Just in case you were wondering ...

... 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

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

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'

"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

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

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

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.