Howl of the KweerWolf

Just in case you were wondering ...

2007-05-18T21:15:00.000-05:00

... why I haven't update this blog in a while, it's because I packed up and moved my blog to another service.

The new (and hopefully improved) blog can be found at The Good, the Bad ... and the Fabulous.

(Yeah, I know, it's kind of a gay name. But then it is a gay blog.)

Ex-Reverend Lonnie gets off on hustlers and technicalities

2007-03-15T20:08:00.000-05:00

Back in those carefree days before most of us had heard the name Ted Haggard, (or, if we had heard it, we had no idea he was experiencing "the sins of Sodom" first-hand with a hustler who was also supplying him with crystal meth) There was only Oklahoma's Rev. Lonnie Latham to make fun of.

Rev. Lonnie, for those who don't recall, was a Southern Baptist preacher and leader who was picked up in a prostitution sting outside Oklahoma City's notorius Habana Inn for propositioning a hustler. (The full story is here ... just scroll down to the bottom on the page on the link.) Lonnie tried to explain it away by claiming he was conducting a new sort of Baptist sidewalk ministry to save those pitiful homo-seck-shuls from the hellfire of eternal damnation.

Poor Lonnie! He had to step down from his church and his leadership position within the Southern Baptist Convention. Southern Baptists, it seems, don't take kindly to the fellas they look up to for moral guidance getting down on their knees for any reason other than prayer. While the Baptists shunned him and gays made him posterboy for denial, he did make a few friends like those godless, pro-commie, pro-abortion, pro-gay rights folks at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Makes you wonder which caused Rev. Lonnie more embarassment: getting caught in a prostitution sting at an infamous gay hotel or being defended by the ACLU?

Rev. Lonnie had his day in court recently and, unlike his interupted business transaction/sidewalk ministry with a young hustler, this time Lonnie got off.

According to an article in EthicsDaily.com:

An Oklahoma judge on Wednesday acquitted a former Southern Baptist Convention leader accused of propositioning an undercover male police officer, but did not address whether the lewdness statute under which he was charged is unconstitutional, according to news reports.

Latham's attorney last month filed a motion to have Oklahoma's lewdness statute declared unconstitutional, based on Lawrence v. Texas, a 2003 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that states cannot make it a crime for consenting adults to engage in homosexual acts.

Unlike other suspects arrested in the Oklahoma City sting operation, Latham reportedly did not discuss exchanging money. If an act isn't criminal, attorney Mack Martin argued in a two-week non-jury trial, it shouldn't be illegal to discuss it.

Martin told the Tulsa World that Latham was ecstatic about the verdict when he spoke to him Wednesday afternoon. The Associated Press added that Latham is not bitter about the case. Latham reportedly did not return phone calls to the newspaper Wednesday afternoon.

So Brother Lonnie got off on a technicality instead of a hustler ... all because he didn't discuss the idea of paying for the services of the hustler.

That's kind of a weak vindication, Lonnie. It doesn't mean you weren't trying to get the guy up to a room for a little "service" of your own. In fact, based on the Southern Baptist preachers I've known, it's probably much more likely that Rev. Lonnie was looking for a little freebie to ease the tension of conducting his sidewalk ministry. And if the business deal had been concluded, Rev. Lonnie would have no doubt found a way to write it off on his taxes. Doesn't screaming "Oh Gawd! Oh Jay-Zuz! Ah'm comin'," amount to conducting a church service?

If these was justice in the world, Rev. Lonnie would step up and announce that he is gay ... that he's always been gay ... that he was born that way ... and that despite all his prayers, he's still gay.

That's not likely to happen though. As the EthicsDaily article continues: "As a spokesman in media, he reportedly supported the SBC's position that homosexuality should not be tolerated but rather overcome through religious faith and counseling aimed at changing sexual orientation." So instead what we'll likely see is Rev. Lonnie coming back in a few months to announce that he's completely cured of his perverted urges and if you'll just send him enough money and sign up for his "Pray Away the Gay" seminars, you, too, can be healed!

A (mostly) undistinguished history of music appreciation

2007-03-11T16:54:00.000-05:00

Without the benefit of any formal musical training - apart from a singularly uninspired year of trombone in the seventh grade - I have doomed more careers of musicians than the most persnickety Rolling Stone music critics.

Even as a child, I could hear a song I really, really liked on the radio, go out and buy the album (back in the dark days when music came on flat, vinyl discs), and the musician who recorded it would drop right off the charts and into the oblivion of one-hit wonders.

Want proof? Anybody heard of Susan Jacks and the Poppy Family? The first time I heard them sing "Which Way You Going, Billy?" on the top-40 AM radio station, I just had to get the album. A week of chores and lawn-mowing for neighbors gave me enough money to rush out and buy it. The result is history ... or non-history, as the case may be. Susan Jacks and the Poppy Family is now barely a footnote in the history of rock-n-roll.

Flash forward a few years and I can take credit (or blame, depending on one's point of view) for the death of disco. I was 19 and it was the nation's bicentennial and I was enamored with the first song I heard on my first trip to a gay bar. (For the record, the bar was The Dover Fox on Main Street in Kansas City which exists as a vacant lot today.) So I rushed right out and bought not one, but two disco remixes of classic '60s songs: Santa Esmerelda's "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" and "House of the Rising Sun." The house that disco built collapsed almost overnight.

The era of MTV arose from the ashes of disco and my poor luck with picking music continued unabated. The only difference was that now I was working and had more disposable income with which to demolish musical careers. Quarterflash, Bertie Higgins, Haircut 100, Gary Numan and Thomas Dolby all disappeared overnight, never to be heard from again outside of those K-Tel music collections sold on late-night infomercials.

About the only musical groups whose casettes I could safely buy were already established groups whose fame made them mostly immune to being relegated to the one-hit wonder status my curse bestowed on so many musical groups. But with the still new MTV introducing me to so many new groups back in the day when MTV actually played music instead of focusing on dumb "reality" shows, I was so tempted to risk dooming a group to the Wal-Mart bargain bin by purchasing their casettes.

One group I'd been following since I first saw MTV was the Irish rock band U2. I can still remember the music video for "New Year's Day" from the early days of MTV, but I resisted buying their music. Afterall, I made the mistake of buying the first album from Asia, rumored to be the first supergroup of the '80s, and the band promptly broke up. But in a moment of weakness, I bought U2's Joshua Tree album.

I loved that album ... every song on it. When it wasn't with me in my car stereo, the casette was in my home stereo. Surely this was tempting fate considering my luck at picking bands. I expected to hear any day that all the members of U2 died in a fiery plane crash on their way to a concert or were killed in a Northern Ireland bomb blast.

When no tragedy happened, I began to wonder if the curse had been broken. With every subsequent release of a U2 album, my fears that my mere touch could doom a band faded. I watched as the band became even more popular - even if lead singer Bono could be insufferably sanctimonious on occasion.

I was thinking back on U2's The Joshua Tree album just the other day when I stumbled across one of those "This Day in History" triva fillers on a web site. The Joshua Tree was released 20 years ago Friday ... and despite my curse, U2 is still around and making music.

My casette of The Joshua Tree is long gone and replaced later by a CD and most recently downloaded onto my iPod. Songs like "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" and "Where the Streets Have No Names" still speak to me with as fresh a voice today as when I first heard them two decades ago.

Maybe that's the definition of good music. If I were to hear Quarterflash singing "Harden My Heart" or Bertie Higgins singing "Key Largo" today, I'd smile about the memories and how the songs brought back a particular place and time. But The Joshua Tree album has a timeless quality that speaks to me in a new voice every time I hear it.

IHOP, home of the 'Rooty-Tooty Fresh 'n Fruity,' wants diners who are less 'fruity'

2007-03-08T18:42:00.000-06:00

"You must remmember this/a kiss is just a kiss ..." Or so sang Dooley Wilson as the piano-playing Sam in "Casablanca." That was back in 1942. Sixty-five years later, a kiss is just a kiss only if it's involves a couple of the opposite sex.

If you're talking, say, girl-on-girl action, kissing can get you kicked out of the International House of Pancakes. At least it can in Grandview, a run-down, backwards, pit of a town just south of Kansas City where they apparently like their pancakes hot and their same-sex smooches not at all.

Last week, so the story goes as reported by one of the local TV stations, a small group of lesbians gathered at the Grandview IHOP - as they had been doing on Friday evenings for years. (I'll leave aside any snarky comments about why any gay or lesbian would actually want to eat at an IHOP.) One of the women arrived late and when she came to the table, she kissed her partner. That when the trouble began. According to news reports from FOX4 (yes, I said FOX) the only news outlet to actually cover the story:

The women said they met up at IHOP Friday night around dinner time. When one of the women's partners showed up, they greeted each other with a kiss. They said there was another kiss on the cheek later, but they said it was nothing outrageous. The restaurant's general manager said he got a complaint and asked the women to leave.

The women said they've been going to the IHOP off 71 Highway in Grandview for years and they've never had a problem until Friday.

"We were being disruptive by having a common kiss like any normal straight couple would have," Blair Funk said.

"He said it's just that we've had complaints and it's unacceptable and as a family restaurant we don't accept that and don't accept you and she said maybe we should go," Jackie Smith said. "He said I'm going to have to ask you to leave and not return."

The general manager told me he had a complaint because one of the couples french kissed and were touching each other. He said he told them this is a family restaurant and their behavior was unacceptable. Blair said she and her girlfriend weren't doing anything outrageous

"My significant other had her arm around me on the back of the bench or whatever and we did kiss and then I maybe kissed on the cheek but it was nothing too intense," Funk said.

"And it was after we left, he flat out asked us to leave because we were gay," Smith said.

Smith wrote a letter to IHOP's corporate office and got an email response Tuesday that said, "we're sorry to learn about the difficulties you encountered at this location."

It's not hard to imagine some Grandview diners being scandalized by actually seeing a lesbian liplock up close. Grandview, by the way, is the home for the delusional "ex-gay" snake-oil salesman Andrew Comiskey. No wonder he feels so at home there. No doubt there's lots of pressure exerted to make sure IHOP remains a bastion of family values ... just as long as the families are made up of a heterosexual couple of their statistical 2.3 children.

You can be sure that a hetero version of the same display of affection would have passed without notice.

While I've never been to the Grandview IHOP, I have been to other IHOPs, including another suburban one on Shawnee Mission Parkway. I can recall seeing two straight couples sharing a booth in which one of the teen couples was engaged in some serious making out. They weren't just pecking each other on the cheek. They were playing full-on tonsil hockey. And yet no one complained to the manager.

It makes me wonder what would happen if I would have called the manager over and told her, "Those kids over there with their tongues down each others' throats are offending my sensibilities. Please ask them to leave."

It would make an interesting experiment to conduct if I ever go to IHOP again. But I seriously doubt if I will; at least not until they issue an apology to the group of lesbians they kicked out and adopt a policy that they will not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.

(If anyone else is moved to contact IHOP and express their opinion about how IHOP treats its LGBT customers, the company's contact information can be found here.)

Selling the 'ex-gay' snake oil

2007-01-20T15:56:00.000-06:00

The Kansas City Star, Kansas City's only daily newspaper, is selling snake-oil. Again.

On Friday’s op-ed page, The Star handed over space to a proponent of “ex-gay” therapies and allowed him to hawk his dubious “pray away the gay” cures in a piece titled “Christian community can transform homosexuals.”

This is the second time the Rev. Andrew Comiskey of the “ex-gay” Desert Streams Ministry has been allowed to promote his anti-gay agenda unchecked on The Star’s opinion pages. He first attacked the LGBT community with an op-ed piece in the June 21 issue of the newspaper.

We all know that “ex-gay” ministries are not only a fraud, but represent a clear danger to LGBT youth and others who become ensnared in such programs. However, it’s apparent that The Star doesn’t know that … at least not yet. That’s why I’m encouraging everyone to inundate The Star with letters to the editor (letters@kcstar. com) and send letters and e-mails or call the newspaper’s op-ed page editor, Charles Coulter (816-234-4476 or ccoulter@kcstar. com) and it readers’ representative, Derek Donovan (816-234-4722 or ddonovan@kcstar. com) objecting to space being given for Comiskey to promote his anti-gay agenda.

Some talking points you may want to consider using are:

The American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association (among many other organizations) have condemned “ex-gay” therapies and have gone so far as to declare them harmful to clients.

Studies of these programs show they have very low success rates, in the neighborhood of 3 percent of participants successfully converted. That's a big difference from the highly exaggerated success rates these programs claim.

Comiskey's own Desert Stream Ministries has provided examples of what a sham these programs are. Desert Stream Ministries was sued in 1998 by the parents of a client who alleged the young man was sexually abused while undergoing therapy. The family later settled for an undisclosed sum.

By providing a platform for people like Comiskey to claim sexual orientation can be changed, The Star is promoting a potential harmful “treatment” no different from fake “cures” for cancer that prey on the gullible and desperate.

Additionally, if you're in the Kansas City area I would like to hear from anyone who might be interested in forming a delegation to meet with The Star’s editorial board and taking our concerns directly to the newspaper. If The Star is going to publish opinion pieces from opponents of our community, then it’s time that The Star begins publishing more voices from our community.

If you are interested in meeting with officials from The Star or getting involved in some way, please e-mail me at kayceewolf@yahoo. com.

The accidental president and the accidental hero

2006-12-27T19:00:00.000-06:00

With the news today that Gerald Ford died last night, I find myself thinking back to what I can remember of the 38th president. Since I was in high school at the time of his presidency, mostly what I remember is his occasional stumble and the way Chevy Chase mercilessly lampooned Ford as a bumbler back in the days when Saturday Night Live was actually funny.

I can also remember the outrage many felt at his pardon of Richard Nixon, the man he followed into the presidency; his wife, Betty, who I always thought was classy for a Republican; those silly WIN (for "Whip Inflation Now") buttons; that he was given the title "the accidental president" because - named vice president when Spiro Agnew resigned in disgrace and then Nixon resigned in the wake of the Watergate hearings - he became president without a single person voting him into office. I also remember he survived two attempts on his life as '60s idealism collided with '70s cynicism.

Seventeen days after an assassination attempt by a former follower of convicted mass murderer Charles Manson, Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, as second attempt was made on Ford's life. That attempt, on Sept. 22, 1975, as Ford was leaving San Francisco's Saint Francis Hotel, was thwarted not by the Secret Service agents given the responsibility for protecting the president, but from a bystander who happened to notice the nondescript, middle-aged woman pull out a .38-calliber revolver and aim it at the president.

The would-be assassin, Sara Jane Moore, a one-time FBI informant who was obsessed with the Patty Hearst case, missed Ford from a distance of about 40 feet because the man standing next to her, a Vietnam veteran, grabbed her arm.

That man was Oliver Sipple, known as Billy to his friends. He had grown up in Detroit and signed up with the Marines. During a tour of duty in Vietnam in 1968, Sipple was wounded by shrapnel. He was in and out of veterans' hospitals in Michigan and in San Francisco where he later moved. Eventually he was listed as completely disabled on psychological grounds. Sipple could have faded into history as one of thousands of returning Vietnam vets who carried wounds on their psyches as well as on their bodies. More than likely that's what would have happened had he not stopped to see why a crowd had gathered outside the Saint Francis Hotel on that day.

In a single instant, the time it takes to grab an arm pointing a gun, Sipple's life changed. In saving the life of Ford, he was initially known as the Vietnam vet hero. But there was more. Sipple had a secret. He was gay.

It's hard to believe some three decades hence, but in 1975 there were no gay-straight alliance clubs for high school-aged kids dealing with coming out. Back then talk shows like Donahue still considered being gay shocking enough to be the subject of entire shows - unlike now where you'd have to be a gay Republican married to a person of the opposite sex who enjoys sex with various barnyard animals to raise the eyebrows of the typical talk show viewer. There were no shows like Will and Grace on TV that featured ongoing gay characters. Instead, if a show was brave enough to introduce a gay or lesbian character, you could expect that they'd never be mentioned again at best or, at worst, be killed off in some gruesome fashion by the end of the episode.

While Sipple was gay, he was also not out. At least not in the sense we understand it today. That's probably why he left his family behind in Detroit to move to San Francisco.

Once in San Francisco, Sipple volunteered for politicians, including Harvey Milk whose own assassination was still three years away. He also took jobs as bouncer in some of the city's gay bars.

After a day at the Vietnam vet hero, more stories began to leak out about Sipple and his connections to San Francisco's gay community. Gay activists - including Harvey Milk - saw an opportunity to show America that gays weren't the stereotypical sissies. They proclaimed that gays could be heroes, too, and pointed to Sipple as proof. Soon the story was picked up by the mainstream media and it wasn't long before Sipple's family back in Detroit was reading about Sipple's heroism and his homosexuality.

Sipple's mom, a deeply religious woman, would have no doubt been proud to have a hero in the family, but just not a homosexual one. She (and the rest of Sipple's family) cut off all communication with him. Sipple wasn't even contacted by family members when his mother died.

Angry about the effect his "outing" had on his life and family, Sipple filed a $15 million lawsuit against The San Francisco Chronicle and other publications who printed the story about the gay veteran who saved the president for invasion of privacy. Sipple's case was dismissed and, in 1984 the dismissal was upheld by the state court of appeals. The loss caused Sipple's attorney to wonder whether the next time an ordinary citizen had the chance to intervene in an assassination attempt he or she would hesitate, remembering what happened to Sipple.

Broke and embittered, Sipple spent the rest of his life slipping deeper into an alcoholic haze and depression. His health - physical and mental - deteriorated until early February 1989 when he was found dead in his bed. He was 47 when he died.

For saving the life of Gerald Ford, Sipple received a letter of thanks from the president. He also received life-long estrangement from his family, an uphill legal battle that he didn't win, and enough bitterness at the media and the gay activists who had used him to last the rest of his lifetime.

Penguin butt-sex and other worries of the lunatic right

2006-12-16T09:25:00.000-06:00

Penguins are big with the whacko fundies this season. First they went after the children's book, And Tango Makes Three, a true story of two male penguins in New York's Central Park Zoo who care for an egg and raise the chick. Surely a subtle reference designed to promote the idea of gay adoptions!

Now, intent on removing all references to homosexuality ... oops! make that "homo-seck-shu-ality" in the vernacular of the religious reich ... those who would peek into everyone's bedrooms are finding sinister hints of gayness in kids' movies.

The object of their wrath? The movie Happy Feet, about a penguin who can't sing like the other penguins, but, boy can he dance.

Happy Feet has already rattled the right wing with its pro-environmental message and references to global warming (no doubt a subtle endorsement for Al Gore to make another run for the presidency in 2008). Now it has apparently caught the attention of the anti-gay bigots for its lead character who is "different" from the other penguins. Differtness, it seems, is not only suspect among the religiously addicted crowd, it's also a code for ... you know ... homo-seck-shul butt sex!

No less an authority than James Dobson, arch-homophobe and founder of the extremist fringe hate group Focus on the Family, weighed in on perverted penguins on his show earlier this week. He was discussing the film with washed-up right-wing movie critic Michael Medved, according to the media watchdog web site, Media Matters for America:

During the December 11 edition of his Focus on the Family broadcast, FOF founder and chairman James Dobson hosted syndicated conservative radio host Michael Medved to discuss the film Happy Feet (Warner Bros., November 2006), an animated feature about penguins living in Antarctica during a period of environmental upheaval. Medved claimed that the film contains a "subtext, as there so often is, about homosexuality," prompting Dobson to wonder whether the filmmakers are "getting at the idea that homosexuality is genetic."

As Media Matters for America has noted, in a November 17 entry, titled "Don't Be Misled By Crappy Feet," on his Townhall.com weblog, Medved called the animated movie, "the darkest, most disturbing feature length animated film ever offered by a major studio." He further alleged that the film contains "a bizarre anti-religious bias" and "a subtext that appears to plead for endorsement of gay identity." Medved also attacked Happy Feet in a November 29 op-ed in USA Today for its purported "pro-environmental" propaganda, as Media Matters also documented.

You know, there are medications that can treat the type of paranoia exhibited by Medved, though I seriously doubt he'd avail himself of that sort of therapy. No doubt he makes a buttload of cash pushing his delusions to the easily panicked sheep on the far right. But I digress. Medved's mental health issues aside, here's a transcript of Dobson and Medved chatting about penguin perversion:

MEDVED: And then there's this whole subtext, as there so often is, about homosexuality. Not that the penguins are gay -- they're not gay -- but the one penguin hero doesn't fit in and the religious authorities -- the so-called religious right in the penguin world -- are very judgmental. They say, "You are not a penguin. You're not a real penguin." And then he makes this heartfelt plea, he says, "Dad, you have to accept me as I am. I can't change." And --

DOBSON: Are they getting at the idea that homosexuality is genetic? Is that what the subtle implication is?

MEDVED: Well, how many times do we hear that in the media? That it's not a matter of choice, it's not a matter of change, and my problem with that -- as I understand, that there are some people, who -- for whom that may be true, but they're other people -- and you and I know them -- who have changed their lives and have turned around their lives.

In just a few short sentences, Medved and Dobson manage to tie an animated penguin who can't sing like the other penguins to bashing the religious right for being "very judgmental" (here's a hint guys: they ARE judgmental!) and then promote the sickness known as the "ex-gay" movement.

Wow! Are these guys good or what? I think we should get them started on digging for more evidence of a "homo-seck-shul agenda" in other kids' stories. At least that would keep them busy for a while and cause them to leave the reality-based world alone.

I'll even get them started with a few suggestions they may want to check into:

Peter Pan - all that stuff about the "Lost Boys" is surely a code for something unsavory! (Kind of makes you understand why Michael Jackson called his ranch Neverland!)

Dumbo - Now there's a character who's different from the rest of the elephants and thanks to Michael Meved's exceptional mind we now know that different equals gay. And besides, Dumbo's relationship with that mouse is just plain unnatural!

Cinderella - Ever see the two mice in the Disney version? Gay, gay, gay!

The Ugly Duckling - Oh my Gawd! That duck is DIFFERENT from the others! And the story was written by Hans Christian Andersen, a known homo!

Warner Brothers cartoons - Just why was Bugs Bunny so willing to put on a dress to fool simple-minded "wabbit" hunter Elmer Fudd? No doubt Elmer's a symbolic swipe at the religious right who would like to do some of their own homo huntin'.

There you go, Jimmy and Mikey. There's some ideas to start you out. Now go do your research about how there's a big conspiracy to promote that homo-seck-shul agenda you both keep harping about ... and leave the rest of us the fuck alone.

Coming out of the clergy's closet

2006-12-11T21:46:00.000-06:00

There must be a shortage of toaster ovens. That's the only reason I can think of for the number of clergy people who are coming out, possibly in response to the aforementioned home appliances the LGBT community is rumor to hand out to new recruits.

The latest clergy member to get in line for a free toaster is the Rev. Paul Barnes of Grace Chapel in Douglas County, Colorado. According to an article in The Denver Post, Barnes spoke to his 2,100-member congregation Sunday via a videotape and announced that he had struggled with his homosexuality most of his life. He also stepped down as leader of the church he founded.

Unlike the Rev. Ted Haggard, another Colorado native, Barnes was neither a high-profile evangelical preacher nor hypocritical enough to preach against the evils of homo-seck-shu-ality at roughly the same time he was getting a hands-free prostate massage courtesy of a male prostitute. According to the article:

Barnes and Grace Chapel stayed out of the debate over Amendment 43, a measure approved by Colorado voters last month defining marriage as between one man and one woman.

"I can't think of a single sermon where he ever had a political agenda," said Dave Palmer, an associate pastor.

Palmer said the church got an anonymous call last week from a person concerned for the welfare of Barnes and the church. The caller had overheard a conversation in which someone mentioned "blowing the whistle" on evangelical preachers engaged in homosexuality, including Barnes, Palmer said.

Palmer met with Barnes, who confessed. At an emergency meeting Thursday, a board of elders accepted Barnes' resignation after he admitted "sexual infidelity," violating the church's code of conduct. Church leaders also must affirm annually that they are "living the moral and ethical teachings of Scripture in my public and private life."

Also unlike Haggard, I can summon up sympathy for Barnes. He spoke in his 32-minute videotaped message about his experience of struggling with his gay feelings and his desire to serve a God he believes views homosexuality as a sin. It's in those moments when Barnes seems most human and most vulnerable ... and most like a person those of us who have struggled with reconciling our identities with the lessons we are taught in the religions in which we grew up. According to Barnes' videotape:

In their only talk about sex, Barnes said his father took him on a drive and talked about what he would do if a "fag" approached him.

Barnes thought, "'Is that how you'd feel about me?' It was like a knife in my heart, and it made me feel even more closed."

When Barnes experienced a Christian conversion at 17, it gave him a glimmer of hope. But his homosexual feelings never went away, he said. He said he cannot accept that a person is "born that way," so he looks to childhood influences.

Barnes said he asked God many times why he was called to ministry, to start Grace Chapel, carrying a "horrible burden."

Barnes' story hits home for me personally - and I'm willing to bet for a lot of other gay men, too. Especially those of us who grew up in conversative religious traditions. I remember struggling with my own feelings about being gay and knowing instinctually that it was something I had to hide. At the age of 16, I even planned to go into the ministry. That was my own form of bargaining with God, just as it was with Barnes.

Though I don't agree with Barnes' rejection of the idea that sexual orientation is something we are born with, I can respect his opinion. And I can respect him for being open with his family and his congregation ... even if the honesty came 40 years late and at the instigation of outside influences.

I hope the members of Barnes' congregation opened their hearts to his story of struggling with who he was. I also hope they are able to remember his story when it comes to dealing with gay issues.

For too long churches have been guilty of the spiritual abuse of their LGBT members. They have forced them into dark corners and denounced them as sinners. They have fostered a system that accepts LGBT folks only if they lie about who they are - to themselves, as well as to the church. For many of us, the choice boils down to rejecting our faith or rejecting ourselves.

As much as I love to poke fun at the hypocrisy of a Ted Haggard or a Lonnie Latham (the Oklahoma Baptist leader who was arrested for soliciting an undercover officer at the infamous Habana Inn in Oklahoma City), it's the experiences of Paul Barnes that drive home the cruel choices some religious traditions force upon their LGBT members.

It's also the experiences of people like Paul Barnes who will help begin to change the hearts and minds of some congregations.

'Whose side were you on in the culture war, Mommy?'

2006-12-06T20:26:00.000-06:00

It was news that shook Washington, D.C. Not the release of the Iraq Study Group report, but the announcement that Vice President Dick ("I'm NOT a war criminal") Cheney and his wife, Lynn, who has dabbled in girl-on-girl action in the pages of a novel she penned, are about to become grandparents.

Actually, the Cheneys already have five grand children. But the sixth one will be a wee bit unique. It will be born to lesbian daughter Mary and her partner Heather.

All along the far right the tongues are wagging. Though in deference to Grampa Dick being a part of the religious right's beloved BushCo administration, much of the "official" comment from the far right has been subdued. At least compared to comments on the ultra-conservative web site, Free Republic, where comments have been posted referring to Mary and Heather's baby as "Satan spawn" and "turkey-baster baby."

Here's a little sampling of the "official" comment from the religious right, the group who put Mary's daddy and his cronies in power:

Janice Crouse of Concerned Women for America described the pregnancy is "unconscionable."

"It's very disappointing that a celebrity couple like this would deliberately bring into the world a child that will never have a father," said Crouse, a senior fellow at the group's think tank. "They are encouraging people who don't have the advantages they have."

Crouse said there was no doubt that the news would, in conservatives' eyes, be damaging to the Bush administration, which already has been chided by some leaders on the right for what they felt was halfhearted commitment to anti-abortion and anti-gay-rights causes in this year's general election.

Carrie Gordon Earll, a policy analyst for the conservative Christian ministry Focus on the Family, expressed empathy for the Cheney family but depicted the pregnancy as unwise.

"Just because you can conceive a child outside a one-woman, one-man marriage doesn't mean it's a good idea," Earll said. "Love can't replace a mother and a father." (From The Associated Press)

Or there's this tidbit from ABC News:

Similar sentiments were expressed by Robert Knight, director of the Culture and Media Institute of the Media Research Center.

"I think it's tragic that a child has been conceived with the express purpose of denying it a father," Knight said.

"Fatherhood is important and always will be, so if Mary and her partner indicate that that is a trivial matter, they're shortchanging this child from the start."

"Mary and Heather can believe what they want," Knight said, "but what they're seeking is to force others to bless their nonmarital relationship as marriage" and to "create a culture that is based on sexual anarchy instead of marriage and family values."

Heck, even the man Grampa Dick works for is on record as not exactly supporting the type of family living arrangement the new Cheney grandchild will be born into. It's only been a few weeks ago that Dubya sobered up enough to tell an Iowa crowd of inbred yokels shortly after the New Jersey Supreme Court instructed the state legislature to provide the same legal rights to same-sex couples as to straight couples, "I believe that marriage is a union between a man and a woman. ... And I believe it's a sacred institution that is critical to the health of our society and the well-being of families, and it must be defended."

And these folks are friends of the Cheney family?

Surveys have indicated how younger people have less of an issue with gay rights, samesex marriage and the idea that the most important element of a family is love and not the genders of parents. Those young people will be voters some day and when some ignorant fun-D'uh-Mental-ist tries to put a law on the books that discriminates against LGBT folks, these young voters will think of their best friend from high school, or the uncle or their cousin or maybe even a brother or sister who's gay or lesbian. They won't just vote "no;" they'll vote "Hell, NO!"

In the breadth of a generation, the landscape will change and those who fought against recognition for families like Mary and Heather's will be looked at with the same sort of shame my generation looks upon the segregationists who screamed about "niggers" and taught that God meant for the races to be separate because the white race was superior to those other people.

Twenty years from now Mary and Heather's child will probably be starting college. When he or she isn't being a typical teenager and thinking that parents can't possibly know anything, perhaps the young person will come to Mary and Heather and ask question.

"What was it like before you could get married, Mom?"

"Did Grampa really work for a man who tried to keep people like you and my other mom from getting together and raising families like it says in my American history textbook?"

"How could you live in such a world, Mom? Wasn't it hard?"

"Did Gramma really let that awful Alan Keyes guy call you a 'self-hedonist' and a 'sinner' and not chew him up and spit him out?"

"If Grampa was the vice president, how come he didn't just tell all those people that hated families like our's just to shut up and be nice to everyone?"

"Mom, my history teacher says the years around the time I was born are called 'the culture wars.' What side of the culture wars were you on, Mommy?"

That last question may be the hardest one Mary and Heather will ever have to answer.

American Apartheid: Notes from the new South Africa

2006-12-01T15:32:00.003-06:00

It used to be popular to hate South Africa. That country on the southern tip of Africa was the last hold-out of white minority rule and the ugly policy of apartheid, a systems of laws that harshly segregated blacks and non-whites (legally referred to as "Coloureds") from the priveleged white population.

U2 lead singer Bono and other rockers calling themselves Artists United Against Apartheid released an album called "Sun City," named after a white-only resort in South Africa, and took a pledge not to perform there until apartheid was abolished. Universities, at the urging of student activists, began to divest themselves of investments in South Africa. It became unfashionable to own gold Krugerrands. Even Mel Gibson's second "Lethal Weapon" movie featured white South African diplomats as the bad guys in 1989.

Faced with the wrath of Mel and Bono - not to mention near universal condemnation around the world and at the U.N. - South Africa began to change. The racist system of apartheid, which had been in place since 1948, fell in 1994.

Once a symbol of oppression, South Africa became a symbol of hope on the African continent and around the world.

In little more than a decade, South Africa has gone from international outcast to a respected member of the world community and a leader in the field of human rights. Meanwhile, America has gone from acknowledged superpower and leader of the free world to a nation viewed with mistrust and sometimes out-and-out loathing.

Since 9/11 and BushCo's ill-conceived war in Iraq, America's standing in the world community has dropped like a stone carelessly kicked into the Grand Canyon. BushCo squandered the world's sympathy and support following the 9/11 attacks on a war based on either erroneous beliefs or outright lies that Iraq was stock-piling weapons of mass destruction. We thumbed our national nose at the international community's concern about how we treated prisoners ... oops! I mean "detainees." Secret prisons, "water boarding," suspension of habeus corpus, photos of grinning Marines pointing to the genitals of naked Iraqi prisoners, thousands upon thousands of dead Iraqi civilians, and a leader viewed by much of the world as a three-quarters mad cowboy who would rather shoot first (and second ... and third) than ever ask questions, painted a bleak picture of 21st century America for the rest of the world.

Somewhere along the way America lost its soul. Or perhaps it simply traded it off for a chance to seize control of an ever-dwindling supply of oil.

The American experiment that began with such promise in words like "We, the people" and the visions of great men of ideas seems destined to draw its final curtain on a leader without a vision who refers to the Constitution as "just a goddamn piece of paper."

LGBT Americans see the reflection of America's ever-speeding decline in our own positions on the national stage. Always marginalized, we had begun to see movement toward having a place at America's table. Rights began to be carved out. Some cities and states passed laws to protect us from discrimination or allowed us domestic partner benefits. We won court challenges on the legality of same-sex only sodomy laws, parenting rights, custody battles, and more.

Then came BushCo and the rise of the hate-mongering "new" conservatives. Suddenly our rights became frozen. As more and more states enacted bans on same-sex marriages, the rights we had won began to be chipped away. Those who would normally be our political allies abandoned us out of fear just supporting our rights would doom them to election losses.

Few things drive this home better than the news out of South Africa today: South Africa becomes first country on continent to legalize same-sex marriage, according to the Associated Press.

Somewhere along the way, America and South Africa traded places. While South Africa moves to become a progressive nation that protects all of it's citizens, America falls back on out-dated bigotry to justify oppressing a minority group.

Now even the U.N. is beginning to pay attention to the plight of LGBT people. A petition titled "For the Universal Decriminalization of Homosexuality" and based essentially on the articles of the U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been introduced into consideration, New York City's Gay City News reports. That document says, in part, "We ask the United Nations to request a universal abolition of the so-called 'crime of homosexuality,' of all 'sodomy laws,' and laws against so-called 'unnatural acts' in all the countries where they still exist." According to the article:

Five Nobel Prize winners, six Academy Award winners, 10 Pulitzer Prize winners, and two former French prime ministers are among the hundreds of VIPs who have endorsed a critically important new global petition campaign for a United Nations resolution in favor of the universal decriminalization of homosexuality, unveiled Monday in Paris.

The resolution and the petition campaign for it were the brainchild of Professor Louis-Georges Tin, president and founder of the Paris-based International Committee for IDAHO (the International Day Against Homophobia).

"With more than 70 countries in the world still making homosexuality a crime by law-and punishable by death in 12 of them-this is a legal scandal which the petition for a proposed U.N. resolution decriminalizing homosexuality gives people a concrete way to fight," Tin said in a statement launching the online petition drive.

Elsewhere, other countries are stepping forward to stand against anti-gay discrimination. Norway is at the forefront of recent efforts, according to the U.K.'s Pink News:

Representatives from Norway will be delivering a short oral statement at the United Nations Human Rights Council on Friday on the issue, and ARC activists want other countries to pledge their support.

The statement deals with the most severe human rights abuses , such as violence, torture and death, directed against people because of their sexual orientation and gender identity. ...

The main States which have already joined, or might consider joining, the statement are Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the European Union have expressed their support for the statement.

I don't see America on that list of supporters, though the article does mention that "the USA may support the statement with sufficient international support and domestic encouragement."

Odd how we used to be the first nation to call for an end to human rights abuses. Now we wait and offer our support only after we see who among our allies is taking a stand.

Odd, too, how we used to condemn countries like South Africa who make bigotry official national policy and now, sadly, we have become one of them.

Statistics paint sobering picture on World AIDS Day

2006-12-01T10:18:00.000-06:00

(These statistics come directly from the Human Rights Campaign's web site. To them I can only add this: Please, please, please be careful and treat yourselves and your partners with respect.)

Dec. 1, 2006, marks World AIDS Day, a time for people around the world to unite in the fight against HIV and AIDS. Twenty-five years have passed since the first AIDS case was diagnosed — and the latest statistics in the United States are staggering. Take a look:

Forty thousand people become infected with HIV every year in the United States.
HIV is the leading cause of death worldwide among those ages 15-59.
Among those living with AIDS in the United States, approximately one-third to one-half are either homeless or at imminent risk of homelessness.
HIV/AIDS is now the leading cause of death for African-American women age 25-34.
More than half of all Americans who received an HIV/AIDS diagnosis in 2004 were men who had sex with men. Nearly 20,000 men who had sex with men received a diagnosis of HIV/AIDS,* accounting for 70 percent of all male adults and adolescents and 51 percent of all people receiving an HIV/AIDS diagnosis that year.
Men who had sex with men accounted for 70 percent of all estimated HIV infections among male adults and adolescents in 2004,* even though only about 5 to 7 percent of male adults and adolescents in the United States identify themselves as men who have sex with men.
HIV infections among men who have sex with men are on the rise. The number of HIV diagnoses for men who had sex with men decreased during the 1980s and 1990s, but recent data show an increase in HIV diagnoses for this group.
The number of HIV/AIDS diagnoses among men who had sex with men increased 8 percent from 2003 to 2004.
Men of color who have sex with men, particularly African-American men who have sex with men, are at particularly high risk. In June 2005, in five major U.S. cities (Baltimore, Los Angeles, New York City, Miami and San Francisco), 46 percent of African-American men who had sex with men were HIV-positive.
Of HIV infection cases reported in 2001 among men ages 13 to 19, 46 percent occurred in men who have sex with men.
Young men who have sex with men are increasingly unaware of their HIV status. In a recent study, 77 percent of those who tested HIV-positive mistakenly believed that they were not infected. Young African-American men who had sex with men were especially likely to be unaware of their infection — approximately nine out of 10 young African-American men who have sex with men, compared to six out of 10 young white men who have sex with men. Of the men who tested positive, most (74 percent) had previously tested negative for HIV infection, and 59 percent believed that they were at low or very low risk.

* Based on data from the 35 areas with long-term, confidential name-based HIV reporting.

Sources: The Centers for Disease Control, Advocates for Youth, Kaiser Family Foundation, HRSA/Department of Health and Human Services.

No mo' of these 'mo's in 2007 ... please!

2006-11-29T19:43:00.000-06:00

The days are dark and dreary now. Sunset comes too early in the day and cold winds begin to sweep down the prairies of Kansas and Nebraska. Flipping up the collar of my jacket as I left work today, I felt the sting of the season's first ice pellets. Two thoughts occurred to me. First, winter is just around the corner; and, second, it's time to trot out that hoary tradition known as the old "end-of-the-year review."

Maybe at some future point I'll post my list of homo highs and lows for the year, but perhaps reflecting my general pissy mood that my usual 10-minute commute home from work took an hour-and-a-half tonight, I think I'll start with a list of celebrity and/or otherwise well known gay folks I sincerely hope don't make the news in 2007. Or, to put it more succinctly: a bunch of big ol' 'mo's who should shut the fuck up.

First up, Sir Elton John. Hey, this guy was my idol in high school. I felt like I was the only one who saw through the coyness to really understand that his "Daniel" was a gay song. Unfortunately, Dame Elton hasn't produced anything worth a crap since Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy hit the charts (and I still want to bitch-slap him and demand my money back for his "Rock of the Westies" album that marked his ignoble decline into irrelevancy). Too bad Elton can't retire and rest on his dusty laurels. Instead he scratches and claws his way back into the spotlight like a demented drag queen on meth. From his public catfigths with Madonna to his recent pronouncement that organized religion should be outlawed, Elton makes clear he'll say anything that will insure he'll get quoted in the media. It's just too bad that all his recent quotes make him sound more bitter than a fourth-rate Bette Davis impersonator at a Joan Crawford film festival. The Bitch is Back? Oh puh-leeeeze, she never left ... but we wish he would.

And speaking of washed up queens, that brings us to George Michael. After all the publicity had died down from his 1998 Los Angeles arrest for "engaging in a lewd act" in an L.A. tearoom with an undercover cop, you'd think 2006 would be the year of sweetness and light for Georgie. After all, he and his boyfriend Kenny Goss planned to register this partnership officially in the U.K. Then in July a British tabloid caught George jumping into the bushes at a notorius gay cruising spot with an unemployed truck driver who was definitely not Mr. Goss. Hey, to each his own, I figure. But then Georgie opened his mouth and claimed cruising parks for anonymous sex at 2 in the morning was part of his "culture" as a gay man. Ummmmm, Georgie, our culture includes such varied things as brunch, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, overly dramatic characters like Blanche DuBois, witty reparte and devastating bon mots ... but I don't think being a park slut qualifies as "culture" in anyone's dictionary. In the coming year may you find all the noteriety as the other half of your duo, Wham ... ummmm, you know? Whats-his-name!

Slutty? Well, that brings to mind the next winner, a guy who puts the 'ho' in homo: Jeff Gannon. Or whatever name he's going by these days. Jeff's the former White House correspondent for the now defunct Talon News Agency who raised eyebrows by always pitching softball questions to Dubya during press conferences. Turns out Talon was a cover for a right-wing web site that took just about any old drivel the White House handed out as a press release and posted it verbatim. Jeff, it seems, wasn't much of a journalist, but he was a former $200-an-hour male prostitute who went by the name of "Bulldog" on the male escort web site liberal bloggers dug up. So just what was Jeff doing on all those visits to the White House on days when there was no press conference? The world may never know. It looked like Jeffie was headed toward obscurity when Chris Crain, the thankfully now former big-wig at Windows Media, hired him to write columns for the company's chain of LGBT publications such as The Washington Blade, The New York Blade, The Southern Voice and others. It's bad enough that Gannon's 15 minutes of fame was extended, but his virulently conservative views - seasoned with more than a dash of Republican self-loathing - saw the light of day in a gay publication, no less, long after he should have followed in the footsteps of other old whores and just (ahem) blow away.

Next up along 2006's walk of shame: former New Jersey Governor James McGreevey. Two years ago he stepped down as governor when his was revealed he tried to land his then-boyfriend a cushy job in state government. (For the record, the "boyfriend" claims he never had sex with the gov, but was sexually harassed by him.) Greevey, who was married to his second wife at the time, announced in a press conference that he was resigning and admitted to being a "gay American." Then he disappeared into the sunset, never to be heard of again. At least until he penned his autobiography, The Confession. Oh, if he had only stayed somewhere off in the sunset. His "confession" (along with his publicity kick-off on Oprah) were things only George Michael could love with his stories of cruising roadside rest areas and fits of woe-is-me self-loathing.

Rounding out the top five: Joe Solmonese, who was selected to lead the allegedly LGBT Human Rights Campaign. My apologies in advance if you're hoping I dug up something sleazy about Joe. I have no idea if he ever went down on George Michael in the bushes or played hide the salami with James McGreevey at a rest area along the New Jersey turnpike. Joe's more of a political whore than a sexual one. As the newly annointed leader of HRC Joe embarked on a cross-country trek to find out what real live gays and lesbians (translation: those who live outside the Washington Beltway) believe are the important issues facing them. Every place he went - and Missouri was among his stops - people told him how important they believe employment issues were. Wow! That was a revelation for Joe! He went back to Washington fresh with the perspective of those real-live homos and dykes his organization is suppose to represent and promptly started talking about the marriage issue. Thanks, Joe. Glad to see our issues and ideas were so important to you that you hightail it back to headquarters and announce your top priority was getting all us homo folks married off so we'd be just like the breeders. We might get fired for being queer, but it's nice to know you want us to come home and share the misery with the same-sex partner of our choosing.

Failing to make the Top 5 list were these two who are at least deserving of a Dishonorable Mention:

Former Congressman Mark ("I did it because I'm an alcoholic ... I mean because I'm gay ... I mean because I was molested by a priest ... I mean because I'm a gay alcoholic who was molested by a priest") Foley; and

The Rev. Ted ("I just got a massage and I threw the meth away") Haggard.

(No doubt we'll see "confessional" autobiographies by them in the bargain bins at Barnes and Noble in the next few years.)

Subjecting nominees to 'the neighbor test'

2006-11-28T08:51:00.000-06:00

Sam Brownback, the right-wing U.S. Senator from Kansas who's considering a run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, is playing to the party's fun-D'uh-Mental-ist fringe. Heck, there's nothing new about that. What is new is that he may be setting a new precedent for judicial nominees: the neighbor test.

Brownback has been blocking the nomination of Michigan Court of Appeals Judge Janet T. Neff because she once attended a commitment ceremony for her lesbian neighbors in Massachusetts four years ago.

According to an Associated Press article:

"But what I want to know is, what does it do to her look at the law? What does she consider the law on same-sex marriage, on civil unions, and I'd want to consider that," Brownback said Sunday on ABC's "This Week." ...

Brownback called gay marriage a developing area of the law best not left to the judiciary anyway.

"To me these issues should be decided by the legislative bodies, not by the judicial bodies, and it seems to me this may indicate some view of hers on the legal issue. And that's what I'm concerned about here, is her view of the legal issue involving same-sex marriage," Brownback said.

In a letter to Brownback written back in October, Neff explained: "The ceremony, which was entirely private, took place in Massachusetts, where I had no authority to act in any official capacity and where, in any event, the ceremony had no legal effect."

Apparently Brownback is looking for a new precedent that can be used to disqualify "liberal" judges. (In Brownback's warped view, "liberal" means the nominees might actually have gay friends or believe that women have a right to control their own bodies.)

But Brownback's tactics may backfire. Suppose that, along with judicial philosophy, Senators can begin delving into other aspects of a judicial nominee's life. Imagine the scene in a Senate hearing room:

"Judge Smith, our background report says you once attended a barbecue at the home of one of your neighbor's who visited a white supremicist site on the Internet on three separate occasions. I'm sorry, but we'll have to disqualify you."

Or maybe this:

"Judge Thompson, I'm afraid we're going to have to disqualify you because your neighbor three doors down was once involved in the radical anti-abortion group Operation Rescue."

Far-fetched? Not really if the ever-oily Brownback gets his way. If one's neighbors can cause a judge's nomination can be blocked over living near liberals, it's only fair that the same can apply to judges whose neighbors are conservative.

In the twin interests of playing to the fundies and spreading anti-gay hate, Brownback has opened a Pandora's box. But like most reactionary conservatives, he's not bright enough to realize it ... until it turns around and bites him in the ass.

Penguin 'family values' ruffle fundie feathers

2006-11-26T10:28:00.000-06:00

These must be hard times for the "family values" crowd who have taken it upon themselves to try to control what the rest of us see and read. Unbridled sex explodes from the movie screens from sea to shining sea ... and even if you happen to find a PG-rated movie where two actors technically can't make the two-backed beast on camera, there are still all the references to sex, sexual innuendos and crude language. The television industry also has been possessed by sex-obsessed demons who, when they aren't going as far as they can to let viewers know that two characters are schtupping, feature gunfire and bloodshed. And don't even get them started on the type of filth in books and magazines.

Surprisingly, though, it's the field of children's literature that's most likely to get the would-be book-burners frothing at the mouth and itching for matches and a pile of books. It's as though they have given up preaching to the rest of us who can legally get into an R-rated movie, don't use a V-chip parental control feature in our televisions and can walk into the nearest 7-Eleven and buy a copy of Playboy without having to resort to seeking a hidden stash at the back of our parents' closet.

The latest target for the fundies is a book called And Tango Makes Three. It's the true story of two male emperor penguins named Roy and Silo in New York's Central Park Zoo who adopt an egg, hatch it and raise the Tango of the title.

Every year or so it's a new title that piques the wrath of the book-burners. Remember Heather Has Two Mommies, a book that made the point that not all kids come from the same sort of families? And then there was the book King and King about a prince who just wasn't into princesses and married a prince? Now it's Roy and Silo who have stirred up the conspiracy-minded "family values" crowd who see evidence of the dreaded homo-seck-shul agenda at work.

Efforts to remove or at least restrict access to the book are underway in a number of state, including - not surprisingly - here in Missouri.

Having read And Tango Makes Three (What can I say? I was bored during my last trip to Barnes and Noble), I have a hard time finding anything that might be objectionable in it. Not once do Roy and Silo offer to introduce little Tango to penguin sodomy. In the tradition of Sesame Street's Bert and Ernie, Roy and Silo are "just good friends" who take it upon themselves to adopt and abandoned egg.

If those who object to the book had taken the time to watch the penguin family values documentary "March of the Penguins," they'd know that female emperor penguins leave the hatching of the eggs to the males. The females are gone for weeks at a time, leaving the males to care for the eggs.

Frankly, I'm surprised the fundies didn't picket "March of the Penguins" because it pushed a feminist agenda by depicting females having little or nothing to do with their eggs and leaving their obviously emasculated male partners at home playing Mr. Mom. But that's a whole different subject.

Typical of the radical right-wing response to And Tango Makes Three is this gem from an article in Georgia's The Brunswick News: "Whether it is And Tango Makes Three or other books that promote two parents of the same sex, it can easily be said that they are a challenge to Judeo-Christian values," said Debbie Brown, member of the First Baptist Church Social Concerns Committee. "A kindergarten or elementary school classroom or library is truly not the place to introduce such controversial issues."

So let's get this straight (so to speak), Debbie ... we should re-write all our science books to reflect that the animal kingdom follows the traditional Judeo-Christian model of a nuclear family consisting of one daddy who goes out and provides for his family, one mommy who stays at the nest, den or lair and lovingly cares for her offspring, and a whole bunch of little ones?

If Debbie and her ilk are offended by two male penguins raising a chick - and promoting that homo-seck-shul agenda - I sincerely hope that none of them go to movies. What must they think of the 2003 film "Second-Hand Lions"? I don't recall seeing them picketing theaters showing the film because perennial adolescent Haley Joel Osment was being raised by two "bachelor uncles" played by Michale Caine and Robert Duvall. Surely those two old guys must have been back at home humping while Haley Joel was out wondering in the cornfield!

Let's hope the Debbies of this world don't have a TV either. Otherwise they might stumble across a show like "Two and a Half Men" where Charlie Sheen and Jon Cryer raise a young, impressionable boy. Why, it's a scandal!

And even if they exercise their parental authority and block that channel, what if their kids happen to find the "family-friendly" Nickelodeon channel and witness such perversions as the classic "My Three Sons" with Fred McMurray sharing parenting responsibilities with (ahem!) Uncle Charlie? And heaven forbid they should catch an episode of that baby-boomer favorite "A Family Affair" with Brian Keith's Uncle Bill and Sebastian Cabot's Mr. French so obviously burning with barely concealed lust for each other while raising Buffy, Jody and Cissy. Talk about an agenda! Do they realize that "french" is a code for oral sex? I won't even mention the obvious play on words with big sister Cissy's name!

To all the Debbie Brown's of the world, here's a thought for you: Lighten up. You make youselves look ridiculous. If you want to spend your time hunting for outlandish conspiracies, by all means go for it. But don't expect the rest of us to jump onto your bandwagon of paranoia.

And don't expect the rest of us to close our eyes to the fact that - whether you like it or not - all sorts of families exist. Not just among humans, but in the animal kingdom, too.

Resignation of right-wing group's leader reveals much about Christian Coalition's 'agenda'

2006-11-25T08:31:00.000-06:00

A little over a month before he could take office, the president-elect of the notoriously right-wing and anti-gay Christian Coalition of America resigned earlier this week. The Rev. Joel Hunter, who was to take over leadership of the group, cited philosophical differences with the group.

So just what were these differences? Hunter wanted to expand the issues the Christian Coalition was involved in to include social issues like poverty and the environment. At a board meeting Wednesday, the group's board of directors delivered an unequivocal veto of Hunter's plan. They wanted the group to remain focused on the Big Two: homosexuality and abortion. "They pretty much said, 'These issues are fine, but they're not our issues, that's not our base,'" Hunter said in an Associated Press article.

As much as I loathe the Christian Coalition, a right-wing group founded in 1989 by religiously insane broadcaster the Rev. Pat Robertson, I have to admire Hunter's stand.

"These are issues that Jesus would want us to care about," Hunter told the AP. "To tell you the truth, I feel like there are literally millions of evangelical Christians that don't have a home right now."

Those comments by Hunter are proving correct on the national stage as some groups within the Christian Coalition are expressing dissatisfaction with the direction the 17-year-old organization is taking. According to the AP, four states - Georgia, Alabama, Iowa and Ohio - have decided to split from the group over concerns it's changing direction on issues like the minimum wage, the environment and Internet law instead of core issues like abortion and same-sex marriage.

So what does this mean to the rest of us - especially the LGBT community? For starters, we can expect no let up in the anti-gay rhetoric from the fundies. That should come as no surprise. Likewise, it's no surprise that the religiously addicted are so focused on homosexuality and abortion. We've always known that, but it's nice to see in print what we've always suspected: groups like the Christian Coalition are so obsessed with LGBT folks that they ignore many of the various issue Jesus spoke about.

What is new in the resignation of Hunter is that the cracks in these groups that like to portray themselves as monolithic are beginning to show.

It's nice to see these so-called Christian groups beginning to focus on issues that reflect concern for the type of social challenges the founder of their religion stood for rather than spreading hatred and prejudice that he would abhor.

Putting Nancy and the Pussy-crats on notice

2006-11-24T21:37:00.000-06:00

Less than a week after Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean incurred my wrath for his "move to the back of the bus" attitude toward gay issues expressed in a speech to the Internation Gay and Lesbian Leadership Conference, another Democrat has proposed a similar strategy for the coming Congressional session.

Nancy Pelosi, newly selected Speaker of the House, tacked to the right and announced she'd be steering a centrist course in the coming legislative session. "Centrist," in this case is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it's doubtful we'll have to fight off another attempt to write discrimination into the Constitution in the form of another odius federal marriage "protection" amendment. On the other hand, don't expect any progress to be made on issues that affect millions of LGBT Americans.

According to a recent article in The Boston Globe:

Anxious to chart a centrist course with Democrats' new majority in Congress, incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her top deputies are busily working in private and public to rein in the liberal ambitions of some senior party heavyweights --including proposals to reinstate the military draft and end the Pentagon's ban on gays in uniform.

Pelosi has urged House Democrats, including incoming committee chairmen, to use the first weeks of next year's congressional term to focus exclusively on proposals on which the party is unified and legislative goals that are within reach, according to Pelosi allies and aides. ...

Pelosi has also tempered hopes of reversing the "don't ask, don't tell" policy on the service of gays and lesbians in the military, after two key Democrats -- Representatives Martin T. Meehan of Lowell and Barney Frank of Newton -- said last week that they want to repeal the policy.

Though Pelosi believes homosexuals should be able to openly serve, she has made clear that she believes Democrats have more urgent national-security priorities -- including changing course in Iraq and investigating war-related contracting.

Pelosi and Hoyer outlined an agenda yesterday for early next year that Pelosi said will relieve "the middle-class squeeze." It avoids hot-button issues such as tax cuts, gay rights, and abortion for popular issues such as a higher minimum wage, more affordable student loans, and congressional ethics reform.

So there you have it. Another Democrat tells us we should move to the back of the bus because our issues just aren't important enough; that we're a "special interest group" who might scare faint-hearted voters into voting for Republicans again.

Given the pivotal role LGBT voters and their allies played in the 2006 midterm elections, I am more than fed up with the way the Democrats are treating our issues.

Perhaps it's time for the Democratic Party to change its symbol from the donkey - an animal known for its obstinancy - to a cute widdle cuddly kitten. What better symbol for this new Democratic Party than an animal that is weak, defenseless and skittish. Likewise, maybe they should come up with a whole new name to reflect the Party's timidity. I suggest Pussy-crats, a name that not only incorporates the new symbol, but also, in the best tradition of the old schoolyard vulgarity, labels them as weak, ineffectual and cowardly.

The Pussy-crats haven't yet even begun their tenure as majority party in the House and Senate and already I'm sick of them. I am angry at how quickly they can forget one of their most dependable constituencies. I'm ashamed of their gutlessness.

Today I received my usual weekly e-mail from Wayne Besen, author and activist. In his column, Besen addressed this same issue and came up with a more moderate approach. (At least a more moderate one than I would have considered in my anger.) In his column, Time for a smart gay agenda, Besen wrote:

One lesson from the past is that if gay issues are haphazardly introduced they can be radioactive and sidetrack the Democratic Party's broader agenda. If the Democrats are seen as kowtowing to a controversial special interest group the moment they are in the majority it may jeopardize their ability to reach mainstream Americans.

On the other side of the coin, the gay community has been a loyal constituency group and our basic rights should be protected as a matter of morality. The way to reconcile this ostensible conflict is for major gay political organizations to have an early strategic powwow with incoming House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

The gay leaders should offer to step back and make no demands for six months to let the Democrats establish a tangible record on bread and butter economic issues. The party must establish itself as one that represents all people and cares most about the concerns of average families.Once party leaders have built a reserve of political capital and are able to boast of bipartisan accomplishments they will have earned credentials with suburban families and can address gay rights without looking like they are pandering.

Democratic leaders should agree that for the GLBT community's six months of silence a major piece of legislation would be introduced in June. The most logical legislation would be the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which would prohibit job discrimination based on sexual orientation.

I don't like waiting for rights I should have already, but Besen's suggestion is one that I could live with. I am willing to give the Pussy- ... oops, I mean Democrats ... six months to build coalitions and make bipartisanship efforts on core bread-and-butter issues.

That gives them time to show they can lead. And it gives us time to figure out how we should respond if the Pussy-crats want us to keep moving to the back of the bus "just a little while longer ... maybe until after the next election ... but definitely by 2040 ... probably."

If that happens I hope we have a way to strike back and strike back hard. So Nancy and the Pussy-crats, you're on notice. The clock is ticking on your six-month "honeymoon." In every action the Democratic Congress takes for the six months after taking office, may they always hear a quiet little tick-tock, tick-tock in their ears.

The controversy over 'controversy'

2006-11-24T11:06:00.000-06:00

I run hot and cold over Wal-mart. One the one hand, some of their business practices and the ways the corporate giant treats employees are loathsome. On the other hand ... well, I'm cheap and just can't find the 50-pound bags of dog food the three four-legged family members consume cheaper anywhere else. In the end, I compromise, grit my teeth and put some hard-earned cash into the Walton family's fortunes, but draw the line at buying the cheaply made, non-union clothes and other items there.

Then a few months ago I had a reason not to drive 20 miles or so to shop at a Wal-Mart where I was unlikely to run into my fellow liberal friends. This summer Wal-Mart paid $25,000 to become a member of the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce. It also donated $60,000 to Out and Equal, which promotes gay-rights advances in the workplace. Likewise, it didn't balk at carrying the film "Brokeback Mountain" when it was released.

Of course the fundies went ballistic over Wal-Mart's business decision not to exclude that disposable income the LGBT community is supposed to have, but I was happy to have a reason to be an out-of-the-closet Wal-Mart shopper.

But now I'm about to go back into the Wal-Mart closet so deeply that I won't be doing any Christmas shopping there.

The reason? Wal-Mart caved in to demands from the rabid mouth-breathers at the American Family Association over the companies tenuous ties with the gay community. According to an Associated Press article:

A conservative group that had called on supporters to boycott Wal-Mart's post-Thanksgiving day sales to protest the retailer's support of gay-rights groups withdrew its objections Tuesday, saying the company had agreed to stay away from controversial causes.

The American Family Association, which had been asking supporters to stay away from Wal-Mart on Friday and Saturday — two of the busiest shopping days of the year — said it was pleased by a statement the company issued Tuesday.

While stressing its commitment to diversity and equality, Wal-Mart said in its statement that it "will not make corporate contributions to support or oppose highly controversial issues unless they directly relate to our ability to serve our customers."

So let's see if I've got this right ... marketing to the LGBT community is a "controversial issue," but caving in to organized hate groups like AFA isn't?

Excuse me, Wal-Mart, but what the fuck are you thinking? Are the tattered dollars spent by the extremist religious fringe somehow greener than the dollars spent by gays and lesbians? Is the issue of right-wing groups who want to deny rights to others somehow less controversial than the issue of a group working to overcome its second-class status?

The article goes on to quote a fun-D'uh-Mental-ist (emphasis on the "mental" part) zealot from Operation Save America - a second group that has not yet called off its Wal-Mart boycott:

[S]ome conservative activists depicted Wal-Mart's engagement as endorsement of same-sex marriage and a pledge to give gay-owned businesses preferential treatment — assertions Wal-Mart denied in its statement Tuesday.

Conservative leaders had viewed Wal-Mart's actions as a betrayal of its own traditions, which have included efforts to weed out magazines with racy covers and CDs with explicit lyrics.

"This has been Christian families' favorite store — and now they're giving in, sliding down the slippery slope so many other corporations have gone down," said the Rev. Flip Benham of Operation Save America.

"They're all being extorted by the radical homosexual agenda," Benham said.

Yeah, right, Flipper. And your group's efforts aren't extortion? Take another sip of your Jesus juice, you Bible-thumpin' cretin.

Personally, I've had it with organizations like Wal-Mart who seem to think that the only "values" are those expounded by radical groups like AFA and Operation Save America.

I'm urging everyone I know to take a few minutes and call WalMart and let them know that your values prohibit you from doing business with any company which has its policies controlled by some fringe right-wing "religious" organization. Point out that AFA is now dictating a company policy defining a "controversial" issue for them.

Ask them how a company that claims to be committed to diversity in the workplace would stand there and listen to religious bigot customers and employees degrade another group of customers and employees, and then claim to make a blanket policy from such "concern." Then ask them why they are giving money to the Boy Scouts and the Salvation Army, when both organizations go against the very diversity principles and avoidance of controversy that their "new" policy establishes.

Here is their contact number: 1-800-925-6278. It's time this company heard from someone besides the American Family Association and the knuckle-dragging Neanderthals in the religious reich.

Staying at the front of the bus

2006-11-19T21:23:00.000-06:00

Howard Dean, the integrity-challenged chairman of the Democratic National Committee, believes the shift in power in Washington will make it easier for gays and lesbians. At least that's what he told the International Gay and Lesbian Leadership Conference. The group just wrapped up a four-day conference in Houston and Dean was one of the politicos chosen to address the group.

An interesting choice of words, that "easier." One can assume he meant it would be easier for gays and lesbians with the Democrats controling both houses of Congress rather than the Republicans. The latter, it seems, would settle for legislating us out of existence (only because it wouldn't be politically correct to declare open season on us.) By comparison, it will be easier under the Democrats. They only want us to move to the back of the bus instead of throwing ourselves under the wheels.

According to an article in The Houston Chronicle, Dean told the conference:

"My advice to — not just this community, but every community that plays an important role in the Democratic Party, and this one certainly does — is to try not to do everything at once. ...

"We need a careful, narrow, targeted agenda to make it clear what the difference between the Democratic Party and Republican Party is before we go into the next election."

Uh-oh. You can almost hear an unspoken and you ain't part of it right after that bit about needing a careful, narrow, targeted agenda.

Dean, it seems, is squeamish about Repugnantcans and fun-D'uh-Mental-ists poking a finger at the Democratic Party and declaring, "See? They really are the party of homo-seck-shuls! Now vote for us or else they'll be teaching the finer points of anal intercourse to kindergarteners!"

I'm ashamed of Dean. I'm also ashamed that the Democratic Party isn't ashamed of him. This flirtation with gay issues only to run back to the right has got to stop. Sure, Dean signed the nation's first civil partnership law while governor of Vermont, but let's not give him a medal for doing what the courts and legislature told him to do.

His record on gay rights since heading up the DNC has been lackluster at best.

Let's not forget that he did away with the DNC LGBT outreach office and fired a gay staffer whose partner was critical of Dean in print. Even more troublesome was his appearance on senile Bible-thumper Pat Robertson's "The 700 Club" during which he either "mispoke" - or maybe out-and-out lied - about the Democratic platform on gay marriage.

"Think how you felt in the last six years when you were being run over roughshod by an administration who used your community to beat up on folks and scare them to get them to vote Republican," Dean is quoted as telling the group.

I wonder if Dean can imagine how many of us feel now, after being demonized by one party and marginalized by the other? I wonder if he has any idea how offensive his "step to the back of the bus" message sounds to those of us who worked so hard to vote out the bigots and tools of the religious right like Missouri's Jim Talent, Pennsylvania's Rick Santorum, Virginia's George Allen and others? I wonder how long he thinks the Democrats can hold onto their narrow win without acknowledging the LGBT community's role in that victory?

According to some analyses, a coalition of LGBT voters and their allies may have played a major role in handing Democrats a one-vote margin in the Senate. A post-election article in The Falls Church (Va.) News Press puts it this way:

An analysis of the voting pattern Tuesday in Virginia suggests that the so-called “marriage amendment” on the ballot as Question 1 might have cost U.S. Senator George Allen the election. If true, it would mark an ironic twist, the backfiring of an effort Republicans hoped would spur a stronger turnout for their incumbent. ...

The analysis is based on a comparison of votes cast for Question 1 compared to the other two amendments on Tuesday’s ballot, and especially to Question 2. Question 2 involved granting churches in Virginia the right to incorporate. It was strongly pushed by the same religiously-based forces that backed passage of the anti-gay marriage measure.

But Question 2 garnered 133,411 fewer votes than Question 1, meaning that many more voters were moved to vote on the gay marriage measure.

Of those additional votes, more than that entire margin voted “No” on Question 1. With all but three of the state’s 2,443 precincts reporting as of late yesterday, 231,727 voted against Question 1 than voted against Question 2.

It can be credibly argued that a significant portion of those extra 231,727 people who voted against the gay marriage ban also voted against Allen. Many of them, in fact, may have been motivated to come to the polls by the aggressive campaign led by a well-organized collective effort of civic and religious groups known as the Commonwealth Coalition.

With Allen’s margin of defeat in the Senate election being only 7,307 votes, any significant percentage of the 231,727 additional “No” voters on Question 1 would have been decisive. Allen’s opponent, James Webb, stated publicly his opposition to Question 1 during the campaign.

So there you have it. Rather than telling us - even politely - to move to the back of the bus because are issues just aren't important, Dean should be kissing our collective asses. Without us and our supporters, Senate leadership would still be in the hands of the Republicans.

No thanks, Dr. Dean. I believe we'll sit up here by the bus driver. And we won't hesitate to tell him when he starts to take a wrong turn.

Getting in touch with your inner-Old Testament wrath

2006-11-15T19:38:00.000-06:00

Since it's been over a month since I set fingers to keyboard and wrote anything on this blog, I'm tempted to start off with "While I was away due my abduction of aliens ..." or "Sorry to have been away so long on my secret mission to reset all the Diebold voting machines ... ." Instead, my excuse is much more prosaic: I had too many commitments and not enough time. Oh sure there were numerous times when I thought about blogging. And there certainly were a lot of topics worth blogging about ... the Mark Foley scandal involving male Congressional pages, the election, Arizona's defeat of a same-sex marriage ban, the ousting of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the shell-shocked look on Dubya's face the day after the election, the downfall of meth-crazed closet-case bottom-boy Ted Haggard, and my usual potshots in the cultural war against fun-D'uh-Mental-ists. Any and all of those topics are certainly blog-worthy, but what brought me out of blog semi-seclusion was pondering this question:

Can Soulforce, a group founded by now openly gay former ghostwriter for Jerry Falwell, have its collective nose any further up the ass of the religious right?

Consider this:

LGBT ecumenical group Soulforce is calling on gays to offer compassion to the Rev. Ted Haggard - the minister who despite a history of bashing gays from the pulpit was ousted by his superchurch when it was disclosed he had a longtime relationship with a hustler.

Soulforce wants gays to write letters of support and concern for Haggard.

"This is obviously a moment of personal, familial, and professional crisis for Rev. Haggard," said Soulforce spokesperson Paige Schilt.

Schlit said that Soulforce acknowledges that many in the gay community feel legitimate anger toward Haggard for his history of religion-based oppression.

At least the timid assimilationists at Soulforce are right on one point: many of us DO feel legitimate anger toward Haggard, a man who harangued his 14,000-member flock in Colorado Springs about the evils of homo-seck-shuls but made monthly trips to Denver to pay a male prostitute to give him a hands-free prostate massage.

It's hard to work up more than half a thimble full of compassion for someone like Haggard who spends his life in the eye of a hurricane of hypocrisy. His wife and kids? Sure, I have no problem summoning up compassion for them. After all, they weren't the ones who put themselves in the situation they find themselves in. But as for Ted, I have a hard time restraining myself from sending a letter as Soulforce suggests ... but one that reads Burn in your own homo hell, hypocrite.

Ironically, Haggard may soon find himself in homo hell. Teddy will be working for "restoration," a code word of the religious right for ex-gay brainwashing. No less of a proponent of "reparative therapy" than Joseph Nicolosi, founder of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, suggests that he could help Haggard if the evangelist was prepared for "deep, emotional work."

So what happens when Teddy goes through the hell on earth of the type of ex-gay therapies that have left behind so much emotional wreckage among gays and lesbians who have been subjected to at the hands of pedatory ex-gay snake-oil salesmen?

I'm betting he'll announce himself cured and be photographed with his wife and kids with that humongus smile on those lips that have found themselves wrapped around gay prostitute Mike Jones' love muscle numerous times. I'm also betting that he'll be a lot more discreet next time he invites a guy to take a ride on his Hershey highway.

If Haggard emerges from his pray-away-the-gay "restoration process" as an honest man, he'll say, "Nope, I still want to chug weinies." Given his history of duplicity and hyprocisy, I'm inclined to doubt that will happen.

Oh, but if it did what a day that would be. Perhaps then it would become clear that these ex-gay programs not only don't work, but are harmful. Then I would have all the compassion in the world for Haggard.

I'm glad there are groups like Soulforce who preach compassion, even to those who have shown no compassion to them. While I've always tried to believe in the biblical admonishment to turn the other cheek, I think it's important to point out that the Bible fails to make clear exactly how we should react when we run out of cheeks to turn. And when it comes to the fun-D'uh-Mental-ists who rake in the dough by stirring up hatred toward gays and lesbians, we ran out of cheeks a long time ago.

Soulforce is too quick to hold out an olive branch to folks like Haggard and Falwell and Dobson. For a religious-based LGBT organization, it would be nice to see them once in a while get in touch with their inner-Old Testament wrath when it comes to dealing with fundies.

McGreevey's gay probation

2006-09-10T13:30:00.000-05:00

In writing about preparations for the rollout of former New Jersey Governor James McGreevey's soon-to-be-published book, The Confession, the Associated Press made reference to McGreevey as "openly gay."

That's a phrase that's kicked around a lot in the media. Presumably it's the opposite of "closetedly gay," but then by definition anytime the media writes about a closeted gay or lesbian they become openly gay or lesbian. It would seem to be a lot more straight forward for the media to just refer to a person as gay or lesbian, but then no one ever accused the media of having consistent standards when it comes to tip-toeing around the topic of sexual orientation when it comes to celebrities and public officials. (But that's a whole other story.)

For those who may not remember, James McGreevey made a blip on the nation's radar screen in August of 2004 when he resigned as governor of New Jersey and, with his soon-to-be-ex-wife at his side, announced that he was a "gay American." (Note to any future McGreevey's: If you're going to get caught doing something you shouldn't, try not to get caught in August when Congress is in recess and the national media is scrambling to find something ... anything! ... to make into a story.)

Did I say McGreevey "resigned"? Perhaps a more accurate description was that he was forced to resign when it became public that not only was he a gay American, but he had tried to appoint his male lover to a cushy state job as a homeland security advisor. That plan fell apart when it was discovered that his boyfriend could not get the necessary security clear because he was an Israeli-born citizen.

Oops!

Faced with the prospect of being outed for putting his boyfriend on the state payroll, McGreevey called a hastily-convened press conference to announce that he was resigning as governor and, oh yes, that he was a gay American. By calling the press conference McGreevey managed to out himself on his own terms rather than watch himself get outted by the media.

Out of the national spotlight for the past three years, McGreevey used the time to write his book (no doubt with a hefty advance from the publisher to soothe his bruised ego). He's also had time to find a new boyfriend, this time an Australian financial adviser named Mark O'Donnell.

On Sept. 19 McGreevey will unveil his book (and supposedly his boyfriend) on Oprah. That will be followed by more appearances and more news coverage and more accolades as an openly gay man.

Now wait just a second! Sorry Mr. Ex-Governor, but you haven't earned the title of openly gay man yet. You're still in the closeted-gay-man-who-got-caught-cheating-on-his-wife-and-trying-to-put-your-boyfriend-on-the-state-payroll category. Don't think that a tearful press conference and a self-serving memoir will earn you anything more than probationary status in the pantheon of openly gay men.

In some ways the James McGreevey of today reminds me of the Barney Frank of 30 years ago.

Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank is one of the most respected members of the U.S. gay community today. But it wasn't always so.

Frank began his political career as a deeply closeted gay man. That all changed in 1987 when he met Steven Gobie through an ad for a male escort in The Washington Blade. Gobie knew a good thing when he saw it and attached himself to Frank like an ugly barnacle on the hull of a gleaming cruise ship and began operating an escort service out of Frank's Washington apartment.

It wasn't long before Frank's closeted life began to unravel in a rapidly building media storm. Faced with the knowledge he was about to be outed in a big way, Frank beat the ouers to the punch and came out. Just like McGreevey would do nearly three decades earlier. While Frank weathered stormy seas for a while - he became only the seventh congressman to be reprimanded in 1990 in part because he had used his influence to fix traffic tickets for Gobie - Frank persevered.

Frank continues to persevere today. He fought back against gay-baiting Republicans by threatening to out closeted members of Congress. He spoke out on issues involving the LGBT community. He earned the title of openly gay man not because he was forced out of the closet, but by virtue of the fact that, once he was out, he worked for the LGBT community. While I haven't agreed with every stand Barney Frank has taken, I certainly respect the man for being out there for the rest of us.

McGreevey, on the other hand, is only now beginning his journey. A tearful press conference and a tell-all book do not an openly gay man make.

Right now McGreevey might more accurately described as a "formerly closeted gay man." That means he's on probation with the gay community. If he continues to stand with us and to use his position to speak out on our issues, then he'll earn his wings as an openly gay man.

American madrasahs

2006-09-09T10:31:00.000-05:00

Before the 9/11 attacks, few Americans outside of specialists in education or international affairs had heard the word madrasah. The word comes from the Arabic word for "school," but in the post=9/11 world the word acquired a new and sinister meaning.

In oil-rich countries such as Saudi Arabia - where most of the 9/11 hijackers came from, incidentally - donations from wealthy sheikh funded the establishment of Islamic schools around the country. It was the way the wealthy gave back to the poor in a country with no tax-supported education system. In a Muslin version of noblesse oblige, wealthy (and often progressive) Saudis established the schools and then turned their attention to other matters, believing their duties as a benevolent ruling class had been fulfilled.

What they didn't stick around to witness was that the teachers given charge of young Muslims education were an increasingly radical group. Along with lessons in the Quran and the Islamic version of the three R's, young Saudis were being indoctrinated in a virulent version of radical Islam with a decidedly anti-Western slant. While the wealthy ruling class in Saudi Arabia moved toward modernizing their country, a generation of young men were being trained to reject all things modern and Western.

That indoctrination culminated on Sept. 11, 2002, in the wreckage and death of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania.

OK. The history lesson is over. Time to turn our attention to another place and time: America last week.

According to an Associated Press report, Christian evangelicals are being urged to pull their children out of public schools and enroll them in private religious schools. "Homeschoolers avoid harmful school environments where God is mocked, where destructive peer influence is the norm, where drugs, alcohol, promiscuity and homosexuality are promoted," says the California-based Considering Homeschooling Ministry.

In her outstanding book Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, Michelle Goldberg examines the growing influence of radical Christians and their attacks on homosexuality, sex education, the separation of church and state, and education. She provides a quote from Michael Harris, president of the religiously conservative Patrick Henry College, as saying: "If we're going to stop judicial tyranny, I think we need to have a comprehensive plan. ... A comprehensive way of approaching the problem is, we've got to train the next generation."

According to Goldberg's book:

Farris refers to these parents [attending a Christian Home Educators of Colorado conference] and their peers nationwide as the Moses generation, because they have successfully led their children out of the bondage of godless public schools. But permanent exile from the American mainstream was never the goal. As Farris wrote in the book Generation Joshua [named for Moses' military commander who led the Israelites in seizing the holy land], the homeschooling movement "will succeed when our children, the Joshua Generation, engage wholeheartedly in the battle to take back the land."

He admits it's a large task. "The is the land of MTV, Internet porn, abortion, homosexuality, greed, and accomplished selfishness," he observed. Giants stalk America, "giants that live in the fields of law, government, journalism, and history. And we are going to look in depth at the elite colleges and universities of our nation. The enemies of freedom and truth dominate these institutions and thereby dominate our nation."

What Farris wants is a cultural revolution. He's trying to train a generation of leaders, unscathed by secularism, who will gain political power in order to subsume everything - entertainment, law, government, and education - to Christianity, or their version of it.

The generation of Christian homeschooling advocates before people like Farris were far more radical in tone. They spoke of using religious schools to "raise an army for Jesus" who would turn America into a "Christian nation" by force if necessary. That approach scared away more people than it enticed, so today's homeschool advocates have taken a kinder, gentler approach while playing on the fears of public education bringing about the downfall of America and, more importantly for them, the demise of Christianity.

Evangelical Christians bristle when liberals (or even moderates) describe them as America's Taliban. Yet they seem compelled to follow the same path staked out by radical Islam when it comes to indoctrinating future generations in their vision for overthrowing democracy in this country and replacing it with a theocracy.

Sadly, through it's faith-based initiative programs and support of a voucher system that would allow tax dollars to flow into private schools, the Bush Administration is courting voters, but selling out America to the same sort of radicalism that led unerringly down the path to 9/11.

The Ongoing Saga of Trials of My Online Gay Life Part 3: "The nekkid and the nude"

2006-09-02T22:59:00.000-05:00

Over nearly five decades on earth I’ve seen my share of nude men. In paintings. In statuary. In drawings. In photographs. In the pages of magazines. Even in person. And in online profiles.

That’s a lot of penises, butts, torsos and every other conceivable body part and I think I’m well passed the possibility of being shocked by any of them. Truly, I don’t even think I’ve been mildly surprised by a depiction of nudity since Jimmy Carter was president (and, besides, that was when I inadvertently opened a copy of Larry Flint’s Hustler magazine and saw sights no self-respecting gay man should gaze upon).

I used to worry that my inability to be shocked – or even react to nudity with more than an indifferent shrug – meant I was jaded. Now I think it’s more a matter of being bored.

The average American man, no matter how sexually liberated he claims to be in his online profile, makes a naked body an object of ennui instead of an igniter of lust and desire.

I made this discovery while perusing a gay personals site that includes lots of European men. Now those men know how to pose for the camera! Perhaps its their proximity to museums that feature the best of classical art and sculpture. Or maybe they just aren’t as hung up about nudity as American men.

Take your average American gay male, remove his clothes and ask him to pose for a nude photo and here’s what you get: A guy standing their stiffly (and not in a good way) with a deer-in-the-headlights look that says, Oh shit! I’m naked and I don’t know what to do with my hands!

It’s true. Take 100 Americans from all walks of life and tell them you want to take their photo. Unless you tell them specifically how you want them to stand, they will invariably do one of three things:

1) Shove their hands in their pockets

2) Stand with their arms stiffly at their sides

3) Turn their hands into makeshift fig leaves and cover their “naughty parts” even if they are fully clothed

Don’t believe me? Try it sometime. Unless you cheat and take photographs at a nudist resort or at a porn star convention, I’d bet 90 percent of the subjects will automatically do one of the above once the camera is pointed in their direction.

European guys, on the other hand, seem to have a knack for finding just the right light and arranging themselves in just the right composition. You could probably show up unannounced at an Italian gay guy’s house early in the morning and you’d find him artfully sprawled on his bed, the sheets disheveled in a way that draws the eye to the natural lines of the body, and the early morning sun casting a delicate interplay of sun and shade through the slats of the window blinds and falling across his naked body in sharp lines that contrast with the suppleness of his sleeping form.

(Whew! I need to stop now for a cigarette!)

The majority of American guys will just stand there. Usually against a blank wall. They’ll wait for their photo to be snapped with a mixture of worry and shame on their faces. Then when the photo is snapped (inevitably with a harsh flash), their skin ends up looking at least four shades more washed out than it actually is.

What are these guys thinking when they post the finished product in an online profile? Yeah, sure, my skin looks as pale as if I just go out of prison, but at least my dick shows and that’s the main thing. I just hope this picture will get me laid.

When it comes to nudity, most American gay men (and, in fact, most American man) are darn near schizophrenic. On the one hand those long-dormant Puritan genes kick in with a hearty “SINNER! It’s an affront to Gawd Almighty to show yourself NEKKID!” Maybe it’s precisely because we still carry a whopping load of guilt about our bodies that we turn in the other direction and cruise the Internet or pop in a DVD looking to wash away our guilt in an overload of porn. In a backlash against those Puritan ancestors, we watch images where everything but the genitalia is superfluous and the camera seldom gets above crotch level. About the only time a porn actor’s face is important is when it’s attached to the mouth that is in turn attached to the engorged and throbbing naughty part of his co-star.

Because Americans in general are so schizophrenic about sex and nudity most of us are never quite comfortable standing naked in front of a camera. Our discomfort comes through loud and clear in the end product which we post obediently on our profiles because they look just like the photos other guys have posted.

Somewhere deep inside we wonder if perhaps the Puritans weren’t right about how we should feel shame about our bodies. After all, if God had meant for us to pose nude, He would have surely provided us with pouches like the kangaroos so we’d have a place to put our hands.

Even after NBA career, Charles Barkley is still scoring turnovers

2006-09-02T10:12:00.000-05:00

As I've made mention before, my knowledge of sports is infinitesimal. But enough has seeped in over the years that I do know that Charles Barkley was a professional basketball player.

Now I've got another reason to remember the former NBA MVP. (I feel so butch when I toss around sports acronyms like that!) In an interview that airs this Sunday on the Fox network's SportsNet's "Chris Meyers Interview," Barkley is likely to make Republican sports fan shudder and drop their jaws like a fumbled pass. In that interview, he'll announce that: 1) he's no longer a Republican; 2) he's considering a run for the governorship of his home state of Alabama; and 3) he supports the idea of gay marriage.

While it's long been difficult to understand how any African-American (other than modern-day Step-N-Fetchits like Supreme Court Justice and porn connoisseur Clarence Thomas or Secretary of State Condaleeze Rice) could vote Republican, the GOP has been only too happy to use Barkley as a poster-jock to entice blacks to forego their own interests and vote for the party of big business, big oil and big drug companies.

I doubt they will be doing that any more. According to an Associated Press account of the interview:

Barkley was a Republican until recently, saying he switched parties when the Republicans “lost their minds.” He said he is troubled by some of the actions of people in the United States in the name of religion.

“Religious people in general are so discriminatory against other people, and that really disturbs me,” he said. “My idea of religion is we all love and respect. We all sin, but we still have common decency and respect for other people. So right now I’m struggling with my idea of what religion is.”

Ouch! Don't look for Barkley to be invited to the White House any time soon. And it's probably a safe bet he won't be invited on the religiously insane Pat Robertson's "700 Club" either.

For gays and lesbians, even more astounding than Barkley political epiphany is his views on gay marriage. He supports the idea. In the interview he says, “I think if they want to get married, God bless them. Gay marriage is probably 1 percent of the population, so it’s not like it’s going to be an epidemic. Hey, trust me, I’m never going to kiss you and say, ‘Chris, you’re sexy.”’

Score one for our side.

When Republican operatives try to stir up African-American congregations on the "evils of homo-seck-shul marriage" and hand out cash from the so-called Faith Based Initiative as barely concealed bribes, it's refreshing to see major black role model stand up to the GOP.

Fundies gone wild!

2006-08-31T19:08:00.000-05:00

Tuesday, Aug. 29, was not a good day to be a fun-D'uh-Mental-ist. That was the day California's moderate Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a gay rights law that has fundies shakin' their fists, stompin' their little Wal-Mart clearance-rack clad feet and threatenin' to take to the streets.

But before we get to the reaction of the "christian" supremacists, let's look as a straight (so to speak) forward account of what happened:

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed legislation Tuesday banning discrimination in state operated or funded programs on the basis of actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity.

The legislation is designed to protect from discrimination, Californians who utilize public services such as police and fire protection, financial aid, social services and food stamps.

The measure would also include protections for those associated with a person receiving services who has, or is perceived to have, any characteristic covered by the bill.

The legislation passed its final hurdle in the legislature earlier this month when the Assembly approved it on a 43-25 vote.

This bill will help to ensure that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Californians are treated equally by our government and is an important step towards our goal of ending discrimination in the Golden State," said Geoff Kors, the executive director of Equality California which lobbied for the measure's passage.

Seems like a good idea to me. Or at least a good start. But leave it to the fundies to wail and gnash their teeth and whip themselves into a homophobic frenzy.

Charles B. Lowers, the executive director of the pro-family Considering Homeschool, used the occasion to encourage so-called Christians to yank their kids out of public schools and begin home-skoolin' 'em. In an interview with the far-right World News Daily, Lowers had a few gems to share with his followers, like this one:

"'Heck no, our kids won't go!' should be the rallying cry of Christian parents this week as school starts, instead of following the broad road of perversion and destruction that California schools are offering."

Or this one:

"Worldview surveys show that the majority of kids from Christian homes are humanist by graduation. School-based 'clinics' are expanding … to ensure that your daughters get birth control and abortions without you knowing. Now that the homosexuals are dictating curriculum, 80-90 percent of Christians should be homeschooling, not the other way around."

Or how about this head-scratcher:

"Public school is no place for innocent little kids. If they don't get molested by the John Karrs who are in the system, their minds and hearts will be molested by the curriculum."

Or even this:

"Instead of the traditional three R's in California's public schools, children are learning Rebelliousness, Relativism, and an R-rated lifestyle."

Lowers, with his way with words and flair for hyperbole, also claimed that in California, the public schools are controlled "by a group of elitist, leftist, homosexual socialists."

Not to be outdone in the righteous outrage department, uber-conservative Agape Press published its own broadside at the Terminator on the American Fascist ... Oops! I mean American FAMILY Association web site:

Earlier this week the Republican governor signed into law SB 1441, a measure which could force Christian colleges to either abandon biblical standards on sexuality or reject students who receive financial aid from the state. The bill adds sexual orientation to already existing provisions in the state's law that prohibit discrimination on the basis of, among other things, race, national origin, ethnic group identification, religion, age, sex, color, or disability.

As pointed out by one pro-family group in the state, the law could potentially prevent parochial schools such as private, Christian, Catholic, Mormon, or other faith-based educational institutions from receiving student financial assistance if they also maintain a code of conduct that prohibits homosexual behavior as immoral based on their religious beliefs.

Randy Thomasson is president of the group Campaign for Children and Families (CCF), headquartered in the Golden State's capital city. He says Schwarzenegger's actions prove that party labels are virtually meaningless when it comes to a politician's standards and beliefs. In direct reference to Governor Schwarzenegger, Thomasson states: "A liberal Republican is more dangerous than a liberal Democrat."

According to the CCF leader, a liberal Republican "will hurt the church and culture more in the long term because he will dumb down the Church, dumb down the Republican Party, dumb down conservative and Christian talk radio stations." The result, he contends, is that there "will be nobody big enough to stand against evil Democrat politicians if you let the Republican Party be dumbed down by a liberal Republican like Arnold Schwarzenegger."

Schwarzenegger has spoken at churches and claims to uphold family and religious values -- but his actions, says Thomasson, tell a different story.

"Most Christians in California made a big mistake by electing Arnold Schwarzenegger," he says. "They liked him. They actually liked his movies, although the movies mostly were immoral." The CCF spokesman recalls the election which propelled the former actor to the governor's mansion. "[Christians] were idolizing him. They said he was the lesser of two evils. They voted him into office. They looked the other way," he remembers. "Now, he's coming back to hurt them."

Now, he's coming back to hurt them? Well, what can I say. Arnie, in the role of the Terminator did make the cinematic promise "I'll be back ... asshole." Who would have guessed that when he rippled open his shirt to reveal his muscular (if somewhat sagging) chest, it would be tatooed with a big red "666." At least in the minds of some fundies?

I'm not a big Schwarzenegger fan ... of his movies or his politics. But I have to hand it to him that watching him piss off the fundies has earned him an honorary Oscar for Best Performance in a Role Most Likely to Push Right-Wingers Over the Edge in my book.

It must suck to be Arnold. Seems like he's forever bouncing back and forth catching hell from one side or the other. He pissed off the LGBT community by vetoing the marriage amendment in California. So to placate them he hired an out lesbian (and former staffer of his predecessor Grey Davis). That set off a firestorm on the right in California politics and Arnold ended up hiring a former lobbyist for the Traditional Values Coalition to help sell his re-election bid to conservatives. That was on Aug. 20. Three days later Arnold canned the guy. Now he's signed the pro-gay legislation (though some would argue that with a Democratic-controlled legislature he had no choice).

You have to admire Schwarzenegger. His consistently inconsistent. He runs to the right and when that provokes controversy he runs to the left. Back and forth he goes like a pinball, seeming unaware that when he pleases one group, he pisses off another.

I'm sure tomorrow or next week or next month Arnold will feint to the right again to try and convince conservatives he's one of them. But for now I'm content to sit back and watch as the fundies froth at the mouth and go wild.

Smoking ... anti-socially and with a sense of drama

2006-08-29T10:51:00.000-05:00

I used to get a chuckle out of some of the online sites for personal ads that asked guys who posted their profiles to list whether or not they smoked. It seemed like a straight-forward question. Either you do or you don't. But in place of checking a "yes" or "no" box, some of this sites have come up with ways to turn a perfectly simple question into a multiple choice test.

Some of the sites include choices like "I don't smoke and don't want to date someone who does" or "I smoke and only want to date a smoker" or the ever-popular "I have no smoking preference." Then there's the box marked "quitting." I guess that's the choice for guys who are on the patch or perhaps furious chewing that awful tasting nicotine gum. Yeah, I can see having the "quitting" option even though it seems like one is either smoking or not smoking.

Finally there's an option on some of the profiles that lists "I smoke socially." Ummm, excuse me, but what the hell is that? Is that like social drinking that's supposed to separate the guys who enjoy an occassional beer from those who can't make it through the day without guzzling enough to finance single-handedly an entire 30-second Budweiser commercial during the Super Bowl?

I guess I don't grasp the concept of "smoking socially." Maybe it's because that's exactly opposite of my smoking habit. I'm an anti-social smoker. I tend not to smoke in social situations - especially if I'm around non-smokers. But plop me down in front of the TV or computer at the end of the day and the cigarettes get fired up.

Perhaps that makes me a closeted smoker. Certainly, given today's emphasis on health and the dangers of second-hand smoke, smokers can develop a sense of shame to accompany their habit. And if we don't, then we can always count on an anti-smoking crusaders to remind us we should be ashamed.

This year I've managed to quit smoking for at least two weeks three times. Then something stressful happens in my life and, hey, there's always a Quik Trip open just a few blocks away from wherever I am with a dizzying array of tobacco products in colorful packages right there behind the counter.

Earlier this month The San Francisco Chronicle ran an article on smoking in the gay community. It found that LGBT's in California were twice as likely to be smokers as their straight counterparts. According to the article:

Stress, many health care experts believe, is one of the main reasons why the smoking rate among gays and lesbians is at least twice the average in California. More than a decade of advertising targeted at gays and lesbians is also to blame, they say.

It's only in the past year or two that researchers were able to confirm what they'd suspected all along about the high smoking rate in the gay community. Now, at least one new survey, the results of which are expected next year, seeks to explain why.

About 14 percent of Californians smoke, according to a 2005 Department of Health Services survey released in April. But in a 2004 state survey, more than 30 percent of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people were smokers.

Lesbians smoked at an even higher rate, 32.5 percent -- nearly three times the average -- for women in California. And among young lesbians between the ages of 18 and 24, a staggering 47 percent were smokers, compared with the average rate of 18 percent for that age group overall.

The article also lists possible explanations from gay smokers for all that smoking. Perhaps it's the emphasis on the bars and clubs - often smoke-filled - that keeps gays puffing away. Or maybe it's coping with the issues of unsupportive families or the difficulties of finding "the one" in a world full of not-the-ones. Or perhaps it's all about the image of smoking in the queer collective conciousness ... from the smolderingly sexy Maraboro Man to the worst Bette Davis impersonator waving a cigarette and proclaiming, "It's gonna be a bumpy night!"

Dr. Elizabeth Gruskin, the reseacher quoted in the article, has a theory. She says, "It doesn't seem like the issues are different than with straight people, so maybe they're just more intense."

"More intense"? I think that was a polite way of saying gay smokers tend to be drama queens.

Perhaps there's truth in that. In my case, at least, my attempts at quitting smoking failed following some "drama." In college I remember going back to smoking because the guy I was dating at the time failed to say "I love you, too" when I had confessed my feelings. Being laid off last year provided enough drama to keep me smoking even when I should have been using my unemployment checks for more necessary things. Then this summer it's been my dad's failing health that steered me to the nearest convenience store on the way back from a hospital visit.

So there I sit ... alone in front of the computer screen, contemplating the latest drama and puffing away.

If all the health organizations really want the LGBT community to cut down on smoking, the solution is really very simple: Quit causing us so much drama! Muzzle Fred Phelps, the American Family Association, Jerry Falwell, Focus on the Family, the entire Bush Administration, and 90 percent of Republicans for six months and we'll be a happy, healthy and smoke-free minority.

Suppose we have a chance of getting such a program implemented?

A drop of blue in a sea of red

2006-07-30T14:35:00.000-05:00

Unfolding a political map of Kansas you'd mostly see an unbroken sea of red. Sure there would be a few blotches of blue - Wyandotte County, for instance, with it high number of poor and minority voters and the influence of union workers, and Douglas County, home of the University of Kansas and long a bastion of liberal ideas - but for the most part, the rest of the state can be counted on to vote not just Republican, but conservative Republican.

But now a tiny drop of blue can be added to the map in the tiny (1,600 and some sturdy Kansas souls) hamlet of Meade, Kan.

Meade's probably the last place you'd expect to find a battle brewing over a rainbow flag, something that's become a symbol for the LGBT community. But nonetheless, the little town at the junction of arrow-straight state highways 54 and 23 located about midway between Dodge City's "Boot Hill" and the "Land of Oz" museum in the somewhat misnamed Liberal, is facing its own version of the culture wars.

According to Wichita CBS affiliate KWCH Channel 12, the trouble began when the proprietors of a local bed-and-breakfast hoisted a rainbow flag to fly next to Old Glory from their historic former hotel that now offers 10 guest rooms.

Local resident, Keith Klassen says the flag is a slap in the face to the conservative community of Meade. "To me it's just like running up a Nazi flag in a Jewish neighborhood. I can't walk into that establishment with that flag flying because to me that's saying that I support what the flag stands for and I don't," says Klassen.

And that's just the beginning. The B-and-B's owners say the local newspaper, The Meade County News, ran an article about the rainbow flag and never bothered to contact them for a comment. The local radio station threatened to reject all advertising for the restaurant at the bed-and-breakfast unless the flag was removed.

So who are these folks who have upset the Meadeans (Meadites? Meaders? Whatever.) so mightily? No doubt some of those radical homo-seck-shul types from that Sodom-on-the-Sea San Francisco intent of forcing their perverted lifestyle on the decent, God-fearin' folks of Meade?

Nope. Not even close.

The proprietors of the Lakeway Hotel are J.R. and Robin Knight. Despite the somewhat suspicious-sounding initials and the androgynous name like "Robin," J.R. and Robin are a married couple. Married as in traditional heterosexual man and woman joined in holy wedlock. Married ... with kids.

In fact, you could say it's the Knight's 12-year-old son who set the whole controversy in motion. On a trip to the Land of Oz museum, he got a rainbow flag. As his father explains it, the flag reminded his son of the song "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" from the 1939 Judy Garland film, The Wizard of Oz. (Being a card-carrying homo-seck-shul, I don't have to check to see when the film was made. All sorts of Wizard of Oz trivia comes pre-programmed into my genes ... like the fact that Buddy Ebsen was originally cast as the Tinman but had to withdraw when he developed an allergy to the metallic makeup, or the fact that the studio demanded a dance number called "The Jitterbug" be cut from the final version of the film, or that ... but never mind. You get the idea.)

Now where was I before I began my digression into Wizard of Oz overload?

So anyway, the kid thinks the rainbow flag is neat. The Knights see it as a way to promote the Land of Oz attraction. It should have been a no-brainer.

Enter the fundies who see nefarious motives flapping in the hot summer breeze of the southwest Kansas prairie. Instead of following the logic of the flag over the rainbow, they focus their attention below the belt. Surely, they reason, there's a plot afoot to promote the homo-seck-shul agenda and teach sodomy to our innocent grade schoolers, they thought.

So the battle is on in this little skirmish in the culture wars.

Here's what J.R. Knight has to say about the whole incident to the Wichita TV station:

Knight says it's not meant to be a gay pride symbol but he doesn't mind if that's how it's taken. "Any gay or lesbian people that do stop by will be treated with the best service I can give you," says Knight

But despite the local ridicule and loss of business, Knight is determined to stand his ground. "When this rainbow flag shreds, I will buy another one, and another one, and another one - just like my American flag, I'll buy another one."

I've never met the Knights. I've never passed through Meade. And I've never stayed at the Lakeway Hotel. But if I'm ever in the area you can bet I'll be stopping in for a meal and even maybe a night's stay.

Now whenever I'm feeling frustrated listening to the religious right prattle on and on about family values, I'll just remember the Knight family and how they have values, too.

(If you'd like to contact the Knights and let them know they have well-wishers out here, they can be reached via e-mail at: innkeeper@lakewayhotel.com.)

Rights that stop at the city limits

2006-07-01T21:53:00.000-05:00

Every time I hear about another city enacting an LGBT-inclusive human rights ordinance I cheer a little bit. And then I sigh wondering how long it will take for some gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender person to run smack into the reality that such ordinances are better at providing symbolism than any real protection.

Most recently I can across a reference to such a human rights ordinance in The Dallas Voice, an LGBT publication that heralded Dallas' anti-discrimination ordinance. "The city of Dallas wants to make sure you’re aware of the protections available to you under its anti-discrimination ordinance," the article began. That's a good start, but what the lead paragraph promised was being chipped away by the forth paragraph.

Moving further down the story - into what would be called "the fine print" if it were a contract - we find out there are certain restrictions to LGBT inclusiveness.

You've only got 180 days to file a complaint.

Some organizations and government entities are exempt from prosecution under the anti-discrimination ordinance.

You can't sue religious organizations.

The federal government and its departments and agencies are all exempt from following the law.

So is state government and its departments and agencies.

Oh ... and so are private membership clubs, landlords who own three or fewer single-family dwellings, and social, fraternal, educational, civic, or political organizations that exist solely for the benefit of members.

And finally, there's this kicker: If someone files a complaint against a business that's actually covered by the law and prevails, he or she is entitled to a grand sum of (drum roll please!) $200 to $500. That's a maximum. Not one cent more. The wronged party doesn't even have the right to file greivances with state or federal agencies where the fines and penalties are higher. All because LGBTs aren't covered by federal anti-discrimination laws or even state laws except in a scant few states.

Back in 1993 when I was just starting down the path of gay activism, Kansas City had just passed its human rights ordinance giving lesbians and gays (we still don't include transgender persons or mention gender identity in the ordinance) equal rights in employment, housing and public accommodations.

We saw it as a major victory. Perhaps it was. It was certainly a step forward. But then to go from having no recourse to discrimination to limited recourse is always an improvement.

During that same time I was volunteering with the local anti-violence hotline. The hotline grew out of complaints that police were failing to take gay-bashing incidents seriously as well as the need to educate the community about how to file a discrimination case under the new ordinance.

Some of our callers just wanted to share their stories. Others from surrounding communities were shocked to find out that because the incident occurred outside Kansas City, there was no recourse for them to file a complaint.

One caller in particular stands out in my mind. He was a young man in his 20s who worked in downtown Kansas City for a large corporation. Discretion prevents me from mentioning the company by name, but I can say its initials were AT&T.

The caller was a gay man who had the unfortunate luck of working for a piously religious supervisor who made it a point to mention that the Bible labeled men like him "abominations." She left religious tracts about the perils faced by those who lived the homosexual lifestyle on his desk. She also advised co-workers that they were working about a gay man and even made a point of taking the food he brought for an office potluck dinner off the table out of fear other less sinfull employees might catch some disease from it.

By the time the young man contacted the hotline, he was at his wit's end. Literally. He had just been released from a psychiatric facility where he had spent a couple of weeks after a job-related breakdown. He had also reached a point where he was ready to fight back and I walked him through the process of filing a complaint.

Over the next couple of mouths I spoke with him several times as his case wound its way through the system. The city's Human Rights Department assured him he had one of the most clear-cut cases of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation they had ever dealt with. For once he sounded hopeful instead of bouncing back and forth between depression and anger. Having sheparded him through the system, I felt I had done my part in getting him the help he needed.

Sometime later I ran into the young man's lover and inquired about his case.

"His case?" he asked.

"The case he filed for discrimination."

"Oh. Yeah. That one," his lover answered. "He won. They gave him the maximum. It was $500."

Shortly after he won, he resigned. The company put him back under the same supervisor who was now adept at less overt ways to make his life hell. So he quit. And the $500 he received came no where near paying his medical bills.

The LGBT community had won a victory when it won inclusion in the non-discrimination ordinance. But it was a tiny one, in retrospect. More like a symbolic victory than a meaningful one.

Had the young man be black and his supervisor referred to him as "boy" or taunted him about eating watermelon and fried chicken, he would have had recourse beyond a hollow victory and $500.

Had he been a young woman who was groped and propositioned by a supervisor, the fines would have been heavy.

Had he been a Jew working for a right-wing Christian who called him a "Christ killer" or tried to convert him, AT&T would have faced much more than a slap on the wrist.

But he was gay. And apparently being discriminated against for sexual orientation carries a bargain-basement price tag because our rights extend only to the city limits ... and in many locations those rights don't exist at all.

Municipal ordinances that cover LGBT folks are great. We need more of them. But we also need state and federal laws that back them up and provide additional legal recourse to those who have faced discrimination.

That's why we can't rest on our laurels and stop pushing - even in the face of the most homophobic administration this nation has produced.

As long as one LGBT person faces discrimination or is fired because of his or her sexual orientation or gender identity our job isn't done.

Cleaning out the blog box

2006-06-22T20:36:00.000-05:00

Back several months ago when I was unemployed and had the time to attend to this blog more frequently, I started keeping a file of ideas for blog topics. When nothing in the day's news caught my attention as particularly blog-worthy, I'd raid my file for ideas. Some of those ideas made it into this particular portion of cyberspace and others have collected dust. It's not that they weren't good ideas to blog about ... I just couldn't think of ways to turn a two-sentence idea into a full-length blog (and as readers know, my blogs do tend to run to the full-length variety).

So with no further ado, here's my attempt to clean out some of my files by collecting some "mini-blogs" into a full-length one.

Debating a dying prejudice

The Rt. Rev. John Spong, former Episcopal bishop of Newark, N.J., was part of the "religious left" even before there was a religious right. He's written books on a number of theological issues, including LGBT topics, in such books as Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism: A Bishop Rethinks the Meaning of Scripture, Why Christianity Must Change or Die: A Bishop Speaks to Believers In Exile, and Living in Sin?: A Bishop Rethinks Human Sexuality. With titles like those - and the ideas contained in them - it's little wonder that Spong is the type of Christian who drives folks like Falwell, Roberts and Dobson into fits of near-apoplexy.

Earlier this year Spong was on the lecture curcuit in Oregon and something he said in an interview with The Oregonian caught my attention. When a reporter asked him why he belived the battle for gay rights has already been won, he replied:

No prejudice is ever debated that isn't already dying. The reason we debate a prejudice is because it isn't holding anymore. We saw black people as being less than human. But we began to see them as human beings. It took a while to work that out. We used to define women as dependent, weak, emotionally hysterical, incapable of bearing responsibilities. Women began to challenge that in the 20th century. The same thing is happening with gay people.

To those of us int he middle of fighting for our rights, that's a very comforting idea and I've thought about it often when I feel frustrated that the extremists in the religious reich are gaining ground in their attempt to keep LGBT people oppressed.

"No prejudice is ever debated that isn't already dying." It's a shame I was born without the Martha Stewart gene or else I've have that sentiment cross-stitched in rainbow thread and hanging on my wall.

Gay evolution

Are there any other two words that send fundies into fits more than "gay" and "evolution"? (Well, maybe abortion and ACLU ... but that's beside the point.) Now put gay and evolution together and watch the far-right heads spin!

A transgender biologist at Stanford University has written a book on the evolutionary role of same-sex behavior in the animal world. Joan Roughgarden's Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender and Sexuality in Nature and People is one of those books that earns a spot on my as-soon-as-I-get-time reading list. Her theories were featured in a recent issue of Seed magazine. Among them was this:

Japanese macaques, an old world primate, illustrate this principle perfectly. Macaque society revolves around females, who form intricate dominance hierarchies within a given group. Males are transient. To help maintain the necessary social networks, female macaques engage in rampant lesbianism. These friendly copulations, which can last up to four days, form the bedrock of macaque society, preventing unnecessary violence and aggression. Females that sleep together will even defend each other from the unwanted advances of male macaques. In fact, behavioral scientist Paul Vasey has found that females will choose to mate with another female, as opposed to a horny male, 92.5% of the time. While this lesbianism probably decreases reproductive success for macaques in the short term, in the long run it is clearly beneficial for the species, since it fosters social stability. "Same-sex sexuality is just another way of maintaining physical intimacy," Roughgarden says. "It's like grooming, except we have lots of pleasure neurons in our genitals. When animals exhibit homosexual behavior, they are just using their genitals for a socially significant purpose."

Besides sounding like an interesting (if challenging) read, the book has already given my a new pick-up line I'm dying to use: "Hey there ... why don't you come over to my place so we can use our genitals for a socially significant purpose?"

Faith-based health insurance?

Right-wing Republicans in several states are trying to give insurance companies permission to deny coverage for people with "morally objectionable" conditions. It doesn't take much to see how adversely that could affect people with AIDS, women seeking birth control, transexuals in need of hormone treatments, or even LGBT folks seeking any sort of medical treatment.

Between those efforts and the controversies over pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions for conditions they don't approve of, it apparent some doctors, pharmacists and insurance companies don't want us as patients.

They claim they are objecting to certain patients, treatments and medications on religious grounds. If that's the case there are a whole lot of folks these health care professionals won't be serving.

"I'm sorry, Rev. Falwell, but we can't fill your prescription for blood pressure medicine. You've been gaining weight and, well, you know gluttony is one of the seven deadly sins."

"Gee, Sen. Helms. All those years you spent smoking while representing Big Tobacco's interests in Congress have left you with lung cancer. I'd like to help, but the Bible says the body is a temple and you've been treating your's like a smokestack."

"You've developed chirrosis of the liver from all your years guzzling booze at cocktail parties back in Texas, Mr. President. God says drunkeness is a sin so you're not eligible for a liver transplant, sir."

"I'm afraid your eyesight is deteriorating, Rev. Dobson, but there's nothing I can do to help you since it's obvious you must have been a chronic masturbator in your youth. God has chosen to strike you blind."

I feel witty ... oh so witty

Researchers from the University of East London published a paper last winter on the dry-sounding topic of how male aggression patterns vary with sexual orientation. Don't fall asleep yet. I can sum up their findings in just three words: Gays are witty.

According to the study, "Homosexual males are often reported to be less physically aggressive than heterosexual males. Previous aggression studies have not, however, compared all forms of direct aggression, indirect aggression, and empathy among these populations. These results suggest that homosexual men are not less aggressive than heterosexuals per se, they simply express their aggression in different ways."

Boiled down to its essentials, straight men use their fists when they get pissed off while gay men use their mouths. Not that way, though. They use their mouths to utter put-downs, devastating bon mots, withering reparte and rapier-sharp wit.

Well, d'uh!

No wonder we get the stereotype of being witty. As a minority within a dominate and often hostile culture, we've developed a non-physical form of confrontation as an adaptation.

Besides, delivering a wickedly satirical verbal jab at some room-temperature-IQ redneck who's gettin' ready to stomp our faggot asses gives us time to get away while Bubba stands there tryin' to figure out what the hell we just said and whether or not it's an insult to mention the appalling lack of branches adorning his family tree.

Have you seen this guy lurking around?

2006-06-21T22:50:00.000-05:00

Take a good look at the guy in the photo. Have you seen him lurking around Kansas City where he now calls home? Ever seen him driving through Penn Valley Park and slowing down to cast an appraising eye at the hustlers plying their trade there? Or furtively darting in and out of booths at that last bastion of the closeted, shamed and self-loathing, Erotic City? Or perhaps bumped into him in some suburban mall's men's room?

If so we want to hear from you.

Just who is this guy and why would he be hanging out in such lurid places? He's "Rev." Andrew Comisky, director of the "ex-gay" program Desert Stream Ministries. Today I found out, courtesy of an op-ed he wrote for The Kansas City Star, that he and I both live in Kansas City.

So naturally I'm curious about my neighbor who claims to be a former homo-seck-shul and want to make sure he's appropriately welcomed to town by Kansas City's gay community.

So if you bump into Andy is some gay venue, drop me a note to kayceewolf@yahoo.com about it so I can share it with everyone else and we all can give Andy a big ol' "howdy" when we see him out and about.

One lap dance away from heterosexuality

2006-06-20T20:58:00.000-05:00

Maybe it's time I stopped picking on the "ex-gay" movement. The way some factions of the homo-no-mo' crowd are picking on each other, I think I'll sit back and let them do my work for me.

Case in point: The American Fascist ... Oops! I mean "Family" Association web site carries an article titled "Experts Split Over 'Bizarre' Sexual Orientation Therapy Techniques." (For a group like AFA to call an "ex-gay" therapy bizarre is what originally piqued my interest. Usually AFA reserves adjectives like "bizarre" for descriptions of abortionists, feminists, lesbians (which is sort of a synonym for "feminist" in the AFA lexicon), homo-seck-shuls, people with memberships in the ACLU and the every popular "radical homosexual agenda.)

In this particular case, "bizarre" was the word used to describe the reparative therapy techniques of Richard Cohen, president of Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays (PFOX) and author of Coming Out Straight, a book purporting to outline Cohen's ideas for turning even the swishiest queen straight. For an idea of the esteem Cohen's ideas are held in, check out the amazon.com link and read some of the reader reviews. Or you could just save time and read the headlines such as "How long will this stupidity continue?," "Worthless--except as a propoganda piece" and "WARNING! This book will be harmful to your health!"

Apparently more than just "radical homo-seck-shuls" are giving Cohen and his theories the thumbs down. He's also drawing criticism from some of his fellow practitioners of "ex-gay" snake oil salesmanship. According to the AFA article:

Christian psychotherapist Richard Cohen, board president of the ex-homosexual education and outreach organization known as Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays (PFOX), is addressing criticism leveled against certain therapy techniques he uses on clients with homosexual desires.

Cohen, a former homosexual and the author of the book Coming Out Straight (Oakhill Press, 2005), insists that no one is born with homosexual desires. He claims his reparative therapy group, the International Healing Foundation (IHF), has helped many men and women with unwanted homosexual desires achieve their goal of changing their sexual orientation and becoming heterosexual.

It is not a choice to have homosexual desires, the IHF director contends, but it is a choice to act upon those desires. He says those unwanted homosexual feelings are the result of temperament, familial influence, and environmental or social conditioning, all of which can be addressed through specific therapeutic principles and practices.

Cohen's methods have raised some questions, however; and he has lately taken sharp criticism over a May 23 appearance on Cable News Network (CNN), in which he demonstrated a technique that involves cuddling a male client in his lap. ...

Cohen, who refers to himself as a reorientation therapist, explained the "holding therapy" exercise as a means of using "healthy touch" on clients, who very often were "touch deprived" as children. He says this technique is one of the most effective ways to help men and women leave homosexuality.

Ummmmm ... yeah, I can see where being forced to sit on Cohen's lap would make me denounce my sinful ways. Especially if Cohen began the session with, "Come here and sit on my lap and we can talk about whatever pops up. (Giggle!) Yeah, that's right ... now sort of rock back and forth a bit ... mmmmmm ... yes! ... Now bounce up and down. ... Faster! ... Oh yes ... yes ... yes! Sweeeeeeet Jay-zuz!!!"

I shudder to think of the scene. Apparently so does a former colleague of Cohen's who is openly critical of him in the AFA piece.

Psychologist Dr. Warren Throckmorton, director of college counseling at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, maintains a blog on sexual identity change therapy and related information for interested individuals. He is not a reparative therapist, but he claims Cohen's techniques as demonstrated on CNN are bizarre and are not based on solid research.

Since viewing the "Paula Zahn Now" segment, Throckmorton has notified PFOX that, although he supports its mission and its belief that people are not born homosexual, he will not represent the group as long as Cohen remains its board president.

"Richard means well and has a good heart," Throckmorton acknowledges. "I think he is interested in helping people achieve the change that he himself has achieved. However, I also am concerned that the techniques and the portrayal of them left the wrong impression in the minds of many people in the public."

The impression the psychologist and Grove City College official is concerned about leaving with the public, he explains, is the false notion that all change-oriented therapists engage in the kind of techniques employed by Cohen. Not all reparative therapists use such techniques as Cohen's, the former PFOX spokesman says, nor is their use widespread or mainstream in change therapy circles.

I can see why Throckmorton is concerned. Nothing would scare off potential clients quicker than a request of sit on a therapist's lap. Even with only a couple of college psychology courses and a year's subscription to Psychology Today that has long since lapsed, I think I am qualified to tell the difference between bona fide therapy and something that's a mutant offspring of a sexual harrassment lawsuit waiting to happen and the start of a bad 1970s porn movie.

It's too be expected that real psychologists are aghast at Cohen's techniques. In fact, in January 2005 Cohen was permanently expelled from the American Counciling Association for ethical violations "which included inappropriate behavior such as fostering dependent counseling relationships, not promoting the welfare of clients, engaging in actions that sought to meet his personal needs at the expense of clients, exploiting the trust and dependency of clients, unethically soliciting testimonials from clients and promoting products to clients in a manner that is deceptive," according to author and activist Wayne Besen who writes frequently on the "ex-gay" movement.

What's astonishing is that people in the reparative therapy community like Throckmorton are working hard to distance themselves from Cohen and his "bouncy-bouncy" therapy. That's kind of like being kicked out of the asylum because the other inmates took a vote and declared the new guy to be crazy.

It's almost enough to make you feel sorry for Cohen. Almost. But then you realize that he's out of the street looking for the gulible to convince they are one private lap dance away from heterosexuality.

Confusing winning a battle with winning a war

2006-06-10T11:29:00.000-05:00

The Defense of Marriage Act has gone down in defeat, just as predicted. We can all breathe a sigh of relief that - at least for now - the Repugnantcans and their henchmen on the far right extreme of the religious reich won't be writing discrimination into the Constitution this year as a first step in turning America from a democracy into a theocracy.

We won that battle, so we can celebrate at our gay pride parades and hoist a few toasts at our favorite watering holes.

Then most of us will probably forget about making our voices heard on LGBT issues until the next time the fun-D'uh-Mental-ists and their GOP masters need a boogieman to scare voters to the polls.

For much of the gay community, we approach gay activism the same way the fundies approach defining us. Just as being gay means more than indulging in one of those sex acts the religious bigots denounce as "abominations" (but yet have such an obsessive interest in), being a gay activist means more than just speaking out when the radical right takes steps to deny our rights.

Joe Strupp, a straight man who is a senior editor for Editor & Publisher magazine, understands that fact. On the day that debate began in the Senate on the so-called Married Protection Amendment, Strupp wrote a column titled "Editorials should come out ... for gay marriage." In it he wrote:

It is bad enough that newspapers have not taken a harder stance in favor of gay rights in the past. But to allow this short-sighted misuse of the Constitution to move ahead without condemnation would be the ultimate irresponsibility.

Forty and fifty years ago, some of what kept the fight for black civil rights going came from newspapers. Either through the strong, tireless coverage on the news pages, or the brave, stubborn stand on some editorial pages, the plight of blacks seeking justice was a clear, necessary story that many papers would not let go.

Today's fight for gay rights has some similar elements, but it has not reached the level of demand for full justice that the civil rights movement before it did. I remain puzzled that gays and lesbians are not taking their battle for true equality to the streets in huge numbers. That could be part of the reason that the newspapers have not taken up their cause as a priority.

He's right. Not just about newspapers shying away from taking a stand on gay issues, but on the reluctance of LGBT folks taking to the streets to demand our rights.

The LGBT community has become a victim of its own success, albeit limited success. We have become nonchalant and complacent ... able to be stirred only when something like the marriage amendment comes along. And in all likelihood, even that didn't move many of us because it was predicted the amendment was almost certain to fail.

I include myself in that number as well. My sole contribution to the debate was to post a link on my Democratic club's web site to the Human Rights Campaign's online petition that allows supporters to contact their Senators and voice opposition to the amendment. Oh, sure, I could defend my lack of effort by pointing out that my Senators are both Republicans. Missouri's Jim Talent is a tool of the religious right and Kit Bond is a party-line asswipe who will vote as his party tells him, so my letter was unlikely to make a difference.

But I should have written - and so should many others - just to let our elected officials know that they had gay and lesbian constituents who were willing to make our voices heard.

After nearly six years of the Bush administration, the most rabidly anti-gay administration in U.S. history, we have been cowed into silence. We think our voice makes no difference to politicians who pander to the religious bigots. We content ourselves with tidbits and forget about demanding a place at the table.

Joe Strupp gets it exactly right: to advance our cause, we must be willing to take our struggle to the streets.

That doesn't just mean waving a banner at the gay pride parade. It means living as activists every day.

Nor does it mean letting our straight allies do the work for us.

Take, for example, a recent local incident in which a man was fired from a position as choir director for a Catholic church because he was also the music director for the Heartland Men's Choir, a gay singing group. Of the letters to the editor about the incident printed in the local newspaper, the vast majority of supporters identified themselves as straight.

Where was the LGBT outrage?

Or for another example, last summer two lesbians were assaulted with a baseball bat simply for walking down the street and holding hands. This happened only a few blocks from my home and the perpetrators were never found. The local Anti-Violence Project held a community forum on the incident and only a handful of people attended.

Where was the LGBT outrage?

We cannot now allow ourselves to become too complacent. Unfortunately, the complancency comes from confusing winning a battle with winning a war.

Just because we work in a company that recognizes domestic partners doesn't mean we quit pushing for equality for all LGBT people. Just because we've never been gay bashed doesn't mean it's safe for all LGBT people to walk the streets. Just because we attend a church that welcomes LGBT folks doesn't mean we don't speak out against churches that wrap their bigotry in scripture and try to force their beliefs on everyone.

Back during the early, dark days of the AIDS epidemic, the gay community was stunned into silence as we watched friends sicken and die and feared we ourselves might become the solemnly reported statistics of those infected and those dead. Faced with our own premature mortality, we were silent as the Reagan administration refused to even utter the word "AIDS" until thousands were already dead and the preachers and pundits proclaimed AIDS was evidence of God's wrath.

It took a straight ally in the form of Bette Midler to articulate exactly what the gay community needed to hear. "For Christ's sake, open your mouths! Don't you people get tired of being stepped on?" said the Divine Miss M.

Just as we needed to hear those words from Bette back then, so, too, now we need to here Joe Strupp saying, "I remain puzzled that gays and lesbians are not taking their battle for true equality to the streets in huge numbers."

But beyond hearing those words we need to act on them, too.

If you're gonna steal, only steal the best

2006-05-31T22:17:00.000-05:00

I have a confession to make. Most of us bloggers steal shamelessly. We read someone's thoughts and ideas on a message board or blog and figure we can improve and expand on them. Viola! We have a blog!

I try not to steal too shamelessly. And when I do, I try to make sure that I give credit to the person whose ideas I'm expanding upon, or at least make sure there a link to the original source material.

But sometimes I find an idea so perfect in its presentation, so forthright in its logic, so succinct and profound and meaningful, that it would be a shame to "borrow" little bits of it to be edited into words I could pass off as my own.

Such a case is a "Faith Matters" column on the pending Federal Marriage Amendment being considered next week in the Senate. The column was written for Scripps Howard News Service by David Waters. In a scant 628 words, Waters manages to sum up all that is wrong and hypocritical about the Federal Marriage Amendment ... something I'd be hard-pressed to do in ten times that many words.

So with kudos to David, here's the entire text of his column (including an e-mail address if anyone feels so inclined as to send him an atta boy):

Marriage is under attack, but not by 'them'

We're pouring hundreds of billions of dollars, not to mention thousands of troops, into the quicksand that is Iraq.

Millions of Americans are uninsured or underinsured. Millions more can't afford the health care they need.

Gas prices are hurting every level of government, every business and every individual except the oil barons (in and out of the White House).

The government can't seem to stop spying on us or lying to us.

Our borders are about as secure as a screen door in New Orleans.

Mother Nature is getting hotter and testier with every passing storm.

We've got big problems.

So, naturally, some of our political and religious leaders have something more important on their minds:

Gay marriage.

Must be an election year.

"Today, the institution of marriage is under attack," Sen. Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said a few months ago when he promised to haul the Marriage Protection Amendment _ which defines marriage as a union between one man and one woman _ out of cold storage and up for a vote in early June.

"The danger this betokens for family life and a general condition of social justice and ordered liberty is hard to overestimate," stated a letter sent last week urging Congress to approve the amendment. It was signed by "the Religious Coalition of America," an impressive list of 50 religious leaders, including Rick Warren, James Dobson, Charles Blake and Eugene Rivers, and all eight U.S. Catholic cardinals.

Frist and the "Coalition" are right about one thing. The institution of marriage is under attack, but not by homosexuals.

By heterosexuals.

The percentage of men and women who get married every year is as low as it has ever been in this country.

More than half of all African-American children are living in single-parent homes. Fifty years ago, that figure was 22 percent.

One in five white children are living in single-parent homes. That figure has tripled in the past 50 years.

One in three children in America are born to unwed mothers!

I'm not a fan of exclamation points, but the previous sentence should shock us all.

As any judge, police officer, teacher or president can tell you, children born out of wedlock are more likely to live in poverty, drop out of school, commit crimes, go to jail and father (or mother) children out of wedlock.

"The union of a man and woman is the most enduring human institution, honoring _ honored and encouraged in all cultures and by every religious faith," President Bush said.

"Ages of experience have taught humanity that the commitment of a husband and wife to love and to serve one another promotes the welfare of children and the stability of society."

Bush said that in 2004, the last time politicians used the Marriage Protection Amendment as an election-year distraction.

No doubt the president and the Senate majority leader _ not to mention the 50 black and white ministers who signed the letter "in defense of marriage" _ are seriously concerned about gay marriage.

But if they're serious about protecting the institution of marriage, they should start by figuring out a way to stop straight people from having children out of wedlock.

Require men to marry the mother of their children and to be responsible for their care, or send them to jail.

Require women to marry the father of their children, or take their children and their welfare benefits away from them.

Require all men and women to undergo premarital counseling and parenting training before they can get a marriage license.

Stop obsessing about the specks in the eyes of gay people who want to get married.

First deal with the planks in the eyes of child-bearing straight people who don't.

(Contact columnist David Waters at waters@commercialappeal.com or by mail at The Commercial Appeal, P.O. Box 334, Memphis, TN 38101.)

OK ... so feeling inspired? Good! Here's what you need to do. Click on this link to the Human Rights Campaign's on-line petition about the Federal Marriage Amendment and let your lawmakers know how you feel.

Collision course: LGBTs next major challenge will come from the Left

2006-05-29T08:08:00.000-05:00

Call it "not-so-friendly fire," but the next major obstacle to LGBT equality will come not from the far Right and their religious zealots, but from the Left and portions of the Democratic Party.

Among some Democrats who otherwise call themselves Progressives, there's a snarling, snarky attitude toward LGBT issues that seems to be growing. Oh sure, they aren't quite as venomous as Republicans and their lap dogs in the religious reich. The far Right would prefer concentration ... opps! I mean "re-education" camps. Democrats, meanwhile, will just encourage gays and lesbians to move to the back of the bus.

So what's shrinking the Democrats' "big tent"? It's the convergence of two issues. First, the Democratic Party is terrified of being associated with the idea of "gay marriage" as it was in the 2004 election when Repugnantcans herded their sheep (a.k.a., their base) to the polls with amendments in 11 states banning same-sex marriages. Among some Democrats, LGBTs bore the brunt of responsibility for Kerry's loss. Many Democrats tried to distance themselves from the marriage equality issue. Others made sure LGBTs got the message to shut up and sit down on otherwise politically progressive forums such as Democratic Underground.

After a few months the infighting died down, but it never really was adequately addressed and it certainly never went away.

Enter reason two for the anti-LGBT backlash on the Left. Last month Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean made some major missteps in the eyes of many LGBT Democrats. First he fired his director of LGBT outreach after the man's partner penned an editorial that Dean wasn't doing enough for LGBT issues. Then he appeared on Christian mullah Pat Robertson's odious "The 700 Club" and bungled his own party's 2004 platform by claiming it stated marriage is between a man and a woman only. (For the record, the platform says nothing of the kind. For more information, check out this earlier blog entry.)

LGBT resentment bubbled over and editorials begin showing up in gay publications questioning Dean's ability to lead. Some, like an editorial titled "Time for Howard Dean to resign" from The Washington Blade, took a more blunt approach:

I’ve always been suspicious of his pandering to gay voters when he thought he needed us. It is clear now that he thinks we are a burden on the Democratic Party, and he is moving away from us as fast as he thinks he can get away with it.

To do so is wrong strategically and a betrayal of the party’s ideals. People don’t want wishy-washy statements — they want clear position statements from their politicians and their parties. That is what wins supporters and elections.

So Howard Dean must go.

No sooner did these editorials began to circlate than the Democratic anti-gay backlash began.

The editorial was posted on the LGBT forum on the Democratic Underground - usually a fairly quiet forum populated by LGBTs and their straight allies - and angry "progressives" began to pounce.

The editorial opinion was called "useless" by one straight poster. Another called it "hogwash." Gays and lesbians were accused of disloyalty to the party and the man who brought civil unions to Vermont. (For the record, Dean's action in Vermont was a response to a court order in Baker v. Vermont requiring that the state extend marriage rights to gay couples. The Vermont legislature came up with civil unions as a response, which only satisfied the Court's ruling by technicality, giving gay couples many of the same rights but not the same status. So far from being a hero for gay rights, Dean opted for a compromise position.) Other straight Democrats accused the editorial of being planted by Log Cabin Republicans - the only LGBT folks they can "officially" hate.

Throughout it all, the attitude expressed by the heterosexuals who ventured into the LGBT forum was: "Shut up. You're gonna cost us another election."

And all this in a supposedly "progressive" forum.

Those angry Democrats are what we can expect to face, at least among some segments of the Democratic Party, during the coming election season. They will excuse their own bigotry by claiming at least they aren't Republicans, but their message comes across crystal clear: Move your ass to the back of the bus and don't say a word.

Furthermore, when the Federal Marriage Amendment goes down in defeat (which it is almost certain to do) the Democrats will use it for years to come to claim they've done their job for LGBT rights. In essense, LGBT issues will be stymied. Instead of using their efforts to help LGBT rights progress, the Democrats will claim they've done enough simply by keeping those rights from regressing.

So vote for us, Democrats will say, because we aren't as bad as the other guys. Never mind that you're not making any progress under us. Just sit there at the back of the bus and we'll get around to your issues ... in 2040 ... maybe.

I'm not fully ready to abandon the Democratic Party. There are good Democrats out there. But I no longer trust the leadership of the Party and I no longer believe they have our best interests at heart.

However, I'm not above holding my vote hostage and telling the Party they can either play ball or my vote and my contributions will go to support a third-party candidate.

At a minimum, the LGBT vote makes up 3 percent of the electorate, or about the same size as the Jewish vote. Most of those LGBT voters vote Democrat. In a close election, LGBTs can provide the swing votes as we did with the election of Bill Clinton in 1992. We need to remind the Democratic Paty of that. We need to let them know that we will not take a seat on the back of the bus. And we need to let them know that without our support, the Democratic Party may once again find itself twisting slowly in the wind come election night.

'X' marks the allegory

2006-05-27T09:49:00.000-05:00

It's a pretty safe bet that teenage boys weren't the target audience for "Brokeback Mountain" when it opened late last year. But this weekend many of those teenage boys will be flocking to what is likely to be the gayest movie of the summer: "X-Men: The Last Stand."

Yep. You read that right. The latest installment of the X-Men series is gay, gay, gay. And not in the "that's sooooooo gay" parlance of the young that signifies something is lame. Gay in the sense of "I wish I could quit you, Wolverine."

Since X-Men premiered as a comic book back in 1963, there's been something different about the series. I remember reading X-Men comics back in the late '60s. There was something about the characters that struck me as comforting and oddly relevant - feelings I didn't get from Superman, Spiderman or even Batman and his young sidekick, Robin.

The X-Men spoke to me about being "different" in much the same way that the Disney movie "Dumbo" and Han Christian Anderson's story of The Ugly Duckling equated differentness as specialness in my pre-teen years. The X-Men derived their powers not from being born on another planet or from vast wealth that allowed them to afford bullet-proof outfits, but from mutations. Something within them made them mutants and gave them their powers. For someone just beginning on his own path of being "different," the X-Men universe was a comforting one.

Being gay wasn't something talked about in the '60s, at least not in a positive way. But being different was something that I could relate to. Every month I picked up the latest installment of the X-Men and read it cover to cover in one of the old vinyl-upholstered booths at Parsons' Drug Store ... usually while sipping a cherry phosphate.

Gradually I gave into the peer pressure to put aside comic books as "kid stuff" and move on to other pursuits. Then in 2000 the first X-Men movie came out and what was a vague undertone in the comics of my youth announced itself loud and clear in the movie. Take, for example, this line from the anti-mutant villian, Sen. Kelly: "Now I think the American people deserve the right to decide if they want their children to be in school with mutants. To be taught by mutants! Ladies and gentlemen, the truth is that mutants are very real, and that they are among us. We must know who they are, and above all, what they can do!" It doesn't take much imagination to replace "mutant" with "gay" and hear that same line (or ones even more vehement) that are delivered against LGBT people in the pulpits and houses of political power on an almost daily basis.

The second film, "X-Men United," came out in 2003 the gay subtext moved even closer to the surface. There was even a "coming out" scene when Bobby Drake, a.k.a. Iceman, comes out to his parents as a mutant. His mother responds with "Well, have you ever tried not being a mutant?" Now there's a scene most of us can identify with.

Now comes the third installment, "X-Men: The Last Stand," that features a plot line ripped out of the headlines. A vaccine is invented to "cure" the mutants. Think of this as the ultimate "ex-gay" therapy. The idea of being just like everyone else is tempting to some, such as Rogue whose touch can be deadly. (Would this mark Rogue as a self-loathing mutant?) But others proudly defend their right to be openly mutant.

The character of Storm (Halle Berry) is given this gem of a gay ... oops, I mean mutant pride line to deliver: "There's nothing to cure, nothings wrong with any of us for that matter."

Adding to the "mutant as metaphor for gay" subtext of the X-Men films is the openly gay director of the first two movies, Bryan Singer. The third film in the series is directed by Brett Ratner, presumably so Singer was freed up to direct "Superman Returns" which opens later this summer (and begs the question of whether the latest film incarnation of the Man of Steel will contain any gay subtext). Singer, incidently, will turn his attention to a film that doesn't disguise its gay material under super hero uniforms next year when he directs the long-delayed version of Randy Shilts' "The Mayor of Castro Street" about the life and death of openly gay San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk.

So until "The Mayor of Castro Street" opens next year with a story of a real life hero, we'll have to content ourselves with tales of fictional superheroes with a gay subtext hidden beneath - just barely beneath - the surface with the latest X-Men movie.

And maybe, just maybe, the some of the teenage boys who will turn out in droves to see this weekend's release of "X-Men: The Last Stand" will have the proverbial light bulb go on right above their heads that the classmates they call "faggot" are a whole lot like the mutant superheroes they cheer on the screen.

Maybe they'll also get the idea that it's not a good idea to pick on the faggots 'cause you never know which of them might have some kick-ass super powers, too.

Freddie Phelps' l'il cult of hate gets egg on its face ... among other places

2006-05-22T19:32:00.000-05:00

You know it just had to happen. Someone was going to get fed up with Fred Phelps and his cult of inbred followers from Topeka's Westboro Baptist Church.

And sure enough, someone did!

From an Associated Press account of yet another one of Phelps' funeral demonstations - this one in the small town of Seaford, Delaware (population 6,000 or so) which has lost two young men in Iraq in less than two weeks:

Police were seen making several arrests and the state police helicopter had to be called into disperse the crowd after a clash Sunday in Seaford between a handful of anti-gay Kansas church members and hundreds of demonstrators supporting the American military.

Members of the Westboro Baptist Church came to Seaford’s Gateway Park to demonstrate before the funeral for Marine Corporal Cory Palmer, who died earlier this month from injuries suffered in Iraq. The group believes God is punishing America for being too tolerant of homosexuals by killing soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But they were far outnumbered by troop-supporting demonstrators. Some broke through police barricades, hurling insults and chicken eggs onto the anti-homosexual demonstrators.

As a Seaford volunteer fire company van came to pick the Kansas based group up, eggs and bottles were thrown at the fleeing group and then the crowd broke the police lines again, shattering the windows in the van.

Stephanie Hansen, a lawyer for the town of Seaford says the town did everything it could to protect the group.

Let me preface what I'm about to say by noting that I'm not an advocate of violence, but ...

Go, Seaford!

It's about friggin' time someone said "The hell with the First Amendment, you boil on the ass of humanity! You crossed the line of simple human decency long ago ... and now we're going to kick your ass!"

Phelps and his followers - mostly family members and those who have had the misfortune or poor taste to marry into the clan - will no doubt use the incident to play victim and cry about how persecuted they are as simple God-fearin', Bible-believin' Christians. Poor Fred! The only sympathy he gets from me is not from being pelted with eggs and bottles, but from being so tragically wrong about the meaning of the word "Christian."

A disbarred lawyer himself, Fred has made sure most of offspring from his withered loins went to law school. A good portion of the Phelps phamily phortune comes from cases the family has won against those who oppose him. No doubt he'll probably try to sue the town of Seaford for failing to protect his little band of cretins and miscreants. We can only hope that this time the judicial system has had enough of Fred's antics and tells him to stuff a sock in it because his funeral protests are reprehensible. Likewise, I hope the five people arrested for going after the Phelpses have their cases dismissed and are welcomed back into the community with a parade.

Finally, it looks like America is getting fed up with Fred.

"Victimhood" and potential lawsuits aside, I truly hope that as the crowd broke through police lines and rushed the demonstrators that the Phelpses experienced a moment of pure terror at the thought that they might be pulled to pieces at the hands of a mob. The only thing that could have made the moment more perfect would be if the Phelpses cried out in unison to whatever perverted version of God they pray to only to be answered by a loud, booming voice from above saying, "Go get them, Seaford!"

And on a personal note, I'm hoping Freddie and his freak show plans a trip to Kansas City soon. If they do, I'll make sure to visit the local dog park before hand. Eggs are expensive and bottles are recyclable. But a fresh pile of steaming dog shit is free and makes a much more powerful statement about Phelps and his family.

Tony Snow gets 'tarred' and feathered

2006-05-16T21:15:00.000-05:00

By the time I got home from work today I had two e-mails from friends and acquaintances informing me that "Tony Snow used a racial slut in the first full press conference today!" By the time I'd fixed dinner and sat back down at the computer, I'd received three more e-mail variations on the same "Tony Snow is a racist" theme.

While all the e-mails differed slightly, on two points they all seemed to agree. First, Tony Snow, the former FOX News (or as I prefer "Faux News") anchor and newly appointed White House press secretary used the term "tar baby" today. Second, there was a preponderance of exclamation points in the e-mails to drive home the point of outrage over the use of a racially charged word!!!!!!!!!!!!

A couple of the e-mails even attached copies of White House transcripts of the press conference. These transcripts did, indeed, show that Snow did use the phrase "tar baby." Here's what he said:

Q: You might repeat the same thing, but why not declassify this? I mean, the President did talk about the surveillance program a day after The New York Times broke that story. This would seem to affect far more people, and it did sound like the President was confirming that story today. He was answering Terry's question --

MR. SNOW: Well, if you go back -- if you go back and you look through what he said, there was a reference to foreign-to-domestic calls. I am not going to stand up here and presume to declassify any kind of program. That is a decision the President has to make. I can't confirm or deny it. The President was not confirming or denying.

Again, I would take you back to the USA Today story, simply to give you a little context. Look at the poll that appeared the following day. While there was -- part of it said 51 percent of the American people opposed, if you look at when people said, if there is a roster of phone numbers, do you feel comfortable that -- I'm paraphrasing and I apologize -- but something like 64 percent of the polling was not troubled by it. Having said that, I don't want to hug the tar baby of trying to comment on the program -- the alleged program -- the existence of which I can neither confirm nor deny.

Later in the press conference, a reporter asked Snow to clarify his "hug a tar baby" remarks and this was the explaination he gave: "Well, I believe hug the tarbaby, we could trace that back to American lore."

The Left was ecstatic! In his first press briefing, Snow, the smarmy, smirking epitome of all thing FOX (which means "all things Republican") had been publicly unmasked as a (GASP!) racist! The exclamation points began to fly!!!!!!!!!!!! And so did the explanations that "tar baby" was a racist term for African-American babies ... sort of a younger version of "pick-a-ninnies" which was a racist term for black children after they passed toddlerhood ... and so on and so forth up until "the N-word" apparently kicked in at adulthood.

The somewhat more moderate Left pointed out that "tar baby" was from the Uncle Remus tales in which Br'er Fox makes a baby out of sticky tar and uses it to catch Br'er Rabbit. Aforesaid rabbit encounters the tar baby and, infuriated that the baby doesn't speak when addressed, slugs it and gets stuck to the tar. That's a slightly more benign explanation of the term, but the Uncle Remus tales (along with such children's "classics" as Little Black Sambo) have fallen into disfavor for being racially insensitive.

So take your pick. Tony Snow is either:

A) A racist; or

B) Racially insensitive.

Internet savvy bloggers quickly discovered that today's press briefing wasn't the frist time Snow has used the objectionable term. Back in 1999, Snow offered this piece of commentary about Kosovo: "Most congressional Republicans are guilty of appalling cynicism and silence. They figure Clinton has hugged the tar baby in the Balkans and they want to watch him writhe."

But while Googling "tar baby" you can also find some other columnist and pundits who have made reference to tar babies. And not all of them are FOX News commentators ... or even conservatives.

Here's this from U.S. Reppresentative Diane Watson of California: "The Bush administration now faces the danger of adopting by default a so-called “tar baby” option, where the more the U.S. tries to disengage itself from Iraq, the more bogged down it becomes."

And this from former CBS News anchor Dan Rather interviewing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld: "Mr. Secretary, just this week there have been quotes in the paper, rank and file Americans, saying are we into a tar baby situation?"

Or this from liberal author Jim Kunstler's blog, Clusterfuck Nation: " This whole spectacle -- both the inept war itself and our debate about it here at home -- is particularly shameful for the official opposition, my party, the Democrats, because we could be talking about the so-called elephant-in-the-room, namely how we live in America and the tragic choices we've made, and the things we might do to change that -- but the party leadership is too brain-dead or craven to do that. As long as we don't, we're going to be wrassling a tarbaby in the Middle East."

Or even former Republican diva-turned-liberal Arianna Huffington who wrote: "According to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, 57 percent of Americans are opposed to investing the time and money needed to rebuild Iraq. But the Democrats sit idly by, their thumbs otherwise engaged, while the administration's Iraqi tar baby grows stickier by the day."

Let's face it, we on the Left can't lob sticks and stones at Tony Snow unless we are willing to toss some friendly fire at our own compatriots.

As a spokesman for the Bush Administration, Snow showed incredibly poor judgement in his choice of words.

Is Tony Snow a racist? I doubt it. Did he make a stupid choice of words? Yes ... and so did Huffington, Rather and the rest. They all should have been called on it.

Despite my loathing for Tony Snow and the administration he represents, I'm not ready to call for him to be tarred and feathered over his tar baby remark. But I do hope he do better next time.

Tony's a smart guy. I'm sure he knows lots of big words. Lots of words would convey the point he was trying to make better than "tar baby." Like the word "quagmire," for instance.

Oh, wait. He wouldn't dare use that word for fear the press would believe he was making reference to the Iraq war.

Born with two left feet in his mouth

2006-05-11T21:59:00.000-05:00

Back during the keynote address at the 1988 Democratic convention then-Texas State Treasurer Ann Richards skewered the sometimes upper-crust but less-than-elegant speaking style of George H.W. Bush (a.k.a. "Bush the Elder") by describing him as "born with a silver foot in his mouth." Perhaps Republicans now have a target they can aim similar vitrile at in the person of Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean who seems to have been born with two left feet in his mouth.

Let's face it. It hasn't been a good week to be Howard.

First there was the dustup over his firing of the DNC's gay outreach adviser Donald Hitchcock less than a week after Hancock's partner, Paul Yandura, accused Dean of not doing enough to promote the cause of gay equality. You can read about the firing here and read Yandura's remarked that reportedly prompted the firing here.

Though Dean denies it, the firing has all the earmarks of retaliation. Barely had the dust begun to settle in that skirmish when Dean found himself in trouble once again with LBGT Democrats who are among the party's most consistent Democratic voters.

This time Dean has stepped in an even bigger pile of steaming political doo-doo. In what was supposed to be an effort to woo disaffected conservative voters, Dean made an appearance on fun-D'uh-Mental-ist whack-job and uber-conservative Pat Robertson's "The 700 Club." During his interview, Dean stated that "the Democratic Party platform from 2004 says marriage is between a man and a woman." Governor Dean went on to point out that Democrats seek to respect and provide equal legal protections to all families.

Depending on one's personal views, Dean was either: a) "mispeaking" in the style of the White House's current occupant; b) outright lying for the benefit of the fundie followers of Robertson; or c) had been sucking on a crack pipe just prior to his appearance.

For the record, here's the exact wording of the Democratic 2004 platform on the issue of gay rights and marriage equality:

"We support full inclusion of gay and lesbian families in the life of our nation and seek equal responsibilities, benefits, and protections for these families. In our country, marriage has been defined at the state level for 200 years, and we believe it should continue to be defined there. We repudiate President Bush's divisive effort to politicize the Constitution by pursuing a 'Federal Marriage Amendment.' Our goal is to bring Americans together, not drive them apart."

No reference to "one man and one woman." In fact, the platform even goes so far as to repudiate Bush's Federal Marriage Amendment proposal.

Reaction from LGBT organizations was swift.

The National Stonewall Democrats released a statement saying: "Our founders created a federal system that allows individual states the freedom to develop policy for their own families as they see fit. Democrats do not believe that the federal government should forcefully dictate family policy for individual states, as championed by congressional Republicans and the Bush Administration. Therefore, we strongly point out that Governor Dean incorrectly spoke when stating that the 2004 Democratic Party platform defines marriage as between a man and a woman."

From the Human Rights Campaign's Director Joe Solmonese: "Governor Dean's comments weren't a mere slip of the tongue but a glaring reminder of the governor's lack of leadership on this issue. As we face a Senate vote in June that threatens to put discrimination in our Constitution, Governor Dean should not only have known better but he should have used the opportunity to speak out about the lack of values involved in the current constitutional debate."

The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force went so for as to return a $5,000 contribution from the Democratic National Committee. In the Task Force statement, Executive Director Matt Foreman said: "Governor Dean's record on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues since becoming DNC chair has been sorely and sadly lacking. The Democratic Party chair should stand by and fight for the party's own platform and values. In light of Governor Dean's pandering and insulting interview today with the Christian Broadcasting Network, we have decided to return the DNC's recent $5,000 contribution to us. We do so with great sadness, knowing that the Democratic Party has long been a champion of our rights."

Caught between a rock and a hard-headed fundie, Dean issued the following statement:

"I misstated the Democratic Party's platform, which does not say that marriage should be limited to a man and a woman, but says the Party is committed to full inclusion of gay and lesbian families in the life of our nation and leaves the issue to the states to decide," he said in a statement.

"The Democratic Party remains committed to equal protection under the law for all Americans. How we achieve that goal continues to be the subject of a contentious debate, but our Party continues to oppose constitutional amendments that seek to short circuit the debate on how to achieve equality for all Americans."

So let's recap, shall we?

Former presidential candidate Howard Dean enjoyed a great amount of support from the LGBT community. Under Dean's governorship, Vermont became the first state in the nation to offer civil unions for same-sex partners. He parlayed his popularity - and LGBT support played a large part in that popularity - into his successful bid to become chairman of the DNC. His elevation to that post was deemed a victory for the liberal wing of the Democratic Party ... and a defeat for the moderate, pro-business, socially conservative portion of the party represented by groups like the Democratic Leadership Council.

Safely installed in the ivory tower chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee, Dean embarks on a mission of being all things to all people. This leads him to an appearance on Pat Robertson's odious "The 700 Club" in which he tries to court religious conservatives who feel disenfranchised by the Bush Administration into the Democratic Party's "big tent."

Oops! I guess to accommodate all those fundies just looking for a chance to break ranks with Republicans and sign up for the Democratic Party, Dean had to kick the LGBT community out of the other side of the big tent.

When called on his actions by LGBT folks (who are disproportionately Democrats, by the way), Dean issues a less than satisfying mea culpa:

"I misstated the Democratic Party's platform, which does not say that marriage should be limited to a man and a woman, but says the Party is committed to full inclusion of gay and lesbian families in the life of our nation and leaves the issue to the states to decide," he said in a statement.

"The Democratic Party remains committed to equal protection under the law for all Americans. How we achieve that goal continues to be the subject of a contentious debate, but our Party continues to oppose constitutional amendments that seek to short circuit the debate on how to achieve equality for all Americans."
Now it's the fundies' turn to say See? We knew he was lyin'! We jes' knew Guv'ner Dean supported that dang homo-seck-shul agenda!

End result? The fundies Dean was trying to woo can't trust him. The LGBT community who would normally be natural allies with Dean and the Democrats can't trust him. In a matter of days Dean manages to piss off both ends of the political spectrum.

Way to go, Howie. I'm sure somewhere Karl Rove is dancing a little fairy jig and thinking I couldn't have sown the seeds if division any better myself!

With friends like Howie, the LGBT community doesn't really need any enemies.

Is there anything this guy won't lie about?

2006-05-07T13:53:00.000-05:00

American author and humorist Mark Twain once observed, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."

Twain's quip, it seems, has become outdated. Because he died in 1910, Twain wasn't around to meet George W. Bush, a man he would certainly have added as a whole new category of liar.

This isn't going to be one of those blogs about how Bush lied and misrepresented intelligence data to get us involved in an unwinnable war in Iraq. Nor even about the myriad other issue in which Bush stands accused of bending the truth into a pretzel. Instead, it's a blog about how Bush can't even seem to tell the truth on inconsequential matters on which the fate of the free world doesn't turn.

When as during an interview with a German magazine about his best moment as president, Bush said this:

U.S. President George W. Bush told a German newspaper his best moment in more than five years in office was catching a big perch in his own lake.

"You know, I've experienced many great moments and it's hard to name the best," Bush told weekly Bild am Sonntag when asked about his high point since becoming president in January 2001.

"I would say the best moment of all was when I caught a 7.5 pound (3.402 kilos) perch in my lake," he told the newspaper in an interview published on Sunday.

When you think about it, it actually seems sort of human ... George W. Bush as the common man, bearing the weight of the world on his slumping shoulders but still finding time to cast a line into the farm pond on his Texas ranch. It's a rather bucolic portrait of a man who wants to show he hasn't lost his common touch.

But dig a little deeper and you find that, like Bush, his fvorite memory is a steaming pile of bullshit.

Check out the web site Catch Photo Release and you'll find a listing of record-setting catches. Here's what it said about the record for perch, the type of fish Bush claims to have caught in his farm pond:

This species lives in schools in deeper water during the day and is known to move into shallower water at dusk to feed. It is also often harvested commercially in the US and Canada. Yellow perch spawn when the water is between 45 and 52 degrees and don't build nests or guard their young. They have also been known to go into water that contains little or no oxygen for short periods of time to feed on bloodworms.

Yellow Perch World Record is 4lbs 3oz - Bordentown, NJ

White Perch World Record is 4lbs 12oz - Messalonskee Lake, ME

So here are the possible explanations. Either Bush is such a humble man that he fails to report that he caught a perch almost twice the size of the world's record or he can't event tell the truth about a fishing trip.

I'll leave it for the reader to decide which explanation is the most plausible; but for me I would update Twain's adage to read: "There are four types of liars in this world: liars, damned liars, statisticians and George W. Bush."

An open letter to Mary Cheney

2006-05-06T11:23:00.000-05:00

Dear Mary,

It's been almost 48 hours since I watched you being interviewed by Diane Sawyer Thursday on ABC's "Primetime." Your performance (and I fail to come up with any word other than "performance" to describe it) still causes my blood pressure to rise and my stomach acids churn.

I can deal with you being a Republican. I don't agree with your decision, but it is, after all, your decision.

What I can't deal with is your complete apathy toward issues that affect those of us who don't come from wealthy families in positions of authority.

I'm glad you felt secure enough to come out to your family. And I'm glad that, even through their tears, they accepted you. Not all of us are that lucky. Some of us have been thrown out by families who can't accept who we are. Some of us are estranged from our families for years. Some of us are never able to bridge the chasm with the families whose love is conditional on us being heterosexual.

If the interview showed you had one shred of self-respect, it was when you admitted there was a time during the 2004 presidential campaign (in which your political party used people just like you and your partner to scare conservative voters to the polls with the boogieman of gays and lesbians threatening "traditional marriage") you considered leaving the campaign.

But you didn't.

You hid behind mommie and daddie and when John Kerry mentioned you when asked during the debates if being gay was a choice, your parents feigned indignation and said Kerry was a bad man for "outing" you before the entire nation. (Never mind that you had been out for years while working for Coors Brewing Company marketing its swill to gay and lesbian consumers. And never mind that your parents said nothing when Republican presidential candidate Alan Keyes called you a sinner and a hedonist.)

When Diane Sawyer asked if you would still be a Republican if your father wasn't the vice president, you avoided answering by saying you "don't answer hypothetical questions." That's a cowardly cop-out.

Likewise, you hedged on answering if you would still support the Bush administration if your father wasn't on the ticket. Your answer: "I think he's a very good man. On these {GLBT} issues, he hasn't caught up." Well, d'uh! And no doubt he won't ever catch up if there are LGBT people around him who don't speak up.

Perhaps the most disheartening part of the interview was when you mentioned that Bush offered to give you time to let you give a public statement in disagreement, and your father indicated publicly he disagreed with his boss on the issue. You declined the offer.

Now there's an opportunity that 99.99999999 percent of us will never, NEVER have. And you passed it up. You could have be brave and let the Republican Party know that not only are their LGBT members among them, but that their anti-gay policies hurt families and individuals.

I guess it was just too easy to hide behind mommie and daddie. And their money. And their connections.

You don't have to worry about losing your job for being a lesbian. It was your connections that helped you land a well-paying job with America Online. I seriously doubt Steve Case will show up at your office some Friday afternoon and request you to clean out your office because you're a lesbian. And even if he does, you could trade your family name for a position at any number of other companies that would be more than happy to cash in on the name "Cheney" in their roster of employees.

You don't have to fear like most of the rest of us who work in areas where we can be fired simply for who we are. Those kinds of rights don't concern you because your family name insulates you from what the rest of us in the real world go through.

Then to top it all off you mentioned that you and Heather Poe, your partner of 14 years, have no need for marriage. "Well, from my perspective," you told Diane Sawyer, "Heather and I already are married. We have built a home and a life together. Um, I hope I get to spend the rest of my life with her. The way I look at it, is we're just waiting for state and federal law to catch up with us."

So in other words you sit on your rich, priveleged white ass and let the rest of us do the work so that one day the laws change and perhaps you and Heather can have an extravagent wedding.

I have no use for people like you, Mary Cheney. Because you've lived a priveleged life, you don't see the struggles of others who are just like you except they were born into families who don't have political power. No one can control what sort of families they are born into, but they can damn well develop a sense of empathy with what other people are going through.

Most of us don't bring home six-figure salaries. Most of us don't have powerful parents. Most of us don't have the contacts to publish our stories with major publishing houses like you have done with your book, Now it's My Turn. And most of us don't have to go through such tortured logic and arguments to justify why we can align ourselves with a political party who has declared itself our enemy.

Maybe one day you and Heather will have the privelege of getting married. But one thing is certain ... you've done nothing to earn that right.

Carving out a slice of history

2006-04-22T10:08:00.000-05:00

Back when I was in high school in the mid-'70s there was a movement in education to make what was taught in school "more relevant." Students, so the idea went, aren't interested in learning when they can't personally relate to the lesson.

Almost overnight schools began to offer courses in African American history and native American history. Some offered courses in women's history. Oh sure, traditional courses in American and world history were still mandatory, but students could choose to take elective courses to learn about the parts of history that got left out of or mentioned only in passing in the traditional history texts.

When it came to blacks, history texts mentioned Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass, but few other names of African Americans were mentioned ... unless you count all the references to the slave trade which lumped all blacks together under the category of "slaves." The treatment of native Americans was even worse. Texts glossed over massacres carried out by white soldiers, broken treaties and such shameful episodes of the Trail of Tears. Native Americans seldom got mentioned as individuals and when they were they were presented as obstacles in the way of America's manifest destiny to expanded from one ocean to the next. And women? Well, apart from Betsy Ross and a few first ladies, it almost seems as if the founding fathers reproduced by some unknown method.

Since the 1970s history text books have tried to be more inclusive of the American experience. Now, with a law being considered in California, students may one day be learning about the contributions of gay and lesbian individuals to America's history.

Sponsored by openly lesbian Sen. Sheila Kuehl, the bill would add LGBT folk to the list of minorities California requires its schools to include. According to a San Francisco Chronicle article:

State law now requires that "men, women, black Americans, American Indians, Mexicans, Asians, Pacific Island people and other ethnic groups" be included in textbook descriptions of "the economic, political and social development of California and the United States of America, with particular emphasis on portraying the role of these groups in contemporary society."

"This is simply adding the LGBT community to the groups that the state has said must be included in the curriculum," said Geoffrey Kors, executive director of Equality California, which backs the bill. "There's nothing special or different.

As you can imagine, the fun-D'uh-Mental-ists are going bat-shit crazy over the bill. That should come as no surprise. They make it clear they'd like to wipe the LGBT community off the face of the earth. But they'll settle for erasing them from the history books. At least for now.

Why should we care about teaching "gay history"? The article in the Chronicle makes it clear.

Researchers at San Francisco State University studying gay youth and their families have found that not teaching about gays and lesbians affects adolescent development.

"It's very important for self-esteem and for (gay youth) feeling their lives matter and are important," said Caitlin Ryan, who leads the Family Acceptance Project at the school's César E. Chávez Institute.

An American Academy of Pediatrics policy states that environments critical of gay people interfere with the development of gay youth. And a 2003 Preventing School Harassment Study by the California Safe Schools Coalition found that school climate improves and students feel safer and experience less name-calling and other harassment at schools where gay and lesbian issues are taught.

Growing up gay in a small, rural Midwestern town, finding the tantalizing hints that there were others like me out there made a difference. I can still remember an English class in which we read portions of Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass." (If you don't know who Walt Whitman was or why he is a major figure in gay history, put on a lavendar dunce hat and go sit in the corner.) The teacher mentioned in passing that Whitman was considered gay and had written poetry that seemed to indicate his interest in men.

That was all it took. I bought a copy of Leaves of Grass and devoured it for clues to myself. That lead me to other writers such as W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, A.E. Houseman and the like. I read the section of Moby Dick in which the narrator shares a bed with Queequeg with new insight.

A couple of years later Jonathan Ned Katz published his groundbreaking Gay American History, a thick book that found hints and clues about gay culture from the early days of exploration of the New World to the modern day. Other books followed the trail blazed by Katz and made it clear that there - between the words of the dry, academic history books - was a whole culture lying undiscovered.

I've long said that one of the major obstacles to the LGBT community advancing in society is our need to re-invent ourselves with each passing generation. Because we lack a shared history, each generation must discover itself anew and the accomplishments of the past generations are lost. That's one of the ways a dominant culture keeps subcultures oppressed.

When we moved native Americans onto reservations, we taught them English and punished them for speaking in their own tongue. We obliterated their history and replaced it with "Great White Father" George Washington bringing a "superior" culture to their land. We stamped out their beliefs and forced them to convert to Christianity.

By denying gays and lesbians their own history, the dominant culture is repeating the same sort of cultural elitism.

But now maybe GLBT youth will be learning something about their past. Maybe they will encounter people like Alan Turing, the British code-breaker during World War II who is the father of modern computers. Or maybe they'll learn that Jane Addams wasn't just single because she was totally dedicated to helping the poor. Or perhaps they'll learn that the struggle for gay rights in America didn't just start with the Stonewall riots in 1969, but was preceeded by the formation of the Mattachine Society in the 1950s (and even that was preceeded by the short-lived Society for Human Rights in Chicago in the 1920s).

We need our own heroes and our own history. Kuehl's bill in California is a first-step in that direction.

Honoring a hero ... and re-thinking an "enemy"

2006-04-15T12:38:00.000-05:00

What I know about football wouldn't fill a thimble. I know it's a semi-civilized form of mock warfare where two teams pummel each other for the right to carry an oblong ball into the other team's territory. It's strategy and aims are completely lost on me. I can name only a handfull of names associated with the sport ... and probably most of them haven't seen a field in years.

One name I do recognize is Reggie White, but it's not for any of his accomplishments on the field. To me he's only the football player-turned-preacher who ranted and raved against gays and lesbians from his pulpit.

That's still the view of him I had when I heard Reggie White died. If I spared him a thought at the time of his death it was probably something like 'Good! Burn in hell, bigot!'

Today while blog browsing I found a reference to Reggie in Mike Fitzpatrick's "Reality Check" blog. In it Mike notes the passing of the Rev. William Sloane Coffin.

Coffin, Mike writes, "had been active the civil rights movement for nearly four decades. In 1962, he was a Freedom Rider in the black civil rights movement in the South. As chaplain at Harvard, he provided sanctuary to draft-resistors to the Vietnam war. In 1979, he was one of four clergy permitted to minister to the Americans held hostage in the U. S. Embassy in Tehran, Iran. Rev. Throughout the 1990's and until his death, Rev. Coffin had been active in the gay civil rights movement, marching with his wife and at times with his (straight) children in numerous Gay Pride parades in New York and other cities."

Coffin was also instrumental in helping Reggie see gays in a whole different light ... a light that led White in his last years to repent of his attacks on gays and others from the pulpit.

Besides honoring the passing of Rev. Coffin, the blog reprints his "Open Letter to Reggie White." The letter is so moving that I've reprinted it below in it's entirety:

Dear Reggie White,

I've only heard good things about you, and nobody for a moment doubts your greatness as an athlete. But if your words to the (Wisconsin) legislature this week were accurately reported, I'm troubled, and in particular about what you said about homosexuality.

I write to you as one ordained minister to another. As the Bible is the founding document of every Christian church in the world, it can't be taken seriously enough. But if you take the Bible seriously, you can't take it literally - not all of it.

For instance, in the book of Leviticus, it is a "toevah" - an abomination - not only to eat bacon, sausage and ribs, it is sinful even to touch the skin of a dead pig. If you thought that insight valid today, would you be playing football?

Homosexuality is not a big issue for Biblical writers. In the 66 books of Scripture (71 if you're Roman Catholic), only seven verses refer to homosexual behavior. Some time ago, I picked up a pamphlet entitled "What did Jesus say about homosexuality?" Opening it, I came across two blank pages. Closing it, I read on the back, "That's right, nothing."

St. Paul thought all men were straight. He assumed all homosexual activity was done by heterosexuals.

This assumption is true as well of Old Testament writers, which means that all the Biblical passages used to flay gays and lesbians have really nothing whatsoever to say about constitutionally gay people in genuinely loving relationships.

As Christians, we don't honor the higher truth we find in Christ by ignoring truths found elsewhere. I'm impressed that the American Psychological Association does not consider homosexuality an illness, and that natural scientists have discovered homosexuality in mammals, birds and insects. Clearly, God is more comfortable with diversity than we are!
In my experience, a lot of people talk in the abstract about homosexuality being a sin, but without first-hand knowledge of gays and lesbians. Wouldn't it be better to talk with rather than about homosexuals?

I write you all this in large part because today the "gay agenda" has replaced the "communist threat" as the battering ram of reactionary politics. It grieves me to see you put your considerable muscle behind such a blunt instrument of prejudice.

We live in a land of great prejudice and you as an African American and I as a white man have had to overcome the differences we have invented about one another. It is urgent that men and women, gays and straights, do the same, for as James Baldwin described us, "Each of us, helplessly and forever contains the other - We are a part of each other."

--Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Lawrence University

That marked the beginning of a change in Reggie White. White began to question organized religion. He went to Isreal and learned Hebrew so that he could study the Bible in its original language. He began to question the assumptions and beliefs he'd grown up with. And he changed.

Instead of wishing Reggie to burn in hell, I now wish I'd have met him in his last years when he was searching for truth. And I wish I had known Rev. Coffin, too.

Rev. Coffin's life reminds me that, even in a world where there is hate and bigotry, there are good people who quietly stand firm against it.

And Reggie's life reminds me that even people whose lives are so consumed with that hatred and bigotry can change.

(Thanks for the blog, Mike! ... and for more information about Reggie White's life - at least for the football-challenged - see the MSNBC article "Reggie White had just begun to live.")

Protect your children! Republicans recruit!

2006-04-13T19:23:00.000-05:00

I'd never heard of tiny Grays Harbor College in Washington state until I came across a rather striking story about it while looking for news articles to link to on my Democratic club's web site. (Just in case you're interested, the news page is here. ... How's that for a shameless plug?)

It seems the college's gay-straight alliance received a rather unflattering appraisal from a member of the student senate. According to the story in Grays Harbor's The Daily World:

The gay-straight student alliance at Grays Harbor College will not file a formal complaint against a student senator who believes being gay is “bad behavior.”

But Jeremy Vaughn, president of the club, is still asking for an apology from Amanda Plumb for comparing his group to a “pedophile club” during a student senate meeting.

Plumb told The Daily World Wednesday she hasn’t spoken to Vaughn. She said she has retained legal counsel and must be “cautious about what I say or don’t say.” Plumb declined to identify her lawyer but said he’s a member of her church and is offering his advice free of charge.

The county Republicans, meantime, are going to give her a “warm welcome” at their meeting tonight.

That's only the opening few paragraphs of a much longer story, but in those brief introductory words there are a couple of statements that raise questions among enlightened readers (ie., readers who don't goose-step to the Repugnantcan/religious reich agenda.

First, there's this gem from future mutiple divorcee Amanda Plumb: She said she ... must be “cautious about what I say or don’t say.”

Ummmmm ... Miss Plumb, if you're going to go around comparing gay organizations to "pedophile clubs," perhaps you should consider that the best time to exercise caution in what you say is before you open your mouth to spew venom, you ignorant, bigoted Republi-bitch.

Secondly - and hold on to your hats for this one 'cause it's a shocker! - is this bit of journalistic revelation: The county Republicans, meantime, are going to give her a “warm welcome” at their meeting tonight.

Holy crap! The Repugnantcans are actually celebrating such ill-tempered, brattish behavior by an adolescent? It boggles the mind! Who have thought it?

Do you think Repugnantcans give our toaster ovens to those who recruit young people away from the light and into the darkness of their twisted lifestyle? Inquiring minds want to know!

Having issues with being an issue

2006-04-09T13:24:00.000-05:00

I like straight folks. I really do. Granted, there are some I wouldn't mind seeing dipped into honey and left bound near a nest of fire ants ... both those are a separate subset of straight folks generally called the religious reich. Forgetting that group for a moment, there are plenty of other straight folks out there that are truly allies. They really get the struggle for LGBT rights.

Then there is a huge middle ground of straight folks who, in general, support gay rights, but only in the most superficial way. They'll make statements like "It's wrong to discriminated against gays" or "Same-sex couples should be allowed to get married," but they don't give a lot of thought to really understanding why discrimination against gays and lesbians is bad or why allowing same-sex couples to marry would be a good thing.

Take, for example, an online conversation I had with a straight person last week. It was on a progressive political message board and I had posted a comment on a news story about a group within the Methodist Church starting a petition to "disinvite" Emily Saliers, half of the lesbian due The Indigo Girls, from a Methodist women's conference. Saliers, according to the article, should be disinvited because her "open practice of lesbianism and her promotion of the acceptance of the lifestyle is contrary to church teaching."

The article went on to say:

The United Methodist Church does not condone homosexuality, though the church also says gay people should not be discriminated against. Consequently, both sides are citing church teachings to justify why Emily Saliers' invitation should be sustained or rejected.

Noting that both sides were using the same church doctrine to back up their argument, I posted: "I guess that's what happens when you have one of those namby-pamby denominations that speaks out of both sides of its mouth at once."

Almost immediately my comment drew a response: "'speaks out of both sides of its mouth' or a denomination that's divided?"

The discussion went back and forth and remained civil, though it was apparent the straight poster and I had very different opinions. He opposed confronting the conservatives within the church, while I perferred to go after them with the ultimatum that they either join the 21st century or go form their own church. "I favor remaining together so that time can heal even if it takes millenniums," he posted. That is a favorite patronizing position among unenlightened straight folks who seem think we have millennia to wait for our rights while they enjoy all of their rights.

While this person was working his way under my skin and doing a tap dance on my very last gay nerve, I decided that this was a better opportunity for education than cyber ass-kicking. I explained that it was the Methodist Church's nonconfrontational approach that prompted me to leave the church. "Having grown up in the Methodist Church and felt first-hand what it's like to have one's church struggle with deciding whether you are worthy enough to be a member, I hope you understand that on a personal level I chose not to hang around to see what the final outcome would be. I've seen adulterers, thieves, child and spouse abusers, and a whole host of other 'sinners' welcomed into full participation in the church. When the church in effect says, 'Whoa ... we've got to figure out whether you're good enough to be one of us,' it was time for me to go."

That brought a response of: "People leave their churches all the time for various reasons. However, that's a personal decision and separate from leaving a denomination intact so it can discuss divisive issues."

Before I could craft a response, another gay poster chimed in with a heated response that started with "Excuse me...but we are talking about someone's life and identity here and there is nothing that irritates me more than a bunch of straight people who gossip/debate/discuss others as if they aren't in the damned room." That was only the opening sentence of his post and it got far more fiery from that point. The straight poster's response was simple and to the point: "Thanks for your opinion. Have a nice day." At that point communication was shut down.

That's the trouble with modern pseudo-liberals today ... they talk down to you and refer to you as an "issue" rather than a person. They strip away your personhood and reduce you to being just another issue. And if you challenge them, they become dismissive and cut off communication.

Taxes, Social Security, military funding, cuts in social services, national security, foreign policy debates on isolationism vs. internationalism are all issues. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender folks aren't "issues." They are people. And when the pseudo-liberals see us as only "issues," it's their attempt to minimize our concerns and see us as not quite equal.

Such people are the figuritive grandchildren of the pseudo-liberals who advised blacks to be patient and continue sitting at the back of the bus during the Civil Right era of the early '60s. That was wrong then and the same approach in dealing with GLBTs today are equally wrong.

Bless all those straight folks who really, really understand our issues and care enough to offer their support. If gay activists were the first wave of the movement seeking equal rights for LGBT folks, then our straight allies constitute the second wave. If there is to be a third wave, we need to get all those heterosexuals who support us in theory, but haven't spent a lot of time thinking or confronting any of the problems we face, to see us not as issues to be moved from the back burner only when it's politically expedient, but as real flesh-and-blood people who are affected by prejudice and discrimination and homophobia.

Thirty-two years of sanity and counting

2006-04-08T20:26:00.000-05:00

On April 8, 1974, a medical miracle occurred. Some 10 million Americans suffering from a mental illness were suddenly cured. Most didn't know that they had been mentally ill, but the American Psychiatric Association had said so, so it must have been true.

Then, 32 years ago today, the APA declared that those 10 million or so citizens were suddenly cured of a mental illness. This overnight cure didn't have anything to do with a new drug or a new therapy. Instead, the APA figuratively stamped "SANE" on the forehead of 10 million or so gay and lesbian American when it voted to remove homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual - the Bible of the psychiatric profession that defines mental illnesses and sets for the guidelines for their cures.

Suddenly the 10 million gay and lesbian Americans at the time were free to go about their daily lives, safe in the knowledge that they were not mentally ill. Or, if they were, it was not because they were gay or lesbian.

Up until that point, the heterosexuals who made up the majority of Americans had four very solid reasons for discriminating against gays and lesbians.

Homosexuals are sick. And so they were. The medical field had long seen homosexuality as an illness to be treated with goat gland injections, electroshock therapy, lobotomies, years of psychotherapy, and other treatments that ran from the bizzare to the almost sympathetic (at least in comparison to slicing open the brain and mucking around a bit in the grey matter).

Homosexuals are criminals. And so they were. From the Old Testament where homosexuals were called "abominations" and suggested as being worthy targets for stonings and Paul's epistles where his prudery about "men lying with mankind as with women" was clucked over and given the First Century equivalent of a thumbs down, homosexuals didn't fare well. As laws were written and passed down, ancient prejudices worked their way into the fabric of law that made anyone who had sex outside the biblically correct man-on-top-of-woman-in-the-missionary-position-with-the-lights-out-and-please-don't-enjoy-it way a criminal. Then suddenly in 2003 that all charged with the Lawrence v. Texas U.S. Supreme Court ruling that suddenly changed the estimated 16 million gays and lesbians in America at the time from criminals to law-abiding citizens in one feld swoop.

Homosexuals are unnatural. And so they were. From the days of the biblical patricarchs on down, it seemed readily apparent that homosexuals were outside the natural order of things. They may be "fruitful," but they sure couldn't multiply. Why, not even filthy animals engaged in that sort of behavior, so therefore, following classic Aristolean reasoning, homosexuals were unnatural. At least that was the reasoning until biologists really begin to study animal behavior and discovered that all sorts of animals engaged in that ol' unnatural male-on-male or female-on-female stuff. Books like Bruce Bagemihl's Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity made note that homosexual behavior happened in the animal kingdom where the king of beast could turn out to be a queen. It followed, then, that something that happens naturally in nature could hardly be considered "unnatural."

One by one over the past three decades, the old ways of thinking about gays and lesbians - and coming up with logical reasons to hate them - have fallen.

Now that the APA has revised its definitions of mental illness and begun to view sexual orientation as a diverse spectrum, no one but the lunatic fringe makes the claims that homosexuals are sick.

With the Lawrence v. Texas decision, no one can automatically include gays and lesbians as criminals solely on the basis of who they sleep with ... though the religious reich and other assorted fringe elements make clear they would like to role back that decision.

With new, unbiased studies that show same-sex behavior is just one variation along a spectrum of sexual orientation, the condemnation of gays and lesbians as "unnatural" runs counter to scientific knowledge - except among members of fundamentalist cults who have been suspicious of anything that smacks of science ever since it was proven that the earth revolves around the sun.

The old bastions of prejudice have fallen, leaving the last and most formidable bastion alone on the battlefield.

Homosexuals are sinners.

The other bastions fell because they were exposed as false by empirical evidence. The last bastion - religion - remains standing because its insistence on faith and belief make it immune to empiricism. No amount of scientific proof can shake the faith of someone who stubbornly refuses to question his or her beliefs.

Despite all the evidence that sexual orientation is innate - a complex mix of genetics and hormones and environment in the womb and beyond - fundamentalists continue to insist that homosexuals choose to be homosexuals. It is an article of faith for them ... just as it is an article of faith that to choose to be homosexual is a sin. You can explain to them again and again how words that were translated as referring to homosexuals in the Bible actually were meant to condemn the pagan rituals of temple prostitution and the arguments make no dent. You can point to passages in the Old and New Testaments that proclaim the "sins of Sodom" to be pride and inhospitality to strangers, but they stubbornly refuse to be budged from the position that Sodom was destroyed because of wicked Sodomites wanting to play hide-the-sausage with angelic visitors.

Because the last bastion of prejudice against gays and lesbians is built on the basis of faith, it will take a long time for it to fall. And more than likely it will never truly fall even though bits and pieces are chipped away from it. There will always be those who will cling to their "the preacher said God said" blind faith to the exclusion of all reason, empiricism and proof.

For now we have to contend ourselves with living in a time when we saw three out of the four justifications for anti-gay prejudice collapse. For now we have to remind ourselves that three out of four ain't bad.

Getting Biblical

2006-02-19T22:12:00.000-06:00

Today's lesson comes from The Book of Daniel.

Not the one in the Old Testiment, but the short-lived NBC television series that began last month, produced wailing and gnashing of teeth among the fundamentalist set who prefer their biblical allusions straight (in ALL senses of the word), and then was unceremoniously dropped by NBC. The cancellation of the show gave the aforementioned fundies - primarily the foaming-at-the-mouth members of the Tupelo, Mississippi-based American Family Association - the opportunity to pick up their hairy knuckles from the ground and cheer, claiming their blather and bluster was behind the cancellation of "The Book of Daniel."

To hear the show's creator, Jack Kenny, tell it, the rabidly homophobic AFA was not the proverbial lion's den where "Daniel" met his fate. Instead Jack Kenny has placed the blame on his show getting axed squarely on the shoulder of ... (drum roll please!) ... me. And you. And all the rest of us queers who didn't rush to the show's defense and stand up against those nasty ol' bullies at the AFA.

Here's what Mr. Kenny had to say in a piece he penned for the Advocate.com:

Shortly before our premiere on January 6, 2006, The Book of Daniel wound up at the center of a controversy. Advertisers had already been skittish (as they had with Desperate Housewives, Queer Eye, NYPD Blue—any show that pushes the envelope), and this controversy, started by a very small group of bullies in Tupelo, Miss., pushed them further away. Every show lives or dies on numbers, and ours dwindled due to lack of advertisers and therefore lack of budget and support for promotion. It’s just an unfortunate truth about network television. Shows get less and less time to find an audience.

But my beef is not with NBC, nor with the advertisers, nor even with the American Family Association. We all know what the AFA is—a small group of loud-mouthed bullies who traffic in hate and fear and have been using and promoting homophobia to raise money for years. No, my issue is with my own community: the LGBT community.

In the AFA’s first very extensive e-mail attacking our show, they named me, Jack Kenny, the show’s creator, as a “practicing homosexual.” They played on that fact and the fact that there was a gay character in the show to say that I had no business writing about Jesus or Christianity. I tried to turn it into a joke (which is what it should have been) by saying I was not a “practicing homosexual” but had actually gotten quite good at it. But their attacks continued. Where was my community when I was being gay-bashed, quite openly in a very public forum? Where were the protests? Where were the articles in the gay press?

I've thought about Mr. Kenny's words for several days. I've set the subject aside and tried to write on other topics, but my thoughts kept creeping back to Mr. Kenny's empassioned plea. Perhaps my case of blogger's block can only be addressed by putting pen to paper (ok, well, for the literalist among us, "putting fingers to keyboard") and responding to Mr. Kenny. Here's what my response would be:

Grow the fuck up!

I watched your show, Mr. Kenny. It was interesting. I'll give you an "A" for originality and an "A-" for casting. Aidan Quinn is definitely watchable and I'd probably tune in to watch him reading the telephone directory. Your casting of the "Jesus" Quinn's pill-popping Episcopal priest talks to, on the other hand, was a cross ("Cross"? Get it?) between the perpetually stoned surfer dude played by Sean Penn in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" and the Buddy Jesus dashboard figurine from "Dogma." You not only managed to piss off the fundies with that depiction, but you managed to awake a few of my long-dormant Puritan genes.

As for the rest of the cast, I'll give you points for giving Quinn's character a gay son and not putting him in a dress, but what were you thinking with the rest of the cast? A wife who was a lush. A rebelous, shoplifting, drug-dealing daughter.

Here's how one publication summed up the cast:

The new show is called "The Book of Daniel," which is first and foremost a tired carbon copy of the outrageously dysfunctional suburban family shtick, but with the twist that this time, the Fool is played by Our Lord. Episcopal minister Daniel Webster is hooked on Vicodin and sees Jesus Christ regularly. His wife is an alcoholic. His son is gay. His daughter sells marijuana. His adopted Chinese son is a teenage sex machine. His female bishop, who asks him for one of his "Canadian headache pills" for the codeine, and later raids his office for more, is having an adulterous relationship with his father, who's also an Episcopal bishop, whose wife has Alzheimer's and keeps talking about penises.

Personally, it sounded like a winner to me. I don't mind some well-intended pokes at organized religion from time to time, but it seemed "The Book of Daniel" kept bouncing back and forth between poking at organized religion and then laddling on some sappy sentiment. I was never sure whether I should be laughing or reaching for some insulin.

My whole response to The Book of Daniel" was basically one of ho-hum.

According to Mr. Kenny, that wasn't the right one. I should have ran to my e-mail and starting sending out endless versions of e-mails to NBC asking them to save the show and not listen to those crazy AFA folks. After all, it had a gay character, so it was my DUTY to save the show.

Guess I shouldn't have been so wrapped up with lesser issues like writing to Ford Motor Company when AFA was claiming it forced Ford to cut its advertising in gay publications. Or writing my state legislators to keep sexual orientation in an anti-bullying bill and maybe ... just maybe ... supporting legislation to add sexual orientation to the state's categories of non-discrimination. Or letting my national legislators know what I think about issues like the so-called Marriage Protection Amendment and the "don't ask, don't tell" policy. Or trying to come up with options for friends with AIDS who are suffering from state Medicaid cutbacks. Or writing letters to the editor about the wire-tapping of Americans. Or any of a few hundred other issues that might actually affect real peoples' lives just a little bit more than a television show.

And don't even compare your experiences to a "gay-bashing," Mr. Kenny. Of all the whining and hands-on-hips-foot-stomping you did in your piece in the Advocate, that's probably the one statement that pisses me off the most. How dare you compare what you experienced in having your show cancelled to what thousands of us here in the part of the country you no doubt contemptously refer to as the "flyover" live with on a daily basis.

To quote a line from "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert," "Get down of that cross, honey. Someone needs the wood."

Sure, you wrote what could have been an interesting television series. Based on the two episodes I saw, my response to the show was lukewarm at best.

So to paraphase something the Aidan Quinn character's imaginary Post-Modern Jesus Dude might say: Like, Dude, because you're neither hot like my double-Dutch mocha decaf latte nor cold like my refereshing Diet Coke in a Big Gulp cup, I will spit you out of my mouth.

Lessons from the life of a dog

2006-01-29T15:41:00.000-06:00

The absolute worst argument over religion I ever got into wasn't over gay rights or abortion or any other of the "hot button social issues" religious zealots get dogmatic about. It was about whether animals - dogs, in particular - have souls. I don't remember much of the argument nor the scripture my opponent quoted to justify his position, but I do recall it being particularly nasty and ending with my pronouncement that if my dogs didn't have souls, they were certainly welcome to mine because they were a damn sight more worthy of an eternal afterlife than the vast majority of humans I'd ever known. Unknowingly, I was echoing Will Rogers' sentiments about dogs and the afterlife: "If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went."

A decade ago I wouldn't have engaged in such an argument. I'd always been a cat person. Cats are low maintenance. Make sure they have food, water and a reasonably clean litter box and you've handled your cat duties admirably. Cats were the perfect pet for apartment dwellers.

Then I bought a house and suddenly had the option of having a great big fur-shedding dog to romp in the yard and serve as an early warning system when someone was approaching the front door. Actually, it wasn't long before there were two dogs in the house. I had Sheldon, a collie/samoyed mix, and my roommate had Bubba, a German short-hair pointer.

Then along came Gypsy.

While we had picked out Sheldon and Bubba, Gypsy was the one who picked us. Shortly after I ended a brief, tumultuous relationship Gypsy showed up at the house one Saturday afternoon. She was a pure white German shepard, but starved to the point where her ribs showed under her skin. She carried a scar across her muzzle and the bottoms of her paws were raw and tender. It was clear she had seen better days.

Thinking she had wondered off from her owners, we fed and watered her and my roommate set about finding where she had come from. What we found did nothing to raise my opinion of humanity. A neighbor of her former owners told how Gypsy's owners grew tired of her as she grew too large for their apartment and chased her away with rocks. So we ended up with a third dog.

That was six and a half years ago. She remained ours until last Friday when, after watching her decline as her hips began to give out, we took her to the vet and bid her our last good-byes.

Looking back on Gypsy's time here, it's amazing the lessons a dog can teach.

In the wake of my recently ended relationship, I joked with friends that from now on I decided to give up adopting stray men and would stick with stray dogs. It was later when I realized that was part of Gypsy's first lesson for me: Sometimes it's worth the risk to bring a stray home and give him or her a chance.

Of the three dogs in the house, Sheldon was the resident genius, picking up tricks and commands with very little effort; Bubba was the exuberant clown; and Gypsy ... well, she was a bit of the problem child. As Dr. Phil might say, she had trust issues. Sometimes it would take close to an hour to put ointment on her ragged paws and I quickly learned to raise my hand to pet her slowly so she wouldn't cringe at the memory of being hit. But the worst times were the frequent Midwestern spring storms when the sound of thunder sent her into near panic. I discovered this in the middle of the night waking up to find her standing on top of me, her face inches from mine, and staring into my face with a wild-eyed canine version of "Make it stop!"

While I was powerless to control the storm, the next best thing was for me to get up and go the front room while she impatiently waited for me to move my recliner enough to allow her to squeeze in between it and the end table. Then, hiding her head beneath the endtable, I'd go to sleep sitting at an uncomfortable angle so that I could drape my hand down to rest on her side to reassure her that I was there.

That was Gypsy's second lesson: In the middle of life's storms, it's OK to ask for a little reassurance.

Eventually Gypsy got over her skittishness around people, though it required a lot of patience. While she never quite got over her fear of thunder, it was rewarding to see her learn to trust again. While Bubba and Sheldon liked to jump on me when I'd walk through the door at the end of the day, Gypsy would hold back waiting her turn for attention, wagging her tail and uttering an "arrroo!" which I took as her best approximation of "Hello!" For all the exuberance of the other two dogs' greetings, Gypsy's was gentle in comparison. She'd wait until I was sitting down then use her muzzle to lift my hand and get me to scratch her ears and rub the sides of her face. That would inevitably be followed by a lick, the canine equivalent of "I love you."

That was another of Gypsy's lessons: A hearty lick can make a good day better and even the worst of days tolerable.

I'm convinced beyond all doubt that if more people started and ended their days with a kiss from a dog, wars would end and psychiatrists would be taking their meals in soup kitchens where they could wile away their suddenly abundant spare time debating the canine psyche.

We never really knew how old Gypsy was. She was fully adult when she arrived. From the loose bag of bones that could slip between narrow gap between the house and the gate to the yard when she first arrived, she blossomed into a 90-pound magnificent specimen of her breed with broad, muscled shoulders, ears that stood erect and attuned to any sound and clear deep brown eyes that seemed to connect with me soul to soul. It was in those moments that I hoped I'd one day be as good a person as my dog seemed to think I was.

Over the years Gypsy began to show her age. First it was the "hopping" motion she'd make with her back legs while running, a sign of impending hip problems. She still maintained her puppy-like behavior at times, playing tug-of-war with the other dogs over a toy or expressing puppy-like wonderment at whatever caught her fancy at the moment. But it was apparent that her health was failing. She developed a benign fatty tumor on her side. Sometime it would take great effort to rise from her favorite spot by my bed in the morning. Her walk became wobbly.

A couple of months ago she was unable to get up from the hardwood floor where she would sleep while I worked on my computer. Her front end made a valiant effort but her back end wouldn't cooperate without assistance. Between jobs at the time, I still managed to scrape together enough for a expensive prescription to try to stave off the inevitable and even bought her a hideous fuzzy, orange-colored bathroom rug to lay on by my desk to keep her comfortable on the cold floor. While I would have chosen another color for purely esthetic reasons, the rubber backing worked to keep the rug from sliding on the slick hardwood floor.

Gypsy had good days and bad days after that. But when the bad days began to outnumber the good ones, I knew that the time was short. As much as I didn't want to let her go, the pain of watching her try to walk only to collapse after a few steps outweighed the hope that there were still a few more "good days" left.

Late Friday afternoon my roommate and I loaded Gypsy into the car for a last trip to the vet. We stayed with her, stroking her fur and rubbing her still-scarred muzzle while the vet gave her a sedative and then administered the drug that would end her suffering. We were still petting her and telling her how much we loved her as she breathed her last and that massive chest rose and fell for the last time.

It didn't occur to me until later that even at the end Gypsy was still teaching us. Her last lessons were these: It's OK to let go and it's OK to cry.

Several weeks ago I happened across a quote by cartoonist James Thurber, himself a great dog lover. "If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons," he wrote. That pretty much sums up my beliefs as well.

Gypsy may not have been my whole life, but she shares with most members of her species the ability to make our lives whole.

Some people claim when we die there's a tunnel with a bright light at the end where we're greeted by long-departed family members or maybe religious figures. Others claim that those experiences are merely hallucinations caused by powerful drugs and chemical reactions in the brain. I'm not sure which version I believe, but when the time comes I hope I'm greeted by a big, beautiful white German shepard who comes bounding out of the light to meet me.

The new Scarlet Letter: Confessions of a sex offender

2006-01-24T21:37:00.000-06:00

I am a sex offender.

I have engaged in public lewdness. I have indecently exposed myself. I have had sex with an underage partner.

Never mind that the acts of public lewdness involved my wilder, younger days when I had sex in such exotic locales as a cornfield, a construction site, a tent set up as a display in a Sears department store, and a glass elevator overlooking Kansas City's Country Club Plaza, just to name a few.

As for the indecent exposures ... well, see the paragraph above and add to it a few late night stops to piss behind a bush.

And the underage partner was 14 and I was 16 at the time.

But still, under various state and local laws, I am a sex offender. I've had the good fortune never to be charged or convicted with any of those crimes so I don't show up on any sex offender registry so helpfully made available online by many states. But nonetheless, had I been charged with all my infractions, I'd probably still be sitting in a jail cell.

Sex offenders have become the new boogiemen. Maybe that should be "boogiepersons" since quite a few women show up on sex offender registries, too.

The registries began in response to well-publicized cases in which persons with a history of pedophilia moved into neighborhoods and ended up molesting - and sometimes murdering - youngsters. Suddenly concerned mothers could log on to their computers and check to see if there were any perverts lurking around their neighborhoods.

I'm all for keeping pedophiles as far away from kids as possible. But as with any good idea, it can only be stretched so far before it gets bent entirely out of shape.

The trouble with sex offender registries is that there's seldom any clear definition about what constitutes a "sex offender." Few would disagree that someone with a history of molesting or sexually abusing youngsters should be on the list. But what about a couple of consenting adults - same- or opposite-sex - who get a bit carried away with passion in a parked car and get interupted by a cop with a flashlight? Should they be listed as sex offenders? Or suppose my diabetic kidney doesn't wanted to wait until I get home for relief and I get busted for indecent exposure for taking a leak behind a tree just as a cop happens to drive by? Should I be given the new "scarlet letter" of being forced to register as a sex offender?

Contrary to the popular opinion that the "degenerates" on a sex offender registry are perverts lusting after pre-pubescent kids and weinie-waggers in search of a fresh victim to flash, all sorts of people wind up on sex offender registries.

In Missouri, more than 11,000 people are listed on the state's sex offender registry. Recently a handful of them joined a lawsuit over the issue. None of them are the child rapists the registry was designed to warn the public about. One was a woman who, at the age of 21, had sex with a 15-year-old boy whom had told her he was 18. Another was a parent who spanked his child with a belt and the state, believing that this kind of discipline was a "precursor" of sexual abuse, added him to the registry. All those involved in the case have faced discrimination and harassment as a result of being listed as "sex offenders."

I hope they win their case. But it's going to be a tough, uphill battle. Right now convicted sex offenders are the boogiemen for the left and the right. The right uses sex offenders as examples of why families must be protected and the left uses them to show that they can be tough on crime, too. Each side ups the ante to prove it's tougher on crime than the other side and no one is willing to step forward to say, "But what about the rights of the sex offenders?"

In Kansas, lawmakers of both parties are trying to outdo each other on who can come up with the harshest penalty short of getting all Puritan on the offender's ass with stockades and stonings. The governor, a moderate Democrat, used her State of the State address to call for forcing convicted offenders to wear electronic monitors for the rest of their lives. Not to be outdone, the Republicans proposed a plan to force sex offenders to equip their cars with special pink license plates - presumably so all the self-righteous Kansans can decide who to aim their vehicles at if the Rapture strikes while they are out on the road and their cars are about to become driverless.

Protecting youngsters is a good and noble thing. But how far are we willing to go to reach those aims? And what rights should a sex offender have?

Even before we can answer that question, we need to make clear who is a sex offender. Right now there is such a patchwork of local laws that someone who gets caught pissing behind a tree in one place could get a slap on the wrist and a fine for public urination while the same offense in another location could result in a charge of indecent exposure and a permanent listing as a sex offender.

Let's hope that cooler heads prevail somewhere down the line; but in the current wave of hysteria over anything remotely smelling of a (gasp!) sex offense there are few cool heads to be found on either end of the political spectrum.

Picking a winner in the olympics of delusion

2006-01-16T11:13:00.000-06:00

Sometimes it's hard to pick a gold medalist in the olympics of delusion. A few weeks ago I would have put money on all those "ex-gays" running around and proclaiming their heterosexuality while oogling hot guys in the hope of gaining some decent, erection-inspiring fantasy material for the next time they have the obligatory twice-a-year sex with their wives. Then there was dark-horse candidate the Rev. Lonnie Latham, the Southern Baptist leader who was picked up in Oklahoma City for propositioning a male undercover cop for a little weinie-chugging back at his motel room and then tried to explain away the arrest by claiming his was "ministering" to the wayward flock around the infamous Habana Inn.

But lately my money's on the Log Cabin Republicans. Not only do they give great delusion, but they can trump that act with moral indignation when theie delusions get shattered and they come face-to-face with the fact that their party really does hate them.

Case in point: Last week the St. Petersburg Times reported that the Florida Republican Party was virtually bankrolling the effort to get a statewide ban on same-sex marriages on the ballot in 2006.

Of the $193,000 that has been raised by Florida4marriage.org, the political committee working to amend the state constitution to ban gay marriage, $150,000 of it came in a single donation from the Florida Republican Party. That's over three-quarters of the money raised by the anti-gay group.

Amusingly, even with the infusion of GOP money, the petition seeking to put the ballot measure before voters is still less than halfway to the 600,000 signatures needed by the Feb. 1 deadline.

Now enter the South Florida chapter of the Log County Republicans who were shocked - Shocked! I say! - to discover that their own party was turning on the money spigot to fund an effort aimed at marginalizing them. According to the Jan. 14 Orlando Sentinel, Jack Majeske, president of the Broward Log Cabin Club, a gay-conservative group, said he would file the grievance against the Florida Republican Party over the donation.

I really try to understand the Log Cabin Republicans. I can accept that they are interested in lower taxes and opposed to government spending on social programs. I can even accept that they believe they are working to change the Republican Party from within.

What I can't accept is that they believe that deep down the Republican party really gives a rat's ass about them when it continually works to to undo every modest gain the LGBT community has made over the past quarter of a century.

Certainly there exist moderate Republicans ... or at least those who don't start spitting venom like a cobra on crystal meth at the mere mention of LGBT rights. But as a whole, the Republican Party will care about gays at only two times: First, when they want to give the impression they really are a bunch of good ol' compassionate conservatives under a great big tent (nudge, wink, snicker); and second, when they want to scare the shit out of their knnuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing base and get them to the polls to vote against that homo-seck-shul agenda (and, just incidentally, to vote for decent, God-fearin' Republicans in the process).

You'd think that after a while the Log Cabinites would wise up and realize they are being trotted out by the GOP to serve as the boogieman to scare voters to the polls. Sometimes I think Log Cabinites are a bit like battered wives who stay with their abusive husbands and somehow learn to believe they deserve all the smacks and insults and black eyes they end up with at the hands of the GOP.

Whatever the reason - self-loathing masochism or delusional thinking - Log Cabin Republicans need to let go of the belief that they can change such a system of institutional bigotry and homophobia from within.

The Democrats need more David Elgins

2006-01-15T23:44:00.000-06:00

Chances are that if you are outside the state of Virginia you haven't heard of David Elgin. He's a freshman Democratic delegate representing the 45 District.

He's also a Democrat who "gets it" when it comes to LGBT issues. And that makes him a rarity - even among Democrats.

Virginia is currently embroiled in the debate over a state constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Apparently the old tourism slogan for the state - "Virginia is for lovers" - only counts is the lovers in question have Tab A to fit into Slot B. None of that Slot to Slot or Tab to Tab lovemaking for Virginians apparently. So opposed are some Virginians to slot-slot/tab-tab action that it looks like voters will be voting on an amendment to ban same-sex marriage in the state. Just last week The Virginia House Privileges & Elections Committee approved an anti-gay constitutional amendment on an 18-4 vote. Elgin was one of the four to vote against the measure.

It's not just Elgin's vote that makes him stand out. It's the speech he made in opposition to the amendment that shows here's one Democrat that clearly understands that measures such as this are based in homophobic gay-baiting more than any real desire to "protect families."

Here is the complete text of Elgin's speech:

Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong opposition to this resolution. I’m not going to talk about same-sex marriage. I’m no fool — although others might make a different judgement about a freshman delegate rising in this chamber on the third day of session. But I understand that on the issue of marriage, I’m in the minority, perhaps even in my own caucus. I also sleep very well at night knowing that at some point in the future of this great Commonwealth, those of us of my opinion will be judged to have been on the right side of history. But let’s for a moment forget about the question of same-sex marriage, because this amendment addresses much more than that. We need to be clear and honest: This amendment also outlaws civil unions and domestic partnerships and other similar private legal arrangements.

We have heard from the other side that this constitutional amendment is necessary to protect conventional marriage. I am blessed with a beautiful and brilliant wife who is the love of my life. In June, Shayna and I will celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary, and I would fight with every ounce of my strength anything that would threaten my marriage. So I would like to know, how exactly civil unions and domestic partnerships and other similar arrangements threaten my marriage?

We have heard from the other side that this amendment will protect families. Shayna and I are blessed with a strong and bright six-year-old son, Caleb, and we have a strong family. My friend the gentleman from Rockingham County, Delegate Lohr, and I have discussed how we come from different backgrounds and different parts of this great Commonwealth, yet we share a deep and abiding commitment to our families. I want nothing more than to protect my family. I spent 12 years wearing the uniform of the United States Air Force to protect my family. I’ve been in harm’s way to protect my family. So I would like to know, how exactly do civil unions and domestic partnerships and other similar arrangements threaten my family? Because if they do, I will be the first one to stand up and fight, because nobody better threaten my family.

Moreover, we have heard from the other side that this amendment must pass sooner rather than later, as if there is some kind of crisis that is more important than issues like transportation or education or health care. Why else would this be our first order of business? Yet Virginia law already makes same-sex marriage and civil unions and domestic partnerships illegal.

So if this amendment doesn’t help protect my marriage, and doesn’t help protect my family, and if it doesn’t even change the status of same-sex marriage and civil unions and domestic partnership contracts, then what exactly does this amendment do? I submit to my fair-minded colleagues that this amendment sends a message. And that message is, if you are gay, or lesbian, or even a man and a woman living together and committed to each other who are not married, you are not welcome in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

And who are these people whom we are shutting out in the cold? They are my dear friends Karen and Sue, who have been together for years and are as loving and committed to each other as any husband and wife. They are my friend Lou, who served with me at the Pentagon, and continues to serve our country today. They are Father Mychal Judge, the gay priest who died in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 while ministering to fallen firefighters. They are Mark Bingham, a gay passenger on United Airlines Flight 93, who fought back against Al Queda hijackers and sacrificed his life to save others. They are Ronald Gamboa and his partner Dan Brandhorst, who, along with their 3 year old son David, were killed when Al Quaeda flew United Airlines Flight 175 into the World Trade Center. They are David Charlebois, the co-pilot of American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon when Al Qaeda tried to kill me and my comrades who were on duty inside the Pentagon at the time. They are friends and neighbors and teachers and doctors and soldiers and loving parents who want nothing more than to live life without fear that the government will tear their families apart.

I’m a student of history, and I find our Founding Fathers to be a great source of wisdom on many matters, so I want to close my remarks by reading from a letter that great Virginian named George Washington wrote more than two centuries ago:

“The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for giving to Mankind . . . a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection, should demean themselves as good citizens.

May the Children of the Stock of Abraham who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

Ladies and gentlemen, I implore you, be strong and of good courage and vote down this resolution.

Most legislative freshmen are two busy trying to learn the ropes to take such stands. And when it comes to LGBT issues, most Democrats - especially those in red states - are downright gutless out of fear Republicans will turn any pro-gay vote into a weapon to use against them when election times rolls around.

It's too bad we don't have more Democrats like Elgin.

Are you ready to r-r-r-r-r-rumble?!?! The homophobe vs. self-loathing closet case smackdown!

2006-01-09T20:15:00.000-06:00

Remember the Rev. Lonnie Latham, the Southern Baptist leader from Tulsa who was busted at the infamous Habana Inn in Okla-homo ... Oops! I mean "Oklahoma City" ... for propositioning a male undercover cop? (If you don't, got back a couple of entries. I'll wait for you to catch up.)

OK. All caught up now? Good.

So here's the update on the story: Apparently Brother Lonnie's initial explanation that he was "ministering" to the lost sheep who hang out aroung the Habana Inn didn't pass the smell test for his congregation ... or for anyone with an IQ above room temperature in an air-conditioned igloo, for that matter. So Brother Lonnie stepped down as senior pastor at the South Tulsa Baptist Church and sent his flock a letter.

According to Tulsa TV station KOTV:

In the letter, Lonnie Latham says "Sandra and I thank you for the love and encouragement you have shown us not only before this incident but also after. Your cards, calls, and e-mails of encouragement, your prayers, and your presence sustain us. We will always love you. Our prayer is for you to continue to be the great ministry you are.”

Morris Chapman is the CEO of the Southern Baptist Convention and he says of Latham - "In spite of his denials soon after his arrest, he now acknowledges the incident did happen and that he needs help."

I'd say that's a bit of an understatement that Brother Lonnie needs help. Unfortunately, the Southern Baptist version of "help" in a case like this will be to whisk him off to an "ex-gay" camp quicker than you can say "Lonnie likes to lick young lads lances" three times fast. No doubt Brother Lonnie will come back "cured" and be yet another "ex-gay" spokesperson touting how rededicating his like to Jesus saved him from that awful homo-seck-shul afflication while eyeing a studly young lad in his audience and feel dat ol' devil creep into his crotch.

Ho-hum! We've heard it before from the former heads of Exodus International who fell in love with each other and decided the "ex-gay" schtick couldn't compare to playing hide-the-salami. And from John Paulk, the "ex-gay" head of James Dobson's Focus on the Family's "ex-gay" program ... at least before he got caught trying to pick up guys in a Washington, D.C., gay bar. And from ... well, the list could go on and on.

What make's Brother Lonnie's fall from grace interesting is that it's apparently caught the attention of homophobic heavyweight champion Fred Phelps of Topeka's Westboro Baptist Church. Fred announced in one of his ubiquitous flyers that he plans on picketing that "sodomite whorehouse" otherwise known as South Tulsa Baptist Church.

Apparently Fred is miffed that Lonnie's littel escapade is drawing attention away from him and his picketing of funerals of soliders killed in Iraq. Heck, poor Fred couldn't even get much publicity for his plans to picket a memorial service for the miners killed in West Virginia thanks to Lonnie stealing his thunder.

So now the smackdown is on pitting one certifiably crazy homophobe against one genuinely screwed up closet case.

It's so amusing when the fundies begin to turn on each other. Is it too much to hope they take each other out with one blow (so to speak)?

'Brokeback' backlash: Why so many gay men are luke warm about the movie

2006-01-08T21:39:00.000-06:00

(Spoiler alert: If you don't want to hear about plot elements of "Brokeback Mountain" before you see the movie, don't read this.)

I really, really wanted to like Ang Lee's film version of "Brokeback Mountain." For the past two months, as that all important buzz began to build about the movie, I couldn't wait to see it. My heart leapt every time the film got a great review or was nominated for this or that recognition and I silently fumed as the movie opened on the coasts and I waited weeks for it to open here in the Midwest. Finally a local opening was set and I plunked down $25 bucks for a ticket to a special premier showing. I sat in the sold-out audience as the light faded and the screen came to life.

Once the lights came back up, the one word I could use to describe my feelings was "underwhelmed."

What went wrong? Did I miss something? Had I been led to have too high expectations from all the pre-release Hollywood hype? I obviously wasn't seeing the same films the critics were seeing. They were raving about it. I was giving it a shrug and an 'eh.'

I loved the Annie Proulx story it was based on and the film is exceptionally faithful to the short story. But while I had tears running down my face while reading the last 10 pages of the story, I walked out of the theater dry-eyed.

Thinking there must be something wrong with me, I kept my ambivalent fellings about "Brokeback Mountain" to myself. Then I began to notice something on message boards: I wasn't alone in feeling a "Brokeback" backlash. Gay men all over the country were coming out of the theaters where the movie is being shown with the same sort of mixed feelings about it. Most will concede that the film is beautifully shot and that the acting is definitely above average. But the faint praise stops there at the "but" point ... the point at which they say "but ..." and follow it with some version of "the movie just didn't touch me."

I've wrestled for over a week with trying to understand why I'm not moved by a film others are describing as "powerful." Then today it hit me: "Brokeback Mountain" is a gay mainstream movie. It's "gay" in that it's two lead characters are men with a powerful sexual and emotional attraction to each other and lots of obstacles to overcome in coming to terms with their attraction. That's something I can relate to as a gay man.

What I can't relate to is the "mainstream movie" part of it.

"Gay" and "mainstream movie" aren't necessarily mutually exclusive terms, but they are like two mismatched jigsaw puzzle pieces that don't fit together regardless of how hard you try to force them. "Brokeback Mountain" is as close as we've ever come to a gay mainstream movie, but even it falls short of the goal.

In expanding Proulx's short story, the screen writers expanded the roles of Ennis's and Jack's wives. In the story, Ennis' wife, Alma, has several brief scenes and Jack's wife, Lureen, only shows up in one scene near the end of the story. Their roles are greatly expanded in the film version and it becomes apparent their roles have more to do with attracting straight women to the theater than advancing the story of Jack and Ennis.

Meanwhile, except for the opening 30 minutes that focuses on the idyllic summer Jack and Ennis spent herding sheep and discovering their attraction to each other, the film seems to focus more on the men's relationships with their wives than their feelings for each other. Their sporadic "fishing trips" are mostly just alluded to, but every tic, raised eyebrow and questioning glance of their relationships with their wives fills the screen with ominous portent.

It's such as obvious ploy to attract straight women to the theaters that I'm almost surprised some angry queen didn't stand up halfway through the movie, "Get those bitches out of OUR movie!"

In a sense, the written version of "Brokeback Mountain" is our story. But when Ang Lee chose to try making a mainstream movie, he decided to emphasize elements of the story that would take away the feelings and emotions we "owned" when we read it. In the story, the wives and children and in-laws are background noise to the story of Ennis and Jack. In the film, they move to the forefront to give straight audiences something to hang onto that doesn't involve two men falling in love in the majestic wilderness.

The film also takes what was left ambiguous in the story - the fate of Jack - and makes it explicit on film. (This is your last chance to turn back if you don't like spoilers!) In the story, Ennis learns of Jack's death when he calls Lureen. She tells him Jack died when a tire he was changing exploded, causing the rim to hit him in the face. The film follows their conversation word-for-word just as it was in the book. But in the short story, Ennis wonders if Jack was instead killed by bigots brandishing tire irons. It takes exactly one sentence in the story to convey this and allow Ennis to wonder if Lureen is telling him the truth. The answer is left ambiguous. Instead of opting for ambiguity - which might confuse American movie audience, don't you know? - Lee makes explicit what Ennis wonders. While Lureer tells of Jack's death the audience glimpses Jack being chased by rednecks, knocked down and hit across the face with a tire iron.

Jack's death is actually the second gay bashing we see in the film. The first occurs in a flashback when Jack tries to intrest Ennis in getting a ranch together. Ennis rejects the idea and tells Jack of his father taking him to see the body of one of two "tough old birds" who set up house-keeping together. "Anyway they... they found Earl dead in an irrigation ditch. Took a tire iron to 'im. Spurred him up, drug him 'round by his dick 'till it pulled off," Ennis says, adding that for all he knew, his father was involved in the murder.

Call me jaded, but one brutal fag bashing was enough to get the point across. Lee's decision to make Jack's death explicit was unnecessary and goes way beyond the original story. It focuses on Jack's being a victim at the hands of murderous rednecks and completely looses sight of the fact that Ennis remains a victim of a homophobic culture so ingrained in him that he can't fully allow himself to love Jack. Consequently, the later scene of Ennis going to see Jack's parents and finding the shirt he thought he lost during the summer on Brokeback Mountain tucked inside one of Jack's shirts rings with far less poignancy than it does in the story.

Ang Lee may have wanted to make a gay-themed mainstream movie, but he fell short of the goal. Maybe that's because there really isn't such a thing as a gay mainstream movie. To be mainstream - at least now in the early years of the 21st century - is to dumb down and whitewash the "gay" part to attract the "mainstream" part. Hollywood knows it can't make a profit with a film that just appeals to gays. So it adds elements designed to attract straight audiences and the "gay" part becomes merely incidental to the "mainstream" part.

Other films over the past quarter century or so have tried to be the breakthrough movie for gay issues. "Making Love" dealt with a married man's discovery that he was gay after an affair with another man. But the characters were all so nice and polite and upper middle class that the movie was a colossal bore to gay audiences. Then came "Philadelphia" with Tony Hanks playing an AIDS-infected lawyer who supposedly contracted AIDS from a single one-night stand while hubby Antonio Banderas was out of town. Yeah, right!

Of all the serious "gay-themed" films, "Brokeback Mountain" comes as close as we've ever seen to a mainstream movie. But in doing so, it lost a lot of what made it relevant and moving to gay men along the way.

My advice: See the movie if you want to ... but do yourself a favor and read the story for a far more moving experience.

Baptist 'parking lot ministry' aims at saving homo-seck-shuls

2006-01-04T21:54:00.000-06:00

News item from Oklahoma City: An executive committee member of the Southern Baptist Convention was arrested on a lewdness charge for propositioning a plainclothes policeman outside a hotel, police said.

Lonnie Latham, senior pastor at South Tulsa Baptist Church, was booked into Oklahoma County Jail Tuesday night on a misdemeanor charge of offering to engage in an act of lewdness, police Capt. Jeffrey Becker said. Latham was released on $500 bail Wednesday afternoon.

Oh Lordy! Say it ain't so, Brother Lonnie!

Latham, who has spoken out against homosexuality, asked the officer to join him in his hotel room for oral sex. Latham was arrested and his 2005 Mercedes automobile was impounded, Becker said.

Dang, Brother Lonnie! A 2005 Mercedes? I'm guessing you put a lot more stock in all those parts of the Bible about callin' guys who lay with guys "abominations" than you do in the part of the Bible where Jesus says it's easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to get into Heaven.

Calls to Latham at his church were not immediately returned Wednesday.

The arrest took place in the parking lot of the Habana Inn, which is in an area where the public has complained about male prostitutes flagging down cars, Becker said. The plainclothes officers was investigating these complaints.

The Habana Inn?!?!?! Merciful Heavens, Brother Lonnie! I've heard stories about that place! I've heard it one of those motels were those people ... you know ... the homo-seck-shuls go to perform those vile, lustful acts ... their bodies naked and gleaming with sweat ... animal grunts and groans escaping from them while their naughty parts get all inflammed from rubbing together and being inserted into places God never intended them to go. I'll bet a place like that could even make those naughty cowboys in "Brokeback Mountain" blush.

The lewdness charge carries a penalty of up to one year in jail and a $2,500 fine.

After posting bond, Latham told KFOR-TV in Oklahoma City that he was set up, and was in the area ministering to people.

See! There you have it! I could have told you Brother Lonnie was innocent! He wasn't there looking to chug weinies or take a ride on the Hershey highway. He was there savin' souls. That dim-witted cop - probably one of them lib'rul Godless Democrats - misintrepted Brother Lonnie when he said, "Wanna come back to my motel room for some Bible study, big boy?" I'll bet prayin' for those poor lost souls was the only thing Brother Lonnie had on his mind when he suggested getting on his knees.

No doubt Brother Lonnie has started his own Parking Lot Ministry to save the souls of those poor, misguided homo-sect-shuls who are doomed to hell for all eternity if they don't quit rubbing their naughty parts together and making Brother Lonnie all excited when he thinks about it.

Yep, that must be it! It ain't Brother Lonnie's fault. Those dang homos are trying to recruit him and get another toaster oven!

'Good riddance to bad pseudo-scientific psychiatry'

2005-12-28T21:42:00.000-06:00

Pardon the paraphrasing of the Bette Davis line (from the 1934 film version of W. Somerset Maugham's "Of Human Bondage" ... just to establish my Bette-Davis-quoting queer gene), but Bette's "good riddance to bad rubbish" line seems like an appropriate send-off for one of the LGBT community's worst enemies.

Psychiatrist Charles W. Socarides, one of the founders of the "reparative therapy" movement that claimed psychotherapy could turn a sick homosexual into a functioning heterosexual member of society, died on Christmas Day in a New York hospital. Socarides helped found the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), an organization dedicated to the premise that homosexuality can - and should! - be cured through therapy.

Ironically, I stumbled across one of Socarides' books back while I was beginning to come to term with being gay in the '70s. I found a paperback edition of The Overt Homosexual on the paperback rack at Kline's Drug Store back in my hometown. That drugstore - one of two along the four-block business section of Main Street that ran from the lumber yard on one end to the funeral home on the far end - had a certain reputation among my peers. The other drug store, by the way, was as clean and brightly lighted as Kline's was dark and dingy. I can't imagine a more suitable place for an adolescent boy to begin to explore that secret dirty adult world of S-E-X. If "Old Man Kline" was running the counter, there were never any questions asked if one of my classmates purchased a coveted copy of some of the spicier men's magazines of the times like Playboy, Oui, or Penthouse. Even the paperback rack could be spicy, too, with titles you wouldn't find (or would be too embarassed to ask for) at the public library.

Socarides' book was way too scandalous for me to even consider buying. So I stood there at the paperback rack off to the side of the front door and thumbed through the book. "Homosexual" was a recent addition to my vocabulary. Before I stumbled across it, I didn't have any word to describe the way in which I understood on a very basic level that I was different from the other boys I knew from school. I was just beginning to test this new word to see if it fit me.

What I found in Socarides' book didn't sound like me. The book told me about men in San Francisco who wore dresses and makeup and got kicked out of fancy department stores for using the women's restrooms. It told me about men who lived their lives around cruising for sex in public restrooms and in parks. It told me how many of them met tragic ends, though it was pointed out that their ends were their own doings ... an early sort of "blame the victim" argument. It told me these men were sick.

Suddenly, I begin to wonder if the word "homosexual" really did apply to me since I had never done any of those things.

I think Socarides' book was the beginning of my lifelong queasiness with the word "homosexual." Some in the LGBT community reject the word as being too clinical and a hold-over from the days when homosexuality was a sickness to be treated and not a description of people who were attracted to their own gender. I could (and still can) deal with being called a queer or a fag much better than being called a "homo." And I believe it all traces back to that afternoon at the paperback rack at Kline's Drug Store and Socarides' book.

"Socarides outlived his time," anthropologist Gilbert Herdt said in a New York Times article on Socarides' death. Even during his life he was out of step with much of the rest of the medical and scientific community. In 1972 when the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from it's list of illnesses, Socarides protested the move and claimed the change was masterminded by "a small band of very bright men and women, most of them gays and lesbians" as part of a deliberate strategy. (Apparently, this was before the phrase "the homosexual agenda" had been coined.) "He became a kind of anachronism, and a tragic one in the sense that he continued to inflict suffering on the lives of some gay and lesbian individuals, and the LGBT community in general," Herdt told the Times.

Among those that suffered was his own son, Richard, a gay rights activist who served as President Clinton's liaison to the LGBT community from 1995 to 1999. Richard is quoted in the Times as calling his relationship with his father "complex" and said they remained on speaking terms only when they both avoided the subject of homosexuality.

The unfortunate thing about Socarides is that he leaves behind him a legacy of prejudice wrapped in pseudo-science that continues to fuel the tiny but vocal reparative therapy movement. This, in turn, has given rise to the religion-based "conversion therapy" used by "ex-gay" groups who literally try to "pray away the gay."

But despite it all, I won't condemn Charles Socarides. Instead I'll again turn to the Gospel of Bette Davis in "Of Human Bondage" to offer Socarides a parting thought:

"You cad!, you dirty swine! I never cared for you not once! I was always makin' a fool of ya! Ya bored me stiff, I hated ya! It made me SICK when I had to let ya kiss me. I only did it because ya begged me, ya hounded me and drove me crazy! And after ya kissed me, I always used to wipe my mouth! WIPE MY MOUTH!"

Nuff said, indeed!

The blogs you really should be reading

2005-12-26T15:57:00.000-06:00

Tuesday I re-enter the work force. After nearly six months of the frustrating, endless rounds of job hunting, sending out resumes, collecting "your skills don't meet our current needs" letters, and sitting around the mailbox on Wednesday afternoons waiting for my unemployment check, I'll once again be setting at a desk where I'm not surrounded by sleeping dogs nor distracted by Osama bin Kitty climbing my leg or doing the feline version of the happy dance across my keyboard.

As happy as I am about once again being a productive member of society, there will be things that get moved to the back burner while I'm putting in my 40 hours a week. One of those things, unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately for those that read this and think What a monumental waste of band width!) will be my blog. I won't be giving it up entirely, but between holding down a fulltime job, serving as vice president of communications for my LGBT Democratic club, and doing daily updates on my club's news and opinion link pages (How's that for a shameless plug?) finding the time to keep my blog updated on a regular basis will be problematic at best.

So, if I'm not going to be blogging as much as I'd like - and you know I just love to express my opinions! - the least I can do is offer those who stumble across my blog the option of finding other blogs that get "The KweerWolf Seal of Approval." These are, in my opinion, some of the best blogs on LGBT issues that the Internet (or "Internets," as our bumbling president calls them) has to offer. They are the kind of blogs I'd like to hope this blog could evolve into one day.

So, without further pontificating, here's my list of the best LGBT blogs on the Web:

Pam's House Blend - Yeah, I know we gay men are supposed to get all goofy and nervous around lesbians, but Pam Spaulding has become my favorite blogger. She's got a unique way of covering the news that combines humor with just enough "this pisses me off!" in-your-face outrage to make a really potent ... ummmm ... house blend. She was also recently voted the best LGBT blog, narrowly beating out a gay male blogger whom I'm sure got votes strictly on the basis of the provocative poses he struck in some of his blog photos. Pam's victory reassured me that occasionally substance wins over twinkish style.

BlogACTIVE - I don't know where Mike Rogers get his energy to maintain his blog and keeps his news site, PageOneQ, going, but I'm glad he does. People have really been taking notice of Mike's blog. He's a worthy successor to the blogger/activist mantle of John Aravosis of AMERICAblog fame.

AMERICAblog - Speaking of John Aravosis, no body does it better. John has long been popular, but when his blog "outed" fake White House "journalist" Jeff Gannon as a former $200-a-hour prostitute who went by the nickname "Bulldog," his blog's popularity entered the stratosphere.

DIRELAND - Blogger Doug Ireland is a free lance journalist. If you haven't heard his name, chances are you've read at least some of his stories such as the coverage of Iran's executions of gay men and his coverage of news from the nation's capital.

Good As You - OK, enough heavy topics. For a lighter look at LGBT news, check out this blog. Not only is it a great source for news, but it's "lighten-up" approach may actually enduce some chuckles.

The Republic of T. - Looking for a really different perspective? Then check out this blog written by a blogger who describes himself as "a left-leaning, thirty-something, black gay man, a father, a partner, a vegetarian, and buddist, living and working in the metro-D.C. area."

The Petrelis Files - Jumping to the other side of the country, Michael Petrelis is a veteran gay, AIDS and human rights advocate who made appearance on NPR, ABC, CNN and even "The O'Reilly Factor" on Faux ... oops! I mean FOX News.

Wayne Besen - A little bit of history. Remember the story of John Paulk, the former-drag-queen-and-druggie-turned-"ex-gay"-leader who was featured on the cover of Time magazine a few years back and was then discovered trying to pick up men in a crowded Washington, D.C., gay bar? Wayne Besen was the one who "outed" the definitely not-out Paulk, who subsequently lost his job with James Dobson's homophobic Focus on the Family. Wayne later wrote a book on the incident (and the entire sham "ex-gay" movement) called Anything But Straight. Wayne covers all sorts of LGBT news ... but it's a particular delight when he goes after the "ex-gay" crowd.

Ex-Gay Watch - Speaking of "ex-gays," don't let the name of this blog fool you. They cover a wide range of LGBT news.

ByCDOldenburg - C.D. Oldenburg describes himself as a free lance journalist "with way too much time on his hands." Personally, I'm glad he has all that free time. His blog is a joy to read. Now if he'd just update it more often. (Are you listening, CD?)

Mike Tidmus blog - Here's another blogger I love to read ... and would love to read even more of if he'd just update his damned blog! Oh well, even his old stuff is great (and usually quite funny, too).

QUEERTY - Gotta love the irreverance that comes naturally to these bloggers! They describe their blog as "a healthy mix of style and fashion, entertainment and celebrity, news and politics and, yes, relationships and sex." I couldn't agree more!

Queer Day Magazine - Lively news blog with plenty of brief news items (for those of us with short attention spans). Kudos to Philo Hagan for a well-done blog site!

Michaelangelo Signorille - blog and news site from the famous author and activist who started the trend of "ouoting" closeted 'mos back in the days of the defunct Outweek magazine. He can still come up with a great story, but frankly - at least in my opinion - he can be just a bit full of himself these days.

And there you have them. Kweerwolf's Top 10 LGBT blogs (Give or take four). Enjoy!

A voice crying in the wilderness of AIDS research

2005-12-26T11:57:00.000-06:00

I love a good conspiracy theory. Automobile manufacturers and oil companies secretly bought up a patent that would allow cars to get 300 miles per gallon of gas. The government is covering up the crash landing of a flying saucer in Roswell, N.M., from back in the 1940s. The Vatican is hiding the fact that Jesus was married to Mary Magdeline and they had a child whose bloodline survives to today. The Jews were behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks and all the Jewish workers in the World Trade Cetner called in sick that day. The Church of Scientology keeps the lid on the sexual orientation of certain major movie star (*cough* John Travolta and Tom Cruise *cough*) so they will entice new recruits into the cult through their frequent appearances on "Entertainment Tonight." Pope Benedict XVI, Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, Pat Robertson and several other religious leaders are against same-sex marriage because they know their boyfriends would push them toward the altar if gay marriage was ever legalized.

OK ... so I made up that last one. But it's really no more outlandish than any of the others listed (or a whole bunch more that could be listed).

Most conspiracy theories have their basis in two very basic human needs: the need to understand something and the need to justify our deeply held feelings that people in authority simply can't be trusted.

Since it was first uncovered in 1981, AIDS has been the subject of numerous conspiracy theories. A bad batch of Swine Flu vaccine was claimed to be the origin of the AIDS pandemic. Another theory claimed that researchers were working on an "ethnovirus" designed to wipe out a specific ethnic group - in this case blacks - but the virus got out of control and entered the rest of the world's population. Some gays claimed that the government conspired to stall progress on an AIDS cure until a big chunk of the gay popluation had been wiped out.

Now comes the latest crackpot AIDS conspiracy theory. According to a recent Associated Press article, the federal chief of AIDS research says he believes drug companies don't have an incentive to create a vaccine for the HIV and are likely to wait to profit from it after the government develops one.

Or is it a crackpot conspiracy theory?

The speculation that the pharmaceutical industry was likely to sit back and wait for government-funded research to come up with a vaccine comes from recently released testimony from Dr. Edmund Tramont, head of the AIDS research division of the National Institutes of Health, who testified in a deposition in the whistleblower case of Dr. Jonathan Fishbein.

"If we look at the vaccine, HIV vaccine, we're going to have an HIV vaccine. It's not going to be made by a company," Tramont said. "They're dropping out like flies because there's no real incentive for them to do it. We have to do it."

"They will eventually -- if it works, they won't have to make that big investment. And they can make it and sell it and make a profit," he said.

So Dr. Tramont is suggesting that the giant drug companies are waiting until some scientist working under a poorly funded government grant at some university of research institute makes a breakthrough? And that once a breakthrough is made, the drug companies will swoop down like vultures on a corpse and maximize their profits by taking advantage of the research? And that the lives of the millions of people around the world infected by HIV are simply numbers to be factored in when figuring profits' bottom line?

The idea has all the earmarks of a grand conspiracy theory. Unfortunately, in this case, the conspiracy theory is very likely true.

Despite all the press releases they send out and warm and fuzzy TV commercials they make talking about how much they care about finding a cure for AIDS (or cancer or diabetes or any other as yes uncureable disease) drug companies are not altruistic entities. They exist to make a profit. No, strike that. They exist to make the most profit possible. If, by chance, they benefit someone along with way, that's just icing on the cake and a chance to trumpet about what paragons of virtue they are.

For pharmaceutical companies the bottom line is this: You can make more money by treating a disease than curing it.

If you cure a disease, you get paid once. If you treat a disease, you get paid every time a patient goes to the drug store to get a prescription refilled. Take diabetes, for example. Rates of diabetes have been steadily increasing over the past few decades. That's certainly an incentive for drug companies to come up a cure. Oh sure, there are frequent "We're getting close to a cure" statements, but those a tiny, incremental steps that in the meantime will mean patients will keep pumping money into the system for drugs, monitoring supplies and the like. A "cure" would mean that money would suddenly dry up.

Ten years ago medical science developed the expensive "AIDS cocktail" approach to treating AIDS. Since then they have raked in profits from keeping AIDS patients coming back again and again for more drugs that won't cure them, but may prolong their lives.

So, no, there is no incentive for drug companies to spend money looking for a cure for a disease when they can make even more money from treating again and again and again.

And, far from being another crackpot conspiracy theorist wildly shouting his ideas to anyone who will listen, Dr. Tramont comes a lot closer to being a modern-day version of an Old Testament prophet with "a voice crying in the wilderness."

Families by birth and by choice

2005-12-25T10:11:00.000-06:00

I was going to avoid the whole subject of Christmas with the exception of taking an occasional swipe at Faux News' ludicrous segments about "the war on Christmas." It's been years since Christmas held any real significance for me other than spending money on relatives I don't particularly care for the other 364 days out of the year to exchange during a family get-together that seems to always have an underlying current of tension.

But last night while browsing through postings on an LGBT discussion board I came across a message from someone feeling real distress about the pending holiday. Christmas, he said, with its emphasis on "family," made it worse for him because long-held feelings bubbled to the surface. My initial response was to roll my eyes and think Oh, Mary! Get over yourself! It's an exceedingly rare homo who doesn't hurt. That's my cynical side ... the side I tend to show an often hostile world to let it know it can't hurt me.

I kept watching the thread as it grew. More LGBT folks offered their sympathy and shared the own stories of scars inflicted - consciously and unconsciously - by the families who are supposed to be where we can find acceptance and unconditional love ... at least in a Norman Rockwell, Hallmark cards sort of world.

All of us who grow up in the dominant heterosexual culture carry scars. Sometimes the worst of those scars are inflicted by the families. Unlike racial or ethnic minorities, we are the only minority to be born "into the enemy camp," so to speak. In many ways being LGBT is like being born black in a white family ... only no one realizes that you are black and keeps making racist remarks or telling bigoted jokes or tossing around the word "nigger" without noticing that we wince or shudder or shut down a little bit more with every remark. Some families are more accepting than others, but hardly anyone who is LGBT grows up without some sort of scar, even scars inflicted unintentionally, by his or her family.

I have no doubt that my father loves me. But that doesn't mean I've forgotten hearing him refer to someone who was a few years older than me as a "damned queer" when he came out in college. I knew my mother loved me. But I still remember her saying she didn't want to know if I was gay after finding a couple of gay-themed books in my room ... and the subsequent pain of never being able to share that part of me with her before her death.

Unfortunately, the holiday season with its emphasis on "family" can be an emotional mine field for so many LGBT folks.

Between scars from our own family and the problems of being "different" in society, we face issues that most straight family members can never see nor understand. It's little wonder that there is a higher rate of depression in our community. Nor is it any wonder why so many of us try to self-medicate away the pain with alcohol or drugs or sexual compulsion or some other type of self-destructive behavior.

Sometimes I wonder if the scars ever truly heal. I know they ease after a bit and, in my own case, I believe I have forgiven my family for past issues. But forgiving isn't forgetting and it doesn't take much to bring old memories and emotions flooding back.

If there is one "treatment" for our wounds, it's this: most LGBT folks have two "families" - one is the one that we get be accident of birth and the other is the family of friends we surround ourselves with who can provide the love and acceptance our birth families didn't. While the old scars my never heal, we have our second families we can count on to be the most effective "treatment" for those old wounds.

Unlike the families on Norman Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post covers or those depicted on schmaltzy Christmas cards, our families of choice come in many forms. Sometimes they are the friends we surround themselves with. Sometimes, as in the case of the person who posted on the message board last night, they are people we may never meet, but who can still reach out and touch us with support via a computer.

Our families of choice don't require blood ties to become a part of our lives and our support systems. They are there because they care and they can understand and relate to the joys and pains that we feel.

I don't know if a Christmas wish from someone who doesn't put much stock in Christmas carries much weight. But if it did, my Christmas wish for all of us would be this:

Be gentle with one another, for we are all family.

Digging up gay history

2005-12-24T09:58:00.000-06:00

Once upon a time 4,300 years ago in ancient Egypt lived two men, Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep, who served in the honored position as chief manicurists to the king. We know this because archeologists uncovered the tomb of the two men 41 years ago not far from Cairo. There were no mummies in the tomb, but what archeologists discovered was even more enigmatic: stylized paintings on the wall depicting Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep in a close embrace. Just what that embrace represented has been the subject of heated speculation ever since. Were Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep lovers? Were they brothers, or perhaps even twins? Were they "just good friends?"

Now, according to a recent article in The New York Times, a researcher has offered yet another explanation for the arm-in-arm pair of Egyptian men. David O'Connor, a professor of ancient Egyptian art at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts, pooh-poohs the idea that the pair were gay and has opted for an even more implausible explanation: the men were not only twins, but conjoined, or Siamese, twins.

O'Connor reasons that ancient Egyptian nobility had a fascination with physical disabilities. Dwarves, he notes, held an exalted role in the palaces of kings. Far from being seen as "freaks," persons with abnormalities were viewed as proof that the gods could form any sort of body. The fact that a body might be drastically different from the norm was considered a mark of special favor from the gods.

Meanwhile, others find fault with O'Connor's conjoined twins interpretation.

Opposition to his proposal promises to be spirited. Most Egyptologists accept the normal-twins interpretation advanced most prominently by John Baines, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford in England.

"It's a very persuasive case Baines makes," Dr. O'Connor acknowledged.

And he noted that the gay-couple hypothesis had become the popular idea in the last decade. A leading proponent is Greg Reeder, an independent scholar in San Francisco and a contributing editor of KMT, a magazine of Egyptian art and history. The most Google references to the tomb, archaeologists say, concern the homosexual idea.

The gay argument leans on the analogy with depictions of married heterosexual couples in Egyptian art, which was first suggested by Nadine Cherpion, a French archaeologist.

Because the embraces of heterosexual couples in the tomb art convey an implicit erotic and sexual relationship, and perhaps the belief of its continuation in the afterlife, Mr. Reeder and his allies contend that similar scenes involving the two men have the same significance, that they presumably are gay partners.

Calling attention to the most intimate scene of the two embracing men, Mr. Reeder said: "They are so close together here that not only are they face to face and nose to nose, but so close that the knots on their belts are touching, linking their lower torsos. If this scene were composed of a male-female couple instead of the same-sex couple we have here, there would be little question concerning what it is we are seeing."

As happens so many times with historical artifacts that might carry a same-sex connotation, many researchers tend to ignore them at best or sweep them under the carpet at worst. Many prestigious museums have objects depicting what could clearly be considered same-sex representations in their collections, but either keep them locked away from public view or concoct innocuous interpretations of them so as not to shock the sensibilities of museum visitors.

What's particularly telling is the statement about a "gay" interpreation of the Egyptian tomb painting being somehow putting a 21st century spin on ancient cultures. Apparently homosexuals didn't exist in history, they seem to say, so why would this painting depict two gay men?

I guess it never occurs to researchers that refusing to consider that the men depicted may be involved in a romantic relationship puts a layer of 21st century homophobia over their interpretations. Likewise, it apparently doesn't occur to researchers that homosexuals, who differ from the norm, might also be considered as oddities and worthy of veneration (just as they were among some Native American tribes).

Granted, not much is known about homosexuality in ancient Egypt, but a lack of evidence uncovered thus far does not necessarily mean it wasn't recognized. Too many researchers who refuse to accept a same-sex relationship explanation for Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep are simply trying to avoid having to rethink accepted ideas of Egyptian culture that date back to the 19th century - a time when homosexuality was neither discussed nor accepted.

Part of the problem is that, before the term "homosexual" was first coined by a German researcher in 1869, there was no terminology to describe same-sex love. Even the general, all-purpose word "sodomite" was imprecise and could include everything from bestiality to having sex with one's wife in a position not given official church sanction to homosexuality.

Thanks to ground-breaking research by people such as the late John Boswell who wrote Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality, historian Martin Duberman, Jonathan Ned Katz, author of Gay American History, Bryn Fone, author of Homophobia, and others, there is now evidence out there that homosexuals have existed throughout history and their acceptance or rejection has swung back and forth at different times in different cultures.

Still, traditional research is slow to embrace the upstart field of gay studies. Look at the uproar that accompanied the publication of the late C.A. Tripp's The Intimate Life of Abraham Lincoln that dared to suggest the beloved president might have enjoyed romps with men while Mary Todd Lincoln was out of the White House and that he carried on a four-year relationship with shopkeeper Joshua Speed. There were parts of Tripp's book that I felt reached a bit too hard to make his case, but the reaction by traditional Lincoln scholars to the book often said more about their own views of homosexuality than their opinions of Tripp's research and hypotheses.

History, it is said, is written by the victors. In the case of the history of same-sex love, it seems that history, when it's written at all, is written by the homophobes, consciously or unconciously.

While right-wing politicians and pundits argue that academia skews far to the left, that's not the case when it comes to researching "gay history." A few progressive universities offer courses in gay history, but they are the exception. As a result, depictions in words or painting or other relics that might re-write history books or at least force some reexamination of long-held ideas, end up getting buried or denied. And the rightful place of LGBT persons throughout history is the worse for such denial.

When the dim begin to see the light

2005-12-23T12:07:00.000-06:00

Back in 2003 Judge Roy Moore was removed as Alabama's Chief Justice after the state's nine-member Court of Judicial Inquiry found he had violated judicial ethical standards for defiance of a federal judge's order to move a Ten Commandments monument he had installed in the rotunda of the state courthouse.

At the time, Moore was the fun-D'uh-Mentalists' outrage du jour as they picketed outside the courthouse, wept, prayed and bemoaned how godless secular humanists were pickin' on them 'cause they were decent, God-fearin' Christian folks who only wanted to live by the Bible ... and make sure everyone else did, too.

Moore parlayed his 15 minutes of fame into the speaking circuit, making the rounds of various right-wing religious groups and has now announced he intends to run for governor of Alabama. In an e-mail sent out by his wife soliciting donations for Moore's campaign, there's no hesitation to invoke that boogie-man of the religious reich - homo-seck-shuls! - to raise money. Apparently all the good Christian folks in Alabama fear nothing so much as the specter of homos and perverts running roughshod over the country and introducing grade school courses on the joys of sodomy.

Well, not quite all the good folks of Alabama. Seems one of Moore's former supporters has come out against his candidacy.

Christian talk show host Kelly McGinley, the woman who filed suit to have Moore reinstated to the bench, has done an about-face and is warning her listeners about the threat posed by Moore.

An editorial in The Decatur (Ala.) Daily carries some interesting observations by McGinley:

From Mobile, Ms. McGinley said Mr. Moore and his followers want to establish a theocracy, or a government by a person or persons who claims to rule with divine authority.

She said they “wish to bring a government based on Old Testament law, which would administer the death penalty for offenses ranging from homosexuality to talking back to your parents.”

She says his election could trigger a major showdown between state and federal governments that could lead to violence.

She links the Republican Party, the Council for National Policy, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and Masons in a web of conspiracy to impose Biblical law.

“It is too extreme for the likes of me,” she said.

Hmmmm ... that's a pretty strong condemnation coming fro someone who ostensibly shares Moore's religion.

It's also something that reasonable people - those who aren't mainlining Jesus until the are hooked on hate - have been saying all along.

The religious reich are hellbent (pardon the pun) on replacing the Constituion with "Biblical law." Their warped world view has too long been tolerated and explained away as simply a group of people trying to hold on to their beliefs in a rapidly changing secular world.

It's good to see that people within the social conservative movement are finally waking up to reality and understanding that when folks like Moore talk about "culture war," their emphasis is clearly on the second word.

Unemployment: The good, the bad and the very ugly

2005-12-19T22:23:00.000-06:00

Those who have followed this blog over the past few months may have noticed the occasional references I've made to being unemployed - a situation that sucks at any age, but is an exceptional pain in the ass if you're over 40 and competing against obnoxiously perky recent college graduates who will cheerfully work for peanuts and have no notion of the meaning of the word "mortgage."

Now I can report that just two weeks short of the last of six-month's worth of unemployment checks, I have managed to secure employment. The interval between the end of my last job (in which my entire department was cut in what's euphemistically called a "strategic restructuring") and the 11th hour reprieve from destitution by the arrival of today's job offer is a period I've come to refer to as "God's little reminder to simply your life and learn the meaning of 'frugality'."

Knowing that, despite the rosy picture painted by King George the Lesser, the economy sucks shit through a straw, I thought I'd pass along my thoughts on the upside and downside of unemployment for those who are in similar situations. (And believe me, with another three years of Captain Pretzel in charge of the ship of state, that could be a substantial number of us!)

Upside: Learning that, in a pinch, peanut butter can be substituted for margarine when making one of those cheap boxes of macaroni and cheese.

Downside: Eating macaroni and cheese made with peanut butter.

Upside: Having time to help friends with their projects.

Downside: Having friends who know you have free time and taking full advantage of it.

Upside: Sleeping in on a weekday.

Downside: Being jarred out of bed by Mr. Psycho Roommate screaming at Sammy (a.k.a. Osama bin Kitty) for shredding a roll of paper towels all over the kitchen.

Upside: Having time for a social life.

Downside: Trying to come up with creative ways of telling perspective dates that you'd rather go to a movie on a Wednesday night because that's the day the unemployment check arrives.

Upside: Sending out 67 resumes and only getting three interviews helps build character in the face of adversity.

Downside: Sending out 67 resumes and only getting three interviews is depressing as hell.

Upside: Now I have time to work on all those projects I've been putting off.

Downside: Between trying to find enough jobs to apply for to keep the vaguely humanoid automatons at the unemployment office off my back and then sitting around and moping because of the umpteenth "thanks, but no thanks" letter, who gives a rats ass whether the trim around the house gets painted or not.

Upside: I get to spend quality time with my four-legged kids, Sheldon the collie/samoyed mix, and Gypsy, the white German shepard.

Downside: I now have more opportunities to clean up the mess when Gypsy, who's an octogenarian in dog years, can't quite make it to the kitchen door.

Upside: I can do my shopping during the day when most people are at work and the lines at the checkout stands are shorter.

Downside: Old people shop during the day and any time savings is quickly gobbled up by a member of the blue-hair brigade ahead of me who insists that the clerk cheated her by overcharging for that can of pork and beans or failed to rung up the double coupons.

Upside: Having an 11-second commute between my easy chair and my computer.

Downside: Knowing that regardless of how much I fix up my computer and desk to resemble an office I'm still at home, as evidenced by the incessant sound of Mr. Psycho Roommate's television tuned to back-to-back episodes of Judge Judy, The People's Court, Judge Alex and Divorce Court in the background.

Upside: Having time to spend with my parents.

Downside: Answering some variation of "How's the job hunt going?" at least 50 times from my father (who watches FOX News constantly and thus is certain the economy is in great shape ... so what's the problem with you?)

Upside: Being able to determine for oneself if store brands really are as good as name brands.

Downside: Making a trip to the drug store for a quick remedy when that cheap brand of fabric softener results in a rash.

Upside: Dressing for comfort ... usually in a pair of sweat pants and a t-shirt.

Downside: It took me 17 minutes to remember how to tie a necktie while getting ready for the job interview today.

Upside: I can spend all afternoon at the library browsing for books I can check out for free.

Downside: Being cruised at a library by a homeless person in sweat pants and a t-shirt more ragged than mine.

Upside: Learning to be frugal by shopping in thrift stores.

Downside: Never quite getting over the fear that someone may have actually died in the pair of used jeans I'm trying on.

Upside: Gaining a new understanding of what it means to be poor in America.

Downside: Never being able to pass one of those food pantry donation barrels without feeling guilty if I don't drop a least a can of corn in the barrel. (But come to think of it, that's a good thing, too.)

Saving my outrage for the truly outrageous

2005-12-14T12:33:00.000-06:00

One of the first things to greet me when I turned on my computer this morning was an e-mail from an acquaintance emblazoned with the all-caps subject line: TAKE ACTION ON THIS!!!!!!!!

Oh Lord! I thought. What's happened now? E-mails urging me to take action in all uppercase letters and followed by multiple exclamation points are usually reserved for announcing the latest outrage. The "outrage" in this case was not over some homophobic statement by the religious reich or some anti-gay political move by the BushCo administration. It was over CBS's late-night talkshow host David Letterman's "Top 10" list last night ... a "Top 10" list that, according to the e-mail's author, was "homophobic," "contained gay stereotypes," and was a general put-down of the new film "Brokeback Mountain." The e-mail went on to list links to contact CBS and the Letterman Show to express our outrage.

What the e-mail didn't have were any examples of the homophobia and stereotypes. So I did a quick search and found a web site devoted to Letterman's Top 10 lists. Here, in its entirety, is what Letterman said:

Top Ten Signs You're A Gay Cowboy
10. "Your saddle is Versace"
9. "Instead of 'Home On The Range', you sing 'It's Raining Men'"
8. "You enjoy ridin', ropin', and redecoratin'"
7. "Sold your livestock to buy tickets to 'Mamma Mia'"
6. "After watching reruns of 'Gunsmoke', you have to take a cold shower"
5. "Native Americans refer to you as 'Dances With Men'"
4. "You've been lassoed more times than most steers"
3. "You're wearing chaps, yet your 'ranch' is in Chelsea"
2. "Instead of a saloon you prefer a salon"
1. "You love riding, but you don't have a horse"

Ummmm ... okay ... I'm waiting for the outrage to hit. And waiting ... Still waiting.

Actually, while I'm waiting I'm having a hard time keeping from chuckling. If the worst stereotype Letterman can come up with is that, as gay cowboys, we'd want saddles from Versace, that's pretty tame. (And, I might add, sometimes devastatingly accurate considering how many "brand whores" there are out there sporting names like Tommy Hilfiger or Abercrombie and Fitch across their sculpted pecs.) So I strongly doubt that I'll be joining to angry chorus hurling invectives at Letterman.

Humor inhabits a curious gray area when it comes to determining whether the listener is offended or amused. The same joke can either be funny or offensive ... depending on who tells it. A lot of it is whether the person telling the joke is part of the group about which the joke is told. It's like the "insider/outside" type of language. Among LGBTs, some of us use the word "queer" as an inclusive term for the entire community. Granted, there are some in the community who don't care for the word, but in general it's accepted. But, to hear the same word come out of a straight person's mouth can raise our hackles. It's much the same thing as the use of "the N-word." Young urban blacks can use the term to refer to each other, but it's not acceptable to be uttered by a white person.

The "insider/outside" thing isn't as simple as it may appear on the surface. For the most part we can laugh about a group of gay men camping it up and calling each other "fag," but the same word spoken by Fred Phelps or waved around on his infamous "God Hates Fags" signs tends to become fighting words. In between these two extremes is where humor fits. Here it becomes less clear cut and more "in the eye of the beholder."

Remember the comedy series "In Living Color"? The series, produced by Keenen Ivory Wayans on Fox from 1990 to 1994, was a break-out hit that not only introduced American to urban humor, but launched the careers of folks like Damon Wayans and Jim Carrey. It featured a periodic segment called "Men on Film" in which two stereotypically gay men review films. Any film starring a woman would likely get a "Hated it!" review chanted in unison by Damon Wayans and David Alan Grier, while movies starring hot guys would get "Two snaps up!" There was a lot of disagreement in the LGBT community whether the skits were offensive or not. Personally, I never found the "Men on Films" skits to be particularly offensive - especially considering that the characters seemed pretty mild when compared to the rest of the show. And, believe me, the humor on "In Living Color" spared no group.

Humor is a subjective thing. So often whether a joke is funny or offensive depends on more than just the words. Humor depends on the context of the joke and the past history of the speaker. For example, we tend to be much more lenient about Robin Williams doing a stereotypical imitation of a gay man because we know he has been supportive of the LGBT community in the past and his humor comes across as a lot more gentle than some of the comedians who lack Williams' "street cred" among the LGBT community. Compared to comedians like Sam Kinison who ranted about "some faggot in Africa fucked a monkey and now we have to wear rubbers" or Eddie Murphy who made a joke out of women who liked to hang out with gay guys and then "be kissin' on them and bringin' home nasty diseases," Williams' humor is benign and lacks the vicious edge of other comedians.

I don't doubt that my acquaintance really was offended by Letterman's Top 10 list last night. He's certainly welcome to send an angry letter to CBS. But considering how many things going on in the world that I find worthy of outrage, I think I'll pass on this crusade and save my outrage for other issues.

Intriguing new wrinkle in the Ford story: Is Ford sucking up to conservatives for a bail-out?

2005-12-13T11:30:00.000-06:00

By now you've probably heard the story ... Ford Motor Company, after being a progressive corporation that offers protections for its LGBT employees and has supported a number of LGBT events and organizations, does an about-face at the threat of a boycott by the notoriously homophobic American Family Association. The AFA crows about its "victory" in getting Ford to pull advertising from gay publications and reportedly drop funding for LGBT causes. Then a group of LGBT organizations demand a meeting with Ford and the automaker holds a meeting with representatives from the groups on Monday.

As a result of that meeting, Ford issues the following statement, as reported in a Washington Blade article:

"We value all people regardless of their race, religion, gender, sexual orientation and cultural or physical differences," Bill Ford, chair and CEO of Ford, said in the statement. "This is a historical commitment of the Ford Motor Company that I intend to carry forward." ...

The Ford statement did not mention the advertising decisions or its support for gay organizations and events, but also did not back off from its previous public commitments to pull back on both.

"The automotive industry is a highly competitive business," the Ford statement said. "During these budget-tightening times, our brands must make tough choices where to advertise and how to spend limited sponsorship dollars." ...

The Ford statement also did not specifically mention meeting with the AFA or distance the company from the AFA's subsequent claims that the automaker had bowed to pressure from the anti-gay group. But the statement did include a general denial that its decisions were influenced by anything other than economics

"Ford Motor Company is always willing to engage in constructive conversation with those interested in our policies, even with those who don't always agree with them," the statement said. "But only Ford Motor Company speaks for Ford Motor Company. Any suggestion to the contrary is incorrect."

It goes without saying that the representatives from the LGBT organizations were left scratching their heads over Ford's non-statement statement. Reports to come out of the meeting claim Ford representatives gave verbal agreements to each of the requests presented by the group, but that the "official" statement made no comment about the requests ... or even mentioned the fact that the meeting occurred.

So if you're keeping score, here's where things stand now:

Ford acknowledged that it is cutting back on its advertising in LGBT publications and calls it a "business decision." Meanwhile, the company refuses to correct AFA's claim that it was pressure from the far right-wing organization that prompted the decision. While it will continue to advertise Volvo in gay publications, Ford will no longer use gay-specific images in those ads. And the whole issue of the company's support for LGBT causes is left rather vague.

It's hard to understand how a company that was an industry leader in supporting not only it's LGBT employees, but the LGBT community and causes, could suddenly take an 180-degree turn and reverse its policies.

That is, it's hard to understand unless you consider the rumor that floating around concerning Ford.

According to the rumor, Ford is backing away from its gay-friendly policies as a way of convincing Washington to bail the company out of its financial woes. Those woes run deeper than most people outside the industry realize and are a real threat to the automaker (not to mention the country's economy). Hoping to curry favor with the Bushinistas, Ford is sucking up to the social conservatives by moving its corporate values to the right. Such a move would be looked upon favorably by the Bush administration which would have to approve a massive federal bail-out for the ailing automotive giant.

Adding to the suspicion surrounding Ford is the fact that two of the companies top executives are former members of the Bush administration. Far from leaving their government jobs behind, these executives are reportedly using their position to lobby for the appointment of conservative judges.

Who knows what's really going on behind the closed doors of Ford Motor Company's executive offices? From all appearances it seems as though Ford's decision to back away from gay issues is but the first card dealt in a corporate version of Texas hold 'em in which one of the nation's biggest companies is willing to gamble it's formerly gay-friendly image against the chance for a bail-out from a gay-baiting, right-wing administration.

Playing gay ... not that there's anything wrong with that

2005-12-12T12:32:00.000-06:00

Once upon a time, a much-anticipated gay-themed movie openned. It was hailed as a film that would be ground-breaking and an honest look at people who were ... you know ... that way. Other critics saw in the film a sure sign that the world was going to hell in a handbasket and warned that the movie was not one "decent folks" should see.

And, no, that film wasn't called "Brokeback Mountain."

"The Boys in the Band," based on Mart Crowley's off-Broadway stage hit, openned in 1970. Though the film came out (so to speak) in the year following the Stonewall riots that sparked the modern gay rights movement, its sensibility is definitely set in the pre-Stonewall era. The film follows the events of a single evening when a group of gay men (and one supposedly straight man) meet to celebrate the birthday of one of the group, Harold. The original ads for the film featured a photo of Leonard Frey as Harold on one side under the heading "Today is Harold's birthday." On the other side was a photo of Robert La Tourneaux playing a hustler in a cowboy hat. The caption with it read: "This is Harold's present." The ad (in which both men were fully clothed) was considered so shocking that the venerable New York Times refused to run it.

For those who haven't seen it (and let's face it ... a 35-year-old movie about bitchy gay men battling each other and their own self-loathing is not generally on anyone's top-10 list) the film can be viewed as a look at gay men in the days when "gay" meant "glum" or a camp classic with devastatingly funny lines that can be recited with the same bitchy glee that a previous generation of gay men used to recite lines from George Cukor's "The Women." Gay men, at least those of us of a certain age, still use lines like "Oh Mary! It takes a fairy to make something beautiful" or "You're lips are turning blue. You look like you've been rimming a snowman" or the ever-popular "Who do you have to fuck to get a drink around here?" and even Harold's dark warning to the party's host, "You're a sad and pathetic man. You're a homosexual and you don't want to be, but there's nothing you can do to change it. Not all the prayers to your God, not all the analysis you can buy in all the years you've go left to live. You may one day be able to know a heterosexual life if you want it desperately enough. If you pursue it with the fervor with which you annihilate. But you'll always be homosexual as well. Always Michael. Always. Until the day you die."

As dated and politically incorrect as "The Boys in the Band" seems today, it still represents a breathrough for gay subjects on film. It marked the first time an American film tried to capture "the homosexual experience." It's not that movies didn't occasionally toss in a gay character, but before "The Boys in the Band," such characters were limited to campy asexual "pansies" played for laughs, pathetic victims, or darkly sinister outsiders like Peter Lorre's character in "The Maltese Falcon" who existed mainly to provide a contrast to Humphrey Bogart's he-man detective.

Despite whatever shortcomings we perceive in "The Boys in the Band" from a perspective of three-and-a-half decades later, it still stands up as a breakthough. That's a special status it will likely share with "Brokeback Mountain."

There's also something else both movies share: a tinge of homophobia when it comes to marketing the films to a mass audience.

Back in 1970 the real break-out star of "Boys in the Band" was Cliff Gorman who played Emory, the gayest of the gay who's character is described as "a butterfly in heat." Emory is the type of character to fit most snugly into the stereotype of the time. He lisps. He sashays across a room. At times other actors seem genuinely at risk of being inadvertently smacked by his flailing hands and wrists. Behold, the fairy!

While Emory was the character, the actor who portrayed him was certifiably straight. One interview with Gorman made his heterosexual credentials abundantly clear not only by mentioning his wife in several places, but mentioning his taste in beer (not like those wine spritzers and "fruity" drinks his character might order) and talking about his interest in sports (yep, 100-percent he-man!).

Gorman was safe to market to America because he made it clear that he was only playing a part. He reminded straight American that it's only a movie.

Meanwhile, the spotlight of publicity didn't shine on other characters with larger roles in the film. Maybe that's because they didn't share Gorman's taste for beer or sports. Or women. Frey and La Tourneaux both died of AIDS several years ago. Though nothing was said in the mainstream media about their sexual orientation (or that of some of the other cast members), you can still almost hear the creaking and clanking of the Hollywood marketing machine working overtime behind the scenes. Let's not focus on the other actors, it seemed to say. Some reporter might ask them a ... ummm ... delicate question. The public won't stand for a homosexual actor playing a homosexual character. It wouldn't be make-believe anymore!

Jump forward 35 years and its apparent how far we've come in depicting LGBT lives on film. Gay characters now can do more than engage in catty bitch-fights on screen. Now they can fall in love and (gasp!) have sex! But someone hasn't gotten the memo that actors have to establish their heterosexual credentials in order to play a gay part.

Case in point: Try to find an article or interview about "Brokeback Mountain" that doesn't point out that Australian-born heartthrob Heath Ledger didn't fall in love with Michelle Williams (the actress who plays his wife in the film) while shooting the movie. In its cover story on "Brokeback," Entertainment Weekly, a queer-friendly magazine that should know better, managed to work not only Ledger's romance with Williams, but the fact that she recently gave birth to their child into the very first paragraph.

How's that for establishing straight credibility?

Yep, no homos here. Just us straight guys playing queer. We are definitely ACTING.

I'm happy for Heath and his (as Entertainly Weekly terms her) "soul mate." What I'm not happy with is the need of Hollywood to assure audiences that an actor isn't gay just because he plays gay roles. There's more than a hint of homophobia in that. And it shows how far we really haven't come that far since "The Boys in the Band."

What's still debatable is where that attitude comes from. Is it the actors anxious to reassure their straight fans? Their agents, worried about the career implacations of their clients playing gay? The Hollywood publicity machine that embraces "break-through films," but gets squeamish about marketing them without reminding the straight men who get dragged to the local multiplex by wives or girlfriends that the man-on-man action depicted on screen is one more Hollywood special effect?

I'd hope the movie-going public (the heterosexual part of it, anyway) is adult enough by this time to recognize that a movie is just a movie. I don't recall Anthony Hopkins being asked if he had ever really murdered anyone while promoting "Silence of the Lambs." No one asked Glenn Close if she had ever stalked someone and boiled a bunny while she was making the rounds to promote "Fatal Attraction."

No doubt a sizeable percentage of straight people view being gay as more horrendous than stalking an ex-lover and threatening his family or serving a census taker's liver with fava beans and a nice chianti. For those movie-goers, the distance from "The Boys in the Band" and "Brokeback Mountain" isn't that far at all.

Finding the line between bias and mental illness

2005-12-10T23:21:00.000-06:00

Few things would give me greater pleasure then seeing Fred Phelps and his clan of followers placed into straightjackets and loaded onto a bus to transport them to the nearest psychiatric facility. Or the thought of Jerry Falwell twitching and jerking while undergoing electro-convulsive therapy. Or maybe Pat Robertson channeling his inner Blanche DuBois from the final scene of "A Streetcar Named Desire" and whimpering how he's "always depended on the kindness of strangers" as men in white coats lead him out of his television studio.

Maybe someday we'll be treated to just such scenes if the field of psychiatry decides to include extreme bias in its listing of psychiatric diagnoses.

According to a Washington Post article, a California psychiatrist named Edward Dunbar has proposed writing new guidelines for the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the hefty book that defines a variety of mental disorders. Dunbar's guidelines, which haven't officially been submitted to the APA yet, describe people whose daily functioning is paralyzed by persistent fears and worries about other groups.

The article cites a number of examples: a waiter who lost numerous jobs because he refused to provide service to black customers; a Viet Nam veteran who feared going anywhere Asians might be; a woman in Los Angeles so convinced that Jews carried diseases that she went through elaborate cleansing rituals. And then there's this one:

The 48-year-old man turned down a job because he feared that a co-worker would be gay. He was upset that gay culture was becoming mainstream and blamed most of his personal, professional and emotional problems on the gay and lesbian movement.

These fixations preoccupied him every day. Articles in magazines about gays made him agitated. He confessed that his fears had left him socially isolated and unemployed for years: A recovering alcoholic, the man even avoided 12-step meetings out of fear he might encounter a gay person.

"He had a fixed delusion about the world," said Sondra E. Solomon, a psychologist at the University of Vermont who treated the man for two years. "He felt under attack, he felt threatened."

Wow! If that kind of behavior was suddenly considered a mental illness, the ranks of fun-D'uh-Mentalist churches and right-wing politicians would shrink drastically.

My first impulse was to cheer the APA for considering making extreme bias a new form of pathology. That's because I saw how easily we could use it as a tool to silence the opposition. As much as I'd like to see folks like Phelps and Falwell and Robertson (and a list of several hundred more that I could name off the top of my head) silenced, such a tool could easily become a two-edged sword.

It's only been a little over three decades ago that simply being gay was considered a "mental illness." We were victims of a patholgy at best and crazed, deviant monsters at worst, in the eyes of the field of psychiatry. We were treated with hormones. We were strapped to chairs with electrodes attached to our genitals to provide a shock if we started to become aroused when shown photos of naked men. We were injected with serums made from goat glands. We were lobotomized. We were castrated. All because we were "sick" according to a definition in a manual.

As tempting as it is to wish to avenge those dark years by painting our opponents with the same "mentally ill" brush that was once used on us, there are compelling reasons why we shouldn't.

First, creating a new category of mental illness to describe extreme bigotry would risk setting free those who commit hate crimes. Imagine if such a category of mental illness had been available when the two cretins who murdered Matthew Shepard were on trial. Would they still have been convicted and given life in prison? Or would the diagnosis of extreme bias have provided them with an instant insanity defense?

Second, when a person's prejudices become so severe they create problems with his or her job and social life, there are existing diagnoses that can provide the same treatment without creating a whole new type of mental illness. The article notes that anti-psychotic drugs have been used to successfully treat prison inmates who exhibited high levels of prejudice toward other groups. These same drugs treatments might be useful in dealing with persons who exhibit the delusional belief that a particular group is taking over or out to get him. Why create a whole new category to describe something that already exists like paranoid delusions?

Finally, there's just something a little creepy about using psychiatry to enforce social norms. Some might envision a brave new world free from prejudice, but I shudder at the idea it's not too many steps from copying the Joseph Stalin's style of silencing dissident voices. Stalin claimed the state existed to "protect the people." Therefore, if a person sopke out against the Soviet Union, they were acting against their own best interest and could rightly be judged "insane" and sent for "rehabilitation" to some Siberian gulag.

That's were the two-edged sword comes in. The progress we have made toward LGBT rights is tenuous at best, especially under the current political climate. What gains we have made can be lost and we can once again be judged to be on the wrong side of mental health.

It's important for all of us to talk about racism and sexism and homophobia and all sorts of prejudices. It's also important for groups like the APA to examine what effect biases have on society. There may well turn out to be a good reason to list extreme bias as a mental disorder ... but to set forth a new definition before we've studied the issue in depth could turn out to be a very dangerous proposition.

The only thing worse than disagreeing with someone ...

2005-12-09T14:22:00.000-06:00

"We, we, gotta stop these queers, Ron. There's no question in everybody's mind that this can not go through. Uh, we, we - this is gettin' ridiculous. We gotta, we gotta stop this. There's no such thing as, as queer marriages. We gotta stop it. In fact, you know, I think we should have an amendment - uh - put on the ballot, a referendum. Maybe we should have an open season on those people and just let 'em know how we really think. Okay? Bye."

That the verbatim transcript of a voice mail message left for Democratic Wisconsin State Senator Dave Hansen of Green Bay as the Wisconsin legislature was taking up the issue of a ban on same-sex marriages in the state.

Hanson, a moderate Democrat, has gone on record as supporting "traditional marriages." In fact, he voted for a similar measure when it was brought before the legislature last year. But after receiving the voice mail (not to mention hearing from constituents who voice similar opinion in slightly less violent terms) he proposed an amendment to the proposed legislation to eliminate the second sentence of the amendment that would invalidate any "legal status identical or substantially similar to that of marriage for unmarried individuals." In other words, his amendment would still ban same-sex marriage, but it wouldn't take the additional step of possibly putting benefits afforded same-sex or unmarried opposite sex partners in jeopardy.

Wisconsin's Quest News Update reports:

"In fact, I received a voice mail from a constituent who believes the next amendment we should pass is one that creates an 'open season' on 'those people' so we can show them what we really think about them," Hansen said, after pointing out that "it has become increasingly clear that this Act is not about celebrating marriage as we know it."

In offering his amendment Hansen had made it clear he supported a traditional definition of marriage. "A year ago I cast my vote in favor of the Defense of Marriage Act as an extension of my firm belief that traditional marriage should be defined as a union between a man and a woman," Hansen said. "In these turbulent times of moral uncertainty, we need to affirm our commitment to the fundamental family values that made our nation and our state strong."

Hansen then charged the bill's supporters with political demagoguery. "It has become increasingly clear that this Act is not about celebrating marriage as we know it," Hansen said. "Instead, it has been usurped by those who would use it instead for political gain in the upcoming elections and to spread fear and foment hate. It is the crassest of political strategies. And attempting to turn our Constitution into a campaign document is a dangerous tactic."

Hanson's amendment lost on a vote, but he voted against the ban - a switch in his position from last year.

There are three lessons LGBTs and their supporters can glean from Hanson's switch:

1. Hanson was comfortable switch his vote because he had promised to reflect the will of the voters in his district and in the final days of the push for the measure, callers opposed to the amendment outnumbered those supporting it ... so we need to keep pressure on our elected officials.

2. According to the Senator's staff members, the harm to same-sex and other unmarried couples provided by amendment opponents in the year since the first vote swayed Hansen on the issue ... so never give up trying to educate lawmakers in clear, honest and straight forward information about the effects anti-gay legislation has on his or her constituents.

3. And finally, it was the hatred of gays and lesbians expressed by a significant number of amendment supporters - particularly the "open season" call - that finally changed the senator's vote ... so never let your lawmakers see who the true "extremists" are.

There's an old Zen saying: "When you can hold the central ground, your opponent is pushed to the edge. At that point the battle is won."

That might not be the case with every lawmaker. Some are already on the side of the religious zealots. Others fear voting against the sort of "mob mentality" that the religious reich and their minions represent. But sometimes you find a truly thoughtful politician who approaches an issue with an open mind. Such a politician is willing to listen and when he or she does, it's far easier to sway them with appeals to logic and compassion while the opposition assails them with hatred and bigotry.

I'm reminded of the local effort to get the city to pass a domestic partner ordinance and registry last year. As expected, the measure stirred up the bigots in the religious right who paraded before the city council citing their usual litanies of hatred.

At the beginning of the process, some of the city council members were on the fence about the issue. Hoping to capitalize on their uncertainty, the religious right started showing up at council members offices. So strident were they that one council member ended up having her constituents removed after hearing yet again how she would "burn in hell" if the measure passed.

By the time the smoke cleared, the measure passed 12-0. (One council member who was still on the fence managed to be absent that day to avoid voting on the issue.)

As in the case with Wisconsin Sen. Hanson, the fundies may have declared "open season," but ended up shooting themselves in the foot with their bigotry and hatred. Meanwhile, the LGBTs who worked so hard for passage of the ordinance ended up looking like the much more reasonable alternative.

While there are lessons to be learned by LGBT activists in all this, there's also a lesson for the fundies (though I doubt seriously if they will be acting on it any time soon): Sometimes the only thing worse than disagreeing with someone is agreeing with them stupidly.

Small minds in the smallest state

2005-12-08T13:17:00.000-06:00

Right-wing parents attempting to control what their children (and other parents' children) do or see or read or even think in public schools are nothing new. But sometimes the wingnuts are so outrageously over the top that I can't just let their rantings pass without comment.

Case in point: In Glocester, Rhode Island, a group of parents are wailing and gnashing their teeth over a field trip to see a movie. An optional field trip ... one which requires a permission trip from parents to attend.

And what, pray tell, is this licentious, lewd, socially unacceptable film so likely to warp the fragile sensibilities of the Ponaganset High School ninth graders? None other than Rent, the PG-13-rated film version of the long running Pulitzer and Tony-winning drama.

According to 365Gay.com:

"The lifestyles depicted in this movie are not the majority, not the lifestyles of 99.9 percent of the kids that live in these two towns," School Committee cochair Donna Mansolillo told a meeting of the committee this week.

Mansolillo then handed out a review of the film by the conservative group Focus on the Family that calls the movie "an in-your-face glorification of homosexuality and lesbianism."

Well, first off, Mrs. Mansolillo, if your little section of Rhode Island is 99.9 percent heterosexual, you're seriously short of homosexuals. Estimates of the gay population in the U.S. run anywhere from a conservative 15 million up to 30 million. Between 3 and 7 percent of the population is gay. So estimating 99.9 percent of your high school is straight means that Glocester is statistcally freakish.

Of course it's more logical to assume that with folks like Mrs. Mansolillo running around spouting off about "promoting homosexuality," all those under-counted gays and lesbians aren't as like to come out ... at least not around Mrs. M.

But, you know, Mansolillo and James Dobson's infamous hate group, Focus on the Family, might have a point about Rent glorifying homosexuality. Some little ninth grader could see the movie and think, "Gee, I want to be gay and live in poverty in New York. I want to get AIDS so I can be skinny and all my friends will care about me. And when I die from AIDS I want all my friends to get together and sing about me and dance. Yeah, that's for me!"

Is that what scares you about glorifying AIDS and promoting that big, mean old homosexual agenda, Mrs. M?

It's pretty scary stuff for kids to know that there are all sorts of people in the world besides the Taliborn-agains that seem to infest Glocester like a plague of locusts. There are people in the world that are different colors. There are people in the world who live in fancy houses as well as those who inhabit abandoned buildings. There are people in the world who love all different types and genders of people. And there are people in the world who die from all sorts of causes.

Fortunately, at least for those of us who value being able to think for ourselves and encouraging others to do likewise, the attempts by the wingnuts to force cancelation of the field trip failed. As another parent (one who apparently exercises that dangerous trait of thinking for herself) pointed out: "I don't see what the problem is. If you don't want your kid to go, don't sign the permission slip."

Ah, such straightforward logic! No doubt it's lost on Mrs. M and her ilk who refuse to rest as long as any kid in Glocester remains at risk of thinking or forming opinions for him or herself.

As "Seasons of Love," one of Rent's big show-stopping tunes puts it, there are "Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes that make up a year". But even one of those precious minutes spent listening to the likes of Mrs. Mansolillo is too much.

Merry Rama-Hana-Kwanz-Sol-Mas, Mr. President!

2005-12-07T12:19:00.000-06:00

As one of those dreaded "lib'rul seck-u-lar humanists" the fundies are accusing of "declaring war on Christmas," it warms my heart this holiday season to watch as assorted right-wing whackjobs roast each others' chestnuts on an open fire.

And, like finding an extra gift under the Christmas tree (or "holiday tree," if you prefer), we are treated to the holiday bonus of watching our born-again president step in a pile of Christmas ca-ca because he's apparently among those evil-doers intent on "taking Christ out of Christmas."

George and Laura, the current residents of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., have incurred the wrath of that portion of their constitutents most likely to drag their knuckles when walking by sending out White House Christmas cards without any mention of Christmas. To add insult to injury, the artwork on the card fails to include Mary, Joseph, the baby Jesus, angels, shepards or the three wisemen (though, to be fair, finding wisemen in Washington, D.C., would prove to be nearly impossible). Instead the Bushes opted for sending out a holiday card depicting the White House pets - two dogs and a cat.

Now, in response, the fundies are reacting like Bush called a press conference to announce he and Laura regularly drink the blood of Christian babies they have sacrified to the glory of Satan.

From an article in today's Washington Post:

"This clearly demonstrates that the Bush administration has suffered a loss of will and that they have capitulated to the worst elements in our culture," said William A. Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.

Bush "claims to be a born-again, evangelical Christian. But he sure doesn't act like one," said Joseph Farah, editor of the conservative Web site WorldNetDaily.com. "I threw out my White House card as soon as I got it." ...

"It bothers me that the White House card leaves off any reference to Jesus, while we've got Ramadan celebrations in the White House," (president of the American Family Association Tim) Wildmon said. "What's going on there?"

Ouch! Sounds like BushCo's base is unhappy. At this rate he and Laura might expect to find themselves on the warm end of an auto-de-fe before his term is out.

Rising to the defense of the beleagured (and apparently demon-possessed president, according to some), is Laura's press secretary, Susan Whitson: "Certainly President and Mrs. Bush, because of their faith, celebrate Christmas. Their cards in recent years have included best wishes for a holiday season, rather than Christmas wishes, because they are sent to people of all faiths."

Odd, but that's the same rationale that many retailers use to justify wishing shoppers "happy holidays" when they enter stores.

Those are the same retailers who Faux News commentator Bill O'Reilly claims have declared "war on Christmas."

Christmas and the baby Jesus must really be in trouble if they are depending on O'Reilly to ride to their rescue. It was just over a year ago that O'Reilly was fending off accusations of sexually harassing a female producer who claimed he subjected her to repeated instances of sexual harassment and spoke often, and explicitly, to her about phone sex, vibrators, threesomes, masturbation, the loss of his virginity, and sexual fantasies. But I suppose if grown-up Jesus can forgive a woman accused of adultry, then Baby Jesus can find it in his heart to forgive O'Reilly some "dirty talk."

On his Nov. 18 edition of "The O'Reilly Factor" (along with Faux newsperson John Gibson), O'Reilly made some startling claims:

O'REILLY: See, I think it's all part of the secular progressive agenda --

GIBSON: Absolutely.

O'REILLY: -- to get Christianity and spirituality and Judaism out of the public square. Because if you look at what happened in Western Europe and Canada, if you can get religion out, then you can pass secular progressive programs like legalization of narcotics, euthanasia, abortion at will, gay marriage, because the objection to those things is religious-based, usually.

So is bully boy Bill saying that Bush is pushing a secular agenda? I sure don't see George out drumming up support for gay marriage. He's come out against abortion, too ... though I'd be curious to see how strong his disapproval of abortion would be if either of his wild twins, Barb and Jenna, showed up at Christmas dinner and announced a pregnancy. There's no way he'd support euthanasia ... at least unless he thought he could get away with smothering Big Mama Barbara in her sleep the next time one of her ill-thought-out comments embarasses him. And the whole narcotics thing? Well, he claims to have given all that up years ago.

So yet again the fundies and right-wingers are caught up in their own inconsistencies. They want to boycott retailers like Target for wishing shoppers "happy holidays," but they are stuck supporting a president who does the same thing.

But no one ever accused the right wing of being consistent. Or even particularly intelligent.

So despite not having received a Christmas ... oops! I mean "holiday" card from the White House, I'd still like to wish George and Laura an all-inclusive happy Rama-Hana-Kwanz-Sol-Mas season and welcome them to the scary world of political correctness.

BUSTED! Anti-gay AFA sells 'ex-gay' snakeoil

2005-12-06T12:32:00.000-06:00

Suppose for a moment that an author famous for his books on raising children got caught up in a child abuse scandal. After years of advising parents how to raise their children, he gets caught doing something awful to his own kids like scalding their hands for misbehavior or beating them to the point of requiring medical attention.

News like that would undoubtedly cause sales of the author's books to plummet and stores selling his books would likely pull them off the shelves quietly. And rightly so. No one wants to take advise from someone who so clearly doesn't follow his own advice.

Now suppose a prominent "ex-gay" who touts a video claiming he was cured of him "homo-seck-shul afflicition" by his faith in Jesus is discovered not only to have continued to cruise for men on line, engaged in unsafe sex with multiple partners, and failed to mention the fact that he was HIV-positive.

That doesn't exactly speak highly for his "I was saved from buggery by Jesus" video. In fact, you'd figure any business carrying the video would pull it off the shelves faster than the religious reich could shout "Abomination!"

But if you thought that, you'd be wrong - at least in the case of the rabidly anti-gay American Family Association, a group led by the religiously insane Donald Wildmon.

Author and activist Wayne Besen sent out a press release today that busted AFA for continuing to promote and sell "ex-gay" spokes-homo's Michael Johnston's video "It's Not Gay" on its web site.

According to the copy accompanying the listing:

It's Not Gay presents a story that few have heard, allowing former homosexuals the opportunity to tell their own story in their own words.

Along with medical and mental health experts, these individuals express a clear warning that the sanitized version of homosexuality being presented to students is not the whole truth.

Uncompromising, yet compassionate, It’s Not Gay is a fair and balanced approach to this challenging subject.

Caught selling an "ex-gay" video made by a notorius ex-"ex-gay" is bad enough, but AFA continued to push this video even now ... two years after Johnston resigned in the wake of the disclosure about his secret life.

Says Besen in his press release:

After the incident, AFA spokesman Buddy Smith called Johnston's failure a "moral fall." With the AFA publicly acknowledging that they were aware of Johnston's failure as an ex-gay and his unsafe behavior, it is shocking that they would continue to promote "It's Not Gay" on their website.

"The American Family Association is blatantly committing fraud by suggesting that Johnston is heterosexual and they are promoting the spread of HIV by continuing to use him as a spokesperson," said Wayne Besen, author of Anything But Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies Behind the Ex-Gay Myth. "This episode suggests a stunning lack of integrity on the part of the American Family Association and utter contempt for the truth. If they have a shred of decency and morality, they will immediately stop selling the tape and apologize for their disgraceful behavior."

Yep ... nothings says "gays can change" better than a guy who cruises the internet for men and then doesn't bother to tell him his HIV status. That says a lot about Johnston's real "moral fall."

It also says a lot about AFA's moral bankruptcy that they would continue to promote Johnston's video while knowing his "ex-gay" pose was just a facade.

That's the trouble with the whole "ex-gay" movement. It's become big business for the religious reich and as long as they can continue making money off of it, they won't let the little matter of it's totally fraudulent premise stand in the way.

Meanwhile, AFA continues to sell "ex-gay" snakeoil at $15 a pop.

Finding truth on 'Brokeback Mountain'

2005-12-05T10:06:00.000-06:00

I read. A lot. While the sterotypical gay man's nightstand might feature a candy dish of condoms, lube, a candle or two to set the mood, and maybe a few other items, depending on the owner's particular fetish, mine is piled high with books.

Because I'm such a voracious reader, it caught me by surprise a year or so ago when I begin hearing about a "gay cowboy movie" being filmed based on a short story by Annie Proulx. Unless you've been living in a cave for the past couple of months, you know by now that the movie is "Brokeback Mountain." It opens in limited release later this month and in wider release (which means it will finally come to Kansas City) in January.

The movie, directed by Ang Lee who's made films as diverse as "The Ice Storm," "Sense and Sensibility," "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," the gay-themed "The Wedding Banquet," and the regrettable "The Hulk," stars a couple of up-and-coming young actors, Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, as a couple of cowboys who meet and fall in love while herding sheep in 1960's Wyoming.

But enough about the movie. I'll wait and judge that once I've seen it. What perplexed me is how I missed the story when it was first published. I've long been an admirer of Proulx's work - especially her book "The Shipping News," which was turned into a considerably dumbed-down film saved only by the casting of Dame Judi Dench playing Kevin Spacey's downtrodden character's aunt and the beautiful cinematography of the Newfoundland coast. I love Proulx's respect for the characters she creates and how she allows them to speak more through what they don't say than through their actual dialogue. Her minimalist approach ends up painting a more vivid portrait of her characters than reams of exposition.

So I went in search of this "lost" gay story, wanting to find it before I saw the movie version. "Brokeback Mountain" first appeared in The New Yorker in 1997. It was later published in a book of Proulx's short stories called "Close Range" (and has now been released as just the story with a tie-in to the film).

I wasn't sure what to expect when I first opened the story. I'm not a big fan of the Western genre, but was willing to give it a shot.

Fifty-three pages later, when I closed the book after a single setting with tears still in my eyes, I was stunned. Here is a story about two men in love that never uses the word "gay." In fact, in only one place in the book is the word "queer" used ... and that's put into the mouth of one of the characters to clarify what he is not.

But yet I've seldom read such a book that so clearly addresses what it means to be gay in a straight world. Proulx gets it exactly right! So powerful is the story that even looking through shots from the film on its web site, the film's iconic image - two shirts, one tucked inside the other and hanging on a single hanger beneath a postcard of the mountain of the title - brought tears to my eyes.

Beginning with a paperback copy of Gorden Merrick's The Lord Won't Mind snuck home when I was in high school, I've read lots and lots of gay stories and novels. Merrick's novel (and its sequels) were the first in which I encountered gay characters. The East coast, prep-school backgrounds of the characters was as foreign to my and my experiences as reading about the ancient samurai culture. In college I discovered John Rechy's novels of hustlers and drag queens such as City of Night and Numbers. Interesting, but the dark netherworld of prostitution was beyond my experiences. And then there were books like Andrew Holleran's Dancer from the Dance where the characters seemed shallow and vain and, while perhaps a true examination of gay life at a particular time and place, did little to relate to me. Likewise with Larry Kramer's Faggots, an over-the-top look at New York's gay life in the '70s that was nothing like I'd ever seen or experienced.

No doubt each of those books contained their own truth; but those truths weren't the truths of living outside the gay Meccas. All too often in "gay lit," locations outside of New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Key West exist only as places to be running from.

"Brokeback Mountain" is one of those rare stories that addresses what life is like for those of us in the "flyover" portion of the country. The only other book I've read that comes close to telling the stories of "the rest of us" is Scott Heim's Mysterious Skin (which was released as an equally powerful film by Greg Araki eariler this year).

I have known men like the characters of Ennis and Jack in "Brokeback Mountain" - men who may not be able to put a name to what they feel, but their emotions are equally valid rather they take the time to name them or not. They don't have to work out their issues under the pulsing strobe lights of gay discos where there is a constant percussive beat of dance music. They don't have to go through the almost mandatory "coming out" scene, except within themselves.

Perhaps this is what Proulx was trying to do in writing "Brokeback Mountain." She was stripping all that is "gay" from a story about two men finding love in each other's arms. She took the story down to its very basic, most elemental level - the overwhelming need to love and be loved.

In telling a story vitually devoid of all the trappings that people associate with the word "gay," Proulx has taken a story of two people and reduced it to the point where its themes are universal. Far from being a "gay cowboy story," it becomes a story about how lonely life can be when we can't be true to our own natures.

Ford caves in to fundie "crash test dummies"

2005-12-03T11:52:00.000-06:00

Like a cheap subcompact in one of those front-end crash tests, Ford Motor Company has caved in to the radical religious reich.

According to an article on Advocate.com:

The antigay American Family Association claimed a cultural victory on Thursday and called off its threatened boycott of Ford Motor Co. On Friday, Ford spokesman Mike Moran confirmed to Advocate.com that the company will stop advertising its Jaguar and Land Rover brands in gay publications but insisted it was strictly a business decision.

The Dearborn, Mich., automaker came under fire from the AFA in May for its longtime efforts to increase LGBT workplace diversity and support gay rights causes. Ford has long been a regular advertiser within gay media, including The Advocate, and has donated significant sums to LGBT causes and nonprofit groups such as the Human Rights Campaign.

Threatened with a boycott by the Mississippi-based AFA, Ford and some of its dealers agreed to negotiate, and the AFA announced in June that it would hold off on its planned action. On Thursday, AFA announced the boycott would be canceled altogether.

"They've heard our concerns; they are acting on our concerns. We are pleased with where we are," said Donald Wildmon, AFA’s chairman, in a statement. "Obviously there are still some small matters of difference, as people will always have, but generally speaking, we are pleased with the results—and therefore the boycott that had been suspended [is] now officially ended."

While the boycott by the inbred idiots of AFA may be officially ended, Ford needs to hear that a new boycott by LGBT consumers is just beginning.

In the past Ford has been supportive of LGBT issues and has helped to fund some LGBT programs across the country. But by caving in to the ravings of the fanatical Donald Wildmon and his followers who have made a name for themselves threatening boycotts of businesses they deem to "friendly" to that big bugaboo "the homo-seck-shul agenda," Ford risks making a whole new set of enemies.

Ford needs to hear from us and know that we will take all that supposed "disposable income" we have and shop elsewhere the next time we thinking about a new car.

Ford also needs to know that in siding with AFA, they are jumping in bed with a group that the Southern Poverty Law Center (which tracks such groups as the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nations) listed as a hate group in it's spring 2005 magazine, Intelligence Report.

Here's what SPLC had to say about Wildmon and AFA:

Best known for leading boycotts of advertisers who support "indecency" in the mass media (including the supposedly cocaine-snorting Mighty Mouse), the Rev. Donald Wildmon, a former Methodist minister, has led a series of religious-right groups since 1976. ...

In one October 2004 article, the AFA Journal suggests that gay influences are leading to a "grotesque culture" that will include "quick encounters in the middle school boys' restroom." In its 1994 booklet Homosexuality in America, the AFA claims "[p]rominent homosexual leaders and publications have voiced support for pedophilia, incest, sadomasochism, and even bestiality."

AFA's direct-mail appeals are particularly shrill. "For the sake of our children and society, we must OPPOSE the spread of homosexual activity! Just as we must oppose murder, stealing, and adultery!" says one such recent fundraising letter. "Since homosexuals cannot reproduce, the only way for them to 'breed' is to RECRUIT! And who are their targets for recruitment? Children!"

AFA has 21 state directors, including California's Scott Lively, co-author of The Pink Swastika, a book that claims "homosexuals are the true inventors of Nazism and the guiding force behind many Nazi atrocities" (see also Making Myths).

In late 2004, the AFA called for a boycott of Proctor & Gamble, calling it "one of the largest promoters of the homosexual agenda," partly because it advertises on TV shows "Will and Grace" and "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy." By late January 2005, AFA claimed more than 380,000 people had signed its boycott petition.

If Ford is willing to jump into bed with these bigoted knuckle-dragging Neanderthals, then it doesn't have much respect for the LGBT community.

For anyone interested in letting Ford know how you feel, the company's phone number, address and e-mail is listed on its web site.

Mixing the message in a Cuisinart

2005-12-02T23:39:00.000-06:00

Some people send out mixed messages. You know the type ... "I love you, but I just can't be with you" or "I like what you're wearing, but let me pick out someone different for you" or my personal favorite "I'm so happy to be around you, but I need my space."

Then there's a whole different group of people that fold, spindle and mutilate the message, then put it through a Cuisinart set on puree before sending it out.

In that latter category is the Arlington, Va., Assembly of God Church which began running television advertisements aimed "to extend a welcome to people who might have felt demonized by Christianity," according to an article in The Washington Blade.

According to the church's pastor, Lynn Carter:

"This is a new ad that we're doing just to let folks know that we love 'em and that we care about them," Carter said. "We have various commercials that are on. Some deal with gay issues, some do not."

The commercials spotlight at least two "ex-gays." One commercial features a man, the other features a woman, and each says they were sexually abused as a child and later lived a "gay lifestyle." Both commercials end with the person claiming they are now heterosexual and Christian.

Carter said Arlington Assembly of God was not trying to suggest sexual abuse causes homosexuality.

Ummmm .. OK. So if the ads are not trying to suggest that homo-seck-shuls are created and set on their "lifestyle choice" by being abused, why feature two such pathetic creatures in the ad?

According to Carter, she's heard from some gays who were offended by the ads and some who were touched by them. "We want to convey a message of acceptance or love." The commercials were intended to counteract anti-gay messages from churches, Carter claimed in the article. "I think many gays and lesbians feel that they weren't accepted," Carter said. "God hates liars, too, but God lets liars come to church. If someone's looking for an out [from homosexuality] that's fine, and if they're not that's fine, we just want to let them know that we care."

I'm fine with a message of inclusion and I certainly wish more churches would be inclusive toward gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender persons. But far from being an inclusive, welcoming message, there's an undercurrent that all that love supposed presented in the commercials is kind of ... well, "conditional."

By featuring a couple of "ex-gays" in their ads, here's the real message the church is sending out: "God loves everyone ... but he really, really likes it if you are straight. Or at least not living that sinful homo-seck-shul lifestyle."

That's supposed to make us feel welcome?

If churches want to talk about abuse and groups that have been "demonized" by the church, they need to talk more than a millenia of Christianity's spiritual abuse toward a whole lot of different groups, all of whom have been demonized at one time or another by those who claimed to speak for God.

Gays? "Abominations worthy of death! Remember the story of Sodom (but the Genesis version, not the one in Ezekial and other books that claim it was pride, inhospitality to strangers and failing to care for the poor). We all know you horny homos wanted to hump those angels who visited Lot."

Kids? "Spare the rod and spoil the child. Beat that kid 'cause the Bible gives us carte blanche. Doesn't it say you should stone a disobedient child? Then anything short of killing the little brat is almost ... well, 'liberal!'"

Women? "Hey, it's all your fault, ladies! If you hadn't have picked that damned apple and offered it to Adam, we'd still be running around naked in Eden. You women are a necessary evil, so shut up and keep your heads covered in church. And don't ever think you could actually be in the clergy!"

Blacks? "You people are descended from Noah's son, Ham ... the one who got cursed to live in servitude. So, see, slavery really was OK. And remember that the Bible tells slaves to obey their masters, so quit being so 'uppity.'"

Jews? "It's bad enough you didn't recognize the saviour when he showed up, but then you went and killed him!"

I've actually heard all these arguments made at some point in my life. And I have yet to hear the churches apologize for them. Oh sure, they sweep them under the carpet ... but to apologize for this kind of spiritual abuse? Never.

Until churches can honestly confront their own histories and prejudices, allegedly "welcoming" messages like the ones from the Arlington Assembly of God will ring hollow.

Remembering on World AIDS Day

2005-12-01T09:23:00.000-06:00

Today is World AIDS Day. Around the world, it's a day marked by ceremonies of remembrance for those who have died and speeches pledging to forge ahead toward finding new treatments and - eventually - a cure for AIDS.

Mostly, for me at least, World AIDS Day is marked by numbers and statistics.

Since its arrival was first noted in 1981, AIDS has claimed 25 million lives.

An estimated 40 million people worldwide now have HIV/AIDS.

Last year the U.N. estimates 3.1 million people died from AIDS and another 4.9 million became infected.

In America, the number of AIDS cases among men who have sex with men is on the rise again, according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control.

Despite drops in infection rates among African Americans over the past several years, blacks remains eight times as likely to be diagnosed with AIDS.

Those are the kinds of numbers that get tossed around in World AIDS Day speeches. The news media dutifully reports the numbers. But tomorrow the news will be covering other stories about war or famine or poverty and there will be new numbers and statistics and body counts to report.

We've become immune to statistics. We are bombarded with numbers on a daily basis and there ability to move us for more than a moment has been dampened. The words of former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin have never rang truer: "One man's death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is a statistic."

That's why I don't go out of my way to mark World AIDS Day anymore. The focus on the numbers remove the human face from HIV/AIDS. My own personal "AIDS Day" is tucked away inside a drawer. It's tied not to a calendar, but to my own need to remember.

Fifteen years or so ago my lover at the time and I lived in an all-gay apartment building managed by a gay couple who lived a floor above us. With six apartments in the building, there were always comings and goings and parties and "drama." The parties I remember most are the birthday parties thrown for Floyd, the apartment manager, whose birthday fell on the Fourth of July. We'd celebrate with cookouts and music and, after the sun went down, we'd move the party to the flat roof of the building for a glimpse of fireworks displays.

My gift for Floyd during the three years we lived there was to photograph the festivities and present him with copies of the photos. I'd have an extra copy of the photos made for me. Those photos, along with vacation photos that chronicled my trips, ended up in my nightstand drawer.

A decade ago I ran across those photos looking for something else. I sat on the edge of the bed and thumbed through them, remembering the parties and the people. There was Floyd being presented with outrageous birthday gifts. There was his lover, Steven, and their dog, a huge St. Bernard named, appropriately, Bernard. There was Jeff, dressed as a cheerleader in red, white and blue drag and his lover, Will. There was Tim, my lover's best friend. There was Tony, whom I have to admit I had a secret crush on. There was Tracy who planned on sex reassignment surgery one day and many others.

Then it hit me that many of these people were no longer around. I should have known that since I had sat through their memorial services. But those became times of numbness after a while ... services that melted one into another. Yet in the photos here they were again, smiling back at the camera very much alive at that moment.

Floyd's funeral was the first. I remember his sparsely attend memorial service where we all held hands and comforted Steven.

When Steven died his memorial service was held in his hometown. Few of us had the chance to attend, but I think that's the way his conservative family preferred it.

Tracy died in Florida, still waiting for his sex change operation.

I heard about Tony's death several months after it happened.

Jeff went home to his family in Colorado to die, but a local memorial service was held and I recall thinking how, with his usual drag queen bluntness, he had comforted me and then told me to "move on" after the break-up with my ex.

His lover, Will, moved away and we didn't learn about his death until much later.

Tim died, too. We always assumed he contracted HIV from the priest he dated for a while, (though the priest tried to keep his vocation a secret from us). Tim told us how the priest took him on a vacation to Denver and spent the entire time in a bathhouse there.

And there were others from those photos lost to the ravages of AIDS.

The last time I looked through the photos I realized that (apart from a few people I've lost track of over the years) my ex and I are the only ones I know of still alive.

I've lost friends before and after those pictures were taken, but for me the photos have become my own personal litany of the dead. I pull them out when I need to remember and grieve and to remind myself of the promise that Jeff extracted from me shortly before he went home to die: "Live like you're living for me."

For me World AIDS Day is not observed on December 1st. I keep my own personal World AIDS Day in a drawer by my bedside and I can observe it whenever I need to remember and grieve and keep a promise made years ago.

Saying "I do ... need the publicity"

2005-11-30T11:45:00.000-06:00

Bginning Dec. 21 in England, same-sex couples will be allowed to get married. Well, maybe not "married" exactly, but enter into Civil Partnerships ... so I guess the term will be "civily partnered."

That's a major step for the U.K. and a major victory of British gays and lesbians, including some high-profile couples who have announced plans to tie the knot or bind the partnership or however they will describe it.

Among them is Elton John - oops! "Sir" Elton John, I mean - and his partner David Furnish, who seemed to make a mad dash to announce their plans as soon as the U.K. approved civil partnerships. Not to be outdone, George Michael of the nearly forgotten due "Wham" (not to mention his long-remembered Beverly Hills tearoom arrest) and his partner, Kenny Goss, jumped onto the partnership bandwagon and announced they plan to exchange vows soon, probably early next year.

Call me cynical (though I much prefer the phrase "wise in the ways of the world"), but it's hard to look at these to impending nuptuals as love matches when they have all the trappings of marriages of convenient publicity.

First we have Elton whose career peak came and went decades ago. "The Bitch is Back," according to Elton's song from the days when he still had talent, but in his case the song should have been titled "The Bitch is STILL Here!" Now, instead of turning out pop songs that actually get played on the radio, Elton is trying to dig his fingernails into fame and hang on by singing duets with anyone who'll sing with him. (Remember his embarassing duet with homophobic rapper Eminem on the Grammys a few years ago? That was the first time I noticed his eyebrows move around like two wooly catepillars desparately trying to flee his face when he sings.)

If he can't find anyone to sing with him, Elton tries to keep the spotlight shining on him with outrageously bitchy comments, a la attacking Madonna for miming her songs (for which he later apologized).

Not to be outdone in the race to the altar, George Michael hopes to civily partner with his boyfriend "probably after the first of the year," according to 365Gay.com. He also adds, much to the relief of fashionistas everywhere, "We won't be doing the whole veil and gown thing."

Oddly enough, the wedding does seem to correspond with the release of a rather self-indulgently titled documentary George Michael: A Different Story, which follows the highs and lows of George's life and career. Apparently, his relationship with boyfriend Goss is one of the highs and is featured prominently in the film; so what better way to promote a documentary on a fading pop star than take the relationship to its logical conclusion and get hitched. Mediocre sit-com writers have been using the "wedding angle" to boost ratings during the all-important sweeps periods for years. (These same writers also use the "new baby angle," too ... but please don't tell Elton or George that unless you want to see baby photos of Elton's or George's new baby gracing the cover of People magazine the next time their stardom begins to fade.)

Maybe I shouldn't be so cynical. Perhaps Elton's and George's partnerships are truly love matches with their soul mates. But these are cynical times and it's easy to imagine that both fading divas (or is it "divos"?) captializing on their partnerships as an attempt to hang onto past glories.

As high profile as these civil partnerships will be, I just don't want to read any headlines a year or so from now like "Elton calls it splitsville with hubby" or "George Michael's partner dumps him after 'tearoom' incident." That would just provide more ammunition to the anti same-sex marriage folks who will use it as "proof" that we shouldn't be allowed to marry.

For now I'll wish the best for Elton and David and George and Kenneth - and remind them rather pointedly that the rest of us are counting on them.

And I'll add a tip of the hat to Queen Elizabeth's mother, the Queen mum, who, with the impending "marriages," will soon by the last tired old queen still single in Britain.