Mr. Gay Pride: The Blog

2012-01-09T23:59:00.006-05:00

Short Gay Storyline in Downton Abbey. I caut the first episode of the second season of the PBS blockbuster Downton Abbey last nite. I liked the first season, short tho it was, a mere four episodes as broadcast on my local PBS station (tho elsewhere as eight). This second season is to be eight episodes long, but might also be telescoped into four by WNET (a Newark, NJ station stolen by New Yorkers and moved to NYC without any objection by the FCC, which still shows WNET to be a Newark station). A third season is to start production soon.
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In any case, one of the male servants in the household, the footman Thomas, was shown in series 1 to be of strikingly bad character. In series 2, he is recruited into the British Army during World War I. He is afraid of being killed, so, at nite, when no one in the trench with him can see, he holds up a candle in his left hand, hoping to be shot, so he will be returned to Britain and not have to come back to the trenches. It works. He is wounded in the hand, and then, thanks to a favor by the aristocrats of his former employment, is posted to work in the hospital the family supports.
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The episode descriptions at the International Movie Database suggest in two places in the first season's episodes, that Thomas is gay. But it's subtle.
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In the rehabilitation hospital, Thomas meets a soldier who has suffered blindness from being exposed to poison gas. Thomas reads to the young blind man and tries to buck him up about possible recovery of his vision, or at least of having a life worth living after he recovers as much as he can recover. At one point, Thomas says something about the other soldier being able to have a good life despite being different. The blind soldier picks up on that seeming reference to Thomas himself as being different, but the servant escapes a direct answer as to precisely how he is different.
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In short order, it emerges that the blind soldier and injured servant have become emotionally involved. The soldier is shown placing his hand firmly on Thomas's knee.
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But the crowds of people in need of rehabilitation in that facility force a decision to move the blind soldier to a distant facility, far from his new friend / boyfriend. That nite, the blind soldier slits his wrist and dies before his act is discovered. Thomas sobs uncontrollably.
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This is the most we get of this homosexual love story. The episode description at IMDb says only that Thomas "begins to learn some humanity" thru his duties in the rehabilitation hospital.
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Tho Downton Abbey is a modern production, it is faithful to the attitudes of the age, even in its vague treatment of love between men, and the insistence that any such plotline should end tragically.
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Decades ago, ONE Magazine (a gay magazine out of L.A.) published a short story about a love affair between two men. The story ended badly, so I wrote a letter, which I think was published, asking 'Isn't it time we had a happy ending' to gay love stories? Here we are, over 40 years later, and we still don't have happy endings to gay love stories in major media.
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The connection the servant made with the blind soldier ennobled Thomas. He really cared about helping him. Perhaps for the first time in his life, someone else was more important than himself. So of course the man he loved had to die. Of course. Not.

2011-12-31T08:57:00.003-05:00

Oral History (You Should Pardon the Expression). My friend and fellow gay militant John Lauritsen foned a few weeks ago to say that he had bought a videocamera and wants to interview me as part of an oral-history project he is undertaking, to record the memories and observations of significant people in the Stonewall Era. I am one of those people, having founded a militant gay men's organization on April 1st, 1969, almost two full months before the Stonewall Riots. Homosexuals Intransigent! was not replaced by new organizations after Stonewall, but continued to contribute to the development of the post-Stonewall mentality of gay liberation (lowercase G and L).
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John had become all too aware that the pioneers of the modern gay-rights movement are now in their 60s and 70s, and beginning to die off in significant numbers. We've already lost the men who were in their 40s or older in 1969. John wants to make sure that those of us still alive don't die without leaving some kind of record of their existence and contributions.
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I had mentioned to John something I have thought to do, which is to have some of us oldtimers put together, in a book, their thoughts as to what we want most for younger gay people to learn from our experience. The tentative, working title for such a book of memoirs and advice is "Before We Go", with some subtitle like "Advice for Today's Gay Men [or Gay Men of the Future] from 20th Century Gay Pioneers".
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HI! was the ONLY organization in the United States that permitted membership only to gay men. John, who has studied earlier gay movements in Europe, said there were some male-only organizations in Europe before the Stonewall Era, but I'm not sure any survived into and beyond the Stonewall Era, much less to today.
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I have always been appalled and astonished that almost all 'gay' organizations are organized heterosexually, men-and-women-together-now! That never made the slitest bit of sense to me. But, then, I'm only a genius (near-genius? — in IQ-testing terms). How are gay men and lesbians supposed to press the case that they are entitled to refuse heterosexual sex if they accept heterosexual forms of organization?
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How can (gay) men and (lesbian) women march TOGETHER to assert the right not to be pushed at each other? It's insane.
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And how are gay men supposed to be able to talk about their deepest, sexual feelings about men, in the presence of women, whom they do NOT want in their sex life in any way — not physically, not as eavesdroppers on their conversations and confessions?
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The utter insensitivity of the organizers of 'gay' organizations — or gay and lesbian, or LGBT, or LBGTQ, LGBTQI, or any other crazy, artificial groups — to the need of gay men to be with their own kind and be able to confide their 'darkest' secrets to other men, has always astonished me. How do people who sometimes get haughtily indignant about how 'repressed' in dealing with their feelings straight men are supposed to be, absolutely and brutally ignore the need of their own kind for privacy from women and others unlike themselves? Well, people in general are stupid, I suppose, but it's a special kind of WILLFUL stupidity to create organizations in which the members cannot feel themselves to be among people like themselves, with whom they can relax and be open about their feelings, feelings about which they have had terrible guilts for the bulk of their lives.
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In any case, John and I may meet sometime after the weather warms up, either in New York, to which he would travel from Boston, or in Boston, to which I would drive to be interviewed and to have him show me around one of the Nation's great and historical cities. Boston is the Nation's second-oldest major city, after New York. My city, Newark, is third-oldest, right after Boston. I can get into Midtown Manhattan (oldest major city in the Nation) by car in little more than a half hour, or by public transportation in less than an hour, so meeting John there would be little problem.
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I spent three days in Boston in 1964, working most of the time, and seeing almost nothing outside of work. China detonated its first nuclear device during those three days, and I thought, playfully, that I should never leave town (NYC, at the time) if this kind of thing is going to happen.
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I told John that I was comfortable with waiting till warm weather, since I don't feel in imminent danger of dying. My mother died at age 90, from a medical mistake, absent which she might have lived years longer. My father's mother died at 96, tho her mind was not in good shape in her last years. My father died at 79, and his father at 81, both from cancer. I'm only 67, as of last week, so I think I'll make it to the spring. Were I superstitious, I might say "iN-shah, Allah" or the English equivalent, "God willing". But I'm not.
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I have put onto the Internet many of the things I wrote or edited on behalf of Homosexuals Intrasigent! and other groups I organized, in the period 1969-1975, or a bit later. Some of those materials are on a free website that will not vanish in a month due to nonpayment of webhosting fees, if something should happen to me. Rather, they will remain online for years. I have other materials to put onto those websites, but have not yet done so because there's a lot of typing, and thus time I don't have, involved in doing so (plus creating hyperlinks within and between publications and websites).
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I recently investigated whether there is any free speech-to-text program I could use for this task. I found one, thru C/NET, but it requires a lot of "training" of the program before it can work well, and I haven't yet found the time to do the training. Worse, I also recently developed laryngitis, as too frequently happens with me during the winter. (This mostly keeps me from singing, which I ordinarily do quite well (I spent years in choruses, within and outside school) or shouting at my (three) cats. I can speak, for at least brief periods, tho not always comfortably.) Thus, speaking to add materials to gay websites might not be easier than typing them.
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Memories are curious things, and not always reliable, esp. at a distance. For instance, in recent years I had forgotten that a formal "second" was required for my proposal that the weekend of events to be publicized by the organizing committee for the first march commemorating Stonewall be called "Gay Pride Weekend" rather than "Gay Power Weekend". I saw only in reviewing materials from 1971 that a guy named Jerry Hoose, whom I cannot even picture (tho John remembers him), seconded my motion, before the committee overall voted approval without discussion.
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So perhaps I should read some of the things I and others wrote during the Stonewall Era before I venture to Boston for my date with a videocam.
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I have, within the past three years, been contacted by two men I was crazy about in the 1960s. One was my only "lover", tho we lived in separate cities — and countries (U.S. and Canada) — and saw each other only a few times in the few months we considered each other lovers. Normand (French form of the name "Norman") was born in Bathurst, New Brunswick (a French-speaking area of Canada), and lived for a while in Montreal before he decided he wanted to move to Vancouver, BC. We met in Toronto, as he was making his way west. I was just doing the gay-tourist thing from my home in New York City. He then dallied in Toronto for a couple of months longer than he had initially intended, and visited me in Manhattan before we broke up and he resumed his journey west. He has lived in Vancouver all these years. We reconnected in early 2009, and spent a weekend together (socially) in Montreal in July 2009. I never stopped loving him, in a fond rather than sexual way; and he apparently always held me in fond memory too.
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The other man from my youth who has contacted me did so only a few weeks ago. We went to college in Manhattan together, and I was crazy about him, but he was functionally heterosexual, so I put him out of my mind. It turns out that he later had homosexual "encounters", and is keen on a straight guy of his own, in Toronto! — who is as unavailable to him as Dana was to me.
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I guess I make quite an impression on some people, to be sought out more than 40 years later. It would have been nice if we had been able to get together and stay together all this time instead of reconnecting after decades of distance.
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In any case, I don't know how John Lauritsen will use the materials he creates for his oral-history project. Perhaps he can create a website at which these videos can be watched, perhaps even downloaded for the use of scholars and ordinary gay men. Perhaps he will find a way to create transcripts by machine, or thru volunteer typists, to create a written record from oral interviews.
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I just hope John gets to the people he wants to 'immortalize' before they croak. (Ribbet, ribbet.)

2011-11-22T14:10:00.005-05:00

[This post is a duplicate of a post on another of my blogs, "Newark USA"]

Fotos today are from the little Gay Pride march up Halsey Street into a litely attended gay (and lesbian) festival in Washington Park in late June 2010. I was a little late arriving (what else is new?), so the first few fotos show marchers from the back. I am not protecting their identity, and they were marching openly. I didn't get to this year's event — there's only one of me, and I can't get to every event in the busy New Newark — so don't know if it grew any.

Boycotted Panel on "Queer Newark". Madness has seized control of the Robeson Center at Rutgers-Newark. Its staff permitted a one-day conference to be held on its premises that was called, insanely, "Queer Newark". Let me make clear, for people who just don't know, or have been misled by the propaganda of bizarre gay and lesbian self-despisers, that the word "queer" is the exact equivalent of "nigger". It is profoundly and permanently offensive to the great preponderance of people for whom it is intended. It cannot be "rehabilitated" or "reclaimed", but will always be absolutely unacceptable in polite company. It must NEVER be used by straight people — EVER. If Rutgers-Newark would not smile upon a symposium titled "Nigger Newark", it should never have approved of even a one-day program called "Queer Newark".

Moreover, how do you compensate for long-term, indeed historic refusal to recognize the contributions of gay or lesbian Newarkers, as the materials for the "Queer Newark" program spoke of doing, by means of a ONE-DAY program?

Here is the text put online about this program by Newark Pulse:

Date: Saturday, November 12, 2011

Time: 9am-5pm

Location: Paul Robeson Center - Rutgers - Rm 231

Cost: Free

Rutgers-Newark partnered with community leaders to present "Queer Newark: Our Voices, Our Histories," a free, full-day, oral history conference examining gay life in Newark. It will be followed by an evening of entertainment at The Coffee Cave from 6-9 p.m. Newark Mayor Cory Booker will welcome participants and guests.

"The city of Newark, New Jersey has a fascinating and well-documented history. There are studies of its rich cultural, musical, and literary legacy, its educational system, political life, religious life, immigrant roots, and history of racial conflict," said Prof. Beryl Satter of the Federated Department of History at Rutgers-Newark and conference co-chair, "yet, there is one group whose undeniable contribution to the city’s life has rarely been the subject of historical or academic study -- Newark’s LGBT community. The Queer Newark conference is a way to rectify this omission."

This is the front of the march. Two white people, both female? Why is that? Do white gay men have to sit in the back of the bus, in their own march, in Newark?

Three generations of LGBT Newarkers will be on hand to reflect on their lives as LGBT people in the city of Newark. Panelists will discuss everything from childhood experiences to religion and spirituality during the moderated discussions. Community members, historians and scholars of Newark history and LGBT history and studies are encouraged to attend.

Is that an unusually broad-shouldered woman? Or not? If not, why is he wearing women's clothes? Perhaps a white patch of fabric on her hip makes this actual woman look like a "drag queen", in visually narrowing her hips. I am among the many gay men who have never had the problem of being gender-nonspecific. My proportions, chest hair, facial hair, etc., have always plainly marked me out a man. I feel very sorry for gay men who have been tempted to conceal their manhood because they could. Very sad — but nonetheless contemptible. Other people may not see you naked, but you do, and you know what you are. Be what you are!

According to Darnell L. Moore, former chair of the City of Newark’s LGBTQ Advisory Commission and conference co-chair, "This conference will be the beginning of a larger, ongoing project that we hope will foster an intergenerational discussion of LGBT life in Newark. It will also be the foundation of an archive on LGBT Newark that can be used by historians and by future generations. This is a major first step towards preserving the history of LGBT Newark and bringing these voices and experiences into Newark’s broader communal history."

More Info: http://queer.newark.rutgers.edu.

The website actually uses the insane term "LGBTQ" — for Lesbian [which must always appear before "Gay", because gay men are second-class citizens in their own "community", even tho they constitute the great majority of all members], Gay, 'Bisexual' [a mythical, nonexistent creature], 'Transgender' [another mythic, nonexistent creature], and 'Questioning' [people so moronically un-self-aware that they don't know what the heck they are]. Relatively few gay people, be they teenagers or grownups, do not know full well that they are gay, but all the organizations adjust around the few, maladjusted losers who at least pretend not to know what they are. My friend and fellow gay militant, John Lauritsen, has used the term "synthetic insanity", which refers to people who PRETEND to an insane stance they do not in fact believe but cleave to because it is politic in this demented age to do so. They pretend to think they are women, when they are actually men and know full well they are men, because society has been persuaded that it is biologically possible for someone to be other than what one's genes mandate. It is not.

There is in fact no such thing as an "LBGT...etc." community. The different constituent groups of that preposterous, synthetic "community" have nothing to do with each other. Gay men do not crave being surrounded by lesbians, but do not generally feel comfortable saying aloud that they don't want anything to do with lesbians, but want to be alone with men. Lesbians do not want to be surrounded by gay men. Fortunately for them, given the bizarre double standard that straight society has, regarding men's rights and women's prerogatives, generally do not hesitate to say they want men to leave them alone. No gay man or lesbian wants anything to do with "bisexuals", but hold them in contempt. And all well-adjusted gay men are puzzled by "transsexuals", who pretend to believe that they are not what biology, and their eyes and hands, tell them very plainly they absolutely and unequivocally are. Sometimes "transgendered" people make themselves entertaining in their flamboyant make-believe, but they are basically seen by everyone on Earth as tragic lunatics. Madness is not a form of happiness. Quite the contrary, the insane are almost uniformly miserable, and we do them no favor in pretending to believe that they are sane but the world is mad.

People in straight society have been so misled about the entire issue of homosexuality and/or lesbianism that they tend to believe whatever they are told by "LGBT[Q...I...you-name-it]" organizations. Little do they know that such organizations are, for the most part, headed by self-despising losers who were raised to be heterosexual and have NEVER been able to overcome that early training. As each generation of would-be activists, who start out with good sense enuf to be indignant at the way they have been treated, enters those organizations, they accept what they were told, first by straight society, then by the insane organizations that have themselves been unable to repudiate that heterosexual training. Only later, by years, do they grow beyond such nonsense, and realize that the things they were required by those organizations to say, are nonsense, then leave those organizations of sad, psychologically deformed losers.

Still, they don't denounce the b.s. that the organizations they belonged to inflicted upon society, to correct the record. Rather, they just leave those maladjusted, ridiculous organizations. Alas, that leaves the organizations always under the control of maladjusted losers, and always spouting antihomosexual b.s.

These beautiful young men, carrying between them a banner with the term I offered in 1970, are exactly the kind of thing that makes me very proud to be homosexual. They are stunning, and proud to proclaim to the world that they are gay. Alas, there are in Newark no gay bars, coffeehouses, or ANYthing in which gay men might meet each other to "hook up" and perhaps even fall in love. Yes, men do fall in love with each other. Powerfully, manfully. But even if we don't fall in love, we sure do like to 'get busy', and make each other physically, if not also emotionally, happy. Why can't we state that plainly, in a society in which sexual crudity of all kinds is all over the tube? You can't tune into a single CBS sitcom, or some NBC sitcoms, without being hit in the face by heterosexual obscenity — all the while straight society pretends to be pure, and glowing, and noble, not ever hot for sex for the sake of sex. Truth be told, a lot of straight men would love to have, with women, the fast-and-loose, sex-for-the-sake-of-sex (which is good enuf) twos, threes, fours and mores, and when-it's-over-let-it-go—easy,-without-recriminations attitude of casual gay sex. Gay men have no problem with sex as recreation, which may lie behind the vicious denunciation of homosexuality by so many straight men, because they are ENVIOUS of gay men's not demanding more than sexual reciprocity in order to give sex on demand.

To attend a conference called "Queer [Anything]" would 'confer' legitimacy upon the use of that despicable term, and THAT, I will not do, so I refused to attend.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, gay men had many discussions, in many forums, about which terms were acceptable, and which unacceptable, and why. In addition to "homosexual", "gay", and "lesbian", there were other terms for gay men, lesbian women, and businesses, publications, organizations, and such intended for such audiences, some of which were then and are now generally regarded as disparaging ("fag", "faggot", "fruit"; "dyke", "bulldyke", "lez"; etc.). There was NO agreement over whether "homosexual" could apply to both men and women, nor whether terms like "homophile" (for organizations and publications) were self-assertive or self-denying.

In time, a general agreement, tho not unanimous consensus, emerged. "Gay" is OK; "lesbian", for women, is also OK; "homosexual" has a medical sound to it, but is not offensive. But terms like "fag", "faggot", "fruit", "nancy boy", "poof[ter]", "fem", "dyke", "bulldyke", "lez", "drag queen", "tranny" (which is, in any case, ambiguous; does it refer to "transvestites", people, even heterosexuals, who dress in the clothing of the opposite sex, or "transgendered" people, lunatics who wish they were the sex they're not?) — and "queer" — were irredeemably offensive. There is no such thing as a "gay woman", any more than there is such a thing as a "lesbian man". Nor is there anything bizarre ("queer" in its original meaning) about homosexuality, which is extremely commonplace, much more than, for instance, lefthandedness. Dictionary.com defines "queer" thus:

1. strange or odd from a conventional viewpoint; unusually different; singular: a queer notion of justice.
2. of a questionable nature or character; suspicious; shady: Something queer about the language of the prospectus kept investors away.
3. not feeling physically right or well; giddy, faint, or qualmish: to feel queer.
4. mentally unbalanced or deranged.
5. Slang: Disparaging and Offensive.

a. homosexual.
b. effeminate; unmanly.

If Dictionary.com knows that the use of the term "queer" for homosexuals is "Disparaging and Offensive", why doesn't the Robeson Center of Rutgers-Newark? Definitions 2 and 4 are also offensive, so why on Earth would anyone rush to EMBRACE "queer" for themselves?

Lesbians have NEVER been called "queer" by straight society. The embrace of the term "queer" for themselves by some lesbians is grotesque in every way.

If reality controlled, I would have to be recognized as the single most important gay figure in Newark, not just now but in this city's entire history, for having put forward the term "Gay Pride" as it is now used, in the committee that organized the first, annual gay (and, alas, lesbian) march commemorating Stonewall — which was a gay MEN's bar of which I had been a regular customer, not a "gay and lesbian" bar as it has now been recast. Homosexuality had, before then, been regarded as profoundly shameful, "the Love that dare not speak its name". The power of the term "Gay Pride", thus, was in completely reversing the assumption, from shame to pride.

"Gay Pride" moved the goalpost, in a good way: closer to the great preponderance of people, who understand the importance of self-respect, and who respect themselves, so expect other people to respect themselves. "Pride" is one of various terms for "self-respect", or "self-esteem", a feeling that educators in recent decades — and most especially since 1970, when I put forward "Gay Pride" — have made plain to society at large is quintessential to a person's healthy functioning and future success.

"Gay PRIDE" went beyond defending against assertions that gay men should be ashamed of themselves. It asserted that we are entitled to feel good about ourselves and what makes us, us. It tells gay men that homosexuality is ennobling, and that it's a very good thing not just for ourselves but also for society that some men see other men not as dangerous competitors we must vanquish, no matter how much harm we might do to others in order to vanquish them, but primarily as a source of esthetic, emotional, and physical pleasure.

The term "Gay Pride" has, thus, been transformative in a way that the title for the weekend of events we were organizing among host-city organizations and wanted to unite under a single title, might NOT have been if we had gone with the original thought, "Gay Pride Weekend". My thinking was that "power" is something that depends upon numbers and outside forces, but "pride" is something that depends upon nothing but yourself, internally. You could be in a gay community of a million in a great metropolis like the NY Tristate Metropolitan Area but still not be confident in yourself nor proud in your feelings about men.

Conversely, however, you could be proud of your nature, and your feelings for men, in total isolation from other gay men, hundreds or even thousands of miles from the nearest gay bar or community center. So gay "pride" was a much better term for a movement intended (remember, it was 1970, and we were inventing all of this) to make gay men feel good about themselves, than gay "power", which for most gay men, all around the Earth, would then, and still, to this day, be unattainable. Despite the nonexistence in most places of even the tiniest shred of gay "power" in their locality, every single gay man, in India, Cameroon, South Africa, China, Brazil, and every other place where there is not so much as a single gay bar or organization, could feel pride in their feelings for men if they understood themselves and how ennobling those feelings can be in a man's life.

Mind you, not every feeling that some people attempt to force upon gay men, or seduce them into, is wholesome, and gay men are often pushed to embrace insane and ugly attitudes, such as sado-masochism. Gay Pride is at once an antidote to the ugly, vicious, and insane misrepresentations of homosexuality that straight society's antigay propagandists promote, and to perverted, sado-masochistic attitudes that sexual degenerates proselytize for gay men to embrace — but which we must refuse.

I reject the entire idea of "loving yourself", which is sometimes used as justification for autoerotic self-absorption, as lunacy. No, love comes from one person and attaches to another, not himself. Esteem yourself, respect yourself, yes, to be sure. But "love" yourself? That's freaky.

Newark is large enuf a city to, in most places on Earth, be a center of homosexual in-migration. But Newark is also the second city of the greatest city of the entire world, and largest city of the United States, New York. Newark and Jersey City, in NJ, cannot compete with Manhattan for in-migration of gay men — unless we find something unique by which to distinguish gay life, present or future, here.

In speaking of preferences as to terminology, I am not just talking here of my own viewpoint, without evidence as to how other men feel. I long ago placed upon my "Mr. Gay Pride" website a poll of visitors, which currently shows this result:

If you add up the votes that favor the term "gay", you will find that they amount to 74% of responses.

If importance to changed perceptions of homosexuality were the criterion, I should always be among the first people ever thought of when gay groups think of a Grand Marshal for a "Gay Pride" Parade — which wouldn't even have that name were it not for me. But in fact I have never been invited to be Grand Marshal of ANY "Gay Pride" Parade. Nor, however, would I consent to lead off a heterosexually organized march that repudiated the very concept of Gay Pride, in insisting that men and women "belong together". No thank you. I reject the idea that men and women "belong together" — not in bed, and most assuredly not in a march for the right NOT to be compelled to be heterosexual.

I'm used to being overlooked, ignored, and actively disregarded when other gay people (or fictitious "LGBTQ...I...", etc. people) are honored. You see, I am a gay MAN, and refuse to identify with nor bolster lesbians, with whom I do not in any way nor to any degree identify. Oddly, that seems to have annoyed a lot of lesbians, even those who insist upon women-only organizations and events. All-female is fine; all-male, a crime against humanity!

I also actively object to the idea that gay men are not entitled to a unique identity but must always subsume their identity into an all-gender (i.e., non-gender: castrated, emasculated (for gay men) or de-feminized (for lesbian women)) identity. Biology — that is, actual science — permits of only two genders, or sexes: male, marked by an XY chromosomal configuration, and female, marked by an XX chromosomal configuration. Anything and everything else is ANTI-scientific nonsense that society needs actively to suppress.

Kids were playing in another area of Washington Park at the same time as the Gay Pride Festival was running. Newark is very adult about these things, and doesn't worry that gay people are out to molest children, a favorite, wicked slander from the Radical Right.

There are no chromosomal "mistakes". That is a kindly, scientific way to address the crazy idea that God — 100% infallible God — somehow "made a mistake" and put a woman into the body of a man, or the other way around. Kindhearted people have wanted to accord logical and scientific credibility to the notion that "transgendered" people could indeed exist — but on the basis of what scientific theory?

Why is there this big portion of Washington Park without grass? It cannot be because events are held there, so the grass would be beaten down. Grass is one of nature's most resilient plants, and thrives on beat-downs you might think would kill it.

Why are so many people desperate to accommodate insane renunciation of biology? Society does no favor to lunatics by pretending to believe they are right in their insane beliefs — be it that a modern-day, 6'7" man really is Napoleon Bonaparte, or that a confused, self-despising 20-year-old man is really a woman. Yes, all of society, all of science, reason, and reality is wrong, but YOU who say God made a mistake, are right. NO! Stop this nonsense! Society must tell lunatics that they are out of their mind, and need to let go of their insane delusions and embrace reality.

No one really believes that "Chaz" Bono is a man. Not one single person on Earth really believes that a person who has no male sexual organs and every single cell in whose body bears the XX chromosomal configuration is a man. Not one single person on Earth. So why are we endlessly assailed by lies from media that Chastity Bono, after a double mastectomy and being pumped full of male hormones, is a man, always referred to as "he"? Are all those women who had double mastectomies because of breast cancer now men? No, they are not, and Chastity Bono is not, no matter what she may call herself.

Chastity Bono is "collateral damage" to a Castration Conspiracy designed to destroy gay men surgically because society refuses to accept the masculinity of men oriented to men, even tho there is nothing more masculine than sex between men, in which there is no woman present. Gay men do NOT regard themselves as a kind of woman, but fully as men. WE don't have pink shower curtains, with pantyhose drying over the shower bar; nor duvets nor dust ruffles nor a dozen pillows on the bed. Quite the contrary, we have to question the masculinity of heterosexual "men" who consent to be emasculated by super-feminine decorating. Nor should anyone else ever think gay men less than men, but always as ONLY men. In the same way, no one should ever think of lesbians as anything BUT women. (That is not to suggest that I speak for women, but only that I imagine that lesbians resent the suggestion that they are somehow less than women.)

In promoting the idea that lesbians are men born in the wrong body, Ms. Bono is an enemy of lesbians, for telling the world that lesbianism is fake heterosexuality and gender confusion, and of gay men, in telling the world that homosexuals would be much happier and better off if they would just let the doctors chop off their genitals and pump them full of female hormones.

This was one of the PERVERTED parts of the Washington Park 'gay' festival, a table at which dozens of CONDOMS were offered, but which table was staffed by a woman, probably lesbian. Truly grotesque. But this is what happens when gay is equated to lesbian, such that lesbians intrude upon gay men's sexual privacy. Disgusting. Truly, truly revolting.

I received, this week, an email from a gay writer in NYC, Perry Brass, that purported to list the ten most important gay activists of all time. I was not on that list. That is, alas, same-old, same-old. Mind you, I did NOT, for the most part, participate in typical "activist" actions, demonstrations and sit-ins. But I did help organize the first annual march of the type now generally termed — because of me — "Gay Pride" parades, and did march (an activist activity, in anyone's judgment) in at least two of the first three such parades in NYC.

It's more than a little annoying when even straight allies in defending gay rights send women to gay events. Alas, since gay men refuse to tell lesbians to get their own events, and gay men will stand on their own, always, straight organizations cannot know how offensive it is to gay men to be treated as lesbians.

More to the point, my linguistic activism, "Gay Pride", has affected the perceptions of at very least a BILLION people in the First World, and possibly as many as, or even more than, THREE BILLION people all around the world. What other person on that list has had nearly that impact? No one.

Wide view, from the far side of Washington Street outside the Newark Museum, of the setup for the gay festival in Washington Park.

People who have seen historic footage of the first few marches may have seen me there, near the front. I think that in the first or second march I was wearing a white, long-sleeved shirt, of ("pirate") puffy sort, and may also have been wearing a floppy straw hat against the sun. Such fotos or videos as I have seen do not, alas, record me in verbal clashes with pushy lesbians who felt that gay men had no right to be anywhere near the front of the march that gay men organized.

It is not, mainly, my purpose here to complain about the craziness of New York City "gay" marches, community centers, or anything else — nor of the Gay Men's Chorus's always having a female soloist, because all GMC concerts must be heterosexual in form — so much as to encourage gay men in Newark to REFUSE to let lesbians impose upon them in any way, but always to be proud to be MEN attracted to and, if we are lucky, in love with MEN who love them.

I do not resent lesbians' being lesbians, but only their insisting that gay men identify with lesbians and let them dominate The Movement. Gay men and lesbians have nothing intrinsically in common. Gay men must stop letting outsiders define them, but must refuse pressure to identify with the opposite sex and to give up their masculine purity to accommodate people who are nothing like them. My defense of gay men's right to an all-male identity is of necessity also a defense of lesbians' right to an all-female identity. Why don't lesbians see that?

This statue of Seth Boyden, a Newark-based inventor whom Thomas Edison (whose first laboratory was in Newark) called the greatest American inventor, stands in the incomprehensibly barren area of Washington Park. There should be grass there as much as anywhere else in the Park.

I do not expect Newark to have a major parade on Broad Street each "Gay Pride" Day, even tho the term as it is now used does derive from a current Newarker (altho I lived in Manhattan when I put the term forward). I reject the idea that gay men have some special bond to lesbian women, so must always organize with and march with them. How supremely bizarre this notion is, that men and women must march together to assert the right not to be pushed at each other.
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Rather, I hope that gay men in Newark will learn to think of themselves before they think of anyone else, and see themselves as the norm before they EVER compare themselves to anyone else. We must be the men we are. Love the men we love. Crave the men we crave. And never apologize to anyone for being who we are.

Regular readers of this blog [meaning, here, "Newark USA", from which this post was copied] will know that I rarely discuss gay issues, largely because there is almost nothing for gay men in Newark (otherwise I would include gay items regularly, since gay events are part of the world I report on) but also that my capsule profile at top right always includes mention that I put forward the term "Gay Pride" as it is now used. I would, however, be seriously remiss in not objecting to antihomosexual bigotry — albeit unintentional — by a major Newark institution, such as the Robeson Center of Rutgers-Newark. And now, ladies and gentlemen, I will step down from my soapbox, hoping that straight people among my readers will have learned something that no one else will tell them.

2011-09-01T14:49:00.008-04:00

"Chaz" Bono, Carson Kressley on DWTS. AOL yesterday hilited a story about "Chaz" Bono being cast in Dancing with the Stars. I left the following comments.

There is no such thing as a transgendered person, only someone who is terribly confused and has been monstrously victimized by a society that somehow, bizarrely, finds it easier to accept a biological impossibility -- a person "born into the wrong body" -- than a person who is not heterosexual. This DWTS thing is part and parcel of a widespread Castration Conspiracy targeted mainly at gay men to emasculate them first psychologically and then surgically, but which has as collateral damage victimized some lesbian women too. Legislatures need to pass laws that state plainly that gender is biological, not psychological, fixed, not subject to whim. And media have got to LEAVE the Castration Conspiracy and accept gay people for what they are: fully normal as to gender, just a minority as regards orientation.
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You think "transgendered people" are HAPPY? They are MISERABLE, and cannot ever be at peace with their nature by denying their nature.
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You consent to be castrated, do you? Why not, if a woman can be defeminized, why not a man emasculated? That's what it's all about. "Chaz" should be paired with a WOMAN, and Neil Patrick Harris or some other gay-male star should be paired with a man. He should not have to be castrated to be paired with a man on DWTS. YOU are the enemy of gay men, in consenting to the bigotry that says that anyone attracted to a man must be a woman -- and be made, surgically, to look like a woman -- and anyone attracted to a woman must be a man, and chemically if not even surgically altered to look like one.
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Fine, let 'Chaz' dance -- with a MAN, if heterosexual pairing is compulsory.
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There is no God. If gay people wrote the Bible (a work of self-vaunting fiction), God would be gay. Straight people wrote it, which is the only reason their God is straight.
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Cortez and Columbus did NOT murder millions. You subvert your point thru preposterous overstatement. Millions of American Indians died from DISEASES they contracted from Europeans, and that would have happened if they had arrived merely as traders, not colonizers. The deaths from forced labor/slavery and warfare were trivial by comparison with the toll from simple biological contamination. As for "accept[ing] people the way God made them", Chastity Bono was made a girl, to grow to be a woman. An intolerant society prefers to pretend she is a man than that a woman can want a woman.
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The problem is that Chastity Bono cannot accept her lesbianism.
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Do you really think Jesus would bless gender confusion, castrating gay men, giving women double mastectomies and pumping them full of chemicals, to deny them their actual gender and force them to be something they were not born? I don't.
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Carson Kressley is a disgrace. He and Lance Bass should NEVER have consented to dance with women, and that both have[,] shows they are both antigay losers. Disgusting.
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Alas, you have it exactly backwards. In having a lesbian, Chastity Bono, [touted as a man and] paired with a [wo]man, and a gay man, Carson Kressley, paired with a woman, society is NOT accepting homosexuality nor lesbianism but FORBIDDING both. This is a show of extreme bigotry, not acceptance in the slitest.
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God didn't create "sex-change" quackery. [Chastity Bono] has caused a lot of other confused people to contemplate irreversibly mutilating their bodies. THAT'S the harm she has done.

2011-05-23T14:27:00.006-04:00

The Good Fite vs. Bad Fites. I occasionally receive emails from Billy Glover, a gay man in his 70s who was part of the early gay-rights movement on the U.S. West Coast. Sometimes he talks about today's issues. Too often, however, he replays old quarrels, mainly those that broke up the early organization ONE into ONE and the Homosexual Information Center ("HIC") decades ago. Let it go!
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I sent him this reply to the last email of his carrying on this pointless fite among backers of one side as against backers of the other side in this ancient quarrel over who deserves credit for what.

Is it already too late to establish the truth about the early days of the U.S. gay-rights movement? In the materials you have sent, there are starkly different portrayals of the infiting between ONE and HIC, and between individuals whom younger people have never heard of. Since that all transpired on the West Coast, and I have always resided on the East Coast, I am in no position to say who is right in that intramural squabble. I can say, however, that I am hostile to some of the notions of people who fought not for openness but for "privacy" (shame), and who advocated the silly notion that homosexuality is only a point on a "continuum", and related notions that we must not 'narrow' ourselves to gay-only, but must always see ourselves first and foremost as "human" -- oh? what ELSE would we be? Plainly the people who assert such things believe that homosexuality rules them out of the human race, because they internalized the antihomosexual nonsense they were taught as children by family and society. Of COURSE we're "human". So what? That's a meaningless base point.
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What gay men are NOT is lesbians. But somehow the insane notion has arisen that gay men and lesbians are the same thing. Oh sure, and black and white, blue and yellow, day and nite, Communist and capitalist, are all the same! How did "opposite" become "the same"?
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In any case, I do not care to hear any more about the ONE/HIC squabble. I do want gay materials to be preserved, and if sending them off to academic libraries in the general society is the only way to do that, so be it. I have some materials of my own that I will want preserved after my death -- assuming that happens at some point. As odd comic Steven Wright has said, "I intend to live forever. So far, so good." But who would REALLY want to live forever? The same crap, day after day, for millennia?
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I have always been on the side of openness and seeing one's sexuality as enormously important in personal identity and mental health. I participated in the 1969 ERCHO meeting (Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations) that created the annual march to commemorate Stonewall, and even offered an amendment, that was accepted, that the march should not impose a dress code. Little did we know that not wanting to force men to wear jacket and tie, and women, skirts and sweaters or such -- the dress code of many earlier "homophile" demonstrations -- would be interpreted as license to go absolutely naked, or wear drag or only a codpiece or s&m garb, turning what was intended to be an assertion of pride into instead a freak show on which hostile straight media would focus all attention. I served on the committee that organized the first march, in NYC, and offered "Gay Pride" as the unifying title for the weekend of events around the first march. I have always been indignant at people like Johnny Mathis, Elton John, and others hiding their reality, even pretending to be "bisexual" because they just couldn't admit to being "homosexual", and have been all for people in the closet being "outed".
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We who favored public admissions have been proved right, over and over. Each time someone prominent "comes out", be it Clay Aiken, Neil Patrick Harris, or Ricky Martin, public attitudes shift in our direction. To this day I resent prominent gay men way-back-when for NOT coming out. The Johnny Mathises and Rudi Gernrichs and Tab Hunters and Rock Hudsons could have moved us to TODAY'S public acceptance DECADES SOONER, had they not been worthless cowards. They could also have created films and music for US. But even the "out" gay men aren't creating music or film or TV for us. Why the hell not!?
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I have equally always been indignant at Communists trying to drag our good name thru their mud -- ignoring antihomosexual behavior of Communist countries, including, for instance, an internment camp on Cuba's Isle of Pines. The insistence of some Communists on forcing the Gay Movement to toe the Communist line destroyed GLF and other gay groups, as did constant personality conflicts of, I'm sorry to say, some very petty people. I tried to stay away from that but fell afoul of the unfortunate personality defects of all too many gay men -- in HI!'s case, a con man worked his way into a position of trust, set member against member, then skipped town with our small treasury, leaving the organization not just broke but broken. It never recovered.
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I hope Private Manning is KILLED for massive espionage. It is not for him or any other private individual to decide what should and should not be classified as Secret. I'd be honored to throw the switch to chop his head off by guillotine (so his body might be chopped up for parts for people on transplant waiting lists). He's cute, but that is no excuse for treason and putting people's lives at risk out of ARROGANCE and alienation.
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As for Gay Studies, I am very certain that much of this "scholarship" is shoddy, fraudulent, even knowingly fictitious -- as is a lot of the 'scholarship' in Black Studies. And the notion that somehow we know about the lives of non-famous gay men, centuries past, is pure bull. I am not so arrogant as to pretend to know the unknowable.
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Merle Miller gave my organization, Homosexuals Intransigent!, active encouragement, even tho I never quite managed to meet him. As for Edward Sagarin, he was a professor at City College/CUNY when I was trying to form Homosexuals Intransigent! as a student group there. I had heard the rumor that he was "Donald Webster Cory", so asked if he would serve as our (required) faculty advisor. He refused -- the bastard enemy. Also gay enemies are all those people who insist on using "queer" for gay men -- and esp. for lesbians!, who were NEVER called "queer" even by the heterosexual culture. "Queer" is the EXACT equivalent of "nigger". It cannot be sanitized, but is always ugly, Ugly, UGLY antihomosexual propaganda that asserts in itself the dishonest claims that homosexuality is both rare and bizarre.
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As for early activists consigning themselves to lifelong poverty, there is much to that. I recently found out that my brother regards me as a "failure", because I devoted my early years of college and after college, to trying to change public attitudes and, more importantly, the attitudes of gay men themselves, toward homosexuality. If you don't get a good start on a career early on, you may never catch up. Besides, I had other causes to pursue, even after I shifted much of my attention away from gay rights and self-esteem, leaving my early writings on a website (www.mrgaypride.org or http://mrgaypride.tripod.com) to remain as ongoing advice and activism to this day.

2011-05-22T23:00:00.003-04:00

Lies about 'Chaz'. Media have got to stop calling Chastity Bono a "man", and stop giving publicity to her madness. David Letterman and Jimmy Kimmel both, in recent days, have had that lunatic on their shows and referred to her as "him". They should be corrected, and told that what they are doing is contributing to gender confusion in more people, gender confusion that could also result in their sexual mutilation — and that is a crime against humanity.
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I left the following comment after an online story about Jimmy Kimmel's asking Chastity about a penis transplant (not presently possible, thank goodness).

Chastity Bono is a woman, period. She isn't an intersex, chromosomally, but all-woman. Every single cell of her body has the XX chromosomal configuration that makes a person female, and there is no surgical mutilation that can change that. She is an enemy of the WORLD, promoting sexual confusion as a positive good. NO court should be allowed to recognize a woman as a man. No court has any justification for issuing any papers to "recognize" her as a man. Laws must be put in place to ban such craziness, and to forbid "sex-change" surgery on pain of death to the lunatic who asks for it, and to every member of the surgical staff that commits that crime against humanity. We would have executed "Dr." Josef Mengele if we had managed to capture him. We should as well execute every medical practitioner who commits these modern-day atrocities. Media have got to stop lying, and stop participating in the Castration Conspiracy against gay men, and Mutilation Conspiracy against lesbians. Calling a woman a man is an insult, to the woman, to society, to sanity. It's got to stop.

Chastity Bono is an evil, evil woman who should be executed for promoting surgical mutilation of gender-confused people.

2011-05-19T18:23:00.001-04:00

Hideous ABC 'Comedy', Happy Endings. ABC is running a truly awful sitcom that includes among the main characters a 'straight-acting' gay man who spends ALL his time with straight people. He goes to their houses (apartments, supposedly in Manhattan) and to straight bars and restaurants with them. He spends NO time with other gay men, tho he refers occasionally to having spent the nite before with another man. How? Where did he meet that other man? When? He spends all his time with straight people.
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He is a token gay person who acts straight and tolerates being surrounded, 24 hours a day, by straight people. He even has a straight roommate. So here we have, again, the ever-popular ploy of dividing gay men in two. It's alrite to be gay as long as that doesn't entail sex between men, and gay men behave like straight people, completely immersing themselves in the straight culture at all times. I say "No thanks" to that, and no thanks to that hideous sit"com", which is rarely to never funny even on its own, deformed terms.
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I have given it a more than fair chance, having watched it several times, tho I have had to turn it off mid-episode at least twice. When, in last nite's episode, the white woman married to (living with?) the black guy throws a bag of straight-from-the-restaurant Chinese food into the trash so she can drag him out on the town, I turned that repulsive show off in a rage for the last time. NO ONE ON EARTH would do such a wastrel, selfish, disgusting thing as throw away perfectly good restaurant food rather than simply put it into the frij, not in this economy, not on a starving planet. That act is a perfect example of the self-absorbed, mindless, banal evil of that loathsome show, and I have no desire whatsoever to have ANY of those people in my house, not in person, not on television. As for the 'gay' character, get a life — a GAY life, not an imitation-straight life.

2011-04-25T23:59:00.005-04:00

Grasping at Straws. AOL News today reported ("Judge's Gay Partner Raised in Proposition 8 Appeal") that the antigay bigots who lost a Federal challenge to the Proposition 8 ballot initiative that purported to outlaw gay marriage (but, the Federal Court ruled, could not do that because it violated gay people's constitutional rights) have filed a motion to "overturn[that decision] because the federal judge who struck down Proposition 8 was in a long-term relationship with another man. * * * [which motion claims that] '"Only if Chief Judge Walker had unequivocally disavowed any interest in marrying his partner could the parties and the public be confident that he did not have a direct personal interest in the outcome of the case'." The story was followed by a couple of hundred comments, many of them bigoted antigay nonsense, so I answered some and added my own comment (at the end of the 42 responsive comments below). ADDENDUM: I went back to that story after a couple of hours, and added 32 more comments, amounting to about 2,300 more words. To show my own original comment, then, before the added reply-comments, I have boldfaced that paragraph.

The moral of your silly story is that no judge can sit in judgment of anyone who has anything in common with him or her -- or who is different from him or her.
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Yes, you're mistaken. A decision stands on its own, not on its authorship. And no judge can put his or her own prejudices into a decision without expecting it to be reviewed and overturned if legally void.
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People who don't want to be faithful -- male or female; straight or gay; lesbian or heterosexual -- should not get married. And unjust divorce laws need to be abolished, not enforced equally against everybody. As I look around at the straight world, I see an awful lot of infidelity and divorce by straight people. What do YOU see?
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Why don't you post under your real, full name, and town, so your neighbors can hold you to account for your bigotry?
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Moslem, Christian, Jewish judges don't matter. The LAW matters. We have appeals to correct legal errors in decisions rendered by judges of any religion.
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Perhaps you're not aware of the FACTS (a) that not all gay men have ******** ["anal sex" censored by AOL moderator/software] and (b) that MOST straight couples at some point in time, and some straight people a LOT of the time DO have ********.
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So the world is in danger of depopulation, is it? If homosexuality could bring down this planet's catastrophic overpopulation, homosexuality should be not only legal but encouraged (if not compulsory). As for flaunting one's sexual orientation, perhaps you don't see all the heterosexual hugging and kissing in TV programs, commercials, movies, etc., activity on the street, etc. Straight people wouldn't THINK of making obvious their sexual orientation, of course not. The world is being DESTROYED by heterosexuality. You must be so proud.
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pwanless hugely misstates and exaggerates in calling lesbians "half of the gay population". First, lesbians and gay men are NOT the same, any more than blacks and Chinese are the same thing. Second, there are nowhere near as many lesbians as gay men.
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Your "marriage is an institution" [not a right] premise in no way makes any sense. You don't seem to understand that you make no sense. Sad.
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Don't straight people make a huge, expensive show of their weddings, the start of their governmentally-approved SEXUAL relationship? If gay people were to say that NOBODY should have the right to marry, and that sexual behavior is not for government to approve or disapprove, so all weddings should be without legal sanction, and NO benefits should appertain to straight people's sexual relationships, that would remove "bedroom behavior" as a political issue, wouldn't it? Would you be in favor of outlawing marriage for everyone?
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Amazing. Gay people ask for the SAME rights, and all of a sudden YOUR rights are SPECIAL rights because other people want them too. You cannot magically make the SAME rights SPECIAL rights just by saying so. There has to be some logic, some SENSE, some consistency for rational people to believe something.
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The right to marry is in Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml).
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All treaties to which the United States is signatory are, WITH the Constitution, the supreme law of the land. If Jody doesn't understand that, or does not know that the U.S. SIGNED the Universal Declaration, then she needs some legal education.
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The judge in the Proposition 8 case did not draft the proposition. By your reasoning, no white person should be allowed to act as judge on a case involving white people.
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Unmarried heterosexuals CHOOSE not to marry. They are not FORBIDDEN to marry. If you don't understand the difference, you should not be allowed to drive, nor use a pedestrian crossing without assistance, because you have no judgment.
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Your Highness makes no sense. I say everybody should have the right to choose to marry or stay single, and Y.H. seems to think I'm saying that nobody has a right of choice in this regard. What a twisted world Y.H.'s mind must be.
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The judge was not in the closet. He just wasn't shouting his private relationship. I thought you bigots WANTED gay people to stop 'forcing their lifestyle on others' by publicly proclaiming their orientation. What "hate" has the judge showed in LOVING a man for 10 years? You're making up gay people you know. You do NOT know any gay people who would talk to you about ANYthing. You're just fabricating ridiculous, contemptible, obvious nonsense, like the antiblack bigots who claim that "some of my best friends are black".
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Your fear of your own attraction is showing.
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I have to wonder about your ability to think. Let me try to explain things to you, slowly: the SAME rights are NOT special rights. The desire to reproduce is NOT heterosexual; it is intrinsic to the INDIVIDUAL, a form of egoism, not heterosexualism. Gay people do NOT hate heterosexuals, only mistreatment by heterosexuals. You are PROJECTING your hatred of homosexuals onto gay people and thinking that because you hate them, therefore they must hate you. We have no reason to hate heterosexuals. Our PARENTS are heterosexuals, as are most of our family, co-workers, neighbors, etc. If we don't care to hang out with heterosexuals much of the time but prefer to be with people more like ourselves, that's simply natural. "Birds of a feather flock together." "Natural" means "occurring in nature". Homosexuality and lesbianism occur in nature. Has no male dog ever humped your leg? Watch dogs and cats; you don't have to go to more exotic species to see a LOT of homosexual behavior. You pass it off as "confused" rather than what it is: homosexual. With the onset of artificial insemination, marriages of convenience, surrogacy, and in vitro fertilization, heterosexuality has become OBSOLETE as a means of reproduction. And with the arrival of massive overpopulation of this overstrained planet, accidental reproduction has become a BLIGHT upon the world.
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Yeah, them durned nigras demanded special rights too, like the right to vote. Look how that turned out. One of them durned nigras became President of the YOUnited States, by some crazy accident. What next? Sum durned homo becoming President? They've got to back off and say they've got enuf. Second-class citizenship in the Younited States is better than first-class citizenship everwahr else, ain't it?
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In Prop 8, a 4% majority was permitted to take away a basic human right. Mind you, 60% -- a 10% majority -- is required for almost any controversial legislation in the U.S. Senate. This is why we had to put some rights into the Constitution, so that supermajorities of size would have to agree to take away people's rights.
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The supremacy clause establishes that Federal law voids conflicting State law, not that State law supersedes FEDERAL laws and basic constitutional rights. You don't know what you're talking about. The Bill of Rights and other provisions of the Federal Constitution cannot be voided by state laws nor referendums, and basic rights can be taken away only by the large supermajorities required for Constitutional amendments, not 4% (52% to 48%), which is only 2% above a majority, and not a majority of all the people, but only a majority of those who took the trouble to vote on that referendum. This is akin to the people who vote in a particular referendum approving a law to take away the vote in all future elections of everyone who did not vote in that referendum, or voiding the right of HETEROSEXUALS to marry, by a 2% or 4% majority.
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[The judge's homosexual relationship] wasn't secret. It just wasn't intruded into the case. By your reasoning, no married person could judge a case involving heterosexual marriage; nor could a single heterosexual; nor could a single gay man. White judges couldn't sit in cases involving white people, woman judges in cases involving women, black judges in cases involving black people -- or the other way around. We couldn't very well have a black person judging white people, or a woman men, or heterosexuals judging homosexuals -- or anybody judging anybody.
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Homosexuality is an orientation, not a race. So what? You are not making any sense. What has sexual orientation got to do with the society's interest in helping relationships survive long-term, so that private persons take care of each other, so the government won't have to.
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Nowhere does the story say that the judge was in the closet. And "closet queen" is an antigay slur. Stop using bigoted language.
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So government can outlaw heterosexual marriage any time it wants, eh? I have pointed out that the RIGHT to marry is part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which the United States is a signatory. By your reasoning, nothing is a RIGHT. Certainly the South did not regard there to be a RIGHT to vote if the would-be voter was black; and of course women had no RIGHT to vote until 1920. Elections are only an "institution", not a right. You make no sense.
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The claim that the judge's long-term relationship biased him against Prop 8 because he might have been expected to take advantage of gay marriage is not just logically shaky but actually disproved by the fact that gay marriage was regarded as legal for over a year, but the judge did NOT marry his partner now of ten years, then of perhaps eight years. Since he did NOT insist on marrying his partner when he had the chance, there is no reason to believe that he would feel an urgent need to make gay marriage available for his own benefit. The argument that he was self-interested so should have recused himself is, thus, FATUOUS -- one of those straws that a drowning man is supposed to clutch at. A lot of people, straight as well as gay, see no reason to get married, and even good reason not to -- for instance, because they don't need a piece of paper to validate their love, or because they understand that sometimes relationships fail, and it's better not to be financially ruined if they do.
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Wrong again. Marriage was, for centuries if not millennia, and even to this day in some places, between one man and SEVERAL or even MANY women; in a very few cultures, it has been between one woman and SEVERAL men. The one-to-one thing is, in historical terms, DEVIANT, and, in the estimation of many cultures, UNNATURAL. But you don't know anything about other cultures, do you? You know nothing of the history of marriage in the world at large. Think about THIS, then: since the number of males and females at young adulthood has always been roughly equal, if one man was allowed to have several, or many, wives, other men could have NO wife. Four wives for the rich man, no wife for 3 poor men. 100 wives for the sultan or sheikh, no wife for 99 men.
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To Jody: so if the majority of people here or in AOL's moderators area, decide to ban you from these comments areas, that's fine with you, eh? And if the majority of Americans decide that everyone named "Jody" should be killed, that's fine too? A "simple" majority is not enuf even to pass many controversial ordinary pieces of legislation thru the United States Senate, much less take away the right to marry -- by a vote of 52%! It takes 60% to pass much of anything thru the U.S. Senate now, but 52% in California is enuf to take away the right to marry? How about the right to vote? The right to breathe?
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Plainly you are insane or a worthless gadfly, saying stupid and ridiculous things just to irritate people. Who is hurt by a bank robbery? The bank, of course; the insurance company that insured the bank against loss from robbery; the FDIC if that robbery affected the bank's ability to give depositors their money back. Who is hurt if some fool who refuses to use a seatbelt gets into an accident and is seriously hurt? The insurance group of which s/he is a part, and who will have to pay to repair the fool's injuries, even if that means their insurance rates will have to go up. If the fool is uninsured, the government -- meaning everybody who pays taxes -- will have to pay for that fool's medical care. If anyone were so unwise as to love that fool, and the fool was killed, the fool's foolhardiness would hurt them too. "No man is an island" -- except perhaps for danrothesq, whom no one would miss. And if he didn't have medical insurance, we should just let him die if he got into a serious accident while refusing to wear a seatbelt. No one else should have to pay for his misbehavior. As to sexual behavior, however, there is no wider harm to an individual's personal choices. But danrothesq can't understand that obvious distinction.
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Note that that is only 5 above the positive votes. There is a TINY coterie of Radical Right lunatics who SWARM select stories on AOL and try to make the whole world believe that their insane view of things is the majority view. It is not. It's just a few dozen evil loons.
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Kindly name the provision of the U.S. Constitution that forbids homosexuality. You cannot, because there is no such thing. but you don't know the Constitution or anything else about the American credo, which was first set out in the Declaration of Independence, which spoke to the "pursuit of happiness". You want other people to be unhappy. You are un-American. You are an enemy of everything this country stands for. YOU should leave.
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There is no compulsory voting in the United States, so 52% of Californians who bothered to vote in Proposition 8 do NOT constitute a majority of Californians. And a 2% majority is NOT enuf to take away people's basic rights.
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There is no God, despite the wish of simpletons that there were. Jesus was an UNmarried man of age 30 or so, in a culture where everyone was expected to be married by age 20. Hm. If God is your only argument, you have no argument.
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You know nothing about HIV, which is a HARMLESS microbe that has NOTHING to do with AIDS or any other adverse health issue (www.virusmyth.com).
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The people who base their hostility to homosexuality on Leviticus ignore that much of Leviticus concerns ANIMAL SACRIFICE and Jewish dietary laws. They can sit at their computer, eating a bacon cheeseburger and drinking a glass of milk, yet justify their hatred of homosexuals by Leviticus, which they themselves violate every day.
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einpet needs to know that there is no such thing as a soul, no God, no "holy" this nor "sacred" that. It's all nonsense. If we had a kind of Judeo-Christian shariah law, that forced people to obey everything in the Judeo-Christian Bible, everyone would have to practice animal sacrifice and Jewish dietary laws, nobody would be allowed to work on the Sabbath (whatever day that might be), masturbation would be punished by law, there would be no divorce, adultery would be punished by death, etc. The Bible thumpers would discover that there are 613 commandments, not 10, in the Old Testament, and getting a haircut could get you beaten. It is so much easier to ignore the inconvenient parts of the Bible and land hard only on the ones you like to inflict on other people, than to heed, yourself, what the whole thing says.
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What, pray, have CHILDREN to do with gay marriage? You make no sense.
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The Bible is b.s. There are only a few parts that any decent people pay any attention to, first among which is the Golden Rule, which has various phrasings but most commonly something like this: "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you." That means a lot of things, such as don't forbid other people to marry unless you are content to have them forbid you to marry; don't take away other people's rights of ANY kind unless you are content to have them take away YOUR rights; and gay men PERFECTLY obey the Golden Rule, much more literally than can heterosexuals. Think about it. If you can. Aside from these few valid, non-superstitious and non-supernatural passages, the remainder of the Bible should be burned or composted, and used as fertilizer in national forests.
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So you think it's a great thing that hundreds of thousands of kids abandoned by heterosexual parents or taken away from abusive heterosexual parents by the courts, grow up in (sometimes abusive and often unloving) foster homes or group homes, unloved, unnurtured, to become permanently wounded adults, rather than that they be adopted by loving gay parents? I don't. But, then, I'm a decent human being. You? I don't think so.
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Who lied and cheated? About what? The judge didn't intrude his personal life into the workplace, which you people say gay people should never do. And then you complain that he didn't intrude his personal life into the workplace. Make up your mind (your teeny, tiny, intolerant, bigoted mind).
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Civil union is unconstitutional because it does NOT create an equal relationship under the law. Equal treatment under law is required by the 14th Amendment to the Federal Constitution. California voters cannot nullify the 14th Amendment, but must abide by its requirement that everyone be treated equally by government. If you don't understand that, there's something wrong with you.
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The Supreme Court gave up its antihomosexual ways several years ago, when it voided antigay sodomy laws.
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First, learn how to quote. Second, a judge who had a year to marry his gay lover but chose NOT to is NOT ruling on something in which he has a personal interest. The only interest he had is the personal interest all of us have: social justice. And no one should ever recuse himself from a case involving social justice.
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So you're a lawyer all of a sudden? A person recuses himself only when he has a personal interest, such as ownership of the business at issue. It does NOT relate to a black person's refusing to participate in a trial of a civil rights issue, or a woman's refusing to participate in an issue of equal pay for equal work, or a gay judge refusing to participate in a case involving gay marriage.
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How dare you refer to that judge as "Backdoor Sanders"? You know NOTHING about his sexual practices, and they really are NONE of your business. The "majority of citizens" did NOT vote for Proposition 8. The vote was 52% for, but that was 52% of the people who voted. NOT everyone voted, not even nearly. And a 2% majority is a very thin reed upon which to build a house of hate.
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This is a perfect example of "damned if you do, damned if you don't". If the judge had said he is himself gay, he would be condemned for 'forcing his lifestyle' on everyone, and accused before he handed down any decision of being biased. NOTE that he did NOT marry his boyfriend in the year when gay marriage was believed to be legal, so he was NOT personally 'interested' in gay marriage for himself.
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Cut the RadRite crap. Liberals are better educated, higher paid, and harder working at good jobs than RadRite white trash.
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Wouldn't that [striking down gun-control laws] be legislating from the bench? Make up your mind. Either voiding laws is a proper exercise of judicial authority or it is not. And gun-control laws HAVE been struck down. Did you PROTEST that "judicial activism"?
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Which citizens? Did EVERYONE eligible to vote, vote? NO, they sure as heck did not, because we have a low participation rate. Turnout of REGISTERED voters was 79.42% -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_8_(2008) -- which means that 20.58% of REGISTERED voters did NOT vote, ten times the 2% majority vote in the actual referendum. And "registered voters" is not equivalent to "eligible voters", there being a lot of UNregistered voters who COULD vote but didn't even register. If you want to talk authoritatively about what the people want, we have to have compulsory voting, but you wouldn't want that, because then highly motivated but unrepresentative minorities could not hijack the electoral process.
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Bobalicious seems to think that the only purpose of marriage is reproduction. But society does not require that heterosexual couples reproduce or they lose their marriage. And planet Earth is grotesquely overpopulated, with 14 million children dying every year from starvation and diseases they might survive were it not for deprivation. As for his peculiar and scientifically unsupportable remarks about "deformity of intended order" -- whatever he THINKS that meaningless phrase means -- ignore the obvious fact that homosexuality DOES serve a function in the larger order, in lowering population increase.
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Your ludicrous, silly slander of homosexuals as "not honorable" condemns itself, but it should still be condemned forthrightly by all decent people. Do you really mean that, or are you just a troll trying to get everybody's goat? As for "ill intent", protecting equality under law is not in the slitest "ill intent". What does the "TNC" in your ID mean? "The Nut Case"?
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"Normal" is a statistical term, and refers to commonness. Geniuses are abnormal; saints are abnormal; professional athletes are abnormal. The fact of their abnormality does not make them bad. People of very modest intellectual gifts are the great majority. That doesn't make them wise, or right, or worthy of respect for their uninformed opinions.
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Wrong. The law permits one person (male) to marry another, unrelated person (female). The demand is only that the law must permit one person to marry another unrelated person, without reference to gender -- one person, NOT related to the other person. Of course, "incest" is of little importance if the people cannot reproduce.
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So when the Supreme Court voided McCain-Feingold and unleashed a flood of money on the ridiculous and patently false pretense that corporations are people who have a right of free speech, it created a new law, and thus violated the Constitution, and you were FURIOUS about that, eh?
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Unfortunately, a lot of black Baptists did vote against gay rights in Prop 8. Some have since realized the error of their ways, and might vote the opposite way if a new Prop 8 were presented to them.
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What a twisted piece of imitation-logic you put forth. You can marry -- just not anyone you could love! Your simpleminded bigotry fools no one. You aren't making any valid point. You are just thrashing around desperately looking for some justification for your unjustifiable malice toward people who have never done you any harm and never interfered in any way with your pursuit of marital happiness.
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If voiding a law is judicial activism, then the current Supreme Court is filled to overflowing with judicial activists, because they struck down McCain-Feingold and many other laws.
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The history of the United States is a history of progress from inequality toward equality, and that move was resisted at every stage of the game. But it was never stopped. And it never will be. You are on the losing side of history, and there is no place on Earth you can go that is more reactionary than the U.S. of A. that you pretend to love but actually hate. Because the United States is about "liberty and justice for all", not just for some. And you can't stand that.
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If committed partners, gay or straight, refuse to marry, then they willingly pass up the benefits of marriage. That is nothing like the case here, where a straight couple CAN marry if they want to but a gay couple cannot. You cannot seriously believe that the two situations are comparable. Unless you have a serious intellectual or emotional problem.
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And [Conservatives] never admit, when a judge voids a law they don't like, that that is judicial activism.

2011-04-21T16:21:00.003-04:00

Dr. Phil Has Gay Couple as Guests. I sometimes watch the Dr. Phil show, at least until I see what the topic is. Then I usually turn off, because the topic turns me off, and both stupid and crazy people irritate me. Most of the topics dealt with are irrelevant to my life as a gay man. I also realized that most of the things that Dr. Phil deals with have little or no relevance to me in other ways, because I live alone, my extended family is scattered across thousands of miles, I rarely see my friends because the three I am in touch with most often are scattered (several miles from me in different directions) and I communicate with them almost only via email and IM, and rarely via fone or in-person. So I don't really need relationship advice. I see acquaintances at art events here in Newark (NJ, which has a very active arts community), but those are very brief and casual conversations.
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In any case, I have not until today had a clear idea of where Dr. Phil stands on the issue of homosexuality. Certainly homosexuality has been very underrepresented in his discussions, but I didn't know why that might be.
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Today, I finally saw him speak with a gay couple, Ródiney Santiago and Reichen Leimkuhl. Leimkuhl had won CBS's Amazing Race in 2003 with a different partner, Chip Arndt, but they later broke up. Divorced people are hardly new on Dr. Phil. He's had hundreds of straight divorced people on his show.
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I have actually been indignant that Dr. Phil gave no time nor attention to gay men, but when finally a gay couple was featured, their only problem seemed to be petty annoyance about each other's tidiness. Big deal. The good doctor had them take a personality test, and that indicated that they were pretty well suited to each other. That doesn't mean they'll stay together, of course, it being very difficult for most people to commit to a life-long relationship. But Dr. Phil was not the slitest judgmental, and acted as tho it was absolutely, perfectly normal for these two men to be romantically and (sexually) involved. Good.

2011-04-11T20:41:00.003-04:00

Lowering the Age at Which the Castration Conspiracy Attacks. The Parent Dish website printed an article, hilited on a Welcome screen on AOL, about British doctors giving children as young as 12 drugs to hold off puberty for children who are confused about gender. I was livid, so read thru the comments after it, then added three of my own.

That is a profoundly ignorant and intolerant remark [that in that person's day, people suppressed homosexual tendencies and got married, and everyone was better off for it]. Gay men were oppressed for centuries by the suggestion that "man" means "heterosexual, attracted to women", whereas it just means having an XY chromosomal constitution, which implies nothing about sexual orientation. People may experiment, but unless there are powerful forces interfering with their choice, they will all, at maturity, choose gay or straight. It is only the insistence that male = heterosexual that causes some sad gay kids to be confused: "I'm drawn to boys, so I must be a girl." Then the Castration Conspiracy arrives and pushes them to pretend that they are "a woman trapped in a man's body", which is of course completely insane. Alas, large parts of society have been persuaded by organized lunatics to accept that insanity as sane, then push sexually confused people to mutilate themselves horribly and irreversibly. But sane people could not be persuaded that a woman could be trapped in a man's body if society were not so utterly unwilling to accept that a fully normal and properly functioning man can be totally and intensely oriented to men sexually, esthetically, and emotionally. We need to save people from the hideous physical assault that is "sex-change" surgery, by accepting the normality of homosexuality. "Normal" does not mean "majority". Castrating a gender-confused gay boy is a crime against humanity, Mengele medicine.
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There is no such thing as a natural born "tranny". There is no such thing as a "transsexual" at all, tho there are a few people born as intersexes or with ambiguous genitalia. In most cases, once actual, chromosomal gender is established, surgery can successfully repair developmental accidents and give a person a reasonable facsimile of the appropriate genitalia. That is not what is meant by "transsexual". Rather, people who are confused about gender are not helped to find their true selves (their biological gender) but instead pushed by a very real conspiracy of crazy people in the nonexistent "LGBT community" (the four groups HATE each other, and do not hang out together) to be surgically mutilated, then lie to the world and trick unsuspecting people into homosexual or lesbian relationships they would never willingly have engaged in. This is all a crime against humanity, and is all arisen from the preposterous notion that all normal people are heterosexual. The "doctors" involved in behavior such as described above, and in nonexistent "sex-change" operations (you can't change a person's gender unless you can change every single cell's chromosomal makeup, which is impossible) are guilty of crimes against humanity. Their offending hand should be amputated, and it should be unlawful to replace it with a prosthesis. Mutilating people in so hideous and irreversible [a] way is Frankensteinian, even Nazistic. It is not an act of kindness, and is CERTAINLY not an act of understanding.
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"Howard" needs to mind his own business, and not speculate about the sex acts of other people. Gay men do not tell straight men that heterosexual activity is disgusting and intended ONLY for reproduction, and has not even been necessary for reproduction since the arrival of the age of the test-tube baby. If homosexuality were not normal, it could not happen. "God", in His infinite wisdom, would have made the parts fit only one way, just as man made polarized electric plugs fit only one way. In this time of horrendous overpopulation, when nearly 15 million people, mostly children, die of starvation, heterosexuality is something we should be MOST actively discouraging, and homosexuality is something we should most definitely be encouraging. Instead, straight people have to OUTLAW it because the drive is so powerful that if NOT outlawed, a very large portion of all men would be having sex with men and not bothering with all the drama and frustration of dealing with women, whom they will not ever understand.

2011-03-01T18:07:00.009-05:00

Cannot Cope. I haven't updated this occasional blog in quite some time. It's not that I don't have topics. I have plenty of topics, but they are almost all unpleasant to me, and I'm at a point in my life when I neither seek out unpleasantness nor overestimate my ability to change things. I'm also very busy with other things. But if the topics I note to address afforded me more hope of accomplishing something with commentary, I would endeavor to comment.
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Being homosexual is, in itself, wonderful. Dealing with the insanity of other people about homosexuality, however, can be unbearable.
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I live in Newark, New Jersey, one of the finest cities you might imagine, if you were not already poisoned in your attitudes by preposterous things you may have heard thru media, about how crime-ridden and dangerous Newark is. Reality and media-induced delusion are often opposed, but rarely so very FAR opposed as in the reality of the city of Newark vs. its media reputation.
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I am 66 years old, and incapable of running to safety, due to a very serious injury suffered when I fell off a ladder / jumped off a falling ladder in September 2001. I walk around many parts of Newark, not just the tourist areas of the Arts District, Downtown, at all hours of the day and nite, and have never once encountered a problem. Another fotografer of my acquaintance, also gay, and also elderly, has had the same experience over the course of YEARS. But outsiders continue to think Newark dangerous, esp. to white people. Both I and my friend are white.
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Newark is NOT a gay city. That does not mean it is hostile to gay men, but only that there is very little specifically FOR gay men. But the Newark I move within, the arts community — which most people outside Newark would find astonishing in its size and vitality — is so accepting of homosexuality and lesbianism (and there are a LOT of lesbians in Newark arts) that even tho I mention, very prominently at the top of my fotoblog about Newark, that I am the guy who in 1970 first offered the term "Gay Pride" as it is now used, NOBODY makes a big deal about that. I am very well known in the Newark arts community, but nobody has, as far as I have been able to detect — and remember that I am accustomed to detecting antihomosexual bias — been so horrified or indignant about my being 'queer' (a word I detest, and insist is the exact equivalent of "nigger") that they have refused to shake my hand or otherwise indicated disgust or disapproval when they meet me.
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I love Newark, and just wish it were a gayer location. I don't want Newark to be degenerate, and filled with sado-masochism and "bisexual" swingers. No-thank-you-very-much!
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I imagine there are millions of gay men who have a predicament like mine: they love the city/town they live in, but are extremely distressed by the utter lack of sexual opportunities. I am, as I mentioned, 66 years old, but still sexual. I do not assert that I look younger than I am, but only that I have always been a little better-looking than other men my age. For gay men, however, getting laid in Newark is a major difficulty. It shouldn't be, but is.
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Surely there are a great many gay men in Newark, but not necessarily in the arts community, even if you might think that that would be an ideal place to look.
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I am in a place, or situation, that I was equally in, early in life, before I moved to Manhattan from the exurb Middletown Township, New Jersey, after high school. My father had a business I might have joined, then inherited, but I didn't want to be in Monmouth County, because I saw no possibility of sexual and emotional fulfilment there. So I moved to Manhattan when I was 20 years old — to the far West Side, so I could always SEE New Jersey if only I stepped out of my building. But part of me was sad that I had to give up on where I was born and raised in order to be actively homosexual.
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I was homosexually militant very early on. I moved to Manhattan in mid-1965. Within a fairly short time, I had joined the Mattachine Society, which I had heard about in a documentary on Channel 13, the PBS television station WNET. (Only many years later did I discover that WNET, tho publicized as a New York station, was actually a Newark station stolen by New Yorkers but still, to this day, assigned to Newark, NJ rather than NYC.)
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By August 1968 I was arrested by the NYPD for refusing to "break it up and move on" when talking to gay friends on Christopher Street, Greenwich Village. I was handcuffed, behind my back, and carted off to jail in a commandeered taxicab. I spent the nite in a little cell, to myself, being disturbed only by the heavy breathing/snoring of another man in a nearby cell. Weeks later, I went to court, challenged the interference by police in every citizen's right of peaceable assembly, and was acquitted on that ground by a New York City judge. I then reported that acquittal to Mattachine, which publicized it in its newsletter. Fortunately, we did not thereafter have to trust the police department to accept that court ruling, because Mayor Lindsay around that time ordered an end to harassment of homosexuals.
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So, did my personal act of civil disobedience accomplish one damn thing, or not? We may never know, given the action of Mayor Lindsay. Did HE know of my defiance? Maybe not. But then again, maybe he did, and knew that in view of the court's ruling, he had to act to keep his police force from being repeatedly rebuked, if only in fact, not in specific rhetoric, for harassing homosexuals. (The man was stunningly beautiful. I never saw him in person, but he was gorgeous on TV.)
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I'm proud of my defiance, and of the fact that the court's ruling in itself might have had some effect. I do not dare claim credit for a drastic change in NYPD policy.
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Gay NYC was, in those days, very sexual but not much concerned about legality. I suspect, tho I don't know how a researcher would go about quantifying this, that there was MUCH more sex among gay men in the 1960s and 70s than there is now. Between then and now, of course, gay men were attacked with the HIV-AIDS fraud, which told us endlessly that (gay) sex equaled death. So even if there were less sex now than then, the role of forbidden activity in raising defiance as against intimidation over sex = death is impossible to determine. Suffice it to say that gay men in New York City had a LOT of sex in the 1960s and '70s, and almost certainly far more than gay men of the 1980s and afterward have had. I feel sorry for the younger men who didn't have the enormous amounts of sex in multitudinous situations and locations that we did.
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Newark is a largely homo-desexualized place. But so is New York City, due to the malicious, and knowingly false assertion of governmental entities that homosexual sex kills. I suspect that young gay men in NYC have but a fraction the sex we had when I was their age. I am no longer on constant look-out for sex, so don't know if I could 'score' now in Newark; nor if no one scores now in Newark; nor if no one ever much scored in Newark, or always had to travel into Manhattan to get laid.
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I could never have bought a house in far-western Newark, where I now live, even tho I can get into Manhattan within a half hour by car or hour by bus and then train, when I was younger, even into my late 40s, for fear of giving up access to sexual possibilities. I moved to semi-suburban Newark when I was 55 years old, and could accept that I wasn't getting laid much even when living in Midtown Manhattan. I got older, and less driven sexually.
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Have I now consigned myself to sexlessness for the rest of my life, which could, given my family's longevity, mean another 25 years or so? Perhaps. Perhaps not. I'm not about to cruise Riverside Drive or the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Manhattan — which have, in any case, apparently ceased to be gay cruising areas, given the de(homo)sexualization of New York City. Have straight people become as fearfully controlled as gay men? Or do straight people think themselves immune to AIDS, so continue to be promiscuous? Gay men as well as straight should consider themselves immune from AIDS-as-STD, since AIDS has nothing to do with sex, but is wholly and solely a condition that each AIDS patient in the First World develops from his or her own extremely unwise choices as regards DRUGS, not sex. Unfortunately, most people are not geniuses (as, thankfully, I am; perhaps not a major genius, but certainly a genius by most definitions in regard to IQ tests). So they don't understand when scientific impossibilities are presented to them as realities.
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I have followed what came to be known as GRID (Gay Related Immune Deficiency) and then AIDS (Acquired Immuno-Deficiency Syndrome), since the first reports I heard in about 1980. Thus do I know that everything Government says about AIDS is false. Government says that AIDS manifested itself in the United States in 1981. I know it was 1980. Why does Government lie about even the most obvious statistical realities? Discover Magazine in January 1982 (page 12) said that what became known as AIDS started to appear a year and a half earlier — that is, mid-1980, not mid-1981. But Government keeps saying AIDS appeared in the United States in 1981. Why does Government lie about what you would think a trivial matter? Well, Government lies about EVERYTHING regarding AIDS. A full year's earlier head-start might have meant higher figures for the incidence of AIDS, so the Government suppressed the actual start date at the time, then was stuck with its lie, even when the statistical difference between mid-1980 and mid-1981 became insignificant. But I really don't know why Government would insist that AIDS started in 1981 even tho Discover Magazine said plainly in January 1982 that it started a year and a half earlier. What I do know with certainty, however, is that I have in my filing cabinet a little story at the bottom of page 12 of the January 1982 issue of Discover Magazine that says that what came to be known as "AIDS" started to appear a year and a half earlier, i.e., mid-1980.
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In 1985, the Federal Government of the United States declared that "HIV" was the cause of AIDS, and that a vaccination against HIV should be available within five years. Right. It is now 21 years after that vaccine should have been available, and there is still no vaccine against AIDS, nor even "HIV". I put HIV (which stands for "Human Immunodeficiency Virus") in quotes because it is a misnomer, in that it has nothing whatsoever to do with the development of immunodeficiency in human beings. The epidemiological patterns just aren't there. People who SHOULD have developed AIDS and died from it, such as the wives of hemophiliacs who are said to have died from AIDS, and the lovers (partners who had multititudinous sexual encounters) of men who died from AIDS, have in myriad cases never so much as gotten sick. It's all lies, all sham, all Governmental attempts to control disapproved sexual behavior.
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I won't go further into the argumentation as to why HIV could not possibly cause AIDS. If you are willing to know the truth, you can go to www.virusmyth.com on your own. My point here is that there has been, for a very long time, a coordinated effort by Government and media to suppress homosexual activity with the pretense that it is for gay men's "own good". The people who have always hated us, now want desperately to "save us from ourselves". SURE they do. They LOVE us. They don't hate us, and never have. If you believe that, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you. You'll make a FORTUNE!
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Perhaps you live in a place like Newark, which would be considered a big city and regional center, were it not close in to a major metropolis. Perhaps there is lots of homosexual sex in your own metropolis. Perhaps not. It may be that the liars about AIDS in the Federal Government have succeeded in terrorizing gay men all over the country out of full sexual intimacy, into the imitation intimacy of rubber between each other. But society has given us Internet porn! Isn't that great?! No, it's not great at all. It just makes living into tomorrow vaguely, dull-ly bearable.
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There is no substitute for real sex with a real man, for giving and getting full intimacy, and a full exchange of "bodily fluids".
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Are today's gay men less courageous than we were? Maybe.
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We had to fear police entrapment, arrest, humiliation in court. But Government realized at some point that that wasn't doing what Government wanted to do: suppress homosexual activity, caught or uncaught, completely.
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So Government invented an "invariably fatal STD", and loosed that imaginary disease upon society. They pretended that it could kill everyone who encountered it, but winkingly told straight people that they weren't about to catch it, because it was 'a gay thing'. Yes, of course it was. All STD's stay neatly compartmentalized for 30 YEARS. Of course they do ... not.
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It was like shooting ducks in a barrel. Gay men were already shot-thru with guilts. They would RUSH to believe that there was an STD that targeted only gay men! Naturally, the Government's liars knew that disinterested and honest people in the scientific community would say that there is no such thing as a gay STD that does not equally infect straight people. So Government invented a "global pandemic", centered on sub-Saharan Africa, where almost nobody could do studies to disprove its assertion.
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Centering AIDS on Africa achieved another wondrous in-terrorem effect, or so they hoped, terrifying straight black people into using condoms for every sexual encounter, thus to reduce the black population in the United States.
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Never mind that straight people never did buy into the AIDS terror, and never did adopt universal "safe(r) sex" practices. Heterosexuals were only a tangential target of the AIDS fraud. Tens of millions of cases of STD's each year show plainly that straight people accepted the notion that AIDS was a "gay plague", so they could continue to whore around without fear. All those tens — no: hundreds — of millions of cases of STD's among straight people in the past 30 years produced NO discernible AIDS population in the straight world, but we were all still to believe that AIDS does not discriminate, anyone can get AIDS from anyone, and that each time we have sex with anyone, we are, epidemiologically speaking, having sex with every single person each of them has ever had sex with, and all those other people's sex partners, and their partners, out and out and out in a huge interconnected mass of chains of contacts, involving thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, MILLIONS of other people. Curiously, however, only gay men were supposed to get AIDS from all those uncountable and undeterminable hundreds of thousands of sexually linked individuals.
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And so, for the past 30 years of our lives, gay men have had Government actively and effectively interfering with their sexual happiness. And they don't even know to be indignant, indeed violently FURIOUS about the conspiracy of lies that has actively oppressed them. The bulk of gay men have, astonishingly, chosen to believe that the people they know in their heart HATE them, really want to SAVE them — from themselves! Of COURSE they do. They LOVE us. They don't hate us. They want to SAVE us. They don't want to kill us!
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How did gay men persuade themselves that the antihomosexual bigots who have told us innumerable times that we deserve to die and are going to hell if we do not repent our "sins", desperately care about saving us from ourselves? How did we persuade ourselves that the people who hate us and call us horrible names really LOVE us? I don't understand how anyone could be so deluded.
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In any case, a number of issues arise from time to time that I would like to comment on, here. But I am very pressed for time, and it often seems that there is no point to trying to appeal to the rational mind of gay men, in that the irrational heart controls. I am, I repeat, 66 years old, and I have only so much energy and time to write for my various audiences and potential audiences. Should I try to change the minds of people who are so guilt-ridden that they will not listen? Or should I try to reach people who are not terrified out of the truth? You see my problem.
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I want to reach gay men who either already value themselves and love being homosexual, or who WANT to value themselves and love homosexuality. There is, alas, almost certainly nothing I or anyone else can say to talk people out of self-hatred. I have learned that in the course of my long life. Write them off, isolate yourself from negative people, and move on.

2010-12-28T18:24:00.007-05:00

Homosexuality as Brake on Overpopulation. Yesterday and today I had an exchange with a friend that arose from an article about Vice President Biden's saying aloud that gay marriage in the United States is pretty much inevitable. I told my friend:

Gay groups have been too quiet about homosexuality as a brake on overpopulation. Overpopulation, in turn, is the biggest social issue of all, in planetary terms, but NOBODY is talking about it. If the population of the Earth were reduced to 4B, nobody would be talking about "man-made global warming" either, because it would be plain that if there were that (relatively) few people, they could not be changing the climate.

He misinterpreted that and, in slitely insulting terms, responded:

wait, you're not suggesting that being gay is a means to control the population? you can't be that nuts. that would suggest that being gay is a choice and that would set us back as a whole....and climate change will happen with or without us.

I did NOT say that being gay is a choice, and don't know how he leapt to such a conclusion, but did not reply in insulting terms to him. Rather, I said:

People, esp. religious people, sometimes ask why Nature would produce homosexuality, if the object of every living creature is to reproduce. Plainly, however, with a social animal, such as the human species, reproduction is a collective thing, not individual. We're not cats, who mate and then separate, and the mommy cat raises the kittens on her own. In the human species, the nuclear family, extended family, clan, village, and tribe are all involved in securing the future of the species, by making sure that a large proportion of babies born, survive. That means that there must be defense from other animals and other tribes, and help in gathering food, providing warmth, and many other things that give human progeny a better chance to live a full lifetime and, in their turn, reproduce.
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The higher the ratio of nonreproducing members of the group there are, the more adults there are per child to take care of children, and to man the system of supports necessary to human life. Thus homosexuality is not just an actual brake on overpopulation, when society allows it to be expressed and to control behavior, but it can also be seen as an integral part of a natural order in which childless adults secure the future of the species -- like all those worker bees that cannot reproduce.
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There's no choice in gay men being gay or in worker bees being sterile. That's just the nature of the creature. But in both cases Nature works best when some members of a species do NOT reproduce. Whether that be seen as "God's plan" or just the way things work out doesn't matter. What matters is doing everything we can to rein in population, and changing laws not just to permit but also to encourage homosexuality and lesbianism, [which] would permit a great many more people to live a gay or lesbian life, without ever having their own biological children. A change in laws that grants gay or lesbian couples the right to adopt "unwanted" children would bring home the natural order: that childless people help take care of children.
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In speaking to religious people, we can say "Gay people are not acting 'against Nature' or 'against God's law' but fully in accord with God's plan." With nonreligious people, we can simply make the case that the world is hugely overpopulated and letting gay people be gay without interference, or even with encouragement, would contribute, in greater or lesser measure, to reducing the burden of overpopulation on natural systems.
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No one really knows how much homosexuality there would be if it were actually ENCOURAGED. Plainly there is, in all men, a built-in tolerance for other men's bodies in the tolerance one must have for one's own body. No one could regard himself as sexually desirable if he found himself disgusting. Part of the pleasure every man takes from masturbation is holding a, um, how shall we say?, a 'male organ' in his hand. If we were all built to be able to put our mouth on our 'organ of copulation', there would be at least as much oral sex upon men by men (the man himself) as masturbation. If homosexual activity were actually encouraged, we might find that homosexuals are not 2% (as our worst enemies suggest) or 10% (a figure commonly used by gay organizations), but 25%, 33%, or even higher of all men.

I suspect a lot of men raised to be straight would find a sexually and emotionally intimate relationship with another man far more comfortable, given that men understand men much more easily than they do women. Who knows how many heterosexual marriages end not because the man couldn't get along with a particular woman but because men as such are not suited to the modern conception of marriage as a relationship in which men are expected to spend all their time with not just women in general but also with one woman in particular, when much of the time they'd rather be with their male friends. Traditional marriage, even in the United States, DID minimize the amount of time a man spent with his wife, and men until very recently spent a large proportion of their time with other men, while women spent a large part of their time with other women, and the children. It may be that only the "togetherness" part of the modern, American version of heterosexual marriage produces so many divorces, and if men could spend most of their time with men, and their male children, they would be content to stay married because the annoying things about their wife wouldn't be constantly around them.
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As to how much homosexuality there would be if men were free of all coercion to be heterosexual, I'd sure like to find out.

2010-12-23T17:41:00.001-05:00

How Long Must We Wait for an End to DADT? Tho President Obama claimed yesterday to have repealed Bill Clinton's odious "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, that policy is in fact still in place today, and could be for many months, or even years. Had Obama just allowed the Federal court ruling that invalidated DADT as unconstitutional to take effect without challenge from the "Justice" Department, the policy would have ended months ago. Obama's law permits the Pentagon to delay, and delay, and delay as long as it damn well pleases, because our cowardly Congress, led by our super-cowardly President, didn't simply order an end to the policy NOW.
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The President is Commander-in-Chief. All he had to do is ask Congress to repeal the policy for HIS military, effective on the President's signing that legislation, and the policy would have ended yesterday. He didn't do that. Why not? Because he's a pussy, that's why, and totally unreliable. He has given the bigots and bullies an indefinite pass to continue their injustice to gay Americans until the Pentagon finally persuades the most recalcitrant misfits (and possibly closeted homos) that it really is happening: gay men and lesbians really are going to be permitted to serve openly in the U.S. military.
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There should actually, of course, be no lesbian soldiers, because there should be no female soldiers. The Communized, Radical Feminized U.S. military is causing HUGE problems in our attempts to win over the people of Afghanistan, a profoundly anti-Radical Feminist society. It is not an advance for humanity to turn women, who used to be proud to be the font of life and of maternal gentleness, into instead killers of men, women, and children. Legitimate feminism values womanly virtues and women's work. It does not demand that women's traditional roles and women's work be held in contempt, and that all women be compelled to give up their femininity and become pseudo-men, men-manqué.
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In any case, there was absolutely no need for the law to involve ANY delay whatsoever. The Pentagon has already taken several months to distribute and evaluate the answers to a questionnaire on the willingness of people in the present military force to accept openly gay or lesbian fellow soldiers. The results of the questionnaire disappointed those who hoped that present soldiers would adamantly reject repeal of DADT. But the Pentagon put itself into a trap of its own creation in distributing that questionnaire. Now it is bound to implement the change in policy not "with all deliberate speed" — the standard for racial desegregation given in the Supreme Court's decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, that enabled defiance of desegregation for DECADES — but "immediately".
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I don't know, from the media coverage I have seen, whether the law now in place authorizes the President to shut off Pentagon delay and order implementation at any time of his choosing (as Commander-in-Chief). Certainly there should have been an absolute upper limit, say, six months or less, to full implementation, and an absolute bar on prosecutions under the old policy effective yesterday. I would remind Mr. Obama, tho he should not have to be reminded of this, given the history of "with all deliberate speed" in the case of desegregation, that "Justice delayed is justice denied". I would also remind everyone so subservient to straight mandates as to be willing to wait further months or years for DADT to end, that accepting denial of one's own rights constitutes co-conspiring in the denial of human rights.
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Harry Truman would not have waited months or years after the passage of such a law before implementing it. Indeed, Truman would not have permitted Congress to pass a law with delays. Harry Truman ended racial segregation in the military with a few strokes of a pen.
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Barack Obama is no Harry Truman, and Truman wasn't even a great President.

2010-11-15T23:59:00.006-05:00

Fiting the Antigay Crazies Again. AOL hilited today a story about a Protestant minister of a large church near Atlanta who came out as gay to try to help fite gay suicide. Hundreds and hundreds of Bible-thumping loons attacked gay people in comments after that story, so I replied to a bunch of them. In case you'd like some ideas as to the kinds of argumentation you might use to answer other crazies, you might like to read thru my argumentation, below. It comprises 93 comments, and about 4,500 words.
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There is no God. Morality has nothing to do with sexual orientation, but with how you treat the people you are attracted to.
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So no one at all should be allowed to marry publicly, nor refer to a "wife" or "husband". No one believes you actually believe that.
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Tho there is no God, at least your conception of a loving God is Christian, unlike the JEWISH, Old Testament God of Wrath. What kind of monster would worship a monster God?
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Now, now. Washing people's feet to show humility isn't a foot fetish. Washing one's own feet is standard practice in Islam before entering a mosque, so there is an element of cleanliness before (nonexistent) God to Jesus's act. You are, however, quite right that most of the good stuff in the Bible's "rewrite" -- which OVERTHREW Judaism -- is in the New Testament.
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I have never heard Steve Jobs say he is gay. Nor, certainly, that he is God. What are you talking about?
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It's infuriating that the work we did over 40 years ago didn't change much of anything as regards shame and cowardice on the part of gay men. I'm the man who in 1970 offered the term "Gay Pride" as it is now used, and it was my hope that even where people couldn't have "Gay Power" (the original thought), they might at least have self-acceptance and pride. But kids are still too ashamed to come to terms with their reality or stand up for themselves. If they did stand up for themselves, some of these gay kids could beat the crap out of would-be bullies.
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There is no God, no Harry Potter, no Heaven, no Hell. Get your head out of delusion and deal with the real world. You might like it, if you could let go of your fears and hatreds.
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How many people have considered that homosexuality might be Nature's mechanism for fiting overpopulation, the one most basic cause to all of the world's worst problems?
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There is no God; and a gay man, far from being a sinner, is following Jesus's Golden Rule as closely as anyone can: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."
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If you are gay and open in Conyers, then you have a point. If you are NOT gay in Conyers, you don't know what you are talking about.
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Homosexuality is fully as normal as heterosexuality. There is no God. You cannot prove anythng you say in LOGIC, only superstition. And gay men don't want visuals of STRAIGHT sex. There's an expression in this country that you might have heard, but plainly don't believe in: "Mind your own business." There's another way you don't believe in: "Live and let live." You don't insult my sexuality, and I won't call you any of the unpleasant sexual names WE have for straight men. As for that "abomination" quote, it is from the OLD Testament -- Judaism. If you aren't a Jew, why would you heed it? The book from which that quote is taken also mandates ANIMAL SACRIFICE and Jewish dietary laws. If you don't perform animal sacrifice or obey Jewish dietary laws, you are a HYPOCRITE in citing to Leviticus.
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You know what is in Pastor Swilley's mind, do you? Do you own a crystal ball? Or did you ask your Magic 8-Ball? As regards teen suicide, there are MANY organizations devoted to suicide prevention, but GAY kids are not likely to call them and pour out their heart to presumed heterosexuals. And YES, Pastor Swilley's stance, along with those of other people who have only recently come out for getting gay kids past a temporary crisis, surely WILL save some kid's life. It will also open some people's closed little minds, when "one of us" turns out to be "one of THEM" too.
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More appalling, people pretend that the Jews' (Old Testament) God of Wrath IS the New Testament's God of Love. You CANNOT reconcile the Old and New Testaments; Christians should BURN the Old Testament, or regard it as literature, not God's word.
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In that there IS NO GOD, it is not necessary to prove that John whatever that is (it is not in standard Biblical citation form) or Leviticus or the Koran or anything else is not the word of a nonexistent critter. Prove that chupacabra sucks the blood of goats.
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I suppose you never heard of LAWS. The nonexistence of God does not mean the nonexistence of right and wrong. People establish morality by teachings and LAWS. And go ahead and take other people's property if you want. We will then take you and throw you into prison, flog you, or kill you -- by MAN'S laws.
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Gay men have children all the time, thru in vitro fertilization (witness Ricky Martin). The main biological function of homosexuality is to LIMIT population, something this planet desperately needs. All children conceived by gay men thru in vitro fertilization are WANTED, which, alas, is far more than can be said for children conceived as an accidental byproduct of heterosexual lust.
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Homosexuality is not a sin, but precisely follows Jesus' Golden Rule.
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Anyone who believes Revelation and selectively quotes from Leviticus (the overwhelming preponderance of which they violate every single day of their lives) is someone to be completely ignored by sensible people. If all you have to 'prove' the 'abomination' of homosexuality is a few lines from 2,000- or 3,000-year-old FICTION, you have no case whatsoever.
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God isn't. Not anything. Does not exist. Morality depends on humanity, not divinity.
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Believe your idiotic Bible if you wish, but don't force it on others. We reject your interpretation, and many of us completely reject the Bible, Torah, Koran, and every other work of poetry or fiction that pretends to speak for a nonexistent "God".
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You are mixing and matching things that have nothing to do with each other, such as killing and having sex. If you really cannot see the difference, you need professional help. No one says that "All truth is relative", only that many things are relative. No one, for instance, makes excuses for murder. And no one says "There is no personal responsibility for anything" -- except you, who are intent on creating straw men you can knock down. Nobody buys your line of "reasoning".
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There is no God, and if you have to heed fiction from more than 2,000 years ago to know how to behave in the world of today, you are irrational. So stop talking about a nonexistent God. You cannot prove the existence of any such critter, and sensible people know He is a figment of some control freaks' imagination to scare the stupid.
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A man who takes marriage vows voluntarily forswears other women. So adultery is a violation of a promise, and thus immoral for THAT, not for the sex. That is not at all comparable to homosexuality. You would forbid gay men to have sex with ANY other man, not just anyone he has not sworn faithfulness to. Nice try, but there is no God, Jesus was not God, just a generally very nice man who told us some good things like "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone" and "As you would have others do to you, so too do to them." Think about that last one, and you will understand that homosexuality PRECISELY follows that imperative.
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The only sin in mutally consensual sex is something like selfishness or sadism. When Jesus said "Do unto others...", he meant that as much sexually as any other way.
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So say you. What if I say the only right sexuality is between men? To me, I'm right and you're wrong.
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ddan, there is no God, no afterlife, no Last Judgment. The exact same thing happens to people at death as to cats, dogs, insects, or amebas. They just cease to live.
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Ken..., you are quite right that sin is a religious conception. Morality speaks of rights and wrongs, not sins. And morality is based on reason.
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Not everyone has the strength to stand against society and believe in the rightness of his desires. Not everyone has the good sense to say, "I'm a good person, and I wouldn't want this if it were immoral. But I DO want sex with men, so that cannot be wrong." I agree that gay men should NEVER drag women into their confusions. Elton John did it, when he was pretending to be that mythical creature, a "bisexual", and was terribly sorry afterward for having hurt his wife. If you don't want women, don't pretend to. Be a man -- with men -- and stand up for yourself, always.
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Sorry, cholly, but AIDS has nothing to do with sex, or it would be in every single nook and cranny of society. Actually, AIDS in the West is a DRUG INJURY, which is why it remains tightly confined, 30 years on, within minorities soaked in drugs. In Africa, it is a recasting of the same old things that have been killing poor people in that part of the world for thousands of years: www.virusmyth.com.
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But you think that gay men want to hear about YOUR sexual orientation, YOUR husband (or wife)? Until and unless you hide your sexual orientation and keep your sexual relationships a closely guarded secret, don't tell gay men that they cannot speak of their lives and loves as openly as you do.
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Heterosexuals have sex EVERYWHERE -- indoors, outdoors; in theaters, in parks; in men's rooms at concerts, in women's rooms at sporting events. Stop pretending that all those baby-mommas and baby-daddies producing children from loving, respectful, exclusive relationships in deep privacy.
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Before you preach at people, PROVE the existence of God. You can't do that, because in fact there IS NO GOD. And why the Bible? Which part, Jewish (Old Testament) or Christian? How about the Apocrypha? How about the dozens of Gospels that didn't make the final cut? How about the Koran, or Scientology's basic works? It's all nonsense written by control freaks.
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Jews should not be telling Christians how to live. And if you quote Leviticus, you are acting like a Jew, not a Christian. Do you also obey the Jewish dietary laws, advocate universal circumcision, and practice animal sacrifice, all of which are mandated by that Leviticus ONE of whose condemnations you love to cite? No? Then you are a hypocrite, and nobody pays attention to hypocrites.
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The basic difference [between Bible-thumpers and the people repudiating such crap], which makes ALL the difference in the world, is that we don't tell YOU how to live.
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I think the Ten Commandments -- which are JEWISH, not Christian -- are not and must not be in any courthouse in this country. But you are quite right that none of those Ten refers to homosexuality.
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The end times will be when the sun novas, and that is not expected for millions of years. There are no Saints, and, alas, the fine man Jesus died a very long time ago. Nobody comes back. Nobody. So do justice now, according to the Golden Rule. If you don't know what that is, look it up, and understand that it PRECISELY describes homosexuality.
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Judging: Matthew 7:1. Stone, John 8:9. Now kindly stop denying the authenticity of those Biblical imperatives.
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There is no God, and the Bible contradicts itself, starting in the first few pages: Adam and Eve are the only people on Earth, but their son Cain marries a woman from Nod!
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tgerardb, stop making up gay harassment of you poor, oppressed heterosexuals.
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There is no God, so your interpretation of what God says is of no importance. I also don't think Brits ("behaviour") should intrude into discussions of American issues. Mind your own business. NO one chooses to be gay just to tick people off. Stop making up nonsense. I skipped the middle of your longwinded but empty post. But your assertion early on that the Greeks were antihomosexual is WILDLY wrong.
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tgerardb, to the extent the Roman Empire fell at all (we speak a language filled with Latin words, our Capitol is plainly a Roman building, and the dominant religion of the West is Christianity, which was the state religion of the Roman Empire), it did so as did a whole bunch of other civilizations farther east, because of a chain reaction resulting from the irruption of violent nomads in East Central Asia who pushed outward and caused other 'barbarians' to run away from the rampaging savages, into the Roman Empire for safety. The Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_roman_empire does not contain the word "homosexuality", because it played NO role in the decline/transformation of the Roman Empire.
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You equate attack and defense. Bible-thumpers attack homosexuals; gay men merely fite back. Not the same.
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Kindly point out ONE THING JESUS SAID in condemnation of homosexuality. Don't quote "Saint Paul", who started life as Saul of Tarsus, who persecuted early Christians 'even unto death' until his guilt caused a religious conversion. Quote JESUS. You can't. Jesus is supposed to be Christ, so if CHRIST said nothing to condemn homosexuality, then one can indeed be both a Christian and a homosexual. I do not accept your right to read Jesus's mind, and speak for him on a topic he did not address, and put an antihomosexual animus in his mouth.
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forcollegenow, if you believe that Adam and Eve were the only people at the beginning of the world, then you OF NECESSITY believe that their children had sex with each other and/or their parents, so the entire human race is the product of INCEST. People who believe in the godliness of incest are in no position to condemn homosexuality.
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In order to understand righteousness as against sin, kindly examine, and think about, Jesus's admonition, "As you would have others do to you, so too do to them." That expressly and exactly APPROVES of homosexuality.
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If all pj512 has to justify his antihomosexual attitude is the pretense that his God disapproves, he has NOTHING. There IS NO GOD, but there are many conceptions of God that DO approve of homosexuality.
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The man was weak, "Superdad", and couldn't stand up to the bigots and bullies himself, but finally found his courage when he heard of other people committing suicide because of bullying. Yes, condemn his earlier cowardice, but praise his courage now. One must, however, wonder how many gay kids did commit suicide before he "came out" who might have held on past that awful crisis if he had been forthright, in his megachurch, long ago.
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So you wish his children dead, for never having been born, right? Very Christian. You are right that he should not have TRICKED some naive woman into marrying him, but the article says plainly, "He said his wife of 21 years, Debye, had known before they were married, but loved him anyway." We might agree that that was an odd and probably unwise choice, but it WAS her choice.
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Superdad, there are LOTS of heterosexual marriages of convenience. Some people just give up on finding love, but they commit to someone in the hope that they can have the benefits of marriage, and maybe they'll grow to love. If not, there's always the sex, or the money, or the job with the father-in-law. I trust you are fully as judgmental of those people.
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Ken... Perhaps Randy did choose to be straight, rejecting his actual, homosexual nature. A lot of the most adamant antigay militants are suppressed, self-hating homos.
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bowmakerkt, for a person whose empty-minded antihomosexualism derives from the Old Testament, it's a little odd for you to be talking about bacon. Let us review: there is no God, there is no Last Judgment, there is no Hell. Now, get a life, while you still can. And try to mind you own business. It will make your life easier, and that of everyone else near you.
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Kindly read the story before commenting. He told his kids before he made his announcement, and they backed his decision. So now it's OK to bully not just gays but also straights who have a gay relative?
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Anyone who believes in the silly fable of Adam and Eve -- which would mean that the human race arose from INCEST -- is too foolish to be reasoned with.
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I take it that "Your Highness" refers to drug use. Homosexuality is exactly as much an "affliction" as is heterosexuality. No, I take that back. Homosexuality is wonderful. We can have sex without worrying about knocking anybody up. Any children we have are conceived deliberately. We're not the ones destroying this planet.
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preciouslogic is precious short of logic. If God could just always have existed, then the Universe could just always have existed. Or are you saying that God created Himself? How would nothing create something? -- much less everything?
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bdvs143, you do not speak for God, nor for what any Biblical passage does and does not mean. You are not the Pope -- are you? Protestants tell us we should read the Bible, so they apparently believe that what the Bible says is what it means. But I guess you are the supreme authority on what the Bible means, because you assert with absolute certitude that you know what it means, while anyone who disagrees does not. It doesn't mater, however. You cannot quote any passage of the Bible as authority for anything, any more than anyone can quote a passage of any Harry Potter novel and use it as authority for something.
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How can someone like bdvs143 quote Christian scripture and say that God killed someone?
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Bible-thumpers like those who insist that homosexuality is a "sin" cannot find anything BUT quotations to "God" to justify their baseless assertions. Since there is no God, they have absolutely no basis for their assertions, so all sensible people IGNORE them.
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Jesus was over 30 years old and unmarried, in a society that required marriage. Think about it.
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There is no God, so stop quoting nonsense. You cannot produce a SINGLE logical reason for why homosexuality is "wrong", so just keep your superstitious nonsense to yourself.
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Asserting there IS a God does not make it true.
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Do NOT mistake Paul for Jesus. Paul was an antisexual lunatice who started life as a Jew and persecuted Christians 'even unto death'. Jesus was NOT antisexual, and also not antiHOMOsexual.
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Revelations is meaningless lunacy and has NOTHING to do with anything Jesus said. But everything Jesus said was just the word of an ordinary human being anyway.
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You cannot quote Jesus saying ANYthing about homosexuality -- not anti, no pro. But what Jesus said is just what one man said. You can agree or disagree without any penalty. He has been dead for almost 2,000 years.
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bowmakerkt has apparently never seen a tomcat grab another tom by the scruff of the neck and try to mate with him, nor male cats or dogs sleeping with each other, cleaning each other, etc. The anti-science crowd doesn't want these things studied, but some brave souls have studied homosexuality in the animal kingdom and found it very common.
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Robert, gay people do NOT "thrust their will and lifestyle" upon ANYONE, much less everybody else. You have it exactly backwards. You also do not know how many gay people there are. Nobody does, and as long as people are bullied into hiding their homosexuality, nobody will. The SAME rights are not "extra rights". In Sweden, being black is an "aberration"; in China, being blond is an "aberration". Why should we teach "everyone else's children" that being black or bond is natural? You wouldn't know the truth if it slapped you in the face.
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Kindly quote chapter and verse of where Jesus condemned homosexuality. You cannot DO that, because Jesus NEVER DID condemn homosexuality. Until you CAN quote Jesus against homosexuality, stop taking Jesus's name in vain.
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There is no God, and that "abomination" crap is from Leviticus, which prescribes animal sacrifice, circumcision, and Jewish dietary laws. So unless you adhere to EVERY SINGLE ONE of the over 600 prohibitions in Judaism, you should just shut up about the only one you pay any attention to.
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Adam and Eve supposedly were the only two people on Earth, but billions of people descended from them. How could that be unless their children had sex with each other? If incest is all right with you, what's your problem with homosexuality? And as for population, the world is being destroyed by OVERpopulation. Homosexuality is a natural brake on overpopulation. Embrace it as the blessing it could be, if legalized everywhere on this hugely overcrowded planet.
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wilhoover, Jesus was not antisexual. You have been sold a bill of goods by crazy people who hate the human body. Wake up, be yourself, enjoy the pleasures of the flesh in respectful, gentle, loving activities with men, and let the happiness that homosexual sex gives you fill your life and inspire you to generous activity for others.
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Everything Robert says is not only false, but the OPPOSITE of truth. The only way civilization has ever arisen is thru the actions of what would today be called "Liberals". The Conservatives always defended the institutions of the past, no matter how vicious or wrong they were, such as slavery, treating women and children as chattel property, and on and on. Jesus was a Liberal, who fought for the little guy.
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Who does? I'm homosexual, and I have NEVER called ANYBODY a "butt buddy". You are a clumsy propagandist, aren't you?
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Of course there are gay rabbis and imams. Islam was more tolerant of homosexuality during the West's Middle Ages than was Christendom, but Islam has been largely taken over by its most regressive preachers, as modern U.S. Christianity is under assault by its most regressive preachers. As Islam modernizes, it too will see more enlitened behavior. As for Judaism, there are gay synagogs or gay congregations that meet, with the approval of the predominantly straight congregation that rents them space.
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I'm glad jenjen shows her hatred of the Catholic Church, so we can all see what kind of 'mentality' we are dealing with here. Now she has got herself VERY seriously outnumbered, in taking on a BILLION Catholics, not just the gay population of the United States.
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Leviticus is JEWISH. Christians do not casually disregard the requirements of Judaism. They DEFY them. You then cite to Saul of Tarsus, a man who KILLED early Christians before a crisis of conscience made him convert, whereupon he changed his name to Paul. Find us, the religious and/or cultural critics of the United States ONE quote from JESUS that condemns homosexuality. You can't do it, because Jesus, who was supposed himself to BE God, did NOT, ever, condemn homosexuality.
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Oops. "Critics" should have read "Christians". My criticizing the stance of the Radical Right's misrepresentation of Christianity as Judaism got in the way of my intended statement.
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Homosexuality is barely ever mentioned in media; heterosexuality permeates everything in media. Something has made you hypersensitive. Hm. Hint: It's not outside yourself.
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Lonnie apparently thinks that the living world is divided in thirds, animals, plants, and people. No, human beings are part of the Animal Kingdom in science. But science doesn't mean anything to her. It's just the stuff that made it possible for her to post her silly remarks on the Internet. It has no real meaning.
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Adam and Eve's children had sex with each other, or there would be no human race -- if you believe the Adam and Eve fable. If you do NOT accept that Adam and Eve's children had sex with each other, then you accept that Adam and Eve were NOT the only people at the beginning of the world. Everything you say is subverted by your Adam-and-Eve crap.
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Ah, there it is: the compulsory anti-Obama remarks from the Radical Right. Absolutely NO topic is so far afield that some Radical Rightists cannot bring it around to Barack Obama.
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The only choice he made was to come out publicly.
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yonkaddi, there was a series of gay suicides within a few weeks, including one prompted by a grotesque incident involving a Rutgers University student, and the enormous attention that SERIES of prominent suicides pushed this guy's conscience. Better late than never.
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Yes, of course people choose their orientation, as they choose their race, their place of birth, and their family's socioeconomic status. That is a very Hindu way of thinking. But no, not everyone is bullied mercilessly, tho everyone may be teased from time to time. And not everybody's sex life is streamed on the Internet without permission, which so humiliated a closeted gay college student that he jumped off the George Washington Bridge.
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Kindly cite to ONE condemnaton of homosexuality issued by JESUS. Exact quote, and chapter and verse, please.
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There is no God, and you cannot find any legitimate ground in reality to condemn homosexuality. As for its being a psychological disorder, the American Psychiatric Association says it is NOT a disorder, but you of course know better than the APA.
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Ah, I see. Sex is worse than murder. Of couse it is.
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Those do NOT relate to anything JESUS said. You are quoting Saul of Tarsus ("St. Paul"), NOT Jesus. Stop LYING. Both of those books state very plainly that what follows are the words of PAUL, not Jesus. Paul never even MET Jesus. He never heard a word Jesus said. In fact, he persecuted Christians 'even unto death'. And THAT is your source, not Jesus.
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We are not talking of a choice of actions but of NATURE. He was born homosexual, just as he was born white. There is no issue of a person "choosing to be white". And people cannot choose to "act on being white".
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Actually, reproduction no longer requires sexual activity between the people whose genetic material forms a new life, and in fact we would all be better off if the ONLY children conceived required a carefully considered CHOICE by the parents. This planet is being destroyed by overpopulation, that is, by heterosexuality.
***
So you chose to be heterosexual, and could simply change that choice any time you wanted, right?
***
The nonreligious people here hate the immorality of intolerance, but do not hate the person -- unless they never give up on thumping their Bible instead of thinking, so continue to justify their intolerance.
***
Alas, it is not in the slitest true that the younger generation doesn't care about homosexuality. "That's so gay!" is just one example of the ongoing intolerance and stereotyping that younger people inflict on gay people they don't even realize are in their presence. Teenagers would not be killing themselves if their peers were tolerant. It would be nice if young people were openminded, and anyone could date anyone, of either gender, without being condemned, but we're NOT there yet.
***
I suppose you believe the science of the first century too.
***
The Bible is nonsense. You are entitled to believe nonsense if you wish, but not to condemn people who refuse that idiocy. Keep your religion to yourself. Gay people don't want to hear it.

Bizarrely, I was reproached by AOL Terms of Service for one thing I said:

Date: 2010-11-15 21:09:48.0

Nov 15, 2010 8:59 PM EST SN: mrgaypride Topic: Torn by Bullying Suicides, Mega-Church Pastor Says He\'s Gay Comment: Ken... Perhaps Randy did choose to be straight, rejecting his actual, homosexual nature. A lot of the most adamant antigay militants are suppressed, self-hating homos.

Our Terms of Service agreement, which was presented during the sign up process, allows AOL to be informative, entertaining and, above all, fun for all of our Members. Please be advised that further violations may result in closure of your AOL account(s).

I replied:

NOTHING I said violated any terms of service. I pointed out that self-hatred is a common part of the dynamic of antigay propaganda. If it is "homos" you object to, I as a gay man can use that term. It is a short form, not a pejorative as I use it. Seriously, you are complaining about that, when people are telling everyone that gay men are going to hell, and that's all right with you? Please.

2010-11-13T01:01:00.007-05:00

Comments about DADT. AOL hilited a news story today about the Supreme Court not interfering in the natural course of the Log Cabin Republicans' lawsuit against the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (DADT) law. Following the story were some 300 comments when I decided to read them and reply as seemed necessary or appropriate. Here, now, are my 82 substantive comments. I also made a number of comments such as "Stay on topic", because the Radical Right always tries to hijack comments areas and redirect them to attacks on Obama, and other irrelevancies. Be warned. The text below comprises over 3,500 words.

Unhappily, it is not true that you have to say something. Other people can report you, and then the military DOES ask, or decides from its own investigation that you are gay, then discharges you.
***
Bill Clinton was notorious for half-measures. He was a very bad President, who compromised principles endlessly.
***
Fine, then urge the President to withdraw the appeal. Posting comments here does nothing toward moving the President or DOJ to do that.
***
You're a bigot, pure and simple. But at least you are ALLOWED to be a bigot, openly.
***
I have no desire whatsoever to be thought straight. Would a straight person be alrite with being thought gay?
***
Stop the antihomosexual stereotyping. Gay men in the military are not effeminate, but all-men. And MOST gay men are all-male.
***
To answer num6fan's points, yes, if someone has a legally recognized relationship, they are entitled to the same benefits as anyone else. As to the part of the query, "Will heterosexuals be able to also have same sex dependants?", it doesn't seem to make much sense, but yes, a heterosexual soldier is entitled to claim his sons as dependents.
***
And if they had fought back and kicked the crap out of their attackers? That is the REAL fear: that gay men trained to defend the Nation will as well defend themselves.
***
Why don't you take that attitude toward comments areas? Keep your opinions to yourself. Would you like that to be the law?
***
Not all Republicans are antigay/antilesbian bigots. Dick Cheney's dauter is a lesbian, and he will not enlist in your crusade. The Log Cabin Republicans, whose lawsuit is at issue, are GAY REPUBLICANS. Did you notice the absence of antigay ballot measures this election? The Republicans know that antigay bigotry is no longer a winning issue for them.
***
Everyone's sexual orientation (not preference) is known or assumed. If heterosexuals were forbidden to talk about their girlfriends -- or prostitutes -- how many straight men would serve in the military?
***
Simpleminded bigots have always found ways to 'justify' their simpleminded bigotry. Women can't meet realistic standards, but they are accepted into the military, where they create HUGE problems of cohesion and make our task of winning over the people of conservative countries almost IMPOSSIBLE.
***
Straight soldiers BRAG about their sexual activities in the military, so your imperative "Just keep your mouth shut and do your job" and your assertion that "No one cares what you do in private" are both patently false. Heterosexual soldiers would be OFFENDED if they were told to keep their sexual orientation secret on pain of discharge.
***
Bin Laden is not a myth, just a corpse. He has almost surely "bin" dead for at least three years.
***
Yet we are all supposed to bow down to the military and pretend that they are "defending our freedoms".
***
Yes, [in appealing a ruling that struck down DADT] Obama is no JFK.
***
Why would men -- and women, who do NOT belong in the military -- leave the military in large numbers? Most of them are there because they can't find work in the real world, and want the benefits they will get after they leave the service.
***
But having WOMEN in the same proximity is not a problem? B.s. Women cause enormous problems in the military, and make it impossible for us to win over the people of Afghanistan and Iraq, because Afghan men AND WOMEN don't want women pointing guns at them. So they fite us because they refuse the Radical Feminism the U.S. military apparently wishes to impose upon them. The only good thing about DADT, if it is effective, is that only straight people, many of them macho, antigay losers who are good only as cannon fodder, get killed in the military.
***
Siding WITH a policy you disapprove, and actually APPEALING a decision that supposedly went your way was INSANE. The Obama Administration could simply have accepted the first court ruling, and NOT appealed, and the law would have been voided. It is thus not possible to believe that Obama is sincere in his pretense of wanting DADT to end. Compare racial segregation. Would Obama have appealed a court ruling that racial segregation in the military was unconstitutional?
***
num6fan, the military has SUBVERTED its mission by firing much-needed translators and bilingual intelligence officers because they are gay. So the deaths of U.S. soldiers -- straight soldiers -- that gay intelligence agents could have prevented are the doing of antigay bigots. They are getting their own people killed in order to discriminate against gays.
***
I'm sure you were equally comfortable with a racially segregated military, and would say then too, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it".
***
Had Obama simply accepted the first court ruling, he could have done that [acted like Harry Truman in ending segregation in the military]. But he appealed it! So now he can't ignore the law, because the appellate court found the law constitutional. Obama's behavior is incomprehensible unless he really is an antigay bigot himself.
***
There have been very distinguished military leaders who were homosexual, including Richard the Lionheart and Frederick the Great in relatively modern times, and Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great in the ancient world. How would their countries have fared if they had been thrown out of their militaries or royal families?
***
Straights like to pretend gay men are weak and homosexual sex is disgusting, and YET they are afraid of us -- or of their own desires.
***
There is no such thing as being "visually groped". You are turning non-touch into molestation, by magic. Stop the nonsense.
***
icefishin1 is just making things up. Identical rights are "special" rights. Gay boyfriends "out" their ex and that's the way "98%" of gay men in the military are booted. The other 2% -- don't you just love the specificity of these made-up "statistics"? -- "out" themselves to get out of the military that they joined as VOLUNTEERS.
***
It is impossible to understand Obama sometimes.
***
So bigotry is okay, but fiting bigotry is wrong. Now I see. Perhaps we don't need a military, since it's okay to let other people take our rights away.
***
cruisedoc, the only thing that keeps recruitment down is the endless war that the neocons want.
***
cruisedoc, apply your same standard to straight people in the military. NEVER mention anything that indicates your sexuality. Never brag about your heterosexual exploits, or mention your girlfriend. Keep it to yourself. I'm sure you'd be fine with that. Right.
***
Ignorant nonsense, weng. The toughest army of ancient Greece, that of Sparta, was very homosexual. The greatest generals of the ancient Western world were Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, who were both reported to have sex with men.
***
Phony issue. Nobody is talking about "open gay acts" any more than heterosexual orgies in the barracks. You have no legitimate argument, so create a straw man to knock down.
***
Unless cruisedoc lives in total isolation (as would be appropriate, given his hateful attitudes), he DOES know people who are gay. They just don't "flaunt" it.
***
Drivel, pure and simple nonsense. HIV does NOTHING, which is why the great preponderance of people diagnosed with it live years and years and years without getting AIDS -- which is a DRUG injury, which explains why it never enters the general population, after 30 years!
***
And if you feel uncomfortable showering with a black man, blacks should be banned from the military too, right? Yes, it's all about YOU.
***
tjburkee is just making things up. Homosexuals are NOT sick -- but we are tired of the crap that bigots keep pulling out of the clear blue sky. As for sharing a barracks, are you afraid of being raped by those nelly little faggots, you great big strong straight man? Or are you afraid that you would be tempted to have sex with men if there were no penalty for it?
***
You misinterpreted the article. The Supreme Court chose not to INTERVENE at this stage. They did NOT rule on the constitutionality of the law. Nor is any court authorized by the Constitution to void a law duly passed in accord with the provisions of the Constitution. If the Framers had intended the Supreme Court to have a role in legislation, they would have written an express provision to that effect -- AND provided an override procedure, as they did with the Presidential veto.
***
Another falsification of reality. No one is advocating that people have sex -- hetero- or homosexual -- in front of your children. Cut the crap.
***
So there is no freedom of speech in the Constitution? Perhaps you should READ the Constitution someday.
***
Tony is being completely dishonest. Straight people make a great show of their sexuality every day, in every conceivable place. People indignant about such showing off have invented the expression, "Get a room", for good reason.
***
bobvadc, does this sound familiar? "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech". It's in a little-known provision called the FIRST AMENDMENT OF THE BILL OF RIGHTS. Plainly "don't ask, don't TELL" is an explicit violation of the First Amendment.
***
And millions and millions of Americans think heterosexuality is disgusting. But you people don't keep it to yourself, do you, but talk about it all the time.
***
Tod's extreme sexual insecurities are showing.
***
Cut the crap. You know, we all know, that absent an indication of some sort to the contrary, every single person on Earth is PRESUMED heterosexual. The Courts and the Legislature should let the military operate outside the laws and Constitution? That is a statement fit for a Latin American dictatorship, not the United States.
***
And I'm very certain there has never been heterosexual sex in any military barracks, ship, or other facility. But how did all those pregnant military women get knocked up?
***
Other militaries can handle gay men in the same barracks with straight, but Americans are too stupid, sexually insecure, and brutal to behave in civilized fashion? You have a very low opinion of American military, I see.
***
Actually, the military has long been very different from society in many things, including earlier desegregation than much of society and the acceptance of Radical Feminism. Whether that is a social experiment, progress, regression, or whatever depends upon your point of view.
***
thermalsurface's stance is disgraceful interference with other people's lives. Of course he takes the dishonest stance that many straight bigots do, that they only want to 'save us from ourselves', not control our lives. If we asserted that we have the right to tell them how to live, they'd be perfectly content to accept our lecturing them too, right?
***
Being considered for Government employment on the basis of one's qualifications, not race, sex, orientation, or other irrelevancy IS a civil right. If gay people are not entitled to seek Government employment, we should just stop paying taxes. We don't need to pay taxes to hire everybody BUT us.
***
Equal rights to fite the Nation's enemies abroad is an "agenda", is it? Why is it OK for you to push YOUR, antihomosexual, agenda? but it's wrong for gay people to demand equality?
***
Bob pretends to know how many homosexuals there are, but he is just making things up. The Census doesn't ask about sexual orientation, so where does he get his information? Oh, I know, he just pulls it out of ... the clear blue sky. Gay men are plainly a lot more than 2% of the population, since every year on the same day, hundreds of thousands of gay men show up at Gay Pride events in several cities scattered across the Nation, but only a tiny proportion of ANY population is activist. 10% is a more likely figure. But people's rights do not depend on their statistical numbers, only on their personhood. As for what is good for the military, that is for the Government, of which all military are employees, to decide. We don't have rule by the military in this country -- yet.
***
I'm very tired of fascistic comments by the likes of "Mr. Wonderful", saying that the military is rightly independent of society and not subject to its laws. No, MW, the military does not rule; it TAKES orders from civilians, it does not issue orders to them.
***
So civil rights are properly the concern only of the minorities, right? Never mind that the majority had to pass laws to protect minorities. By your reasoning, that wasn't important enuf to the majority to legislate. No, justice is everybody's business.
***
As far as gay men are concerned, heterosexuality is sick and disgusting sexual behavior. Mind your own business and stay out of our lives. We don't tell you how to live, so don't presume to tell us how to live. "Live and let live" is the proper motto for a Nation that values personal freedom.
***
The Supreme Court did NOT decide the issue, so your meanspirited rejoicing is at best premature.
***
And of course we are supposed to believe everything you say, without proof of any kind, nor even a last name we could look for info about online. But you may have a point: let everyone killed in the military be straight. You're in favor of straight people being the only ones dying, right?
***
People do not willingly get themselves discharged with a homosexual record that can follow them throughout their life. And we know that you do NOT care about protecting homosexuals. Cut the crap.
***
Heterosexuals have made their sexual behavior the subject of EVERYTHING in society. It is all over TV, in films, and in public, and "reproductive rights" are HETERO, SEXUAL rights. If Government were to try to tell straight people that they have no right to talk about their sexual orientation or activities, would you be content with that? No, you would not. But YOU would make THAT a HUGE political issue.
***
You can't keep your opinions to yourself, but other people should keep their fundamental essence to themselves.
***
So if a white soldier doesn't want black soldiers around, that should control, right? I don't give a d...arn what individual soldiers want. They don't write the laws, and they don't give orders to society. Their job is to do their duty and obey the constitution. You don't like other soldiers? Tuf.
***
Yeah, only YOU have rights. You are an enemy of the world, and wholly un-American.
***
Clearly you do not understand how biology works. If six people do NOT reproduce but four people DO, and they have several children each, the population increases, not decreases. There are many biological traits that are passed along and pop up in every generation, whether they are further passed along or not by those individuals. Blond hair, for instance, is recessive, such that if both parents have that gene, one of four of their children, on average, will have blond hair. If only one parent has the gene, none of their children has blond hair. That does not make blondness nonhereditable. It just makes it a minority condition, like hereditary homosexuality.
***
The real problem is that a lot of straight men are afraid they will have sex with men unless they are held in check by laws or taboos. They're afraid not of gay men but of themselves.
***
What is at issue is NOT a private organization but the Government to which we all pay taxes and under which -- or over which -- we are all supposed to have equal rights. Pls do not falsify the issue.
***
"White people do not venture into black people's world. So why do black people want to venture into theirs? Why go where you are not wanted?" And as for "real men", gay men ARE real men. Indeed, they are MORE men than the fearful straight people posting to this area. Straight men are scared of gay men; gay men are not afraid of straight men. We even like some of them, but stick to our own men.
***
icefishin1, the military isn't a women's aerobics class. It is a Government JOB, even CAREER.
***
As the man who first put forward the term "Gay Pride" as it is now used, I can tell you that it was and remains a necessary antidote to the endless attempts of bigots to make gay people ashamed. No one should have been suspended for wearing "Straight Pride" teeshirts. Everyone is entitled to be proud of who and what they are at essence, tho some of their acts may warrant condemnation, such as attacking other people's rights. The idea that heterosexuals are the VICTIMS in this society is INSANE and/or just plain dishonest. Heterosexuals in the military aren't silenced about their sexual orientation. Heterosexuals aren't forbidden to marry, or have any of the rights, such as filing a joint tax return, of marriage. Cut the crap.
***
The problem with the super-rich is that "their" money is NOT "hard earned". And it's not money unless it has our name on it, "United States of America". The could never have achieved ANYTHING without the work that the poor and middle class did to create everything they benefit from. And many of those people who did the real work of society are gay or lesbian.
***
zamaster2 has this crazy bugaboo that gay men are all rapists, and cannot find anyone to have sex with of their own age. Actually, gay men find LOTS of sex with willing partners -- which makes a lot of straight men jealous. We don't have to wait for three (expensive) dates or spend money on a prostitute. We can hook up with a willing partner very, very easily. We don't need to attack the unwilling. And straight men are so weak that they couldn't dissuade someone from attacking them? You poor weak straight people. I feel so sorry for you, being raped by gay men every day.
***
Discriminatory provisions of agreements are void as a matter of law. An illegal agreement is NOT a contract. And we are not talking about private companies but GOVERNMENT EMPLOYMENT. You are twice wrong.
***
Soldiers are forbidden to obey ILLEGAL orders, and depriving people of their First Amendment rights is illegal.
***
STOP repeating posts. As to Kagan, she has NEVER publicly stated she is a lesbian, so how would you know her orientation? Do straight people have to recuse themselves from issues involving heterosexuality, such as abortion of children conceived thru heterosexual sex?
***
Sexual orientation is fundamental to a person's identity and humanity. Are you suggesting that soldiers must be monks or like Catholic priests, forbidden even to think about sex? That makes no sense.
***
If itchy is calling me a socialist, he doesn't know what he's talking about. I, like most Americans, understand that we have long had a MIXED economy, not "socialist", not laissez-faire capitalist. Liberals are the people who CREATED the United States and did everything that has made this a civilized society. The Confederacy was TREASON, and anyone proud of it is proud of treason. I call such a person a "traitor".
***
Kindly put replies to posts AT the relevant post, so we can see what your are supposedly addressing. You are falsifying the issue in DADT. It is not about gay men sexually harassing poor, helpless straight men. Your insistence that gay men "need help" is absurd and insulting. Your extreme stance that any "expression of sexual tendencies" creates a "hostile work environment" is entirely wrong in a couple of ways. First, it would tell straight men in the military that they cannot talk about their girlfriend or wife, much less their sexual conquests. Second, much of the military is not just a workplace but a LIVING ENVIRONMENT. Military people have rights, not all the rights of civilians -- for instance, they can't defy their boss -- but they do have fundamental human rights, such as freedom of speech.
***
itchy, do you REALLY think the smoke inside "your" bars STAYS inside your bars forever, and never gets out into the general atmosphere, in high concentrations nearby and somewhat more attenuated form as it spreads out? Air pollution of many types is worsened by smokers, who have NO right to pollute other people's air. But you don't grant other people any rights.
***
So you concede that straight men in the military DO talk about their sexuality, but now pretend to be indignant about it. No one believes that. Not even gay men mind straight men talking about their wife or girlfriend, as long as they keep it clean. But gay men are not allowed to talk about their boyfriend or civil-union partner. World of difference.
***
I do not waste time on worrying about a nonexistent God. I deal with realities.
***
Yes, gay people are at the root of all the problems of the world. Yeah, right.
***
[And finally, my adamant replies to the nonsense of the Radical Right brought forth the charge that I was "bullying" them! So these are the last comments I posted.]

How, pray, am I "bullying" anybody? I tell people to stay on-topic. That is supposed to be REQUIRED by AOL Anytime anyone dares to answer the Radical Rightists in comments areas, they are "bullying"?
***
It only seems to you that I'm bullying, because I am demolishing the nonsense of the Radical Right here. And I am very proud to be homosexual, but since I'm 65 years old, I don't do nearly as much "practicing" as I'd like. Besides, I don't need any practice. I know what I'm doing.

2010-10-20T13:53:00.002-04:00

Oprah, Gay Enemy. Oprah Winfrey hasn't a clue when it comes to gay issues. She recently implicitly praised a teenage boy who murdered a gay man he claimed was molesting him. In the very short time I watched before turning off in a rage, he admitted to having been approached on more than one occasion, but kept going back to be physically close to the man he claimed was molesting him — and then he murdered him, with, tellingly, a phallic symbol, a knife. People who genuinely feel molested, violated, do not go back for more. The kid had a very serious problem with his own homosexual feelings, and deliberately put himself into compromising situations, then fake-indignantly murdered the man who (correctly) took the kid's returning to physical nearness as a sign he wanted physical intimacy. That evil teenager should be killed, not praised.
+
But Oprah Winfrey is a stupid woman who understands nothing about homosexuality. She has actively encouraged people who have gender-identity issues to have themselves surgically mutilated and parade their new, hideously fake bodies to the world as that of the opposite sex. Oprah Winfrey is an active conniver in the Castration Conspiracy that destroys fragile young men. Somebody prominent has got to call her on it and make her not just stop, but apologize, admit she was 100% wrong, and urge boys with gender-identity problems derived from their attraction to other boys to seek psychological, not medical help, to help them adjust happily to their true nature, homosexual, rather than indulge their antihomosexual delusions in irreversible, monstrous, Frankensteinian surgery — which should be illegal under pain of death. Any surgeon who castrates a gender-confused young man should have both his hands chopped off, so he bleeds to death into containers from which the blood could be transferred to a blood bank for transfusion into decent people. His (or her) body should then immediately be chopped up for parts for decent people, and the rest burned and the ashes dumped anonymously into a national forest where it will do some good in the world, and no one will know to find them.
+
There is no such thing as "sex-change" surgery, just inhuman mutilation by quacks who need to die for crimes against humanity. People like Oprah Winfrey, who encourage gender confusion and castration, should be forced to watch the execution of such quacks, and warned that if they do not stop their co-conspiracy in such crimes, they will be next.

2010-10-19T15:50:00.013-04:00

Anyone and Everyone. I chanced, in the middle of last nite, to see on one of my local PBS stations, NJN-2, a terrific documentary called Anyone and Everyone, about young gay men, and one lesbian, "coming out" to their parents. Several of these young people were lucky enuf to have loving and supporting parents, but I was stunned by how hard some parents took the news.
+
When I told my parents (after I had established myself in my own apartment in NYC, 40 or so miles from home), they did not give me much grief over it, but the same pattern as I saw in the documentary held for me: my father was better about it than my mother. She did eventually come around, even to the point of giving me, one Christmas, a book about famous gay people in history.
+
Why wouldn't fathers take homosexuality in their son better than the mothers? In wanting men, the son is not rejecting his father; tho the mother may feel he is rejecting her in rejecting women generally.
+
One of my brothers had said he thinks I should not use my real last name in my gay-activist work. I thought that was not for him to say, so I asked my father, from whom I got my last name. He laffed. Laffed at the idea that I shouldn't use my last name — his last name. It was one of the best moments between us in all of life. So I am, here in this blog, on the MrGayPride.com website, and everywhere, L. Craig Schoonmaker, not some pseudonymous phony. (I don't know what I'd have done if my father had also said he'd rather I didn't use the family name. Fortunately, I didn't have to make that decision.)
+
The documentary was very well done, and quite moving in places, esp. where the sons got choked up about how well their fathers rallied to them. One father, a Mormon whose family is highly placed in the church by ancestry and church activity, was told by the mother (whom the son had told earlier), while the parents were driving somewhere. He pulled off the road into a strip mall to find a fone (pre-cellfone era) so he could call his son and say "Everything's going to be alrite." As you might expect, the son was very relieved, and moved, to hear that.
+
In another case, a Catholic teen was also reassured by his father on first hearing, and needed a hug, so asked his father if he could just hold him for a moment. He did.
+
Not every case examined went so well, and some of the mothers were extraordinarily, and in my view absurdly, upset. It took them weeks or even months to come to terms with their child's coming out. But the bulk of the parents rallied around their kid, even to the point of standing up against their church and other family members who weren't so accepting. The Mormon mother even told her own mother not to attend her dauter's wedding if she couldn't accept her son's homosexuality, because he would be there. The dauter had already told an unaccepting aunt, the mother's sister, that she wasn't welcome at her wedding.
+
The 1975 song "Stand By Me" comes to mind:

When the night has come
And the land is dark
And the moon is the only light we'll see
No I won't be afraid, no I won't be afraid
Just as long as you stand, stand by me

If the sky that we look upon
Should tumble and fall
And the mountains should crumble to the sea
I won't cry, I won't cry, no I won't shed a tear
Just as long as you stand, stand by me.

Not everyone has been so lucky as most of those in this splendid film. A Puerto Rican guy says he hasn't spoken to his mother in several weeks, because she threw him out and didn't want to see him. And in that small group of interviewees, TWO suicides by gay men of their acquaintance were mentioned. The film's website speaks to homelessness and suicide among gay kids, all of which statistics are speculative, since nobody in Government really knows who is gay and who not, in that the Census doesn't ask and a lot of people would lie anyway; and we don't really have statistics even on homelessness (in part because there are different definitions of "homelessness"). I think the Jewish kid in the film found "disgusting" the fact that someone he met shot himself dead because people couldn't deal with his being gay — or is it that he himself couldn't deal with being gay? In any case, it is disgusting.
+
I visited a friend from high school in her first year at Swarthmore College, an elite institution near Philly. In a group conversation, a guy said that some kid had committed suicide by walking on train tracks near the school, and some of the fellow students condemned that as "stupid" — which made quite an impression on him, because kids in elite colleges don't ever want to be thought stupid. Perhaps if people contemplating suicide thought that they would gain not sympathy but contempt for doing that, it would help them hold the line against a momentary crisis, to push beyond into the better times ahead.
+
Suicide has been described famously as "a permanent solution to a temporary problem". In regard to gay suicides, documentaries such as Anyone and Everyone, and videos like the recent anti-bullying statement by a gay Fort Worth councilman have to help. Appallingly, 41 years after Stonewall, much more still needs to be done.
+
I trust that the kids shown in this 2007 film have passed along to other gay men the emotional support they got at a key time in their lives. The last couplet in Ben E. King's song speaks to giving as well as receiving support:

Whenever you're in trouble won't you stand by me, oh now stand by me
Oh stand by me, stand by me, stand by me.

P.S., November 7, 2010: Perhaps someday I will be able to read this post and follow its links without crying tears of joy and liberation. That day has not yet arrived. And, you know what? I am proud to be pushed to tears by the two extraordinary renditions of the wonderful song "Stand by Me" that I link to above, links that I hope you have followed and listened to. I have been alone much of my life, and if I can help someone get past a terrible time, I will do so without hesitation or apology. I personally have never, alas, actually needed anyone — my personal tragedy — because I am unusually self-sufficient (not wholly by choice). Even I, however, would have been happier to have someone to "stand by me".

2010-10-13T03:44:00.001-04:00

Antigay Dr. Socarides and His Gay Son. I have seen a Richard Socarides on MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann speaking to gay issues. I found that interesting in that there was a viciously antihomosexual psychiatrist named Charles Socarides who, in the 1970s, fought against gay rights. So I looked up these two people with the same unusual name, and it turns out that Richard is not just pro-gay but openly gay, and is indeed the son of the antigay bigot. How very funny. It's not enuf to make me think there is a God with a cutting sense of humor, but it is very funny. (By the way, my "gaydar" must be failing, because I didn't see Richard S. as gay.)

2010-10-12T04:45:00.002-04:00

Jews Against Gays — Who Wins? Who Loses? MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann last nite showed extended video clips, first of New York Tea Party-Republican Candidate for Governor Carl Paladino (an adulterer) blasting homosexuals in the presence of monstrously hideous, inbred (who else would have them?), Hassidic Jews, with silly hats on their heads, ringlets down around their faces, long beards, and long black coats; and then (a clip) of one such Hassid, Rabbi Yehuda Levin, praising Paladino for fomenting hatred. Hitler would be proud. They have learned their lesson well: teach hatred. Hm. What ever happened to Hitler? Ah, yes. He was forced to commit suicide as the forces of a huge international alliance bore down on his bunker.
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Hassids seem to think they are so well loved that they can attack other people and not suffer any adverse consequences. Think again.
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In the United States, not even Orthodox Jews care for extreme-Orthodox Hassids, and the bulk of American Jews, who are not even Orthodox, much less ultra-Orthodox, but Conservative and Reform or, frankly, secular (Jewish in name and culture only) are embarrassed by them. The idea that Hassids are still preaching the vile garbage of Leviticus's condemnation of homosexuality is a profound embarrassment to most American Jews. If gay men, lesbians, and their families and friends decide to condemn Hassidism and promote hatred of everyone who teaches hatred of homosexuals, who will win?
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Hideous, Hassidic extremists cleave to antiquated, idiotic teachings from Leviticus such as that God forbids people from eating pork (including exquisite bacon) and shellfish in all forms, and especially severely condemns eating a bacon cheeseburger with a glass of milk — as a deep and unforgivable offense to God! By far most Jews in the United States today understand that the dietary laws of the ancient world had nothing to do with godliness but only with sanitation — that they were essentially health regulations in a time when pigs carried things like trichinosis and parasites from a diet heavy in things that people regarded as unhealthy, and that there was no refrigeration for shellfish, in a hot area of the world. They also may realize that the prohibition on homosexuality was an attempt to boost the numbers of Hebrews in their endless conflicts with other tribal peoples around them, by forcibly channeling all sexual energy into procreation rather than recreation, or loving intimacy that did not produce children for the armies of Israel or Judah.
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It's time for the modern world to destroy all the idiocy of the ancient Jewish scriptures, from the nonsense about Adam and Eve being the only people on Earth at the beginning of the world, but their children not having sex with each other (as would mean that all of humanity is the product of repeated and endemic incest!); to the odious notion that they should praise a God that drowned the world, including kittens and puppies, for the sins of one species; to the ridiculous idea that a great being concerned with ethicality would care if a person wore a hat or ate a clam or oyster.
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The violence-and-madness filled Old Testament should be torn out of all Christian Bibles, and burned in every copy, that paper biomass used to generate electricity to produce lite rather than darkness.
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Christian Americans should accept the obvious, that the Jewish God of Wrath is NOT the Christian God of Love. That the God of the Christians would NEVER have drowned the world (including puppies and kittens) to punish misbehaving people, and doesn't care if a person wants to drink milk with a serving of meat. Christians need to realize that a very large portion of the Jewish Book of Leviticus that is dredged up to condemn homosexuality, concerns ANIMAL SACRIFICE — which not even Jews still practice — and dietary laws, not just homosexuality in particular or sexual morality more generally. Christians also need to know that Looniticus mandates death to children who disrespect their parents. Why don't we hear politicians demanding the death penalty for kids who tell their parents to go f*k themselves, using Leviticus 20:9 as moral authority?: "For every one that curseth his father or his mother shall be surely put to death: he hath cursed his father or his mother; his blood shall be upon him." That language is absolutely parallel to the antihomosexual provision that Hassids and narrowminded heterosexual "Christians" keep using to condemn homosexuality, a mere four verses later: "If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them."
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Why do "Christians" pick and choose which parts of Leviticus they will heed, and which ignore, or even ridicule? Why don't they obey Leviticus 12:3, and circumcise baby boys as a religious obligation? How can they eat pork or shrimp, or drink a milkshake with a hamburger? Why are ALL the requirements of Leviticus EXCEPT the prohibition on homosexuality IGNORED by so-called "Christians"?
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And what about adultery and Leviticus, Mr. Carl Adulterer Paladino?: "And the man that committeth adultery with another man's wife, even he that committeth adultery with his neighbor's wife, the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death." (Lev. 20:10) How DARE Carl Paladino, who has admitted to committing adultery, go to a Hassidic Jewish group and pose as a great defender of the values of Leviticus? The word "chutzpah" was invented for this kind of thing, and goes back thru Yiddish to Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke.
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Chris Rovzar of New York Magazine was quick to pick up on Paladino's gall, under the heading, "Wouldn’t Carl Paladino’s Remarks Yesterday Have Made More Sense If Someone Had Said It This Way?":

"I just think my children and your children would be much better off and much more successful getting married and raising one family, and I don’t want them brainwashed into thinking that committing adultery and raising two separate secret families is an equally valid and successful option — it isn’t … That’s not the example we should be showing our children".

It's time for Christians to repudiate Leviticus in its entirety, and warn people, be they Hassids or any other retrogressive and intolerant group trying to foist ancient stupidity and violent moralism — not morality, since people who practiced animal sacrifice are in no position to talk about morality — that if they try to push that crap onto the civilized people of the United States, they will face retribution. Hassidic Judaism could be declared a cult, put outside the protections of the First Amendment, prosecuted for promoting hate crimes, and eradicated from this country.
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Apparently Hassids never heard, or don't believe, the expression "People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones." Especially should not people who didn't like it when Germany broke Jewish glass in Kristallnacht, not so long ago in historical terms, think they can now throw stones at homosexuals. How many Christian Americans have Jewish relatives? How many have gay or lesbian relatives? Do the math, and shut the f*k up. Keep your hateful bullsh*t to yourselves.
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You want to believe in the vile and violent crap of Leviticus? Go right ahead. But when you intrude that crap into public policy debates, you are asking for more trouble than you can handle. And don't expect other Jews to defend you. They know better than to take Leviticus seriously when it says stupid, indeed insane, things about putting people to death for swearing at their parents, or a man's having sex with another man, or anyone's having sex outside marriage. Tiny minorities that exist only at the sufferance of society — which can be rescinded — really should not promote hatred of minorities.

2010-10-04T20:34:00.002-04:00

Still Gay Suicides — Disgusting and Infuriating, More Than Just Sad. NBC Nitely News has reported on FOUR — count 'em, 4! — suicides of gay boys or young men across the country in "the last few weeks". The most notorious and shocking was here in New Jersey, when heterosexual monsters spied on a gay college student while he was having sex with another guy and streamed the action, without permission of course, on the Internet! The guy was so humiliated that he jumped off the George Washington Bridge (between North Jersey and NYC), a very high roadway, into the Hudson River. I'm saddened that he wasn't brought to his senses by the fresh air and gorgeous views from that walkway, on my favorite bridge in the world. I have been happy to stroll that walkway, but now it will hold sadness for me.
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Why is suicide of taunted gay men and boys still happening, 41 years after Stonewall? What the hell is The Movement doing that it has not focused on preventing suicide? "Where there is life, there is hope." Conversely, alas, where there is no hope, there is, all too often, no life. What good is anything else The Movement does if the people it is supposed to help kill themselves?
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Would a heterosexual student shown, without permission, having heterosexual sex on the Internet be so humiliated that he would commit suicide? Possibly, but not likely. SO likely was it that a very young gay man shown having sex with another man WOULD commit suicide, that the acts of those two despicable students must be treated as premeditated murder, and a hate crime.
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I don't actually approve of hate crimes in general, since on their face they deny "equal treatment under law" to people not covered by the statute. But this is slitely different, because the identical crime of monstrous invasion of privacy committed against a straight man and a gay man would almost certainly have different outcomes because of societal bias. Thus the crimes are actually different, and the predictable, far worse outcome of the same attack on the privacy of a gay man warrants a prosecution and punishment for a far more serious crime than mere invasion of privacy, or harassment, or any other trivial charge initially considered by the Middlesex County prosecutor's office.
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Some heterosexual male college students would actually LIKE knowing that they were shown having sex with a woman on the Internet. They would brag about it, and want to have a copy of the tape to show others. I am reminded of a story about President Sukarno of Indonesia. Political opponents tricked him into a "compromising position" with two (female) prostitutes and filmed the encounter. They then threatened to release the film to media (there was no Internet in those days). He was then a fairly old man, so he laffed and said, 'Go right ahead! It will boost my image — TWO women! In fact, I want a copy myself.' Will very young gay men and boys ever reach that condition of pride and self-assurance?
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I have had email exchanges in the past with longtime gay activists who have been hugely self-satisfied with how much progress we have supposedly made. Then four gay boys and men commit suicide within one month because of oppressive antigay harassment and humiliation, which puts the lie to how far we've come. What we have done is not enuf, and not the right things. People win respect; they can't demand it. And the first step in gaining respect is to respect yourself.
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The very largest part of the efforts of any gay organization must be to help gay boys and men become comfortable with homosexual SEX, the thing that sets them apart from straight people of both genders and from lesbians. Organizations that don't let gay kids feel comfortable about talking about SEX, with other gay male kids and young men but WITHOUT any woman around, are OPPRESSIVE, and completely fail the people they pretend to want to help.
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Homosexual sex is WONDERFUL — if you do it right; but a lot of young guys don't really know how to do it right, and have no one to ask. There are actually ostensible "gay" organizations that have WOMEN as the only people gay boys can ask about gay sex — which they won't do. And those women cannot possibly know what they're talking about if they dare to try to intrude into sex between males. Gay boys need to talk about gay sex with other gay boys and men. That should be obvious, but nothing is obvious to the lunatic morons who run all organizations nowadays.
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Sane people have been driven out of gay organizations by the endless stream of new, confused, self-despising losers who join the organizations and impose unliberated stances upon everyone. So the well-adjusted leave, the lunatics take over the asylum, and the organizations become toxic manufacturers of misinformation and misery that cannot possibly help anyone find happiness, because the people who staff them are miserably unhappy, maladjusted losers themselves.
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The very first responsibility of any gay organization is to make young gay boys and men happy in themselves and in their sexual interactions with other gay guys. They must work on helping gay people realize that being gay is the most wonderful thing in the world: you get to BE a man and HAVE a man. What could be better?
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But the typical "gay", or, more commonly, "lesbigay" organization is dominated by people who are completely confused about everything, including things you'd think nobody COULD be confused about, like gender. There are actually idiot losers telling the young people who contact lesbigay organizations that gender is a choice, a mental attitude, not a hard-and-fast biological condition that derives from DNA, not daydreaming. All organizations that deal with young gay males should be PURGED of the loons, to teach people to accept the FACT of biological gender and come to peace with reality, not play stupid games that produce, in extreme cases, surgical and chemical mutilation, to castrate men, slash a slit in their crotch, and tell the world that they are women (because, of course, all a woman is, is a slit in the crotch!) — all because society can't accept that myriad real men really want real men, and that is their actual NATURE, not a delusion. To the appalling contrary, many lesbigay organizations actually promote gender confusion as tho it were a good thing, and tell confused young men that they can escape societal disapproval by mutilating themselves and pretending to be a woman, tricking heterosexual men into homosexual relationships they would be horrified to discover they'd been having.
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In short, far from being the gay male's best friend, the lesbigay movement is his worst enemy.
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There are some things young males can read that can help them come to terms with homosexual reality, and take pride in their actual nature, but they are rare and hard for most people to find. The best source I know is the publications of the organization I founded at City College/CUNY in April 1969, Homosexuals Intransigent!. "Intransigent" with an exclamation point: uncompromising! No indulgence of gender confusion. No organizing heterosexually, men-and-women-together-now! No pretense that somehow gay men and lesbian women are the same, or have some special relationship in the nature of things. No toleration of "bisexual" confusion and cowardice.
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The bulk of the publications of Homosexuals Intransigent! are now available online at http://www.mrgaypride.org and/or http://mrgaypride.tripod.com. If every young gay male who doubts his masculinity or decency; if every young gay male who is confused about gender and the difference between sexual liberation and sexual perversion (sado-masochism most dangerously); if every young gay male who wants to be homosexual but fears that to be so would condemn him to perpetual unhappiness, from this day forth to the end of his life, would read EVERY WORD on the MrGayPride website, they would all gain immeasurably in self-acceptance and pride, and march into the future with confidence that homosexuality offers them not just sexual excitement and fulfillment — tho it assuredly does — but also a life of dignity, with a chance at a permanent love relationship with a wonderful man.
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They would learn that what matters most is personal happiness as a homosexual, thru self-acceptance and self-pride; and once they have that, they can approach all the world as equals, extending respect and getting respect in return. Once they themselves have benefited from those writings, maybe they can share the insights they gave rise to, with other gay men, especially confused young men, so we can end suicide as an all-too-common end of gay male lives.
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I urge gay men who have found that self-acceptance has to date eluded them, to read everything in the Mr. Gay Pride website: http://www.mrgaypride.org and/or http://mrgaypride.tripod.com. If, after reading everything, you have questions you did not see addressed, feel free to write to me at MrGayPride#aol.com (where the # stands in for the @ sign).

2010-07-30T06:13:00.003-04:00

A local website in a near-in suburb of my city, Newark, NJ, instituted a column by a Jewish lesbian that irritated me, so I left the following comment.

Lesbians are not "gay". They are not men, supposedly are not attracted to men, and do not speak for gay men. The idea that gay men and lesbians "belong together" is as sensible as that Japanese and Congolese "belong together" because they're both "nonwhite". The people of Tokyo and Kinshasa do not see themselves as "nonwhite", and would be puzzled as to why anyone would think that "nonwhite" means something.
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What matters is what one IS, not what one is NOT.
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How dare Ms. Goldstein write "So, is the non-issue of family makeup good enough to keep the gays skipping to town" and "What you are NOT going to find are rainbow stickers ... welcoming the Dorothy Dollar." Such antihomosexual crap reveals her contempt for the manhood of gay men. Everyone has got to stop trying to impose effeminacy upon gay men, some of whom are hypermasculine.
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"Lesbians" have their own word. They should leave ours, "gay", alone. As for two lesbians making money off gay men to provide a place where men will be surrounded by women, the men who attend a lesbian-dominated get-together should arrange with each other, while there ONCE, to meet at some congenial straight place, where any women present will, like them, be attracted to men.
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The recent police murder of a gay man in Branch Brook Park demonstrates that Greater Newark needs safe gay places - not "lesbian", not mixed, not pseudo-heterosexual. What Greater Newark does not need is more places where men and women are pushed at each other.

My original comment was longer, but that site permits only 1,500 characters per comment, so I cut it back.

2010-07-29T23:59:00.000-04:00

I left the following comment today at a story on AOL about a Brazilian cross-dressing model who is preparing to have himself castrated:

There is a CASTRATION CONSPIRACY loose in the world that works to confuse gay men about their gender and then hideously mutilate them, with "sex-change surgery" that Josef Mengele would be proud to perform. Everyone who argues that "gender and sex" are different things is INSANE. They should be institutionalized in a mental institution, and subjected to electroshock therapy or anything else that might zap them out of madness. Anyone who participates in the CASTRATION CONSPIRACY is guilty of a crime against humanity, for which they should be severely punished, up to and including DEATH. It is not sympathetic but monstrously criminal to pretend that we can change gender at will -- I suppose we can also change species at will -- just by slashing off genitals and pumping someone full of hormones that might induce CANCER. I am endlessly appalled at the STUPIDITY of so much of the human race. That people who are conspiring to make a man hate himself and have himself unalterably and appallingly mutilated actually think they are being humane is a testament to the abysmal stupidity of the human race. The Castration Conspirators should be subjected to exactly what they advocate: grotesque, irreversible surgical and chemical mutilation -- except that they should be marked with a tattoo in the middle of the forehead showing what gender they actually are, with, for instance, the arrow of the male symbol severed and the arrowhead fallen. Legislators and judges who co-conspire in this massive crime against humanity should be EXECUTED, after a new Nuremberg trial for sexual crimes against humanity. And good riddance to bad rubbish.

It was maddening to read thru the various comments by loons who actually think it is kind to castrate confused young men. Some of the commenters insisted on speaking to extraneous side issues, such as people who are born with ambiguous genitalia, which did not in any way apply to that confused young man, who was, genitally, a perfectly normal man. They also willfully gave the impression that we leave people with ambiguous genitalia in that odious condition, whereas best medical practices invariably alter ambiguous genitalia to look normal. The pretense was also asserted that intersexes are commonplace — they are not, but rare — and in every other way normal, whereas many are RETARDED (much like the 'people' — i.e., subhuman, antihuman scum — who advocate castration on demand).
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This country has made tolerance, ordinarily a virtue, into a vice, by tolerating the intolerable. It really is not that difficult to tell the difference between sense and nonsense, or sanity and insanity. Most of the world recognizes the same things to be insane, and always has. The idea that a man can become a woman just by a few slashes of a scalpel is one of the most insane notions that has ever been given more than three seconds' consideration. All "doctors" and "nurses" who participate in "sex-change" operations should be executed by amputation of both hands and being made to bleed to death. Hoist them by their ankles to drain, then cut them up for parts for decent, sane people. We desperately need transplantable organs. Harvest such organs from our own, latter-day Josef Mengeles.

2010-07-05T15:09:00.002-04:00

Gay Email Circle. Billy Glover is an elderly gay man (75?) from Louisiana (LA) who moved to Los Angeles (L.A.) in the days when the first modern gay-rights groups were forming, breaking up, and breaking up again. Mattachine, founded in 1950 in L.A., broke up into Mattachine (which relocated to San Francisco) and One, Inc., and then One broke up into One and the Homosexual Information Center — if I have the sequence right. After decades in L.A., Billy moved back to LA, and moderates a gay email discussion group in which I have at least sometimes been included.
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I, however, am far more militant than the bulk of the other participants in that group, some of whom do insane things like call themselves "princess", and insist on seeing gay men as effectively male lesbians. So I have ticked off some of those loons with my insistence that gay men are not straight, not lesbians, not less than men, but full, natural and normal men who need to find their manhood and make their future with gay men, and preferably one in particular.
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I don't care if I offend gender-confused loons. There is such a thing as madness, and pretending that insane "ideas" are valid points of view does no one any good; not the loon in question, and certainly not society at large and vulnerable young people who might accept lunacy as a valid "alternative" life choice.
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A few days ago, Billy's topic was "How ONE homosexual American feels about supporting/celebrating the 4th of July". His main concern generally is with preserving gay history, and making the young appreciate what was done for them, over how long, and at what personal cost. I don't presume to use his words here, but will merely post my reply, from which you can infer what I am replying to.

[A]s regards what to tell kids, you completely left out the European and American predecessors of the modern gay-rights movement. I don't know if the founders of Mattachine knew of that movement. Do you know if they were aware of it? A lot of what those few Europeans, and even fewer Americans, wrote, and apparently actually thought, is "Uranian", "third sex" nonsense, but at least they were talking openly and trying to understand their nature, why they were as they were. Walt Whitman had a lot of largely open homosexual or homoerotic passages in his writings, tho toward the end of life, when confronted, he denied that interpretation, probably to keep his life's work from being burned after his death, when he could no longer publish his works anew, in replacement copies. Heterosexual sexologists raised some of the issues of actual behavior, and frequency of homosexual behavior.
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And of course the phrases "all men are created equal" and "pursuit of happiness" in the Declaration of Independence, and the rugged-individualist culture of the early United States, played a HUGE role in the development of liberation movements in the United States.
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Alas, we'd also have to tell young gay men, and teen boys, that progress is not inevitable, and things don't automatically get better with time. The European movement went out of people's consciousness with the death of its principal advocates and thinkers, and Walt Whitman's gay poetry was recast as 'brotherly love'. Texas Republicans are now proposing to reinstate sodomy laws and criminalize same-sex marriage, and urging Congress to forbid courts from voiding such laws (under the authority of Article III, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution). Tho it seems unlikely, at this moment, that they would succeed in getting Congress to do that, who knows what will happen in the future?
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Elsewhere than the U.S., the Taliban, which got its big start from executing homosexuals, was ousted by a U.S. invasion after 9/11 but is fiting desperately, and all too effectively, to try to regain control of Afghanistan — and resume the executions. Some foolish and impatient Americans are tired of the war in Afghanistan so are willing to give the country back to the Taliban if that's what withdrawal of U.S. forces would mean. And then the Taliban reign of terror over gay men would resume.
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The point is that we have to create institutions capable of facing future challenges and prevailing.
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Most human progress is of the two-steps-forward-one-step-back variety. Or it is patchy, entailing progress in one area that doesn't touch other areas, be it a geographic area (different countries or different regions of the same country) or a subject area.
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Whereas in the 50s-70s gay men felt it very important to be gay, today's kids are attracted to the idea that it is most important for them to be "human", "just people", rather than gay. That is an old trick of heterosexual intolerance: divide gay men in two, and defeat the gay half. The saddest — and most contemptible — part of this is the implied assertion that gay men are NOT human, NOT people, as long as they insist on being homosexual.
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There has been enormous loss of gay institutions to this assimilationist drive by straight society, just as tens of thousands of black businesses were destroyed by integration. Cities that used to have a thriving gay scene have experienced the disappearance of gay institutions (bars, coffeehouses, bathhouses, cruising areas, sex areas in parks, etc.), replaced very inadequately by "gay friendly" places where you can ALMOST be yourself, but can't really be intent on getting together sexually with another man because there is too much heterosexual CRAP in the way. Straight men have an expression for when they can't get to a desired woman because of things thrown in their way: "cock-blocked". This is the rule rather than the exception for gay men in "gay friendly" places, where explicit cruising is nearly impossible. It is little short of amazing that anybody gets laid at all anymore. And [young] gay men now are almost certainly getting no more than a small fraction the sex we used to get at their age.
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So progress is neither automatic nor irreversible; there are always people trying to separate gay men from homosexuality; and it is important that gay men develop and retain a gay identity, by knowing something about their history and involving themselves in a gay culture, not straight.

There were many other exchanges before that, that I did not put up here, for lack of time and energy. I'll look thru them to see what else might usefully appear here.

2010-04-01T23:59:00.007-04:00

State of the Gay World. April 1st was the 41st anniversary of my founding Homosexuals Intransigent! as a student organization at the City College of the City University of New York. Later this year, we will commemorate the 41st anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. Yet the biggest gay story this past week was that Ricky Martin finally — finally — "came out" as gay. I have heard no one in media realize that tho society met this "news" with a general "Well, duh!", Martin himself agonized over the decision for years. What people do not adequately appreciate is that while someone's being gay is no big deal for most outsiders, it is the biggest deal in the world to maladjusted gay men who are scared to death (sometimes, alas, literally) of being "found out" or "outed", and who cannot "come out" for years, or even decades — still, nearly 41 years after Stonewall.
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This is why the very most basic stance of HI! was that gay men must be honest about their nature. I required everyone who wished to become a full (voting) member of the organization to sign a membership pledge never to deny being gay, and merely making that pledge was liberating. OK, perhaps in an extreme situation, such as being surrounded by a gang intent on gay-bashing, we could forgive a denial, but as a general rule, everyone was expected to be open. Not in-your-face. Just open. If someone asks, tell the truth. Come to meetings and dances, hand out flyers on campus. Be as open and normal about your orientation as you are about anything else quintessential to yourself: gender, race, ethnicity, intelligence, interests — anything.
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I also, decades ago, insisted that it doesn't matter if all the world around you accepts homosexuality; if you don't accept your homosexuality, you will still be miserable. Courage is self-magnifying and self-perpetuating. Cowardice, however, is equally self-magnifying and self-perpetuating.
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This is why I have always taken the stance that self-acceptance and acceptance of other gay men is the first, indispensable task each of us must undertake and triumph in. It doesn't matter if the laws change — because they have — and doesn't matter if societal attitudes change — which they have, in most parts of the United States and many other advanced countries. That outside-in stuff doesn't matter. What matters is the inside-outward process of coming bravely, happily, comfortably to accepting yourself and celebrating your homosexuality.
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When I proposed in spring 1970 that the week of events leading up to the first annual march commemorating the Stonewall Riots be called "Gay Pride Week", tho 'the other Craig' (Rodwell) had just assumed the unifying label would be "Gay Power", I understood (as perhaps did the rest of the organizing committee, since they adopted "Gay Pride") that it doesn't matter how much power you do or do not have. If you are not proud in yourself, nothing else matters. An isolated gay man in a rural area of the United States or any part of most of the Third World has no Gay Power. But he could have Gay Pride. And absent Gay Pride, Gay Power means nothing. It's like fame and money to showbiz losers who drown their sorrowful self-hatred in drugs, and lose decades of their lives, if not their life itself, because at heart, they hate themselves.
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So, even tho essentially every commentator, in late-nite talk-show monologs and other media, said of Ricky Martin's admission, "Yes, we already knew [and we were always fine with it]", Ricky Martin wasn't fine with it. Clay Aiken wasn't fine with it. Neil Patrick Harris wasn't fine with it, but didn't come out until outed. The cowardice of such celebrities, in hiding for years, contributes to the terror young gay men and boys feel about being detested and shunned — or worse — if they should be found out. How many kids have committed suicide who might have held out and come to accept themselves if gay men in the public eye had come out before they killed themselves in tears?
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How many more young gay men will kill themselves from fear and self-loathing because society can count on the fingers of at most two hands the number of very famous gay men who are not suffering for having come out?
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The LGBTI...etc. movement is monstrously deformed and worse than useless. It is actually destructive, for confusing people about what they are and should want from life. The first responsibility of any organization intended to help gay men must be to help them accept their homosexuality and their manhood. The L... movement does exactly the opposite: it tells them to reconceptualize themselves as something less than and other than men, as some kind of intermediate "third sex" lunatic whose only place in society is in a demimonde of unending confusion and depravity.
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All such organizations should be destroyed, replaced by organizations OF gay men, run entirely BY gay men, FOR gay men ONLY, and dedicated to helping gay men find their manhood, their normality, and place in the general world as normal men oriented to men. Self-segregation-OUT is as natural to gay men as to blacks, Orientals, Hispanics, and other groups who may have friends of other groups but naturally enjoy most, the company of others most like themselves. Yes, birds of a feather really do flock together. Look to the sky during migration seasons. Geese do not fly with grackles. Pigeons form flocks of pigeons. The occasional sparrow or seagull may join in pecking at pizza crust or bread tossed by people eating lunch on park benches, but pigeons do not retire from that repast to a collective home with other birds. Just pigeons. Pigeons especially do not flock with falcons.
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But gay men are taught to subjugate themselves and their interests, in their own organizations, to people who are not just not like them but actually their enemies, who use them, abuse them, take their money to redirect it and the organization's efforts to alien issues, and insist that they need to change to be more like their enemies. They actually permit women who hate men to tell them that they must hate their manhood and make themselves into "better people", without any manhood whatsoever. No "patriarchy", no "male privilege". No, they must psychologically castrate themselves, and become some kind of gender-neutral "being", controlled by a "higher consciousness" that "rises above" their (disgusting) natural manhood. Vulnerable, self-doubting, self-loathing, young gay men can be very seriously damaged by participation in the "LGBTQI... community", a "community" that neither does nor ever can exist.
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Legal changes, as to eliminate discrimination in the military and achieve marriage equality, may be all to the good, but they must not serve as the be-all and end-all of a genuine Gay Movement — no L, no B, no T, no Q, no I, just GAY (or Homosexual). Of what value is the right to marry if the bulk of gay men can't find anyone fit to marry, nor feel themselves deserving of love?
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It's the internal, the interior, not the external nor exterior, that most matters. If you respect yourself, you will behave respectably, and thereby earn respect. If you do NOT respect yourself, it doesn't matter how the law or society may change around you. You will still be miserable, behave disgracefully, and fail in relationships. Indeed, even if you do manage to silence that little voice that tells you you're not a man, and not worthy of love, you might still never be able to find a permanent, loving relationship, because everybody else is crazy.
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The Gay Movement must become a Sanity Movement rather than the INsanity movement is now is. Those "Bisexuals" should be confronted: "You're NOT 'bisexual'. You're just a self-despising, lying HOMOsexual." Those "Transgendered" people have to be told, "There is no such thing as a 'transgendered' person, no way a woman could be born into the body of a man. Such talk is just insane. Your 'real' gender is what you were born. Grow the f* up." Those "Queers" should be told, "Queer is the exact equivalent of 'nigger'. It cannot be 'reclaimed' or 'recast' or 'legitimized'. It is always insulting. Why would you want to call yourself 'Queer'? Plainly you think there is something bizarre about homosexuality. You have accepted the lie, and incorporated it into your personality. Grow the f* up."
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So, where do we stand, 41 years after I founded Homosexuals Intransigent!? Still at the back of the bus. But with a difference: blacks always knew they were black. And almost all of them, even most of those who could "pass" if they had to, never had a problem being black. Alas, many did think less of themselves because society thought less of blacks. And yes, some did "pass", and many did straighten their hair. To this day, some blacks are concerned about "good hair" and skin liteness or darkness, lite being preferred over dark. Immersion in a group unlike oneself can cause serious identity confusion and problems of self-esteem, even in so large a group, so largely self-segregated socially as blacks in the United States. Small wonder, then, that gay men, and especially isolated gay men who have no mini-Gay World around them, are so confused about so much.
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A Gay Movement must be one part activist drive, agitating for legal and social reforms; and one part support group, helping the maladjusted become well-adjusted. Support groups cannot incorporate outsiders. Smoking-cessation support groups do not allow smokers to lite up during sessions. And a burn-victims support group would never permit an outsider to bring a lited torch into the meeting room. But the pretense is that gay men can welcome everyone in the world into gay bars and organizations without doing any harm whatsoever to the internal dynamics of male-male relationships. Bullsh*.
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People learn how to be people, from other people. What they learn from others can reinforce their own nature, or subvert it. Even when the otherness of others is fully appreciated, being surrounded by otherness can still distort one's own personality. But when a person is told that those others are NOT others but the same as you, he can become very confused indeed.
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Gay men need to be alone with gay men a LOT of the time. And gay organizations need to reinforce gay men, not subvert them. The actual gay movement isn't even a gay movement, but some bizarrely concocted LGBTQI...whatever movement, in which gay men aren't even first in line, much less importance. They must always play second fiddle to lesbians, who are the exact opposite of everything they are. Yet they are told that they are "the same" as lesbians, so have an obligation to lesbianize themselves, give up their identity as a man, and conform to something that bears no relationship whatsoever to their internal reality nor what they want from life. That must stop.
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You cannot say that it's OK for men to want to be with men without at the same time saying that it's OK for men NOT to be with women. As soon as an organization imposes upon gay men the obligation to be with women, in that organization, it proclaims (a) that men and women BELONG together, which simultaneously proclaims (b) that men and men WITHOUT women is WRONG. You'd think that that would be obvious, but when you're dealing with seriously damaged people who have been psychosexually deformed by constant pressure to be what they are not, nothing is obvious to them. Their own gender isn't obvious to them, even if they can see, directly and in a mirror, that they have a man's body and a man's sexual organs; even when they can feel their male organs with their hands, and feel the sensations men feel thru those organs. No, it's like those crazy anorexics who look at an emaciated, nearly dead skeleton in the mirror and think they're fat. The ability of the human mind to delude itself is astonishing.
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Gay men need to be taught how to be gay, how to be a man, and thus how to be a gay man. They cannot learn that from lesbians, self-denying "bisexuals", or sexual-anorexic "transgendered" loons, who persuade themselves, when they look in a mirror, that they are seeing a woman.
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Gay men cannot learn to respect themselves by calling themselves an ugly name, "queer". They cannot accept the naturalness and normalness — indeed, ordinariness — of homosexuality by accepting a term that means bizarre and abnormal.
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In short, the present gay "Movement" is, as it has always been, fundamentally misconceived and destructive of the very people it was presumably supposed to help. Legal changes and social changes have not brought self-acceptance, and now heterosexual society is much more accepting of homosexuality than are homosexuals. Grotesque but true, as is demonstrated by the case of Ricky Martin. Homosexuality just isn't very important to well-adjusted straight people, so arouses no serious anxieties in them. But it arouses enormous, monumental, stupendous anxieties in young men for whom it is the most important thing in life. How do some people in "the Movement" deal with that? They say that their orientation is NOT the most important thing in their life, but of course it is. What sex you are, and what sex you have, are absolutely fundamental to the personality.
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Gay men need not an "LGBTQI..." movement that tells them that they are freaks fit only to associate with other freaks, but a GAY or HOMOSEXUAL MEN'S movement that tells them they are normal, natural, reasonable, and right to be gay, and they can be good people who do good in the world by treating each other well and giving attention and affection to people they are attracted to. When will gay men have such a movement?

2010-03-13T23:55:00.002-05:00

Antigay Bigotry from SNL. Saturday Nite Live had a bizarre and offensive opening tonite, in a preposterous "exit interview" for Congressman Eric Massa, in which a woman invaded his sexual privacy and said of his homosexual interests "Ew." How dare they?
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No Congressman has to go thru a personnel office "exit interview", so the whole premise of the skit was absurd. That SNL chose a woman interviewer to inquire about a man's homosexual inclinations was an offensive intrusion of compulsory heterosexuality, where men have to get the approval of women in all things; and to have that female interviewer express disgust with male-male sex is inexcusable. SNL has not heretofore been known for antihomosexual bigotry, so this lapse in judgment is particularly objectionable.
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We might expect antihomosexual propaganda from Rightwing televangelists in Texas, but from Saturday Nite Live in New York City? Disgusting. It's good to be reminded, however, that straight people are NOT reliable friends and allies, and we can rely only on ourselves.
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When the host of that episode turned out to be a Brit, I'd had enuf, and turned the TV off in distaste. Not only are gay men to be judged by heterosexual women, but Americans are to be forced to listen to a hideous British accent. Revolting.
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I may yet turn the TV back on for "Weekend Update", which is generally, with the opening skit, the best part of that generally mediocre television show. If it is also offensive, I will find something else to do with my time.
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P.S. I tried to watch "Weekend Update". During the "Really" segment therein, Seth Meyers and guest Jerry Seinfeld addressed the Massa story again, but I missed parts of it because we have had a gigantic storm in this area all day long, a maelstrom of high winds and heavy rain. Digital broadcasting is such a crappy technology that wind and rain knock out TV! So for over a minute in the middle of that segment, my digibox reported "No Signal", and I got no picture and no sound. In the days of analog TV, we might get a poor picture and scratchy sound, but we'd get something. With digital broadcasting, we get either a brilliant picture and great sound, or NOTHING. When it announced that it would be abolishing analog broadcasting (to make money by selling off larger segments of "the people's airwaves" to obscenely rich corporations), the Federal Government assured us that we'd get better TV from the changeover. Instead, tens of millions of Americans have lost free TV all or part-time. When I was young, we used to think the future would be better than either the past or the then-present. We never foresaw the Federal Government destroying free television, on purpose.

2010-02-20T16:01:00.005-05:00

Gender Confusion and Double Minorities. I had an adverse reaction to my post yesterday about gender-confused children, so will share that and my reply. Here's the adverse email:

As a frequent reader of your blogs, I have noticed a pattern of bigotry and animosity toward those with gender identity disorder. Even if you think it unnatural, it would seem your response should be steeped in compassion, not in animosity. However, you, who spew such judgmental and loathesome terms as "monstrosity" and "loons," advocate in your latest Mr. Gay Pride update confining the gender-confused to hospitals meant for those who present a danger to themselves and others and offering them suicide as the only alternative to lifetime confinement if they do not accept their sex of origin. This is nefarious, insensate and totally unnecessary.
I not only find this repugnant but also conspicuously hypocritical given that you consider sex-change operations violent crimes against the "insane." Assisting suicide violates the very "first, do no harm" mantra you use to impugn the case for sex-change operations. In fact, your views are far worse even if your attitudes about sex-change operations are to be taken as valid: You would permit not "mutilation" but DEATH!
I am also curious as to why you are so doctrinaire about gender identity disorder when homosexuality might also be said to be a delusion. How do you know you are not delusional or insane? Why are you not at least open to the idea that you could be wrong about this? After all, it was proud, dogmatic bigots like you who once categorized homosexuality as a mental illness. Let's confine gays to mental institutions, educate them about biology and sexual reproduction, and force them to accept reality or kill themselves.
I do agree with you, however, on allowing minors to alter their bodies. Parents should not permit that but should instead force the child to make those decisions for themselves as adults. Children are simply too young to make life-altering, irreversible decisions about their bodies, and their parents may (justifiably) incur wrath and blame later should the children regret it.
Gender identity aside, there are a number of other areas where I think you're dead-wrong.
You speak for all gay men in deciding they are all drawn to masculinity to the extent that the effeminate are doomed to lives of unhappiness. How then you explain some men's fascination with twinks? I am somewhat effeminate, albeit not ostentatiously (OR ARTIFICIALLY), and men are attracted to me. It happens. Mr. Schoonmaker's experiences and preferences don't define the entire world's.
I also found it reprehensible that you decided to denigrate blacks and Hispanics who voted for Proposition 8 as "niggers" and "spics." It's hypocritical to take the stance that bigotry is wrong and depraved, then quickly descend to it yourself. You were capable of educated, valid criticisms of blacks, Hispanics and OTHERS who voted for Proposition 8 without resorting to hurtful racist terminology. It was almost as if you used it as an excuse to unleash your latent feelings of racial superiority. I happen to be both black and gay and found it sad. I had black bigots alienating me on one side and gay bigots on the other. It is worth noting, though, that early results overestimated minority support for Proposition 8, though you irresponsibly never addressed that.

My reply:

These gender-confused loons ARE a danger to themselves, and to others. They MUTILATE their bodies; and someone who is perfectly willing to harm themselves CANNOT be trusted not to harm others.
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I expressly stated in advocating permitting incurable lunatics to commit suicide: "Here is a supply of pills that can end your misery." Psychology cannot help everyone, and there are dangerous lunatics in and outside of institutions who are consigned to decades of misery before death relieves them of pain. Suicide is wrong when it is a permanent solution to a TEMPORARY problem, not when it is the ONLY solution to a PERMANENT problem. People with a terminal illness may well be right to end their misery. Permanent madness is a terminal illness; suicide is a rational choice in such a circumstance.
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Homosexuality, or any genuine sexual orientation, is not a delusion but an attraction. Homosexuality is found in a very large part of the animal kingdom, if not in every mammalian species. A man who knows he is a man and knows he is attracted to a man and derives pleasure from men is in no way delusional.
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This is the base problem with allowing the gender-confused to vent their madness: it taints everything and everyone around them. Madness is not usually transmissible, but sanity is easily eroded in people of weak identity and weak will. In legitimating the "woman trapped in the body of a man" or the reverse madness, society attacks the whole concept of reality as controlling the universe, and leads some people to indulge and rationalize away insane thoughts rather than understand that they are insane thoughts and either get over them on their own, or seek professional help -- and NOT from someone who will tell them, "Oh, that's not crazy. You are entitled to choose your gender, and we have the knives to help."
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Gay men's sexual identity is under CONSTANT ATTACK from a vast CASTRATION CONSPIRACY, into which you have apparently been recruited. If there were skin-change surgery that could replace black skin with white, and white-controlled media were to promote such surgery as a "cure" to the "problem" of the black race, would you be equally at ease with that "solution"? (Note: I made this comparison before I got to the point in your email that said you are black. Perhaps this comparison is particularly appropriate to make the point for you.)
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You confuse bigotry with certainty. If someone insists that the world is flat and the moon landings never occurred, is society supposed to say, "Fine, you're right, and we are all wrong"? When a person who is obviously a woman is called a "man", but then she has a BABY, there are some stupid, evil people like Oprah Winfrey who will leap to say not, "Well, so much for the pretense that she is a man" but "A MAN just had a baby!"
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The attraction of some gender-insecure men to effeminate men, even men who dress as women, is a desperate attempt to recast their homosexuality as heterosexuality, and thus to deny their own nature and psychosexually castrate their partner. It is NEVER healthy, and it is NEVER genuine but always a willful falsification of reality to preserve a hoped-for "normality" as a "sort-of" heterosexual man who just happens to have sex with (a technical) man.
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My point in saying "niggers and spics" was made very plainly in that passage: "if they can be bigoted against us, we can retaliate in kind"; thus, it is dangerous for one minority to attack and deny the rights of others. The words of the old Negro spiritual "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" enjoin "If you get to Heaven, before I do ... just bore a hole and pull me thru." Gay men have, in general, supported civil rights for blacks, Hispanics, etc., partly from simple fairness but also partly in the hope, even expectation, that as they advanced, in part because of our help, they would return the favor. Didn't happen as fully as we had hoped.
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And whereas blacks are easily spotted, gay men may not be, but be in position to harm blacks or Hispanics he comes to regard as enemies, by passing over them in hiring, entering negative notations in personnel records, voting against them, etc.
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I don't understand whatever point you seek to make by "It is worth noting, though, that early results overestimated minority support for Proposition 8, though you irresponsibly never addressed that." Are public-opinion polling errors germane to the issue of human rights?
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As for your being a double minority, black and gay, I long ago learned that double minorities tend to have ENORMOUS, sometimes insuperable difficulty in becoming well-adjusted gay men. One minority status is hard; two is nearly crushing. The same process of self-liberation should work twice, but perhaps it's like a pint of courage trying to fill a quart container.
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This is where backup from the law, or social approbation, comes in, to fill in that other pint. When, instead, social disapproval and legal pariah status evaporate or siphon off some of that pint of courage, a double-minority person is in worse condition than the single-minority whose pint of courage need only fill a pint container.
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I don't know if there are organizations dedicated to double minorities (2- or some such) that address such issues and provide strategies for dealing with the special challenges of double minorities. A general-purpose gay organization might not suffice, just as a heterosexually organized 'gay' organization that by its very structure promotes a message of men-and-women-together-now! cannot really liberate gay men from impositions of heterosexuality.

2010-02-19T15:26:00.003-05:00

TV Personalities Who Need To Be Punished. Tyra Banks yesterday praised a transvestite model (posing as a woman, modeling women's clothes) as a credit to the gay-lesbian-transgendered community. Tyra Banks needs to be punished. If she is promoting castration of gender-confused gay men, she needs to be imprisoned or flogged.
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When I turned the Tyra Show off, in a rage, I found that at the exact same time, Dr. Mehmet Oz was promoting gender confusion on his show. A stupid, evil woman is shown with her little boy, dressed in girls' clothing, whom the mother calls "her" and permits to be called a "girl". She too needs to be punished.
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A teenaged girl is then introduced to the audience as "Isaac", whose parents permitted her to have a double mastectomy and undergo treatment with male-hormone therapy — at age 17! The parents should be executed, and the insane child should be compelled to accept her reality. If she cannot, she should be put into a mental institution, where her actual sex is known to everyone. And if the costs of taking care of this monstrosity get too high, she should be told plainly:

You are NOT a boy/man. You are a girl/woman. If you can't accept that reality, you will be confined to this mental institution for life. If you cannot adjust happily to reality, feel free to commit suicide any time you want. Here is a supply of pills that can end your misery. There's a glass of water on the nitestand.

A vile, monstrous quack in Dr. Oz's audience advocated grotesque mutilation of gender-confused children as early as age 16. He dares to talk about the safety of a child as being paramount. Safety! The child is mutilated by "medicine". That is not keeping the child "safe"! That "doctor" should immediately be stricken from the rolls of doctors and refused permission to practice medicine. If he has actually committed sexual mutilation of children, he should then be executed, publicly.
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All these adults need to be stripped naked, tied to a post, and flogged. The insane children need to be forced to accept reality, and told very plainly that believing yourself to be something you are not is the very definition of madness.
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I was so livid that I sent this message to the Dr. Oz show by feedback form at its website:

Re "Transgendered" Children

What kind of quackery are you pushing? You are actually telling the world that it is a good thing to accept madness and mutilate people's body to conform their appearance to their delusions, to the point of double mastectomy of an insane female child who wishes she were a boy! Josef Mengele would be very proud of you.

Surgical mutilation makes a person the opposite sex, does it? Well, how about if we castrate you, chop out your Adam's apple, pump you full of female hormones, and change your name? Will that make you a woman?

What will mad "medicine" come up with next? If a schizophrenic hears voices, doctors should tell the world that there really are people inside his head, and the messages have to be accepted as valid? If a 6'4" American man thinks he's Napoleon, chop out the middle of his thighs to shorten him, teach him French, change his name legally, dress him in period costume, and tell the whole world that he "is" Napoleon?

Madness is madness, and telling the world that an obvious delusion is reality is a crime against sanity and society, not just against the sad, tragic lunatic. You actually allowed some monster "doctor" in the audience to talk about committing double mastectomy against a child as keeping her "safe"! How is committing a horrible crime of irreversible mutilation keeping a child "safe"?

You should be ashamed of yourself. You are PROMOTING sexual mutilation and entrapping unsuspecting third persons in same-sex emotional and sexual relationships without their knowledge. You are an enemy of society. Your license to practice medicine should be revoked, your TV show driven off the air. You are a danger to society, an enemy of sanity, an enemy of troubled children. Children have an identity problem? Your solution: Just chop off what causes them problems and parade them as something they're not.

Crazy people cannot consent to anything, because sanity is a legal precondition to consent. So all these mutilating surgeries are violent crimes against the insane. Real doctors are commanded, "First, do no harm."

Plainly we cannot permit "doctors" who accept lunacy as valid and good, to set policy on "transgendered" people. Society needs to outlaw all treatments that validate madness and promote physical mutilation of the insane, on pain of DEATH.

2010-02-09T13:13:00.002-05:00

Gay or Straight Matters. I left this comment today at "Ramon [Johnson]'s Gay Life Blog", about a post concerning Johnny Weir, U.S. championship figure skater who refuses to come clean about his sexual orientation. The original post is from January 12th, but it was linked to, indirectly, from a FanHouse.com article yesterday, so is not pointless. (CAPS are for emphasis; not all online Comments areas permit HTML coding, so rather than risk italics or boldface codes appearing onscreen, I just used caps.)

There are gay kids who commit SUICIDE because they are convinced they are alone in the world and always will be, because COWARDS in public life refuse to come out publicly. If Weir is gay, it is NOT his own business but EVERYBODY’S business. And if Weir doesn’t accept his manhood but grew up thinking that “gay” means “feminine”, then he needs to FIX HIS ATTITUDE and find his manhood as a homosexual man. “Too gay” means EFFEMINATE, not masculine. Gay men are drawn to masculinity, so taking on an artificial ‘feminine’ persona dooms the effeminate to unhappiness. No straight celebrity has ever denied being straight [nor, I might add now, refused to deny being gay]. Ergo, Weir is gay (I avoid the convenient but oppressive rhyming Q-word). Gay boys and men all around the Nation, and world, need to know that, need to be able to point to someone and say, “Look — he’s the best in the Nation, and he’s gay, like me.”

Oh, and I used my real name.

2010-01-26T18:14:00.006-05:00

Countering More Anti-Moslem Bigotry. I don't know what Billy G's bugaboo is about Islam, but he sent out more anti-Moslem propaganda, this time from a supposed Dutch person concerned that Europe is soon to be taken over by Moslems. You should be able to infer, from my replies, the arguments made, without my repeating the slanders and absurdities.

RIDICULOUS. Don't waste my, or anyone else's, time on such nonsense. Europe is NOT being Islamicized. There are 830 MILLION PEOPLE in Europe; the largest Moslem community in Western Europe is in France, which is only 5%-10% Moslem! (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/fr.html). The Netherlands is 5.8% Moslem, Germany 3.7%, Britain 2.7%. Italy is 90% Roman Catholic, and the remaining 10% includes all others, Protestants, Jews, and Moslems. Spain is 94% Catholic, and all others fit within the remaining 6%. On and on thru the list of European countries we can go. Russia is only 15-20% Moslem, despite its having annexed, during the days of the Russian Empire, places like Chechnya whose ancestral religion was Islam. Poland has so few Moslems that the CIA World Factbook doesn't even mention them! The alarmist whose propaganda you quote mentions Malmo, Sweden. But what about Sweden generally? This is what the Factbook says of religions in Sweden:
Lutheran 87%, other (includes Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Baptist, Muslim, Jewish, and Buddhist) 13%
13% for all others than Lutherans, with Moslems mentioned FOURTH.
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This is the same crap we hear in this country about Hispanics taking over and changing our official language to Spanish. All bullshit.
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Population projections 90 years out are nonsense. Pure, idle speculation. And trying to ascertain either the attitudes of Europeanized Moslems or the number of conversions OUT of Islam to their neighbors' religion is impossible. Moreover, if Europe doesn't want an ever larger Moslem population, all they have to do is pass laws to exclude them from immigration. There is no RIGHT to immigrate to Europe. And, as I have said, if Europe wants Christian immigrants, it has Latin America, a region of 570 million Christians, to pull from.
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The issue of sharia courts in Britain is indeed troubling to people who come from a country in which church and state are separate, but Britain is not such a country. A Times of London story about these sharia courts says:
Under the act, the sharia courts are classified as arbitration tribunals. The rulings of arbitration tribunals are binding in law, provided that both parties in the dispute agree to give it the power to rule on their case. ***

[Sheikh Faiz-ul-Aqtab Siddiqi, whose Muslim Arbitration Tribunal runs the courts, said "] This method is called alternative dispute resolution, which for Muslims is what the sharia courts are." ***

Jewish Beth Din courts operate under the same provision in the Arbitration Act and resolve civil cases, ranging from divorce to business disputes. They have existed in Britain for more than 100 years, and previously operated under a precursor to the act.
Is that alarmist indignant that Britain has had Jewish courts for over 100 years?
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If Europeans value their citizenship so little as to let foreigners/dual nationals hold government posts, then why should we care about them more than they do about themselves? The United States apparently permits dual citizenship, meaning dual loyalty, and Congress needs to outlaw it here, for anyone, of any religion, be they Canadian, British — anything. One country or another. Choose, and renounce the other.
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As for Moslems coming to conquer Europe, I rather doubt many have that intent. But we were content to see Jews do that to Palestine. Why should we suddenly become indignant about Moslems doing to parts of Europe what Jews — from Europe! — did to almost all of Palestine? What's sauce for the goose is indeed sauce for the gander. And if Moslems must be stopped in taking over parts of Europe, then the Jewish takeover of Palestine must be reversed.
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As for Muhammed murdering a Jewish tribe, why don't you read about what the Jews did to the Jewish tribe of Benjaminites:
The entire tribe of Benjamin, women and children included, was almost wiped out by the other Israelite tribes after the Battle of Gibeah. The remnant of the tribe was spared and allowed to marry women of another town, whose husbands had been killed, to enable the tribe to continue. (Judges 19-21)
As for Islam being a political system, may I remind you of something called the "Papal States"? How about "Their Catholic Majesties" of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella? The wars between Protestant and Catholic monarchies?
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"Islam wants to dictate every aspect of life." EVERY religion wants to do that. Judaism has 613 rules for living. They affect every single aspect of life, from what you eat to when or if you cut your hair or wear a hat.
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The guy you cite admits he has lived in Israel. He is a JEW, and a Radical Zionist. No sensible person listens to JEWS to get to the truth of Islam. He asserts that Islamic hatred for Israel is a desire for war not against Israel to retake stolen Palestine, but a war on the West. Why would he say that? Because he wants the West to fite for Israel. He, like all Radical Zionists, would be happy as a clam if all the Christians and all the Moslems killed each other off and left the world to the Jews. That is not the slitest overstated.
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His assertion that Jews are fiting the West's war and keeping the West safe is not just insane but also laffable in its absurdity. The 1.2 BILLION rich and massively armed people of the Christian West (not, for this purpose, counting Latin America, tho Latin America is obviously Western) are being protected by 5 million Jews! Of COURSE they are. A BILLION-plus Christians could never protect themselves. No. But 5M Jews can stop OVER a billion Moslems. Of course they can. Don't you see how insane that is? Or how preposterously, patently dishonest?
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It is not Israel that is defending us but we who are defending Israel, and everybody knows it — which is precisely why WE were targeted for the 9/11 attacks.
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Israel is not the West. The religion of the West (devout or cultural) is Christianity. Israel is not in Europe but in Asia. It has NOTHING TO DO with the West. It seeks to pass itself off as a Western country to get the West to defend it. We have no reason to buy that lie, nor to defend Israel from the fully foreseeable consequences of its own monstrous crimes.
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He asserts that reconquering Palestine would not in any way reduce the anger of Islam. That's akin to telling people to ignore that bur under the saddle. The horse will stay angry whether you remove the bur or not.
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"The lights may go out in Europe faster than you can imagine", says that Jewish agent provocateur. But didn't he say earlier that it would take 90 years for Moslems to become a demographic majority in "Europe"? And by "Europe", did he mean that Moslems will become a majority in each and every country, including Poland, Italy, Spain, Russia, Belarus, and the Ukraine? Or just that in some countries there would be few while in others, many? It makes a difference.
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He again displays his Jewish arrogance and agenda when he speaks of "the heritage of Rome, Athens and Jerusalem". May I remind you that Rome DESTROYED Judea? That is the real heritage of the West: a tolerant Empire tired of the endless revolts by violent Jews, retaliated with overwhelming force, destroyed their Temple, and scattered the defeated across the Empire, OUT of Palestine. Might we have to do the same?

Israel is prepared to fite Islam to the last American! We mustn't fall into that trap.
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That anyone should pass along such vicious bigotry is bad enuf. That a homosexual man in the United States should spend so much time attacking Islam when it is Judaism's Leviticus that is used by Rightwing Christians to oppress gay men is disgraceful.

2010-01-26T02:25:00.002-05:00

(Very long post, some 4,000 words. Read at your leisure.)

I have recently participated in a conversation among gay activists about Islam and homosexuality, in which I was astonished at the malice directed against all Moslems. Many of the accusations against Moslems in that exchange constitute slander, and people who pass along slander share the blame for slander, so I will place here only my statements, in chronological order, earliest to most recent, with, if anything, only such parts of the things I replied to as may be necessary to understand why I said what I said. Reading and responding to all these materials took quite some time, and I won't subject you to the full extent of those materials.

False and malicious. There is not a single Islamist GOVERNMENT run by fanatics except the Islamic Republic of Iran. That there are temptations to Islamist purity in Moslem countries and even among some Moslems who have LEFT Moslem countries but did not realize that their leaving constituted rejection of Islamic rule over society, is beyond contention. But there are plenty of Christian, and Hindu, and , especially, Jewish extremists with violent hatred in control of their minds. This past week, Pat Robertson said that Haiti was punished because it had made a pact with the Devil, so Haitians deserved the misery they have suffered for over 200 years, and deserved the mass death and destruction this past week. Good Christian Pat Robertson.
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It wasn't Moslems who burned homosexuals at the stake in Europe, but pious Christians in times of Inquisition, which burning is a possible origin of the term "faggot". Israel has killed, directly or indirectly, perhaps 3/4 of a million to 1.25M Moslems in pursuit of their insane insistence on reconstructing a country that had vanished over 2,600 years before, or, as "Judea", over 1,900 years earlier. That's quite a death toll for a country that has never had so much as 6 million Jews, and most of it was done by the good old Christian U.S. of A. at Israel's demand (in, for instance, two wars against Iraq, Israel's most feared enemy). That means that Moslems really are only pikers when it comes to extremism and mass murder of their religion's enemies.
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Certainly all religion contains within it the possibility of intolerant mass murder, and we have had plenty of that in the Christian West, from the Reconquista of Spain to the wars of the Reformation to the "troubles" in Northern Ireland. All religion is evil, because all religion tells True Believers that they are entitled to kill to defend the Faith or spread God's Word to people who don't want it.
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That Christianity today is the best of the evil that is religion doesn't make it benign. And tolerance is a recent phenomenon in the Christian world, born of centuries of murderous strife. It is for us to explode the madness of all religion, the nonexistence of any god/dess whatsoever who authorizes murder in his or her name, and promote tolerance everywhere, in Israel and India as much as Iran, Afghanistan, and the Sudan. But it does no good to single out the loons of Islam, especially since WE are responsible for their appeal, in having inflicted upon the Moslem Heartland a Jewish state backed by hundreds of billions of dollars of outside money.

There were further anti-Moslem tirades, to which I responded.

I see now the source of your problem: you are listening to Jews for your information about Moslems. That is akin to asking Communists for a disinterested and fair evaluation of Nazism, or Orangemen for information about Catholicism. And do I really need to remind you that the key passages of Scripture that are used to oppose homosexuality in the West are from the OLD Testament book of Leviticus? Judaism!?! "If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them." (Leviticus 20:13)
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The assertion by Jack F. that Somalia's problems were produced by the United States is pure nonsense of the no-bird-falls-to-Earth-but-the-United-States-shot-it-down variety. Somalia was a hellhole when the U.S. first sent humanitarian relief supplies in; that was not an "invasion". Somalia continues to be a hellhole because the U.S. withdrew, leaving it to the barbarians who had ruined it long before we arrived. The U.S. has very little to do with the condition of most of the world, and especially Africa, with which we have almost no involvement. Jack F reveals his Comsymp bias in another preposterous phrase, "the Soviet regime which had come in to stop US meddling" in Afghanistan. Bullshit. The Soviets were doing what they'd been doing since the 1920s, working on worldwide Communist revolution. It had NOTHING to do with "U.S. meddling" but ONLY to do with their 'sacred' obligation to 'spread the good news of our lords Marx and Lenin', a political dogma very like the proselytizing drives of fervent Christianity and Islam.
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As for Nigeria's ruling class being dominated by Christians, I suspect that is wrong but can't find definitive information in the first Google results I tried.
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As for Iraqis fiting Americans, tho I agree the U.S. should never have gone into Iraq and should long ago have left, if Iraqis are fiting Americans, they are doing a damned poor job of it, because the cumulative death toll of Americans in Iraq has stayed at 4,373 for weeks, and only 3 have died so far this month. No, most of the violence is between Iraqis, which is the public rationale for keeping U.S. troops there, to keep the slauter to a minimum.
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"Afghans fighting Americans in Afghanistan.... again, who is the a[g]gressor here?" I guess Jack F never heard about al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan, nor the attacks of 9/11.
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Despite the blatant anti-U.S. bias of Mr. F's remarks [Jack F is a convert to Islam], I agree with him on the central issue of this discussion, that we must not tar the entire Moslem world with the brush of extremism.
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As regards religious control of the United States, I suggest you look at any coin or piece of paper money. There you will see the outrageous and blatantly false assertion "In God We Trust". What "we"? I don't trust in God; I don't believe in God; and even if one were to believe in God, as in a theistic way, belief does not equate with "trust", as in trust God to intervene in human affairs. Theists believe that God created the Universe and established the rules by which it operates, but thereafter God lets things go their own way, and does not interfere.
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Please stop using the self-despising term "queer"; "rich queers" is not one whit less offensive than "rich niggers". Like "nigger", "queer" cannot be made respectable. And no one should try.
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Don't we have enuf enemies without insisting on counting ALL Moslems — all 1 billion plus, and growing — as our enemies? For someone of advanced years [Billy G is about 75 years old]seem to have a very short memory. How long ago was it that a slender gay man, whose name I do not recall, was beaten to death in an alley by the LAPD under a vicious anti-gay police chief whose name I also do not recall? I remember the beatings and deaths, the entrapment, the bar raids and more; the names, however, are too numerous (and irrelevant) to recall. Perhaps six years ago I served on a grand jury in Essex County, NJ, in a solidly Democratic area (my city, Newark, is the county seat) of a Blue State (that inaugurated a Republican as Governor on Tuesday), and listened as an Essex County Sheriff's Department cop recounted his ENTRAPPING gay men in the South Mountain Reservation (a park). I was indignant and called that entrapment "entrapment", but the great majority of the grand jurors voted to indict these entrapped gay men anyway!
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So let us not look down our noses at Moslem societies, most of them traditional, even backward and largely uneducated, despite some relatively recent wealth in relatively few hands. American society did not change in the absence of education and pressure, and brave people letting themselves be known as gay. Even today, in advanced Western countries, including areas where men are allowed to marry each other(!), the bulk of young gay boys and men are NOT willing to be known as gay. It's very easy to be bigoted against gay men when you "don't know any", but not nearly so easy when your uncle or cousin or best friend or captain of the football team is gay — and especially when ALL of those people are known to be gay.
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It took us 60 years to achieve what change we have achieved — and until every kid who realizes he is gay feels free to accept that and tell his parents and friends about it without angst, our work is far from done. The "Movement" hasn't even begun in most Moslem countries. To suggest that Islam is somehow immovable but Christianity was movable is simple-minded and almost certainly wrong. All the sins of Islam are equally sins of other religions.
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You speak about Islam wanting to sweep the world. What do you think all those Christian missionaries sent out, over centuries, to Africa, Asia, Oceania, and to native peoples across the Americas wanted?
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Will we be able to change the minds of Wahhabis? Maybe not, any more than we have been able to change the minds of Mormons and other reactionary sects in Christianity. But might there be the equivalents of Episcopalians and Unitarians in Islam? People rarely try to accommodate their enemies; they do, however, listen to their friends. If you care about gay men in Moslem countries, you need to approach Moslems as you would approach any other potential audience: with good will and an open mind.

Jack F tried to deride my pointing out his Communist sympathies. I responded.

"Comsymp" is not a taunt but a statement of what turns out to be, in Mr. F's case, absolutely factual, since he admits his Communist sympathies. Small-c ["communist", which he admitted to] or large makes NO difference. Communism killed some 110 million people in a reign of terror that is not yet over, and that 110M figure does NOT count people killed in wars to fite back against Communism. Communist sympathy is illegitimate and contemptible, and I won't tolerate it or legitimate it by letting Cold War crap designed to promote worldwide Communist revolution, pass unchallenged. Even as regards gay rights, Communism was and remains a vile enemy. Castro incarcerated gay men on the Isle of Pines, later turned into an AIDS prison. No Communist country had or today has any significant gay-rights movement that I have ever heard of. To speak of "red-baiting" in rejecting the gigantic crimes of Communism is beyond contemptible; it is intellectual criminality.
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As for "anti-Semitic", that is, as Mr. F should surely know, just a "schoolyard taunt" intended to shut down discussion of the crimes of Zionism. It is also exactly the opposite of reason, since "Semitic" properly refers to people who speak a Semitic language, and the overwhelming preponderance of Semites are ARABS. I am certainly not anti-Arab.
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People have an absolute right to point out the madness of religion, any religion, and the arrogance that allows people who claim to be "God's Chosen" to assert the right to steal an entire country out from under the people who have lived there for centuries or millennia, or of various religious lunatics to assert that (nonexistent) "God is on our side".

Jack F again tried to divert the discussion with irrelevancies, attacking my spelling for one thing. I replied.

I am an expert on spelling, and reject some of the more preposterous spellings.
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As for hatred of Jews / hatred of Zionism / hatred of Judaism, plainly the behavior of Zionists taints both Judaism and Jews generally, and otherwise decent Jews tend to permit themselves to be blackmailed into passing over or even defending the crimes of Zionism. That makes them contemptible. The longer Jews in general side with Israel over the Palestinians, the more that hatred for Zionism will convert to hatred of Jews. Some Jews don't fall into that trap, and people like Jon Stewart and Mike Wallace distance themselves from Israeli atrocities — tho I don't recall either of them, or any other prominent American Jew, calling for the dissolution of Israel and its merger into a nontheocratic, nondiscriminatory Unified Palestine where no one has special rights and no one is treated badly because of his religion or ethnicity.
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How many "gay pride" parades were there in the Soviet bloc? Communist China? How many gay publications? What is "significant" may be arguable; but a few people meeting furtively in a few locations in the Soviet Bloc era, even as the laws and culture remain rigidly and oppressively anti-gay does not constitute "significant" to much of anybody. As Billy G says, early U.S. activists met in secret, out of fear. The gay-rights movement did not become significant until the few became the proud, at least to the point of letting the existence of their organizations become widely known, and seeking ever more publicity in order to change public attitudes and then laws.
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Jack F falsifies reality by talking about "Capitalism" in a discussion of political and human rights under Communism. Capitalism is not a political, but economic form, and it doesn't exist in the major countries of the West in undiluted and unregulated form. The U.S. Government BOUGHT major corporations or huge blocks of stock in the latest Great Recession; that is not Capitalism. Communism, by contrast, is indeed a political as well as economic form, because compulsion by government in 'Socialism' (euphemistic misuse by Communists for "Communism") is substituted for compulsion by need in unmitigated capitalism. And dictatorship tends to be a self-enlarging phenomenon, which may start with economic imperatives but easily morphs into totalitarian insistence that there are no private political rights any more than there are private property rights. In capitalism, corporations are happy to sell to homosexuals, as much as to anyone else. But Communist regimes have been antihomosexual for no discernible economic reason.
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As for Nazism, which rounded up and killed homosexuals, it too had a totalitarian mindset that set upon nonconformists largely just because they would not conform. In the case of Germany, however, a relatively small part of Europe that wanted to grow larger, reproduction at a high rate was essential to man the armies and fill the conquered territories of Greater Germany. Thus, homosexual activity worked against that long-term purpose, so suppression of homosexuality could be justified on that basis. The modern world is not allowed to evaluate Nazism's good points, because the things like efficiency, social cohesion, and giving people a sense of national and personal purpose were harnessed to monstrous misbehavior. So the autobahns and Volkswagens, and advances in fields like rocketry made under Nazi government sponsorship are to be ignored. Neither the Soviets nor the United States ignored them, however, and both tried to get as many German rocket scientists as they could after the War. And the U.S. Interstate Highway System, inaugurated by the President who was the Commander-in-Chief of Allied forces in WWII, Eisenhower, proceeded from appreciation of the virtues of Hitler's superhighways.
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The problem for the intellectually honest is always to separate the wheat from the chaff, use what is useful, and learn what can be learned in a good way from a bad time. Five-year plans were given a bad name by the failures of Soviet central planning, but we have REGIONAL plans and set multi-year goals in regard to wetland preservation and restoration, etc. An idea stands on its own, regardless of who employed it. You CAN learn from your enemies. In fact, it is often IMPORTANT to learn from your enemies. But it is equally important not to EMULATE them.

I forgot to mention what I once heard as a Chinese proverb but cannot find thru Google right now, something to the effect that a good word can come from a bad mouth, or do not ignore a good word merely because it comes from a bad mouth.
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Another old-time gay activist and academic joined the discussion, and put what I regarded as an inappropriate and irrelevant historical spin on things. So I replied.

You speak of rituals from hundreds of years ago that are presumably NOT even current practice as tho they are the future. That's akin to suggesting that if Puritans are allowed to preach their brand of intolerant Christianity, we will surely see a rise in people being put into stocks and pelted with rotting vegetables, and witch trials, and people being bound hand and foot and thrown into ponds to see if they are witches or not. Or if Catholicism is allowed to grow, we will see the Inquisition consigning heretics to the flames. Or — you get the picture.
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Most if not all religions are disgraceful in their treatment of unbelievers, and many nonbelievers are grateful that Christendom was rent by the Protestant Reformation, which weakened the stranglehold of a single church on society.
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Don't you see that the appeal of Islam is precisely that the proud (infidels) will be brought low, and that the people who have suffered will rise over and oppress those who at best ignored their pains and at worst actively oppressed THEM? If that is so, then the way to fite Islamist extremism is to do justice to the downtrodden in Moslem countries.
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The main problem with Islam is that it has no Pope to pronounce upon what is and is not permitted. The Koran is apparently so poetic that it lends itself to myriad, mutually contradictory interpretations. There is nothing new in that either. Judaism, and Christian followers of Jewish myth, posit both that Adam and Eve were the only two people at the beginning of the world, AND that Cain found a wife among the people of Nod. WHAT people of Nod? Within 2 pages in the Old Testament, the Bible contradicts itself, but people claim to believe in the literal truth of a Bible that cannot be literally true because two statements are mutually contradictory, so it is not possible for a rational person to believe in both. Indeed, the Jews' "jealous God", their God of Wrath, is plainly NOT the Christians' God of Love, but people pretend He is both. They also pretend that God knows all things in advance, yet went ahead to create the world, only later to drown it for its sins. But He won't do that again, because, um, because he learned his lesson and admitted that drowning puppies and kittens for the crimes of man was the wrong thing to do, a mistake. But God doesn't make mistakes. It's like that classic Star Trek episode in which Captain Kirk gets a robot/satellite that believed itself to be perfect and that its duty was to eradicate imperfection, to admit that it had made a mistake even tho it was supposed to be incapable of mistake, and posed those two "truths" against each other. The robot/satellite starts to smoke from inside its artificial-intelligence brain and is so confounded and occupied in trying to figure out what to do, that the crew has time to beam it outside the Enterprise just before it destroys itself in keeping with its duty to destroy imperfection.
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Would that we could make the religious fanatics of the world accept that they do not have the right to pretend to believe in two diametrically opposed ideas, rather than letting them get away with lame excuses like, "I don't pretend to know everything. That's where faith comes in."
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If a caliph or sultan or other Moslem Pope were to try to crack the whip on heretical misstatements of Islam, would he be able to do so? Not all Christians heed joint pronouncements of the Pope and Archbishop of Canterbury as binding even on Roman Catholic or Anglican/Episcopalian priests, much less ordinary members of the church The notion that each person has his or her own direct line to God so does not need other people telling him/her what to think or do, makes imposing any version of religion upon all supposed adherents nearly impossible.
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It is, alas, not realistic to disabuse people in general of superstitions and supernatural myths, because they serve deep needs of weak and weak-minded people. At end, then, we have to pursue a paired policy of dialog and encouraging a live-and-let-live ethos. Or match Islam's missionary outreach with Christian missionary fervor. Or we have to fite the neocons' permanent war. Or surrender. Or wage a war of extermination that kills scores of millions and fills the atmosphere with nuclear radiation.
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None of the alternatives that come readily to mind are happy ones, if we radicalize hundreds of millions of people across the Moslem world. Zionism has produced vast disruptions and radicalization. Calming down scores of millions of deeply indignant, materially impoverished people is hard to do, especially if they won't take a drink. Obama can't call them together to talk things out over a couple of beers at the White House.

Implicit in the last two sentences is that part of the problem with Islam is its prohibition of alcohol. I am quite serious about that. Alcohol serves hugely valuable purposes in relieving stress and easing social interactions by lowering inhibitions and defenses and opening people to new ideas. Some peoples have problems with alcohol. Perhaps Muhammed felt that Arabs were one of those peoples, like American Indians, who can't handle alcohol; Arabs were his initial audience; and it didn't occur to him that peoples who did not have a problem with alcohol might become part of the body of the faithful of his new religion, so prohibition of alcohol was intended only for people who have a problem with it, not for all people. But Islam is now stuck with that idiotic prohibition. Will modern Moslems be able to get rid of it as easily as the Catholic Church did away with its prohibition on eating meat on Fridays?
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The next round of replies came in, and I answered.

There is a simple solution to the problem of Moslem immigration to Europe: ban it, and make up the need for immigrants, if any (as to support pension benefits for an aging population), from Latin America, a Christian region. I imagine that impoverished Mexicans, Guatemalans, Brazilians, Haitians, etc., would be delited to be flown by employers to countries in Europe — well, at least the warmer countries — and especially if the receiving country speaks a Romance language that would be easier for them than English.
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I called the Western Hemisphere the fortunate Hemisphere because the overwhelming preponderance of its population is Christian, and even parts of Latin America are relatively progressive. Witness approval of gay marriage by Mexico City.
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I certainly concede, as everyone must, that Islam does seem much more violent today than Christianity — today. And there is plainly something wrong with the structures if not actual scriptures of Islam that Algerian Islamists can think it OK to slice open the belly of a pregnant woman and kill her baby after slashing the woman's throat [I saw reports of incidents like that actually happening some years back; I did not make it up] — and think their God wants them to do that, and they will be rewarded in Paradise for doing so. But to say that ALL of Islam is barbarous and incapable of modernization and reform is ultimately defeatist, more than just irrational. It points to only one future: total war. And countries under siege rarely take that as a good time to liberalize.

That's where the conversation ended, yesterday. If there is a followup, and I have something I'd like to mention here, I'll address it in a future blogpost.

2010-01-01T15:11:00.001-05:00

Messages from and for Uganda. I received email today from someone concerned about draconian antigay legislation under consideration in Uganda. This is the legislation that conservative megachurch pastor Rick Warren felt compelled to publicly oppose on December 10th. I present below the text of that email, then my reply.

Here in Uganda, gays are at risk of being segregated from society and there is a bill they want to pass for any one to be sentenced to death if found guilty.

How can you assist us here? I want to start an under ground movement of gays but I need a house where we shall be meeting without being detected.

Waiting to he[ar] from you.

Below is the extract from the media
Kampala — A stringent Bill against homosexuality is in the offing, the state minister for ethics and integrity, Dr. James Nsaba Buturo, has said.

Addressing a press conference at the Media Centre yesterday, Buturo said the country was besieged by homosexuality, pornography, prostitution, human sacrifice, drug abuse, embezzlement and witchcraft to the extent that it was "dangerously becoming a permissive society."

He noted that once the Bill is passed into law, it will be an offence to publish and distribute literature on homosexuality or advocate for it.

He also stated that it would become impossible for homosexuals to address press conferences and attract people to their cause, once the Bill becomes law.

He, however, declined to reveal the penalties for offenders.

Buturo said he was under pressure from some development partners "to go slow on homosexuals".

He disclosed that some donors were threatening to withdraw funding if Uganda becomes more hostile to homosexuals.

"I all the time tell them to leave us alone. I say (to them) that Uganda's integrity is more than the money they give us. We are not going to be taken advantage of on account of financial support," Buturo stated.

After all, he remarked, 70% of the aid that Uganda gets is repatriated.

The minister dismissed the notion that people are born homosexual.
"Ugandans who are choosing to promote illegality should not abuse the rights of the majority," he warned.

Buturo urged religious institutions to fight immorality, arguing that they are "supremely mandated to address matters of the soul."

He disclosed that he was looking after 60 former homosexuals, saying they are under threat from their former colleagues. He, however, did not name the place where they are being kept.

I replied:

We have no contacts in Uganda who might be able to assist, I'm sorry to say. It is extremely bizarre that a continent that is being ravaged by poverty brought on by grotesque overpopulation, which is causing habitat destruction that threatens many species, sees homosexuality, a natural control on overpopulation, as an enemy to be suppressed. Yes, by all means let heterosexuals destroy Africa's wildlife, forests, and grasslands, and produce mass starvation, dehumanizing poverty, and desertification. We wouldn't want populations to be in balance with nature!
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I think that while there is still time, before passage of any law that might forbid open statements to media in favor of homosexual rights, gay men in Uganda and who can reach Ugandans from outside the country need to make precisely this point: that in the work of creating a better future, homosexuality is a potentially huge HELP, not harm. I will put this email exchange into my Mr. Gay Pride blog, WITHOUT your name (unless you want it to appear, with or without your email address), which will provide a means for people with Internet access to consider this matter. Some of them may have ways to help, and if anyone contacts me to offer assistance, I will let you know. But that blog has a very small readership at present. Alas, there is no major way we can help change attitudes in a backward country. We are still trying to change attitudes in the United States. Good luck.

2009-12-24T16:56:00.004-05:00

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)

2009-10-27T09:07:00.000-04:00

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.

2009-10-19T20:20:00.000-04:00

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.

2008-11-06T02:59:00.000-05:00

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.

2008-08-15T02:06:00.000-04:00

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.

2007-09-01T08:06:00.001-04:00

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.

2007-08-30T02:59:00.000-04:00

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.

2007-06-23T19:32:00.000-04:00

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.)

2007-06-12T01:20:00.000-04:00

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.

2007-06-02T02:59:00.000-04:00

'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.

2007-04-02T02:59:00.000-04:00

>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.

2007-03-13T19:42:00.000-04:00

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.)

2007-03-04T09:41:00.000-05:00

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.)

2007-03-03T16:43:00.000-05:00

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?

2006-12-17T16:59:00.000-05:00

"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.

2006-12-01T06:27:00.000-05:00

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.)