From Jim Burroway at Box Turtle Bulletin…  Yes…this is how we ought to ring in the New Year …

In commemoration of the Black Cat raid of 1966, celebrate this New Year’s Eve with a radical act. Kiss him "on the mouth for three to five seconds."

You should immediately go read his entire post about a page of gay history I hadn’t known about… 

It all began exactly forty years ago this New Year’s Eve, on Sunset Blvd., in the Silverlake neighborhood of Los Angeles, in a small bar called the Black Cat. There were some sixty or seventy patrons gathered during those final moments of 1966, counting down the last few seconds to midnight. Couples gathered and stood next to each other, and as the countdown approached zero, they leaned into one other, and, amid the shouts of “Happy New Year!” and the opening strands of Auld Lang Syne, they did something all couples do all around the world.

They kissed.

And immediately at least six plainclothes officers who had infiltrated the gay bar began viciously beating and arresting the kissing offenders. As the melee widened, several people tried to escape to the nearby New Faces bar. Undercover officers followed and raided that bar as well. One of the New Faces workers was beaten so badly by police that they cracked a rib, fractured his skull and ruptured his spleen.

Six Black Cat kissers were tried and convicted of “lewd or dissolute conduct” in a public place, conduct that consisted of male couples hugging and kissing. According to one police report, one couple had “kissed on the mouth for three to five seconds.” Apparently, three to five seconds are what constituted “lewd or dissolute conduct” among the LAPD.

If I’ve heard bigots say once that they don’t care what we do "in our bedrooms" just don’t "flaunt it" in front of them, I’ve heard it a thousand times.  And what is this "it" they’re so afraid of seeing?  It isn’t that we’ll suddenly start having sex on the sidewalk in front of them.  They’d care a lot less about us doing that even, then doing the one thing they simply don’t want to see, don’t want to know: that the objects of their hate are human after all.  That we don’t simply rut, that homosexuality isn’t a lower form of lust, but that we are whole people, who not only desire, but love, and are loved. 

If there is anything the bigots hate seeing us do more then holding the hand of the one we love, it’s kissing them affectionately, simply, lovingly.  They’d hate us a lot less if all they ever saw in us was desire, because that would validate their ignorant barstool conceits that homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex.  You want to really get them pissed off, make them see red, make the veins in their pasty foreheads start throbbing, let them see the slightest hint, the smallest sign, that you actually love your intimate other.  Because that makes you fully human and that’s the last thing they want to know.  What was the first thing the bigots started babbling about after the supreme court overturned the sodomy laws?  Not that suddenly a lot of homosexuals would start having sex, but that acknowledging that we had a right to sexual intimacy, might lead to giving us the right to marriage too.  Marriage was the First thing they started yapping about. 

That says it all.  That really nailed down what this fight is really about, what it was always about right from the beginning.  It isn’t about sex.  It has nothing to do with sex.  It has everything to do with our human spirit.  Homosexuals cannot have love, we must be denied it at every turn, every door to it must be slammed shut in our faces, it must be beaten out of us if necessary, because to allow us love, is to acknowledge that we are human beings, with human souls.  And so long as we must play the roll of scapegoats for the moral failings of heterosexuals, that cannot be.

Burroway concludes with this, and I couldn’t agree more… 

Forty years after the Black Cat raid, men still cannot be seen kissing each other, unless ratings are tanking during the final season or one of them dies.

And yet, what are two lovers supposed to do?

And when two lovers woo
They still say, “I love you.”
On that you can rely
No matter what the future brings
As time goes by.

Go read the whole thing.  And when the New Year rings in, if you’re lucky enough to have found your other half, or even just a happy partner for the moment, take them into your arms and kiss them…

Kiss him for all of those who were not allowed to kiss. Kiss him for those who were beaten and arrested for kissing, and for those who fought back to defend that kiss. Kiss him for those heroes who declared an end to the shame of kissing. Kiss him because now you can; because today your greatest freedom is in that kiss. Kiss him on the mouth. And for good measure, kiss him for much, much longer than three to five seconds. Kiss him hard and long, with a kiss of forty years and still counting.

And wish him a very happy New Year.

In the spirit of the coming revelry…no…not a resolution list.  A Seven Things That Only Make Sense When You’re Drunk list…

Somehow, I’ve no idea how or why, I’m able to keep my common sense when I’m completely wasted.  I may not be able to stand up straight but I know better then to fall for items seven through 2.  But item number one has actually made sense to me when I was badly drunk.  Regrettably. 

It’s good to know where your failure points are.  Take heed of them when partying tonight…

When you have to return home all the same, to 30 degrees and forecasts of snow, visiting the Florida keys for a few days probably isn’t a good idea after all…

I just…don’t want to go outside. 

From our Department Of Unsurprising Things…  The judge who issued a restraining order preventing Oregon’s Civil Unions law from taking effect, was a Bush appointee whose nomination had stirred up some controversy due to his views on the status of gay people.  Emphasis below are mine…

Smith’s Pick Stirs Gay-Rights Controversy

WASHINGTON—What once seemed like a slam-dunk nomination for the federal judiciary in Oregon could turn into a test of political wills for Oregon’s two senators, Republican Gordon Smith and Democrat Ron Wyden.

Michael Mosman, the U.S. attorney in Portland, is Smith’s choice for a vacant district judgeship and is still regarded as a favorite of the Bush White House. But recent revelations of Mosman’s views on gay rights, first expressed in 1986, have delayed his selection and what otherwise would likely be easy Senate confirmation.

…

Mosman, 46, emerged as the top candidate in January after Ray Baum, a lawyer for Smith’s family business, withdrew. But controversy erupted in March, when Basic Rights disclosed Mosman’s role in a pivotal 1986 case, Bowers V. Hardwick.

The group uncovered and presented to Smith two “bench memos” that Mosman had written as a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. Mosman urged Powell to uphold Georgia’s anti-sodomy law against a claim that police invaded a man’s privacy by arresting him in his home.

Memos to court’s tie-breaker

Mosman prepared the memos in March and June 1986, as it became clear Powell would be the court’s tie-breaking vote. He wrote that striking down the Georgia law would lead to an unwarranted expansion of privacy rights under due process.

Such a ruling would leave “no limiting principle” against prosecution of other sex crimes such as prostitution, Mosman wrote. It also would jeopardize rights that society previously had reserved to heterosexuals.

“Without belaboring the point, I am convinced that the right of privacy as it relates to this case has been limited thus far to marriage and other family relationships,” Mosman wrote to Powell. “So limited, the right of privacy does not extend to protect ‘sexual freedom’ in the absence of fundamental values of family and procreation.”

Mosman has declined requests by The Oregonian to discuss the memos. But in a recent book about gay rights and the Supreme Court, Mosman is quoted as saying that his feelings about homosexuality were secondary to his concerns about the law.

“The battle was really about . . . what direction the court was taking on due process,” Mosman said in “Courting Justice: Gay Men and Lesbians v. the Supreme Court.

Mosman added: “The (sodomy) issue could have come to the court as an equal protection case and would have had a better hearing. I would have been more receptive to it.”

…which is not to say he’d have been in favor of overturning the sodomy laws anyway.  After all…having sex is a right that society had reserved to heterosexuals.

For Smith, the nomination could become a test of his credibility as an advocate for gay rights within the Republican Party. Smith won an important endorsement from Human Rights Campaign after supporting hate-crimes legislation, helping his re-election last year.

In a recent interview, Smith downplayed the significance of the Powell memos and suggested that given the opportunity, Mosman could explain himself to the satisfaction of critics.

“This is a decision that was rendered in 1986,” Smith said. “Isn’t it possible that Mike Mosman could also have an evolving view on these issues? I think Mosman is an outstanding legal scholar and an extraordinary U.S. attorney for Oregon.”

But let’s not lay this debacle entirely at the feet of the ersatz "gay friendly" republican.  I think we all know by now that there is no such animal.  But wait…there was a democrat involved in this too…

The stakes could be higher for Wyden. Although his party controls neither the White House nor the Senate, Democrats are regarded as the chief defenders of gay rights. If Wyden endorses Mosman, his decision could be second-guessed by colleagues, including a handful of Democratic senators running for president in 2004.

Democrats have threatened to filibuster high-profile nominees, and they might be emboldened to take on others if they succeed, said Moore, the analyst. In that case, Mosman’s nomination also could be held hostage to political concerns.

“It depends on what happens with the other filibusters going on,” he said.

Wyden hopes to avoid a national controversy over the nomination, said Josh Kardon, his chief of staff. But first, the senator plans to meet with Mosman to discuss the concerns raised by Basic Rights and decide whether to support him.

“Mike Mosman is someone Senator Wyden has supported in the past and someone he would like to support for the federal bench,” Kardon said. “But legitimate questions have been raised that require thorough consideration.”

Well guess what…after "discussing" the concerns raised by the gay community with Mosman, Wyden went ahead and voted for him after all …

"President Bush made an excellent choice when he nominated Mike, and the Senate confirmed that decision with its unanimous vote," Smith said. "He has long served Oregon and the nation with distinction, and I have the utmost confidence that he will continue to do so on the District Court."

"I am honored to have this chance to serve," Mosman said. "I have been impressed throughout this whole process with the fair-mindedness of everyone involved. I am grateful to the president for nominating me, and to Senators Smith and Wyden for their confidence and support."

"Mike has worked hard to show his commitment to equal rights for all Americans," Wyden said. "I believe his sense of fairness and his long and outstanding experience as a prosecutor in our state will serve the District Court and Oregon well."

Some of you may want to contact Wyden and ask him how he feels about "Mike"’s "sense of fairness" and his commitment to equal rights for "all" Americans now.  A few questions about whether or not the democratic party can rightly be regarded as a defender of the rights of gay Americans in deed as well as word probably wouldn’t hurt either.

Oh…and you might want to ask Gordon Smith how much creditability he thinks he still has as an advocate for gay rights within the republican party.  Try not to laugh out loud while you’re asking him please.

More from my wee stroll though Downtown Disney…

A few images from my wander around Downtown Disney and Paradise Island…

Can you see my smile?  There’s a little space in the center of my door that I’ve been saving for one particular Christmas card, I wasn’t even sure would come.  It hadn’t by the time I was on my way south.  I was tempted several times to call the lady who watches my house while I’m gone and ask her if it had come.  When I came home last night from Key West, the first thing I did was look through the stack of mail for it.  And there it was.  With a nice little note inside.

Thank you.  And Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you and yours too!

lonernomore1…what was it about the words "If you have something to say to me about any of it, send an email" that you’re having trouble parsing?

Yes, everyone I write about here on the blog, knows that I write about them.   I’ve told my ex about it to his face.  I’ve told just about everyone I know about this blog and all they have to do to see what I’m putting up here is read it.  It’s not hard for anyone who knows me to find.  It shows up first in a google search of my name.  Hell…its domain name Is my name.  And you still seem to be a little fuzzy about what a blog is because you’re bellyaching about how pathetic it is for me to be putting my life up here online.  Get a clue idiot…that’s what a goddamned blog Is. 

Censorship?  Actually censorship is a common practice most places. It’s just here in the USA that we have something like a first amendment guarantee of free speech. But that applies to Public Forums, which this blog, which I pay the hosting for out of my own pocket, is not, anymore then a newspaper’s Letters To The Editor page is a public forum. And mostly I Don’t restrict commenting here. But I said I didn’t want a public discussion of those particular posts and I’m terribly sorry if you find that inconvenient because you just gotta put your soapbox right on top of my heartbreak but…too bad. Feel free to come back and comment on any other post you like, where I’ve left comments enabled. Just not on those.

And here’s a wee thought experiment for you: do you know my ex’s full name? The name of his boyfriend? If you do, it’s because you know them personally. Actually, according to my server logs, you haven’t even visited the posts where I’ve said even his first name just in passing, so unless you know him personally, you don’t even know that. I am not plastering anyone else’s life up here but my own. Sometimes that involves the people I share moments of that life with, but I always try to draw a discrete curtain around their specific identities because…yes…it’s their right to decide how public they want their own lives to be. My old high school friends for example, may be fine with me sharing what we were all up to back in the 1970s with other old friends…but would they want their current employers knowing it too? Probably…not. So I don’t give details about the people I know here, and you haven’t read anything here about my ex and his boyfriend that would tell you a goddamned thing about them, really. You don’t know who they are, you don’t know where they live (though you might think you do because I keep referring to where he Used to live as though he still does live there), you don’t know what they do for a living, you know even less about them in other words, then you know about me and that doesn’t amount to crap. Unless you know them yourself that is. Do you? You’re in the same timezone as all of us.

No…misery does Not love company. What misery loves is friendship. Which I have. However misery also tends to attract jackasses who think they know all the answers to somebody else’s life problems and that’s exactly why I turned those comments off. No, I am not alone. I will never be alone don’t you see, so long as I have an entire Internet full of nitwits who can read my entire life story in just a few blog posts, and know me well enough to give me advice that is worth its weight in gold about my love life.

Believe it or not, I’m actually a much nicer person to people I know and care about. But if you were one of those you wouldn’t be hiding behind an AOL alias because you’d know that.

Back home.  And…damn…it’s cold outside.

I arrived home late last night, but I know it’s possible now to drive from Southern Georgia to Baltimore in one day.  I didn’t hurry it…just kept driving knowing that even if I got home late, I would have a place to sleep.  Sometimes when you’re on the road, you stop early for a motel room before they’re all booked up.   I’d have loved to stay in Key West through New Years, but I didn’t realize it would be so expensive to stay down there and I basically ran out of hotel money for this trip.  Next time I’ll be ready.  Even with the price of gasoline being what it is now, the major cost of a road trip are the lodgings.  I’m still paying off last year’s trip to Portland, which is another reason why I didn’t have much to spare to spend on this road trip.  When I get everything added up, I’ll post the totals here. In the meantime, here are the stats according to Traveler’s onboard trip computer…

• Miles Traveled: 2832
• Hours Driven: 51.45
• Average mpg: 28.7
• Average Speed: 55mph

All that’s over the course of the entire trip, including driving around Hilton Head for a bit, around Orlando and the area around Disneyworld for a bit, and all the driving I did around the Florida Keys.

I actually got 31 miles per gallon driving back across the keys from Key West to the mainland!  So now I know that my car with that big Mercedes v-6 engine in it will still do over  30 miles per gallon…if I drive it at an average speed of about 45 miles per hour over terrain that is almost totally flat.  But I’ve discovered to my relief on this first big road trip, that it’ll do nearly 30 mpg if I drive it for extended periods at highway speeds.  Typically my trip computer was reading around 29.3 to 29.8 mpg after a few miles down I-95.  That’s Much better then I was expecting.  I have compared the trip computer to my gas purchases  and mileage, which I’ve been recording in a little notebook ever since I bought the car, and they match to within tenths of a gallon, so I’m pretty confidant that the trip computer is giving me an accurate account of miles per gallon as I go down the road.

I’ve put on enough miles now that I can go get my free first tire rotation.  I’ll need to ask them to check out the area around my gas filler.  I pulled over in a small town in North Carolina looking for gas, and saw that the Hess gas station had the good price so I went there and the pumps weren’t working right.  The first pump I went to took about a minute to pump only a half gallon.  So I closed out the transaction there and moved to a different one which was still slow, but not painfully so.  But good thing I always stay near the pump while it’s working, because that one didn’t cut off when it had filled the tank and suddenly I had a massive overflow on my hands.  It was scary…dripping all over the passenger side rear tire and down around the filler cap.  I put the hose back on the pump, doused the area with water from one of the washer stations, and went inside to warn them that they had a dangerous situation with that one pump, and the clerk just nodded her head and said, "Oh yes, you have to watch that one or it’ll do that…"

Christ!  The saving grace of it was it was raining and the roads were wet.  I doused the area with water once again and then drove Traveler through several big puddles and then back onto I-95 where the tire could spray water into that wheel well that got drenched.  Maybe I should have called the fire department on them too, but being by myself in a small southern town I wasn’t sure I wanted to.  I knew they were thoughtless assholes.  If they had a mind to, they could have accused me of damaging their pump somehow and then it’s that little northern faggot against the local boys and I might have ended up being the one in trouble.

So when I take Traveler in for its tire rotation, now I have to ask them to check around the area of the filler cap for damage.  Gasoline is a powerful solvent.  I’ve used white gasoline, the stuff you can buy for camping stoves that comes without all the additives they put into automobile fuel, occasionally for really tough chores like hardened brushes.  But you can’t be too careful with it, and not just for the dangerous fumes, but also what it will damage if it gets dripped on.  So I’m fretting a bit now about what that spill might have done to my new car.

One big reason I turned the comments off in those previous few posts here where I’m letting my heart bleed all over this blog, is that I didn’t want my friends and regular readers getting into it with the assholes I just knew those posts would attract.  Like the one that sent me a longish missive last night about how he didn’t give a damn and didn’t see why anyone else should either, because having read my life story here, he could see so clearly that I’d brought all my problems on myself.  And since I’d turned off the comments to the posts he was referring to, and he just couldn’t bear to send it to me in email like I’d asked, because then nobody else would have seen how profound his thinking on the subject was, he tried putting it on one of my other posts here with the comments still turned on.  Let’s hear it for spam filters.

Actually nitwit, you Do give a damn…otherwise you wouldn’t have written that long, rambling, misspelled, babbling, incoherent message.  Someone who really didn’t give a damn wouldn’t have bothered.  They’d have just…you know…not given a damn. I’d never have heard from them.

But I heard from you.  And in the spirit of cheap barstool psychoanalyzing someone you only know from a few words on a computer screen, methinks you protesteth too much.  What I wrote got under your skin didn’t it?  Seems to me like there’s probably someone in Your past, with a wound on Their heart with Your name on it, and you’ve been spending the rest of your life ever since you put it there trying to convince yourself that it wasn’t your fault and you don’t have to give a shit.

Fine.  We all have our coping mechanisms.  And they say a lot about who we are inside.  I appreciate the "tough love" stuff and all guy, but you know, there are fates sadder then the one I was contemplating back there.  I’d rather care too much and bleed myself to death then stop giving a damn and end my life as an asswipe whose companionship is like drinking turpentine. 

If my bleeding heart emotionalism really really irritates you…good.  That means there’s still something human left inside of you.  Try to find it someday.

Oh…and you were wondering if the people I write about know that I’m writing about them?  Duh…it’s a blog…  Everyone can read it.  If they don’t know, it’s because they don’t give a damn, which is what you said they were supposed to do.

And writing about my past is the least of what’s been going on around here… 

Photo taken at the southernmost part of the U.S., near the southernmost hotel in the U.S., by the southernmost house in the U.S., of the southernmost gay American, the southernmost computer geek, the southernmost shutter bug, the  southernmost cartoonist, the southernmost longhaired male, and the southernmost Mercedes-Benz owner, wearing what was at that instant the southernmost American smile.

If you’ve ever been there, you’ve seen how that one little corner of Key West has a thing for southernmostness.

You can almost see it there in that photo, how the waters of the Atlantic right there were the color of my turquoise bracelet.  The waters around the Keys are just absolutely the most beautiful stretch of ocean I have ever seen.

[New Car Love Alert...]

It felt…good…that first time I checked into a hotel this trip, and wrote "Mercedes-Benz" on the registration form where it asks you for the make and model of your car.

Traveler, my new Mercedes c300, has been a pure pleasure to drive on this first road trip with it.  If I could have dreamed up the ideal touring car I couldn’t have done much better.  It’s not as sumptuous as an E or S class, but sitting in one of those I might not want to be eating road munchies or drinking from my stainless steel Mercedes mug either.  Do they even put cup holders in the S class…?

Traveler is just a pure pleasure to drive down the road.  It hugs the pavement with that perfect balance of smoothness and tight-to-the-road feel that I have always admired in Mercedes suspensions.  I have a good view of the road all around me, and all the car’s controls are within easy reach.  The driver’s seat is comfortable enough to spend hours driving in and the automatic climate control handles everything from Baltimore’s winter chill to the Florida Keys hot sunshine with ease.  It’s been a few years since I’ve been to south Florida, and the intensity of the sunlight down here always catches the northerner by surprise the first time it hits you.  I started feeling it beating through Traveler’s windows when I got down to Fort Lauderdale.  Traveler has sensors that detect which side of the car is getting hit by direct sunlight, and by gosh when I make a turn and the Florida sun starts busting through the front window and right onto my chest, the car adjusts the vents and ramps up the fan speed to keep me cool and I don’t have to touch anything.

The car’s various safety and security features give you a nice sense of confidence on the road.  Going through several sudden and heavy Florida downpours on the way from Orlando to Key Largo, I got a chance to use my fogs…not so much for the forward view, I don’t think fogs are much help in a downpour, as for that nice little rear facing extra bright tail lamp you can switch on to hopefully let the guy behind you know you’re there in low visibility conditions.  I noticed one other Mercedes in the traffic bunch had done the same.  And I don’t fret so much while strolling around unfamiliar territory with Traveler parked somewhere, because the TeleAid service will call my cell phone if the car’s alarms go off.

My only regrets are that its trunk isn’t as big as the one in my Honda Accord, and that it takes only premium gasoline, which is running 3.60 a gallon right now down here in Key West, and 3.30 a gallon back in Key Largo, closer to the mainland.  But everything is more expensive here in Key West, especially the hotels.  The upside to Traveler’s taste for premium is that its appetite isn’t as bad on the highway as I thought it would be.  I was getting 29.7 miles to the gallon on the drive from Washington to Hilton Head, and averaging about 28 miles to the gallon on the rest of the trip so far. 

As far as the trunk goes, I’m still experimenting how to pack it.  In theory there’s enough space in there, but barely, for two sets of luggage.  But I tend to pack along lots of camera equipment.  And let’s face it…I’m gay guy and gay men tend to pack more clothes along.  And I’m a techno geek so double that for all my little gismos.  I have a white noise generator for noisy motel environments.  I packed a sleeping bag along because it’s winter back north and you need to be prapaired in case you get stuck in a snow or ice storm…like I almost did driving to Hilton Head Christmas week of 2004.  Also, the sleeping bag makes a good comforter if your motel doesn’t give you enough blankets and heat.  I tried…I really tried to keep it down for a simple weeklong trip, and I’m Still using Traveler’s rear seat area for storage.  If I ever find a boyfriend, I’m going to have to buy that roof mounted storage bin so there’ll be enough space for both our things.

Despite its expensive taste in gasoline, it’s Really Nice having that Mercedes v-6 under the hood.  It moves the car effortlessly at legal highway speeds and makes a very satisfactory German motorcar roar when passing slowpokes, which it also does quite effortlessly…serenely even.  And that even though it’s feeding torque to an automatic transmission.  That seven speed auto is sweet.  If I’d driven automatics like it back in the 70s I might not have grown up hating them.  This trans just doesn’t feel anything like those old slush boxes did.  It does highway shifts smoothly and solidly.  But where I’m really coming to appreciate it is in stop and go city traffic.  The bumper to bumper, stop and go shuffle in old town Key West with its tiny little streets was no sweat which is really remarkable because I Hate being stuck in traffic like that.  Not any more.  It may not be an E or and S class I’m sitting stuck in traffic in, but it’s damn luxurious all the same.  I just relaxed in my seat, turned up the Harmon-Kardon stereo, let the climate control system do its thing, and just let the car creep forward in drive whenever traffic moved a tad. 

This car is pampering me.  A friend who owns a C class warned me that the car would change my sense of what ‘normal’ is.  I think it already has.  I need to reward it with a nice bath when I get back on the mainland.
 

…taken just a few moments ago while I strolled around the area by my hotel just before dawn.  And brought to your computer through the magic of digital photography and the World Wide Web.  Seriously…an old friend of mine called me on his cell phone late last night as he was driving south through Wilmington Deleware, and there I was chatting with him on my cell phone while I was strolling around U.S. Route 1 in Key Largo and you have to appreciate that we both grew up in an era when telephones had wires connecting to them to the wall and a long distance call to just the next state over was a lot of money, and there we were chatting to each other with little devices that just fit in our pockets, he in Wilmington and I in Key Largo.  And we haven’t really lived all that long.

I could swear I turned comments off for the last few posts…  Sorry.  It’s taking me a lot of nerve to write some of this and make it public like this.  If you have something to say to me about any of it, send an email.  I’m not looking for a public discussion of any of this.

A few moments spent in the arms of someone you love can bring you back.  Even if a few moments is all you get, it can bring you back.  At least, for a while.

Those little moments when a little voice starts telling you, You shouldn’t be alone now…?   I have them occasionally…maybe you do too.  But alone is my default condition.  So when those moments come it usually goes something like, Yes Bruce, you shouldn’t be alone now…but you Are alone…   So I cope the best I can with whatever it is, and obviously I always have because I’m here typing this blog post right now.  And hopefully everyone who knows me won’t suddenly discover one day that I couldn’t cope with it that one time.

You know…people who take their own lives don’t do that because they’re cowards.  They do it because it hurts too much, and they just want to make it stop…

You want to make someone you dumped bleed?  I mean, really, really bleed?  I mean, Profusely…?  Here’s my little tip:  Don’t tell him about all the great sex you’re having now that he’s out of your life.  Don’t bother telling him that your new boyfriend is so much better in the sack then he’ll ever be in his wildest wet dream fantasies.  Don’t tell him how much your new boyfriend understands you so much better then he ever did.  That’s amateur stuff.  Really.  You want to give him a hurt he’ll take to his grave, and hopefully sooner rather then later, just mention in passing some small bit of domesticity that you and your new main squeeze are currently enjoying…

Me:  So I’ll probably be in town in an hour or so…you want to go grab a bite to eat somewhere after I get settled in…

He:  Um…well actually (XXX) and I are about to go grocery shopping in a bit…  Why don’t you call when you get in.  If you want…there’s some good British comedy shows on TV later tonight you can watch at the hotel.  

STAB!  SLASHHHHH!  Bleed!

BleedBleedBleedBleedBleedBleedBleedBleedBleedBleedBleedBleedBleedBleedBleed….

Me:  Err…yeah…

And, so on.  If there wasn’t at least one major heart wound it wouldn’t be Christmas…

I’m taking a holiday break with my new car, and we’re driving south, hopefully to enjoy a warm beach somewhere before winter really sets in here in Baltimore.  So posting will be lite and random, but may include some photos.

Enjoy your holidays.  Have fun…eat recklessly…make the ones you love smile…

I’m leaving soon for a holiday road trip to warmer climes, and I have one last huge post to make before I go.  Consider it my end of year sermon.  It’s about morality and what got me wanting to write about it was a post I saw the other day on Jim Burroway’s Box Turtle Bulletin about John Corvino’s new DVD recording of his “What’s Morally Wrong With Homosexuality?”, lecture.  I’ve seen an excerpt of that lecture before it was yanked from YouTube and it looks to be a good one.  But there is more to the moral question then the one he’s asking.

There are three writers whose ideas influenced me greatly in my younger days.  One respectable, and the other two not so much.  The respectable one is Jacob Bronowski, a man whose work I still treasure.  The two not so respectable are Robert Audrey and Ayn Rand, whose work I am sometimes embarrassed to admit reading.  But I have to give them credit all the same for lighting a spark of understanding in me about human nature, society and morality at a point in my life when I needed it really badly.

I found Audrey’s book, African Genesis in a corner of a warehouse I once worked in, wrinkled and discarded, and reading the first page of it…

Not in innocence, and not in Asia was mankind born… 

…I had to take the thing home where I promptly devoured it.  From Audry I gleaned the idea that the forces that move within our consciousness are understandable, and manageable, but only if we seriously study our evolutionary past, the better to understand the bedrock upon which the human identity was formed over vast, almost unthinkable time.  Not to do so would be akin to trying to build a bridge with no understanding of the nature of the materials you’re constructing it from.  Likewise, to construct workable human societies, and moral codes that actually and really benefit us, we need to undertake an almost brutal, unromantic, understanding of ourselves and that means looking also, to the past which brought us forth…

We are not so unique as we would like to believe.  And if man in a time of need seeks deeper knowledge concerning himself, then he must explore those animal horizons from which we have made our quick little march. 

At about the same time, from Rand I got the another completely radical notion: that morality is the one thing you absolutely have to question.  I had heard all my life that the force, the authority, of a moral code comes from its absoluteness, and that to question traditional morality was to destroy it, leaving humanity with no guide, no moral compass, nothing to judge right from wrong.  Rand, for all her faults, and she had many profound ones, showed me that in fact the exact opposite was true.  If morality is a code of conduct we accept in order to guide us toward that which is good for us, and away from that which is not, then it must be, it has to be, constantly questioned and evaluated…judged…against that purpose. 

Are we better off for abiding by this or that moral code…or are we worse off?  Does a society that embraces this or that moral code prosper and thrive…do its people live in peace with one another…is their society stable…prosperous…peaceful…productive…?  At best a morality that does none of this is irrelevant, at worst it actively diminishes our lives, degrades our existence.  It is like teaching us to put poison in our food, and then telling us that our sickness is the result of not putting in enough poison.  Our moral codes must be, have to be right, or they will destroy us.  So as it turns out, morality is the one thing you absolutely positively cannot hold to be above questioning.  It must withstand critical examination.

Ask the children of Marx and Lenin what happens to a society whose model of human nature, and the moral code flowing from it, is flawed.  Ask the shades that walk nights at Gettysburg.  Collectivism?  White Supremacy?  What is a human being?  What is human nature?  What is good for us?  What is harmful?  You have to get those questions right….or you could find yourself living in a nightmare.  A nightmare made all the worse for your not really understanding why it’s happening to you.

Moral issues have preoccupied me for much of my life.  I was raised in a very conservative Baptist household, with a strict sense of right and wrong always in the air.  But there was serious conflict between the two sides of my family tree, and mom’s side, the Baptist side, was always telling me about how wicked dad’s side was, and warning me that I was likely to turn out just as badly as he did unless I embraced their teachings of biblical righteousness completely.  I worried constantly over it when I was young.  But I grew up to be a nature lover and science geek, and gradually felt myself pulled away from my church over its conception of God verses mine.  I’d always loved the God I saw in nature, and never really felt comfortable with the God I read about in the bible, even while I was being constantly reassured that if I didn’t live by the bible I was doomed.  By the time I entered my late teens, I’d left my church and had come finally to an honest understanding of my sexual orientation, and it seemed for a while that I was completely adrift in a world that science revealed to be so wonderful, so absolutely beautiful at a physical level, but which I could make almost no sense of at all at a moral one.  Bronowski, Audrey and Rand gave me permission in those days to think about moral ideas objectively, in the same sense that I pondered the physical world around me as revealed by science, at a time in my life when I was beginning to despair that such a thing was even possible.

So…by the time I got my first computer back in the mid-1980s, and started debating gay rights issues online, I had already been giving the moral side of the issue a lot of thought.  By the time I got my first Internet account, and was able to access the free-for-all then known as Usenet, I’d already been handing out a lot of fire and brimstone about morality, and gay rights…

Me, March 27, 1999, in yet another argument with a bigot, this one named Russ, on alt.politics.homosexuality…

R> My original statement, at which you took such great umbrage, was to
R> suggest that we ought not to have two different sets of moral standards.
R> It is apparent to me that if we say it is wrong for a person to have
R> sexual relations with another person of the same sex — *except* if they
R> are attracted to each other — then we are not saying anything very
R> rigorous at all, are we?

What’s not exactly rigorous here Russ is your attaching moral significance to gender in the first place.  It’s a lot like your insistence
that marriage is between opposite genders…well…because it is.  Real deep thinking there guy.

A homosexual relationship can be loving and devoted, or it can be greedy and manipulative…just as any heterosexual relationship can be. The moral question isn’t in the gender of the individuals, but the nature of their relationship to one another.  Are they loving, kind, sympathetic? Do they trust, and are they trustworthy?  Are they honest with each other, or is one partner, or both, deceptive and manipulative?  There are your moral questions.  The rest is detail

What’s morally wrong, is to lie to people, to use them selfishly for your own gratification and then discard them when you are through.  That’s not only an attack on the person, but an attack on trust and honor…things we are all arguably put at risk, for their demise.  Even worse, is to lie to someone who is in love with you.  If there is a reason that the marriage vows mean something, it is because the breaking of them takes away from us all, things that societies can little do without.  Love and devotion, trust and honor, compassion and sympathy.

The heterosexual who might have situational sex with a member of their own sex…simply for the sake of having a good time with another person who may actually be Gay and strongly drawn to them…is taking advantage of the Gay person’s nature, and their feelings.  The word for that isn’t love, it’s greed.  But the Gay couple that both desires and cherishes one another, is committing no crime, no sin.  They are in fact cherishing the good within each other.  It Is moral for two Gay, or bisexual people of the same sex, to have a sexual relationship, in a way it wouldn’t be if one or both parties were heterosexual.  A same sex relationship between Gay or bisexual people, is inherently more honest, then one that is not between two Gay, or bisexual people.

Here’s the sick joke Russ: by pressuring Gay people into sexual relationships that are against their nature, you and your kind are encouraging deceptive, dishonest, sexual relationships…and you’re doing that in the name of morality.  If anyone is taking the moral standards of the community into the gutter Russ, it’s you.

…one of many such confrontations I enjoyed from 1993 to about 2002 when the quality of the bigotry began to go way down, and I began to get tired of hearing the same goddamned crap rhetoric over and over and over again.  But I can’t tell you how many times over a period of almost a decade, I would start arguing from a moral standpoint with a bigot who would smirkingly assure me that "you don’t want to go there"…that is, since obviously homosexuality is by definition immoral, I, a gay man, didn’t want to be dragging questions of morality into the argument.  To which my reply was usually along the lines of "Oh yes I do."   And when I did, I was never one for mincing words about it.

Because for all the bigots’ chanting about how they’re only acting out of the purest and most righteous of moral intentions, the fact is they are the ones who get cut up the most in a real argument over moral conduct…

October 24, 1998… 

MJ> I wrote that people who saw that float, according to the network
MJ> report, were put in mind of the Shepherd murder. That’s what I wrote.
MJ> You might want to actually read it.

So might ‘others who judge’.  Let’s let them.  Here is just what you wrote, cut and pasted from

Message-ID: <36284435.14253044@news.pacbell.net>

"There was a parade nearby, about the time young Shepherd was being murdered, which featured a float on which a scarecrow was placed, with the placard or something which said – I’m gay. People didn’t appreciate it, in the parade. And it later suggested to them, in hindsight, the way in which Shepherd was left, by his killers."

"about the time young Shepherd was being murdered"  "it later suggested to them, in hindsight"  You were saying that the float could not have been a deliberate and obscene joke made at the expense of a brutal murder, because it happened While he was being killed, not after his body was discovered and the likeness seen by the two bikers who found him to a scarecrow was reported in the news.  You said it was only in Hindsight that the people who saw the float made the connection.  That could only have been categorically true if his body hadn’t yet been discovered.  But the facts were that it had been discovered days before the parade.  Like a holocaust revisionist, you rewrote the order of events, so you could make the following claim:

 "In fact, what was done in that parade had nothing whatsoever to do with what some killers did, elsewhere."

According to local news reports people who saw it were shocked by it, knowing full well what it referred to.  That didn’t happen ‘in hindsight’.  What you did there, in plain sight of everyone here, was rewrite the chronology of events, in order to claim that no association with Matthew Shepard’s murder Could have been intended by the frat.  And you did it so you could claim the fuss about it was all about ‘PC’, not the shocking obsenity of a college homecoming parade float that mocked the vicious kidnapping and torture of a Gay man only days previously.

Why do you bother?  Because your reflex is to excuse hate, that’s why you bother.  To cover it up.  To deny it exists.  The belly laugh here is that you’re accusing Us of not having self control, but the one thoroughly out of control and in the grip of a self destructive vice here is you, and here we can all see it clearly and sickeningly.  Even when it’s obvious to everyone that you’re lying, you can’t stop yourself, you can’t help yourself.  Your mortal enemy is that scarecrow of your own invention, ‘The Gay Activist’ and nothing can prevent you from striking at it…not Truth, not Decency, not Morality and Virtue, not Your Church, not any thought or impulse to preserve your honor and your name.  If you have to ruin everything in you that makes you human, to get hand on the collar of ‘The Gay Activist’, and put your thumb in it’s eye, so be it. 

But do we have to watch?

MJ> Gimme Catholicism . . any day.

Bless me Father for I have sinned…and sinned…and sinned…and sinned…and sinned…and sinned…and sinned…

Jim Burroway has a post up over at Box Turtle Bulletin, about John Corvino’s new DVD recording of his “What’s Morally Wrong With Homosexuality?”, lecture he’s been giving all over the country since 1992.  Like Burroway, I’m glad to see someone directly confronting, at least one half of the moral issue that bigots keep claiming for their own…

It’s a great topic and one that’s rarely explored, which is a shame since the discussion of homosexuality as a moral mode of existence is every bit as vital today as it was when he started fifteen years ago…

Yes.  It is.  But there’s another side to this coin, and it’s one that needs tackling just as much.  Here Burroway gives it a glancing blow…

But as Dr. Corvino points out, the Bible holds a lot of things to be immoral that we no longer condemn with such fervor (for example, divorce, or women speaking in churches or wearing slacks), and the Bible gives explicit approval — and even instruction — on some things that we today consider to be immorally outrageous. The best example of the latter comes from an equally unmistakable passage of Leviticus. This time it’s Leviticus 25:44-46:

Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. You can will them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly.

The passage is as unmistakably clear as the first one. And if one were to take everything from the Bible in a consistently literal light, then there’s just no way around it: the buying and selling and inheriting of people as chattel slaves is not immoral; it is instead expressly permitted — with rules laid down for its proper execution. But there are very few Christians who are so consistent in their literalism that they would always “approve what the Bible approves and condemn what the Bible condemns” when it comes to slavery. Only Christian Reconstructionists and a few other theonomists are able to sustain this kind of consistency.

So why is it that some people are consistent with literalist interpretations of Scripture where homosexuality is concerned, but when the subject of slavery comes up it’s suddenly all about context, original language and cultural norms? Corvino suggests that we either have to commit ourselves to the idea the authors’s concerns and ours might be very different, and understanding that difference is vital to understanding the text.

Er…no.  Let’s why don’t we, stare that inconsistency in the face and call it for what it is.  And no…it’s not hypocrisy, any more then Paul Cameron’s using his data one way when it suits him, and another when it doesn’t is hypocrisy.  The word we’re looking for here is Mendacity.   How often, how many times, do we have to see this out of both sides of their mouths behavior in anti-gay demagogues before we’re allowed to call it what it is?  They’re not citing the bible, they’re using it like a condom.  Jesus isn’t their lord and savior, he’s their excuse, their scapegoat, nailed to a cross, dying every hour of every day for their cheapshit sins, so they won’t have to look them in the face, and from there to the horrific landscape of human suffering all around them, that has their name written on every heartbroken acre of it.

And never mind the two-faced way they proof text the bible.  A walk through the open sewer most of them call a conscience ought to be enough to disabuse anyone of the notion that moral righteousness has anything whatsoever to do with the anti-gay agenda.  Here’s the current darling of the religious right, Huckabee on homosexuality, from a 1992 questionnaire…

“I believe to try to legitimize that which is inherently illegitimate would be a disgraceful act of government…I feel homosexuality is an aberrant, unnatural and sinful lifestyle.”

Aberrant?  Aberrant…did he say…?  Aberrant like this…?

One issue likely to get attention is his handling of a sensitive family matter: allegations that one of his sons was involved in the hanging of a stray dog at a Boy Scout camp in 1998. The incident led to the dismissal of David Huckabee, then 17, from his job as a counselor at Camp Pioneer in Hatfield, Ark. It also prompted the local prosecuting attorney— bombarded with complaints generated by a national animal-rights group—to write a letter to the Arkansas state police seeking help investigating whether David and another teenager had violated state animal-cruelty laws. The state police never granted the request, and no charges were ever filed. But John Bailey, then the director of Arkansas’s state police, tells NEWSWEEK that Governor Huckabee’s chief of staff and personal lawyer both leaned on him to write a letter officially denying the local prosecutor’s request. Bailey, a career officer who had been appointed chief by Huckabee’s Democratic predecessor, said he viewed the lawyer’s intervention as improper and terminated the conversation. Seven months later, he was called into Huckabee’s office and fired. "I’ve lost confidence in your ability to do your job," Bailey says Huckabee told him. One reason Huckabee cited was "I couldn’t get you to help me with my son when I had that problem," according to Bailey. "Without question, [Huckabee] was making a conscious attempt to keep the state police from investigating his son," says I. C. Smith, the former FBI chief in Little Rock, who worked closely with Bailey and called him a "courageous" and "very solid" professional.

And then there’s Huckabee’s pardoning of convicted serial rapist and murderer Wayne Dumond, after the republican noise machine spun the tale that since one of his victims was a distant relative of Bill Clinton,
Dumond had been falsely accused.  Gene Lyons has the rest of the squalid story of Huckabee’s moral righteousness…

Dumond became a right-wing cause celebre. Guy Reel wrote a book entitled “Unequal Justice,” parroting the same bogus claims. Most significantly, Jay Cole, a Fayetteville, Ark., Baptist pastor and pal of Huckabee’s bought into the delusion.

No sooner had Huckabee become governor after Kenneth Starr’s conviction of his Democratic predecessor, Jim Guy Tucker, than he began talking about commuting the presumptively innocent Dumond’s sentence. He clearly expected to be congratulated. Instead, prosecutor Fletcher Long erupted. How could the governor even think of doing that without reading the trial transcript?

Abandoning her anonymity, Ashley Stevens invaded Huckabee’s personal space: “This is how close I was to Wayne Dumond,” she said. “I will never forget his face. And now I don’t want you ever to forget my face.” Previous victims wrote agonized letters begging Huckabee to desist.

Today, Huckabee alibis that nobody could have predicted Dumond’s Missouri crimes. Many people did. Even this column warned that: “Rape’s not a crime of passion; it’s a crime of rage. Violent sex offenders, innumerable case studies show, keep at it until something stops them. If Huckabee doesn’t understand that, he’s got no business getting involved.”

Instead of backing off, Huckabee got tricky. He held an improper closed-door meeting with the parole board, several of whom say they’d felt pressured. Last week, Huckabee’s then-chief counsel, Olan “Butch” Reeves, basically seconded their claims. After the board voted to parole Dumond to Missouri, Huckabee wrote a “Dear Wayne” letter stressing “my desire … that you be released from prison” — the proverbial smoking gun he can’t now rationalize or whine away.

Angry Missouri cops say Dumond’s victims’ severed bra straps were like a calling card. They found his DNA under their fingernails. Huckabee’s latest book claims that Dumond died in prison before coming to trial. In fact, he was convicted of murdering Carol Sue Shields on Nov. 12, 2003.

It should make anyone with a shred of decency left alive within them want to vomit every time one of these gutter crawling creeps starts mouthing off about morality.  Over and over again you see it…the rote declarations of faith, followed by the cheapshit lying, the bellicose digging in of heels rather when their own pathetic failures of moral character are pointed out, and more and more lately, the squalid details of their own personal lives rushing out like an overflowing sewer.  Why do they single out homosexuals?  Because they need someone to point their fingers at, someone to take the spotlight away from their own failed inner character, someone to distract everyone else from the stench of their own rotten conscience, someone to die for their sins, so they won’t have to take responsibility for the mess they’ve made of their own lives, and everyone else’s within arm’s reach.  We have to bleed, so they can be righteous.

It’s good to see attention being given to the moral issue at the heart of the gay rights struggle.  But the morality of homosexuality is only one part of that.  The morality of those who would keep us second class citizens, outcast and vulnerable, is another.  They are taking what should be one of this life’s most perfect joys, that of finding that intimate other, falling in love, body and soul with them, and making a life together, and they are twisting a knife in it, so that they can feel righteous.  There is nothing moral about that.  If that’s not sin, then the word has no meaning.

The argument I frequently hear is that, well, hurtful as their behavior is toward us, they do it in good faith.  No.  The ones who cut us through simple, mistaken ignorance don’t make a big issue out of it.  They’re not on a crusade.  Maybe they don’t have a gay family member, or at any rate one that’s out to them.  Maybe they haven’t had the opportunity for their comfortable moral stereotypes about homosexuality to be challenged.  We all have some crap in our heads, some ignorant or foolish beliefs that in retrospect make you wonder what you were ever thinking to believe such a thing.  The honest person, the moral person, when confronted by a falsehood, by something patently wrong, accepts that they were wrong and acts accordingly.  It’s not about being an uptight self righteous prick either.  As H.L. Mencken once said, "The most expensive thing on this earth is to believe in something that is palpably not true."  You don’t embrace reality to put yourself up on a pedestal, you do it because you don’t want reality to smack you upside the head.  But that’s what morality is for!

No.  The crusaders are Not acting in good faith, and their crusade is as immoral as they come, and it’s long since time that they got that fact pointed out to them by people who are willing to stand up to their plastic self-serving self righteousness and call it for what it is.  A lie.  A cheat.  A fraud.  They deliberately, willfully, hurt innocent people not out of any sense of doing good, but in order to polish their own shit stained vanity.  It is obscene, positively obscene, how long decent, good-hearted gay and lesbian people have been cowed by moral runts who have been doing nothing more righteous then putting a knife into their hearts as a way of buying their own self-respect.  We are not the ones who have to be afraid of arguments over the morality of our conduct.  They are. 

Morality, the hard work of learning the difference between right and wrong across the ages, is a powerful force in the human story.  It is a tool that guides us to the good, and away from the bad.  It is a tool that our enemies renounced long ago because it does not validate their conceits, their evasions, their bigotries.  And every time they open their mouths with lies about us that they know damn well are lies, they tell us so.  It is long past time to look that fact squarely in the face and acknowledge it.  At some point in their lives, reality collided with their prejudices and instead of doing the moral thing, they sold out.  And now morality turns on them, like one of those weapons in fantasy novels, possessed by the spirits of the old warriors who once bore it.  Mike Huckabee.  Larry Craig.  Ted Haggard.  David Vitter.  And all the other right wing moralists who have been caught frolicking in the gutter recently.  The more they yap, yap, yap about morality, the more you see how far away from it they’re running. 

We don’t have to run from it.  There is nothing wrong with us.  There was never anything wrong with us.  We have been taught for so long, for so very, very long, to hate ourselves, to be ashamed, so that a bunch of moral runts would have someone else to point their fingers at, someone else to bear the burden of shame that they’ve been evading all their lives.  You can’t buy a decent, honest, moral life second hand.  You can’t beg, borrow or steal it from your neighbor.  Our hearts are not their stepping stones to heaven.  Our enemies threw morality away, because they couldn’t get it cheap.  Pick it up.  You can afford it more then you know.  The love of same sex lovers, our moments spent in simple straightforward, honest human desire and affection, are genuine and real and righteous and noble and beautiful, and that is why they hate us.  Every time you take your lover’s hand and offer them nothing more or less then what you have, what you are, the best within you, what our enemies see in that is everything they could have had in their own lives, and every noble thing they could have become, that they are not, and that is why they hate us.  Every time you smile into your lover’s eyes, rather then turn away in shame, you win the moral argument.

Via Slog…   Geeze…if you want to see what the end of the world would look like…the island of “Gunkanjima” is probably the place to go…

Off the westernmost coast of Japan, is an island called “Gunkanjima” that is hardly known even to the Japanese. Long ago, the island was nothing more than a small reef. Then in 1810, the chance discovery of coal drastically changed the fate of this reef. As reclamation began, people came to live here, and through coal mining the reef started to expand continuously. Befor long, the reef had grown into an artificial island of one kilometer (three quarters of a mile) in perimeter, with a population of 5300. Looming above the ocean, it appeared a concrete labyrinth of many-storied apartment houses and mining structures built closely together. Seen from the ocean, the silhouette of the island closely resembled a battleship – so, the island came to be called Gunkanjima, or Battleship island.

Eventually, the mines faced an end, and in 1974 the world’s once most densely populated island become totally deserted. The island, after all its inhabitants departed leaving behind their belongings, became an empty shell of a city where all its peopl disappeared overnight, as if by some mysterious act of God.

Wow.  Check out the photos.  Man…my cameras and I could have a grand old time there…