech for "proud"; her husband's surname] has suggested that among primates in particular, females solicit E.P.C.'s in order to buy a kind of tolerance from their extra-pair sexual partners: Males of many species (including langurs, chimpanzees, and certain macaques) often kill offspring they have not fathered. By copulating with males from outside the troop, females could well be bribing them to avoid such violence toward offspring that might be their own. * * * [This leaves unanswered the question of how a male animal can know which are his offspring and which not. I suspect, in part from the behavior of my cat Leo, that he can actually smell it.]

Social conservatives like to point out what they see as threats to "family values." But they don't have the slightest idea how great that real threat is, or where it comes from. Monogamy is definitely under siege, not by government, declining morals, or some vast homosexual conspiracy -- but by our own evolutionary biology. Infants have their infancy. And adults? Adultery. * * *

... before the cultural homogenization that came with Western colonialism, more than three-quarters of all human societies were polygynous.

But it's one thing to conclude that our biology favors polygyny, and quite another to decide that most people, most of the time, were either keepers or members of harems. The likelihood is that only a few succeeded at polygyny, just as only a small proportion of females were chosen (or coerced). The great majority of people -- of both sexes – undoubtedly practiced monogamy, at least its social variety. * * *

In response to surveys, 25 to 50 percent of American men report having had at least one episode of extramarital sex. The numbers for women are perhaps a bit lower, but in the same ballpark. * * *

There is no question about [sexual] monogamy's being natural. It isn't. But at the same time, there is no reason to conclude that adultery is unavoidable, or that it is good. "Smallpox is natural," wrote Ogden Nash. "Vaccine ain't." Animals, most likely, can't help "doing what comes naturally." But humans can. A strong case can even be made that we are never so human as when we behave contrary to our natural inclinations, those most in tune with our biological impulses.

In a gay couple, the natural disposition of males to look around is doubled, but there is still an aspiration to faithfulness, at least emotional.

A 1994 study in The Advocate, the largest national gay and lesbian magazine, reported that 52% of the gay male couples described themselves as being monogamous ("The 1994 Advocate Survey of Sexuality and Relationships: The Men," The Advocate, August 23, 1994, pp.*nbsp;16-24). * * *

In the 1994 Advocate study, the huge majority of gay couples say that sex outside the relationship is the most difficult problem they face -- 85% of the respondents in the study reported that this topic had caused their biggest fights.

It's not easy to be faithful, even when the risks of losing an enormously important emotional relationship would seem to make the prize not worth the gamble.
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Merely "tying the knot" does not really bind people, and society has had to exert itself mightily to stop people from having sex outside the bounds of matrimony. In the United States, we gave up that fite, as regards heterosexual marriage, decades ago and recognized that if people wanted out of a marriage (usually to pursue a sexual relationship with someone else, either already known or speculative for the future), they would find a way. We decided that "Divorce, American-Style" shouldn't be Marcello Mastroianni's Divorce, Italian Style (murder), nor the prior American style of divorce, filled with recriminations, private detectives, and adultery real and faked.
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The first no-fault divorce law was, oddly, signed in 1969 by Ronald Reagan when he was governor of California. The last was South Dakota's, in 1985.
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Conservative social critics have recently tried to mount a great crusade to abolish no-fault divorce, claiming it has caused this country to go to hell in a handbasket, cheapen marriage, and subvert the family. Note that these are some of the same grounds used to oppose gay marriage. But all 50 states abolished fault-divorce, because the mess that prior laws produced was awful. Tho many social observers are concerned that reformed divorce laws have indeed produced more broken marriages than the old laws, which is surely true, there is no chance that reactionaries will be able to saddle us with laws we abolished decades ago.
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There is likewise very little chance that Massachusetts will repeal gay marriage. Quite the contrary, it seems certain that now that high anxiety about same-sex marriage has subsided, Americans will relax and see legalization of gay marriage as the next step in our progress as a Nation toward "liberty and justice for all".
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(This is a copy of the bulk of the March 24, 2006 entry in my political blog.)

ResurgenceCity@aol.com (L. Craig Schoonmaker) — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 21:25:00 +0000

(This is a combination of pieces of my two other blogs, first the bulk of a comment on Jay Leno, who is insistently antihomosexual; the second, a view of new rental housing that up-and-coming gay men who find Manhattan too crammed-jam and expensive might find congenial in my revitalized city, Newark, NJ.)
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Nasty Guy. Jay Leno made news today for apologizing to a woman friend of the victim for "a sketch that compared Vice President Dick Cheney's hunting accident to a 2003 videotaped shooting outside a Los Angeles courthouse". The L.A. shooting wasn't fatal, but even if it had been, Leno might very well still have joked about it. After all, he joked many times about a notorious incident in which a woman in Texas murdered her husband by running him over with their car, backing up over him, and then driving forward over him again! That struck the monster Jay Leno as funny. No decent person on Earth regarded that horrible murder as funny.
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Jay Leno is a nasty, nasty guy who camouflages his vicious regard for the rest of the world behind a joking demeanor. But he is fundamentally vicious.
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Part of his viciousness is his unrelenting ridicule of homosexuality, and his constant promotion of stereotypes that injure gay men. His "Ross the Intern" bits endlessly tell the world that gay men are faggoty little fruits, and tell easily-confusable gay teens just coming to adulthood that to be gay, they need to be nelly, flaming queens. Leno endlessly makes disparaging jokes about Brokeback Mountain, even now that the film has been disposed of by the Oscars and is probably not even showing widely in theaters any longer. So, topicality is not the standard. Leno has problems with various kinds of people, and attacks them under the guise of humor.
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I feel that I have to watch his monolog for its political content and the reaction of the audience, so usually turn from Comedy Central's Colbert Report to NBC's Tonight Show for the monolog, since Colbert is repeated at 1:30am, same nite, but the Tonight Show isn't repeated until a week later. With topical political humor, a week's delay renders the commentary less than useful in gaging public sentiment.
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I don't know what Leno's problem is, but he is obviously bristling with hostility toward many, many people, and his view of human nature is at best condescending, not warmly indulgent. His "Jaywalking" and "Headlines" segments are based on mocking people. It's not as good-natured as he'd like you to think.
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I don't know why he is so bitter and hostile. The world has certainly treated him very well. He makes millions of dollars a year; is married, famous and generally well regarded; and people in power listen to his political commentary during his nitely monolog. But he is plainly ticked off at a lot of people. A curmudgeon saying the same things in a different tone would be understood instantly to be an unhappy and vicious person. Of course, he is childless. Perhaps his ego does not permit anyone else to get more attention from his wife than he. Perhaps she won't (or can't) give him a Mini-Me. Or perhaps he's sterile, which might explain a lot of his anger toward the world.
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That Leno clothes his remarks in humor and laffs at people rather than launches hard-faced attacks upon them does not in any way make his viciousness palatable to me.
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Yes, many people are stupid and ignorant, but you don't need to harp on it unless it affects you personally, or produces unwise public policy. In the latter case, you should strive to lead opinion to better outcomes, not just mock people.
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Luxury Apartments, Relatively Cheap, 25 Minutes from Manhattan. Here is a foto of the construction site for the renovation of Newark's second-tallest building, which was originally an office tower but is now being created into apartments.

The Raymond Boulevard side of the building shows a sign announcing the anticipated completion date, only part of which fits in a normal camera view. (I don't have one of those super-expensive digital cameras with wide-angle lens.)

I just went to the website noted on that sign, and it has a very jazzy, youth-oriented, slideshow intro that shows plainly the developer's intended target audience: a young, hip, affluent and multiracial audience eager to embrace all that life in a human-scale city has to offer. (They cleverly allow people who remember the site as www.1180rentals.com rather than "eleven80rentals" to get to the same site via redirect.) Gay men should be part of that target audience, especially gay men interested in the many cultural offerings within a short walking distance at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, Newark Museum, Aljira (gallery), and Newark Public Library. In addition, there's a minor-league baseball stadium also within an easy, comfortable walk past two parks filled with sculpture, more than just trees and grass.
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There will be a rental office on Commerce Street opposite 1180 in due course, but it's not yet open.

I hadn't realized that the apartments would be rentals. I assumed that, as in New York, they would be condos or coops. Rentals seem much wiser at this stage in the development of Downtown Newark as a residential center. Good thinking.

ResurgenceCity@aol.com (L. Craig Schoonmaker) — Sat, 11 Feb 2006 09:49:00 +0000

Evil Madness. If any proof were needed that much of this country has lost its mind, here's the clincher: the "gay" (but actually antigay) cable (dis)service Logo, Viacom's horrible mistake, is now advertising an upcoming offering: an all-"transsexual" version of The Vagina Monologues. Think about that: an all-male version of The Vagina Monologues! It's called "Beautiful Daughters". I wish I were kidding.
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Parts of this society have descended into unspeakable evil. Supposedly reputable hospitals are surgically mutilating crazy people incapable, by virtue of madness, of consenting to operations that will massively and permanently ravage them. Those lunatics then go out into society and fool people into participating in twisted homosexual or lesbian relationships on the misunderstanding that they are having sex with someone of the opposite sex, when in fact they are having sex with someone who is, in every single cell of his or her body, the same sex as the person fooled.
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Every one of those make-believe "vaginas" to be celebrated in The Vagina Monologues is lined with cells all of which bear the Y-chromosome that brands a person, for life, as male.
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It's bad enuf that some demented losers in the executive suite of Logo are offering such evil trash. But worse, the mainstream has also lost its mind. An insane "comedy" about a pre-operative "transsexual" won an Oscar nomination for the woman who plays that insane man in the astonishingly evil film Transamerica. The film is summarized thus at the Internet Movie Database website:

A pre-operative male-to-female transsexual takes an unexpected journey when she learns that she fathered a son, now a teenage runaway hustling on the streets of New York.

Note the grammatical gender in that description: female. The man hasn't even had his balls whacked off yet but is nonetheless (nonethemore?) called "she"!
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What is wrong with this country? Women don't have balls. A man whose balls are slashed off by some mad surgeon does not become by virtue of that mutiliation a woman. Why aren't women infuriated by the suggestion that a woman is only a castrated man?
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The vile woman who plays a man in the vile film Transamerica speaks:

It's not a breakthrough, it's a reflection," said Felicity Huffman, a best-actress nominee for "Transamerica," a road-trip comic drama about a man coping with the social stigmas of undergoing a sex change. "I think it's kudos for all of us, because I think we're recognizing, appreciating and making movies that bring understanding and healing.

"And in the case of 'Transamerica,' it's also really fun to watch."

"Understanding and healing"? How does a man heal from castration? Gender confusion and self-hatred so great that a man wants to be castrated is "fun to watch"? On what planet? Please explain to me exactly what is "fun to watch" about a man who is so desperately unhappy that he wants his body to be hideously and irreversibly mutilated, out of the useless hope that cutting his genitals off will change his unchangeable biological reality.
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I have an operation to suggest for Felicity Huffman: an incision should be made across her throat from one ear to the other, and her empty head removed as the malignancy it is. The remainder of her body should then be chopped up for parts for decent, sane people who need organ transplants. Everyone responsible for Transamerica, Beautiful Daughters, and every other "transsexual" crime against humanity should as well be killed and chopped up for parts for sane and decent people.
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How did this country get so crazy? We supposedly were hugely indignant that Josef Mengele cut off the balls of European Jews, but we are now to cheer on Hollywood celebrations of castration of American homosexuals?
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There is no such thing as "transsexuality"; no such thing as "sex change operations" or "sexual reassignment" surgery. There is only castration of tragically miserable men, and malicious mutilation of women, all because society cannot accept that many men want men and (a tiny, tiny number of) women want women. (Actually, I seriously doubt the existence of genuine lesbianism. Certainly there is no evidence that more than one in 2,000 or more women is really filled with lust for women. Rather, lesbianism seems a rebellion against the 'cruel fate' that biology, or God, or something, or someone, has inflicted upon poor, unfortunate women in not giving them manhood. "Lesbianism" seems to be nothing more than gender confusion in women.) Homosexuality, however — intense, driving lust in men for men — is plainly very real. Gay men will take huge risks of exposure, ruin, imprisonment, even death by beating, to have sex with men.
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Society has trouble with two physically intact men having sex. Castrating one of them and pretending that he is a "she" somehow eases that anxiety. But it doesn't change a thing. A castrated man is still a man, just as a castrated cat or dog is still "he". If you don't call Fido "Fida" or Socks "Stockings" after neutering, you know full well that a castrated animal (and people are just animals, after all) has not changed gender. An ox is not a cow. You can't get any milk from him.
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Would we smile on "race-change surgery", in which black people who hate being black are flayed under anesthesia — that is, all their skin is stripped from their body and replaced by white skin? I guess so. And then we could have an all-black chapter of the Ku Klux Klan! Wouldn't that be wonderful, and "bring understanding and healing" to the Nation by empowering self-despising blacks to become openly anti-black bigots!
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Make no mistake: "transsexuality" is an astonishingly vicious antihomosexual Castration Conspiracy that starts with telling gay men that they aren't really men and proceeds to assure the more unstable among them that they can "be" women by a few slices of a knife and injections of hormones for the rest of their life. They can have sex with as many men as they want, without telling those men that they are having sex with a man, and giggle to themselves that they have made fools of straight society and conned straight people into sanctioning homosexual sex.
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For some reason, Josef Mengele was not a hero to the German people, but the surgeons, physicians, and psychologists involved in the Castration Conspiracy are held up to us for admiration for "bring[ing] understanding and healing" to unhappy homos by lopping their genitals off and telling the world that they are thereby making them into women. Men, we are to believe, don't need their genitals. No? Then members of the Castration Conspiracy don't need their heads.
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We all do, however, need new Nuremberg Trials, to round up and punish every member of the Castration Conspiracy. Kill them all, starting with Felicity Huffman and the CEO of Logo. There are decent people in this country dying while stuck on transplant waiting lists for organs that just don't turn up. Felicity Huffman and the other members of the Castration Conspiracy might be perfect matches for decent people who will die without the organs now being wasted on subhuman scum. Chop them up for parts.
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(The post above is a duplicate of an entry in my political blog of this same date, at http://antipost.blogspot.com.)

ResurgenceCity@aol.com (L. Craig Schoonmaker) — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 17:21:00 +0000

Tranvestite Travesties; No-Cost Charity. (This is copied from my political blog of the same date.)
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(1) Acceptable Transvestism. Former U.S. Olympian Cathy Rigby, who won a silver medal at the 1970 Summer Olympics for balance beam, has been playing the boy Peter Pan for 31 years. At long last, this 51-year-old woman's showbiz transvestism is coming to an end, as we in the New York Tristate Metropolitan Area are reminded daily by TV commercials for her Madison Square Garden appearance, which is intended to be her last there. However, once she leaves New York, she won't wrap up her scandalous celebration of gender confusion until at least May 2006, elsewhere.
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Also in New York this holiday season, the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes dress up, as they always do for the Christmas Show, as men in their "Parade of the Wooden Soldiers" — three dozen women pretending to be men. Why is that acceptable? If dozens of men dressed as women, would society be so indulgent?
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Why is it okay for women to dress as men?
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On Live with Regis and Kelly recently, Kelly Ripa recounted that after a performance of Peter Pan, she and her kids made a backstage visit to Rigby. One of Kelly's kids observed aloud that Peter Pan is a girl! How confusing is that to kids?
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Tho there might once have been some legal rationale for using an adult woman to represent a prepubescent boy onstage, out of concern for a child actor's mental health or education, that rationale doesn't hold today, and especially not if other child characters are played by actual children.
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Nor does the justification hold that in a long stage run or national tour, a child would age and have to be replaced as his voice changed. The late Charles Schulz, creator of the Peanuts cartoon gang, saw to it that all the children's voices in his TV specials were actual children's voices. As one group aged, another replaced it. Easy. There are a great many kids eager to act. Children's roles should not be stolen by adults.
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The human race is feeble-minded, in the sense that people need constant reinforcement of even the most obvious things, like gender. Any time you confuse a base issue of identity, like gender, you disserve society and cause very personal pain to confused people. Gender confusion is an extremely serious matter that causes huge personal agony, even to the point of inducing people into having surgery that severely mulilates their bodies, irreversibly, or produces suicide.
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The custom of having a woman portray Peter Pan is not quaint and harmless. It is contemptible and destructive. If Peter Pan is not to be portrayed by boy actors, the play should never again be produced, anywhere, in any medium.
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(2) Care — Free. Just a reminder at the holidays that there are 6 click-to-donate (CTD) sites you might want to visit regularly. Advertisers pay a tiny amount per click (one per visit per day, controlled by cookies) on a button on each site, so anyone can make a small donation to alleviate hunger, provide medical care to children, save the rainforest, distribute books to kids, fite breast cancer, and feed animals in shelters, without spending anything but a moment's time. You can get to all these CTD sites via The Hunger Site. They are displayed as tabs across the top of the screen, and, if you click on the button for one, the screen you are taken to has, you will see if you scroll down, all the others below.

ResurgenceCity@aol.com (L. Craig Schoonmaker) — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 12:38:00 +0000

Electoral Antihomosexualism. My state, New Jersey, one of the bluest of Blue States, is in the midst of an extremely ugly electoral campaign for governor, in which the Republican Party is pulling out all stops, which includes playing the (anti)gay card.
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Republican (multimillionaire) candidate Doug Forrester's most recent slimy, corruption-themed TV ad (TV meaning "television") tries to appeal, sub rosa, to antihomosexual bigotry in dragging in the name of former Governor James McGreevey, who resigned from office because he was about to be exposed as a homosexual man so infatuated with an Israeli that he tried to give him a very high office in state government (homeland security director) for which he was not qualified (despite the assertions we hear endlessly that Israel knows how to protect against terrorism). The Forrester ad accuses McGreevey of 'scandal after scandal', when in fact the only scandal anyone ever heard of was the loverboy fiasco, which was affectional (McGreevey was married to a woman at the time), not financial. So plainly Forrester's attack is intended to identify the Democratic Party in general and Jon Corzine in particular with 'faggotry'. Of course, in this royal-blue state, Forrester's scumbags can't simply say, as Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, or other Red State yahoos can, "Ain't no place in this great state for faggots!" No, Forrester has to pretend that McGreevey's sad infatuation somehow constituted corruption — in which Corzine was somehow implicated.
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Never mind that McGreevey was a terrific governor who closed a huge budget gap that George Bush's insane tax cuts for the rich opened up in every state's budget — and that McGreevey did so without raising state taxes or cutting services as far as anyone could tell. No, the mere fact that McGreevey was a faggot makes him, the party he belongs to, and that party's current candidate for the same office, (morally?) 'corrupt'.
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I saw McGreevey's public announcement of his homosexuality live on television. I worked, at the time, for a major Downtown Newark law firm much involved in civic affairs. So, when administrators heard there would be a major announcement from the governor's office, they put a large TV set in the firm's largest conference room, a splendid glass-walled space looking out over Newark Penn Station and, in the far distance, the skyline of Manhattan, so everyone could watch.
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After a couple of delays, the governor's press conference started. It had been rumored that he would admit to a sexual affair with a woman not his wife. Not quite.
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Skinny but nice-looking McGreevey stood before the state — and announced that he was gay. An audible gasp! went thru the room. He then said he felt he would be unable to continue as an effective governor because of this revelation and because of the controversy over his behavior, so he would resign effective as of a couple of months later.
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I was livid.
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McGreevey had been an extraordinarily effective governor. To this day I don't know how he accomplished the magical act of closing a budget gap of billions of dollars without anybody feeling pain. But he did. And that is the act of a great governor.
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But because he was a faggot who cheated on his wife — whom he should never have married — and might cause embarrassment to his child — whom he should never have fathered (a daughter! maybe there is a God, and He punishes, as by giving a gay governor only one child, and it's a girl!) — he felt that he should resign an office that the majority of voters in the 10th largest state in the Nation had put into office. How stupid.
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I wrote to him to say that it was just plain wrong of him to resign, that that would send the wrong message about homosexuality, that somehow it is so evil that even an enormously effective governor who was gay would have an obligation to resign his office. He paid me no heed, but listened only to his guilts.
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I was ashamed of McGreevey not for being gay, of course, but for dragging a sweet and decent woman into his confusions and unhappiness, thus ruining a substantial portion of her life, and their daughter's life, by not sticking to his decision to live straight. Make up your mind before you involve other people, not after.
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Now McGreevey's gutless faggotry is harming the Democratic Party's chances of retaining the Governor's Mansion because the slimeball Republican who is challenging U.S. Senator Jon Corzine for the governorship is using Corzine's support of (then-presumed-straight) McGreevey as some kind of rationale for voting Republican.
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McGreevey's initial press conference should have announced, not just that he was a "Gay American" — a terrific phrase that did not, or has not yet, caught on — but that he apologized to everyone he misled, but that straight society has only itself to blame for forcing gay men to lie to them, and then gone on to say:

I have made mistakes in my life, some of them with terrible personal consequences for people I loved, or should have loved. But running for Governor of the State of New Jersey was not one of my mistakes. I earned my election as this terrific state's governor. I have done a terrific job. My work is not finished. And thus I will stay in office and continue my work to make New Jersey the best state in the Union.

To everyone I have misled, and misused, I apologize from the deepest part of my heart. But I do not apologize for being gay.

I am not just the Governor of New Jersey. I am indeed a Gay American, and I owe a duty to other Gay Americans to be honest, open, and, at last, proud. The man who put forward the term "Gay Pride" in 1970 was also a New Jerseyan, and I should have heeded that implied advice: be yourself, be proud of yourself. Be gay and glad to be gay if you are gay. And I am.

I have always been gay. I have not always been proud. And I'm sorry for that now. I have hurt people who assumed me to be, and wanted me to be, heterosexual. I don't want any longer to mislead or disappoint them. And I do not any longer want to mislead or disappoint gay men.

I am the highest elected openly-gay official in the history of the United States, and I'm now proud of that. I will remain Governor of the great State of New Jersey, and show everyone, everywhere in this country and elsewhere who may be watching, that gay people can do any job as well as anyone else, and have as total and pure a dedication to the public good as anyone else. So let us all learn from my terrible mistakes, not to draw people into our own confusions but to sort ourselves out. Not to pretend to be what you're not, but to be yourself. Not to accept the absurd and bigoted notion that there is something intrinsically wrong with being homosexual, even if you respect your partner and do nothing to harm him or anyone else, but to love as you are meant to love, with enthusiasm and joy.

And so today I apologize to everyone, of every orientation, that I may have hurt or disappointed thru my entire life up to this point, and resolve to do better in the future. I ask my wife to forgive me, and permit me to dissolve without excessive bitterness a marriage that should never have been. I wanted to be what you wanted me to be, but couldn't. It's very hard to break from what you were always expected to be, and I had a hard time. But perhaps this very public coming to terms with my nature will empower other people to save themselves some of the pain I suffered, in coming to terms with who and what they are. If so, this very public pain of my own will have been well worthwhile.

But to those who suggest that just because I am homosexual I am unfit to hold high public office, I must in good conscience reply, "You're wrong. Gay men are the equal of straight, and have as much to offer society as anyone."

My being homosexual of necessity makes me more sensitive to the problems of everyone who belongs to any minority. But inasmuch as I am white too, I know as well how the 'majority' mind works. My sexuality has thus positioned me uniquely to understand both sides of the most pressing divide in our society, between the majority and all the multitudinous minorities of the hugely diverse State of New Jersey. Politically, then, I am blessed, because I care more and understand more than anyone who does not straddle groups can do.
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So, New Jersey, you are a pioneer. You have the first openly homosexual governor in the history of the United States. And I will do my best to make you as proud in the future as I am today.

That is something like what McGreevey should have said. What he actually said came off as more like, "Sorry I'm gay. Please don't hate me. I'm going now."
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Not good enuf.

ResurgenceCity@aol.com (L. Craig Schoonmaker) — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 07:20:00 +0000

Silliness Delayed. Over 30 years ago, I cut some stencils for the mimeographed magazine I edited at the time for the small college-based organization Homosexuals Intransigent! (HI!) Mostly, the items I typed were briefs, mainly humorous, that were intended to appear amid the longer articles to give the publication a lighter feel by breaking things up visually. In those days, organizations of modest means couldn't readily use photographs or other illustrations for that purpose because of the limitations of the mimeograph medium. So I typed some short items in advance and intended to type in the longer articles around them later.
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Alas, we never did publish the issue for which those 10 stencils were intended, and they have lain in a legal-size file folder for all that time — till now. I have started to offload those texts from the crumbling stencils onto the Internet, and discard the originals, which are not just yellowing but falling to pieces.
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Two items that will eventually go onto the HI! website appear together on two consecutive stencils, and I thought them sort of funny, so offer an advance glimpse here.

INCONGRUOUS ASSEMBLED

Homosexuals have naïvely cooperated with research studies into homosexuality, not realizing that the ultimate use to which such studies will be put is the attempt to eradicate homosexuality. The time has come to stop providing information for our foes to use against us — or, perhaps better (and certainly more fun), to throw a monkey wrench into straights' schemes by playing games on study questionnaires. One feature of many studies is a Family History section to the questionnaire. Here is how I'd like to complete such a section.

Half the men in my family line have been exclusively homosexual for generations. The other half were, alas, sterile, except my grandmother, who is childless, and my mother, who had five miscarriages before I was born. Due to complications while carrying me, my mother died six months before I was born and unfortunately, I did not survive infancy. Immediately after my birth, my mother had a hysterectomy to protect her from hazards, so my little brother wasn't born until two years later. The extended labor following Caesarean section and his brain damage from the forceps used in his breach birth so injured my little brother, who was the last child, that he died within hours of conception.

As a child, I lived a quiet, normal life. My oldest brother, Male 4 Mos., who stays in a formaldehyde-filled jar on the mantel, was always very quiet, and stuck pretty much to himself. (I never could understand the fondness all my brothers and sisters have for formaldehyde. I can't stand even the taste of the stuff.) My next-oldest brother, Male 5 Mos., went off very early to boarding school, where he excelled in biology, serving as an anatomy sample. Male 3 Mos., the older brother closest my own age, was always very serious. I can't recall his ever having cracked a smile. We didn't really get along, and his success has proved a barrier between him and the rest of the family. He is Head Sample at the Princeton Medical School Institute on Prenatal Mortality, and that importance has gone to his head (the rest of him is used in the course on developmental biology). My older sister, Female 4 Mos., was a warm, reticent child who stayed home all the time, mostly on a shelf in the cellar. My younger sister, Female 16 Weeks, was always outgoing, but a bit of a scatterbrain. She resides in Cornell University Medical Center, UCLA Medical School, and Trenton State School of Nursing. The baby of the family, Male 2 Mos. ("X414" as he is affectionately known), is very much like me, but not so handsome. He and I have always been close. I don't know if he is homosexual — if he is, he is in the closet (in the hall, near my bedroom door). None of us has ever married. In fact, I've never heard any of them even mention the topic. And Dad has never pressured me.

The stereotypical Freudian pattern does not fit my background. My mother was not overly dynamic, and we were not even geographically close. As I said, she died four months before I was born and moved away to a cemetery in Communist China, so she could be close to her parents, who are still vigorous and active in community life in Keokuk, Iowa, where our family has always lived except for those who immigrated to the U.S. My father and I have always been very happy and very close. After Mom died, he was like a father and cousin to me.

Dad was an extraordinary man who maintained a full, healthy family life at the same time as he aggressively pursued his career. He won high acclaim for his pioneer work in isolating and refining chromatose neoglabulins into epoxy cigars noted mainly for their freedom from carcinogens and their extreme resistance to fire. Following that breakthru, Dad was able to make significant headway in the inquiry into the nature and possible uses of synthetic exclamatious protineinids. In my teens I spent many hours training the trypanosomes that were so important to Dad's experiments, and used to divert myself by causing them to perform extra little stunts, aside from those strictly necessary for the schismatic-fibrosis-wave alluvations (or "nestorian heresies" as we jokingly referred to them). Dad's including me in his work strengthened our relationship and helped me to appreciate him as a full man, not merely as my father (an extension of myself) or Dad Shapiro's manluvd. In our closeness and the mutual appreciation between my father and myself, we depart from and therefore disprove the Freudian explanations for homosexuality.

Religious influences may be important in the development of my own homosexuality. I was raised a strict Catholic in the Lutheran tradition. I attended Sunday school every week for fourteen years, first at St. Seymour's and then at the Church of the Holy Apocrypha. Naturally, then, I was subjected to a harsh sexual Puritanism except that our minister, Abram Shapiro, S.J., was flagrantly carrying on a discreet sexual affair with my father, in full view of me and my brother X414, except when we were awake. I think that might have had something to do with my positive attitude toward homosexuality. Father Shapiro and Dad were obviously very much in love, and the excitement they felt for each other sort of inspired me. When I met Father Shapiro's son, Carlos O'Reilly (by a former marriage; he and Dad didn't have any children), I fell madly and passionately in love with him, and he reciprocated my feelings. At age 6, he and I were inseparable, sleeping together every night and putting to use the techniques we could manage from those we'd seen our dads employing. We were a very happy, very horny, and very sexually active family. When Teddy and I entered our teens, however, we started to drift apart, he into the Catholic religious life, I into the homosexual movement. We would still get together and make out every now and then, until he left for Ceylon to pursue his studies and I moved here to New York. I still get occasional letters from Johnny neatly typed, but they're in English, and I have a hard time reading his handwriting, so our correspondence is erratic. I'm still close to Dad and the Reverend Father Shapiro — and they're still making it together.

So, as you can see, aside from the fact that I grew up to see the beauty of bulging biceps in the intertwined arms of men making out together, my family history is completely ordinary. One would have to look elsewhere for the "causes" of my homosexuality — if indeed there are causes for homosexuality.

[Just below that article on the second stencil appeared this, typed with forced linebreaks to create the form of a cornucopia with the mouth at the top.]

HOMEWORK
Now, as tho any proof were needed that I've been strange for quite some time, I offer below an excerpt from a radio show I co-wrote, as a class exercise in a summer-session, radio/TV-production course at San Francisco State in 1969: "Shlomo (Shy) Schmerk, the firstborn, was to have been named Evan after Herbert's great-uncle, Evan Spruce, inventor of the spruce tree. But Mrs. Schmerk's best friend, Angina Pectoris of the Boston Pectorises, advised that all the Evans she knew grew up to be homosexual. So Mrs. Schmerk named the child after her maternal great-grandfather, Shlomo Shultz, of surfboard fame. Shlomo Schmerk, a truck driver, now lives with his lover of five years, Edward Sanders, scion of the Anaheim Sanders and heir to the buttonhook fortune built up by his father, Wesley Sanders the Forty-Ninth. Shlomo and Edward met while both were on the wrestling team at Haverford College, and it's been no-holds-barred ever since." (Reprinted from HI! Magazine, No. 5.)

ResurgenceCity@aol.com (L. Craig Schoonmaker) — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 15:49:00 +0000

All Heart, No Mind. Oprah Winfrey has joined the Castration Conspiracy, the drive to convince homosexual (and lesbian) lunatics that it is possible to be 'a woman trapped in the body of a man' (or vice-versa), and become what they 'really are' by surgical mutilation, chemical infusions, and lies to everyone around. Again this past week, she has indulged the insane lie that it is possible to "change one's sex" thru "sexual reassignment surgery". But not one single cell changes from XY to XX, or XX to XY chromosomal configuration, so there is no sex change at all, only mutilation — gruesome, vile mutilation that would be punished by life in prison if it were done to someone without his or her consent.
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Lunatics are incapable of consent to mutilation, and society long ago accepted that crazy people cannot be permitted to harm themselves. It is a sacred trust to protect lunatics from themselves. That is as true of "transgendered people" who want to slash themselves to ribbons as of anorexics who, unless stopped, will starve themselves to death.
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Oprah is a decent woman whose sympathy exceeds her sanity. Indulging lunacy is not in the interest of the lunatic, and studies have shown that people who have mutilation surgery are no happier than people who receive counseling. Worse, "transsexuals" often develop very serious health problems, including a higher incidence of fatal cancers because of disruption of their normal blood chemistry thru the administration of unnatural and inappropriate concentrations of (synthetic) sex hormones. That's why Johns Hopkins University stopped doing "sex-change" operations.
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The harm that these vile lunatics do themselves is the least of it. They also entrap innocent people in their web of lies and madness, inducing people of inappropriate gender and orientation to become involved in hidden homosexual or lesbian relationships, betraying people they pretend to love. There's no surprise there. People who hate themselves cannot love anyone else, so of course they maliciously and willfully use and hurt other people. Society must not permit that, and preventing lunatics from harming others is the other part of the moral charge we are given relative to madness.
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Gender confusion has to be addressed by simple, straightforward explications of science, if not also religion.
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Science can say plainly:

Biology doesn't lie. Chromosomes, not the mind, not human will, not anything else, determine gender, and the physical reality of gender is never a lie, never a delusion. Physical reality is reality. No emotional 'reality' trumps physical reality. You "really" are what your chromosomes say you are, and there is no such thing as "a woman trapped in the body of a man" or "a man trapped in the body of a woman". No such thing. Wishing you were something else doesn't make you something else. You can wish you were Napoleon or a porpoise or orangutang — or refrigerator, for that matter. But surgically installing a lite bulb at the back of your mouth won't make you into a refrigerator.

Religious people can say,

"God doesn't make mistakes, so if you're born a boy, you are a boy, period. You grow up to be a man. No one born a boy grows up to be a woman, or vice-versa. God marked you in every cell of your body with the gender you really are. There is no such thing as emotional reality that conflicts with physical reality. If you are chromosomally a man, or woman, that's what you are. There's no ifs, ands, or buts about it. Now, if you're unhappy about that, we can address that, and help you accept what you really are. But we're not going to pretend that God made a mistake and it is for man to fix it."

The human race is feeble-minded, in the sense that personal identity, something about which everyone should be very clear, can be easily confused. A boy can look at himself naked in a mirror and see plainly that he is a boy, but people's hostility to his wanting to be involved emotionally and sexually with other boys and to grow up to be happily attached to a man, can make him deny his eyes and convince himself that he is "really" a girl and want to grow up to be a woman.
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Simple sex-role behaviors, like the choice of toys or games, can throw a child's identity into doubt. A boy wants to play with a doll or a girl wants to play with a truck, and all of a sudden the adults around start worrying, and conveying that worry to the child. Or the boy is fine with wrestling with other boys, playing with gender-appropriate toys and such, but would rather play piano than football, and a macho, sports-obsessed father starts to feel insecure about his own manhood, then makes it known to his son that there is something wrong with him, that's he's not as masculine as he should be, and that maybe he's some kind of fruit.
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A perfectly masculine little boy notices that when (some) other boys are starting to take interest in girls, he doesn't. Then he realizes that his emotional and sexual thoughts are centered on and intent upon boys, learns the words "gay", "homosexual", "fag", "fruit", "fairy", and the like, and decides that he must be gay, and gay must mean effeminate, so he must become effeminate, not because it's really his nature, but because that's what he's supposed to do. We all try to live up to expectations, to some degree or other.
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So he decides that if to be gay he must become a flaming faggot, he is going to flame as big and scream as loud as anyone has ever flamed or screamed — maybe a bit more. He's going to be the best damned faggot you ever saw!
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Some people are not even that strong, but allow themselves to accept the equation, "Attracted to boys/men = girl/woman", and then conclude that since they are attracted to boys/men, therefore they must "really" be a girl and must find a way to "become" a woman. Along come some medical quacks who say, "For X-thousand dollars, I can make you a woman!" and they buy it. Everyone around them, in government, in media — even Oprah Winfrey, a decent, caring woman — says that's possible, so it must be true.
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But some gay people are stronger than the rest, and say "I know what I want, and know as well that wanting boys/men does not make me any less a boy myself nor keep me from growing up to be a full, normal, active man, enthusiastic about life with men. I don't have to be nelly, or queeny, or flamboyant, or loud and obnoxious about it. I'll just be myself, a gay man, and live my life with dignity, self-respect, and respect for other gay men." They're the lucky ones.
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How can the strong share their strength? "A chain is only as strong as its weakest link", and gay society is very weak indeed, because the connections between us are weak, and many relationships dysfunctional. In a metal chain, a strong link cannot make a weak link strong. Can a human chain be any more dynamic? Can one man's strength and confidence make another man stronger?
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One thing is plain: the confused do not become unconfused in isolation. Surrounded by negative influences, they become more confused, not less. Surrounded by positive influences and role models, they might become less confused, and eventually sort themselves out. But they must escape the constant pressures to confusion. And they can't do that in straight society, not when even decent people are pushing indecent things, like persuading faggots that they should have their genitals chopped off and a slit gashed into their crotch so as magically, by that mutilation, to become a woman! whereupon all the feelings they have for men will become "normal"!
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Gay men must get away from heterosexual notions of gender-appropriate behavior. For us, it is gender-appropriate to make passes at men, have sex with men, form intimate relationships with men. We must find places where those behaviors are not just accepted, grudgingly, but actively encouraged.
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Just as gay men need bolstering, so too, because they too are feeble-minded, do straight men. Thus straight society has to constantly instruct its own members as to what is and is not appropriate. Heterosexual society is constantly reinforcing heterosexuality in images, song lyrics, literature, etc., and constantly fiting against temptations to homosexuality by steering straight men away from 'danger', because people in general are weak-minded as regards sexual identity, straight men as much as gay men.
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Without constant reminders that homosexual sex is disapproved and unmasculine, if not actually forbidden, a very large proportion of "straight" men would have homosexual sex when the opportunity to do so with a desirable man occurred. So the straight world is constantly on guard against homosexuality.
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The gay world doesn't have to be as agitatedly wary, however, because gay men who have made the transition from the straight life they were raised to have, do not ever choose heterosexuality thereafter. Homosexuality is plainly the more powerful instinct. Straight men are attracted to it, so are constantly warned away. Nobody has to warn gay men away from heterosexuality. They just naturally cleave to their own orientation if given a choice.
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The problem is finding a way to be free and to meet potential partners. That is what the gay world is for, but it does a very poor job of providing opportunities for gay men to find happiness as full, natural men. The "gay" world retains a lot of deeply instilled heterosexual notions. That is something we need to work on.
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But the first responsibility of gay men is to GET THE HELL OUT OF THE STRAIGHT WORLD, to escape its expectations and coercions. Lessening those expectations and coercions by altering the straight world's behavior and teachings can help. Thus, it is urgent that whenever someone like Oprah Winfrey does us injustice, we gently but forcefully correct her. I'm going to write her a note. You might too.