Hey John…Welcome to Andrew Sullivan’s world.  You’re straight acting enough to be a member…right…?

Not sure why, but this evening I walked the neighborhood with Franz Schmidt’s symphony #4 playing on my iPod, and ached for the missing people in my life.   And for loneliness I suppose.  Schmidt is said to have composed the piece after his daughter died suddenly.  I’ve never heard music that expresses that wounded pit inside, that shock of…not grief exactly…but loss, like the first two movements of that symphony.  It’s brutal.  Until lately the Zuban Mehta rendering of it, with the Vienna Philharmonic was my favored version, but I’ve not been able to locate a digital version.  I got a digital version today conducted by Franz Wesler-Möst, with the London Philharmonic that is just as powerful. 

This work is one of three dark symphonies in my library, but the other two are dark in a different way.  One is Shostakovich’s 8th, which is said to have been composed by Shostakovich, in part while in Stalingrad during the Nazi siege of the city.  The other is Vaughan-Williams’ 6th, composed during and immediately after WWII.  The Shostakovich piece is a brutal representation of war, that opens with a brooding creeping darkness which builds to a  harrowing climax, punctuated by moments of bellicose militarism, then fades into more brooding.  A giddy fascist goose stepping scherzo follows, and then the set piece of the entire symphony: a relentless rushing sweep of war across the land, like an insane machine crushing everything in its path.  Then the symphony fades into a bottomless sense of grief, punctuated by this little light-hearted dancing tune that almost seems like a giddy madness.  It ends in desolation.  The Vaughan-Williams piece opens with a whirlwind and then settles into a bellicose, dancing, almost jazzy contempt, like a fascist thug skipping gleefully across the landscape, and then the whirlwind returns and fades, and for a moment, for one brief moment, the music breaks like a last fading beam of beautiful sunlight into an achingly heartfelt and lovely melody, that rises majestically…and then breaks apart into a brooding brutal dread, then into another giddy bellicose whirlwind, and then into a barren pit of loss that lasts the rest of the symphony.  But the darkness in these two pieces is of a world that is collapsing around you as you watch.  The Schmidt piece is a personal, private loss of the soul.  The wound is internal, devastating, and yet the world around you goes on.

Why I got into the Schmidt piece this evening I’m not sure, other then going through several bins of old family photo albums recently (I was trying to track down a photo of my paternal great-grandmother who the family says was native American…but I am still unable to prove that conclusively…) brought back to me for a little while, all the people in my life I’ve loved, who are gone now…and perhaps too, the boy I once was, and thoughts of the life he could have had, had he lived in a different time. 

[Edited a tad…] 

Notice: The Iowa State Fair erotic corn dog-eating contest may be canceled…

The competition, which is organized by a Des Moines area radio station and tends to draw a raucous and appreciative crowd, is too tasteless, according to at least one fair board member.

After the topic came up Monday during the board’s critique of this year’s state fair, fair manager Gary Slater said he hasn’t seen it himself.

“I just heard it was kind of disgusting,” Slater said. He quickly added: “It was nothing that was sanctioned by the fair.”

KGGO-FM has held the contest right outside the doors of the Administration Building for four fairs in a row.

Iowa State Fair Board President Jerry Parkins on Monday suggested getting rid of the contest, so state fair staff will tell KGGO’s organizers that it’s inappropriate, Slater said.

If the radio staff don’t agree, “then we’ll take it back to the board and see if they’ll be invited back next year,” Slater said.

The news was tough to swallow for Steve “Round Guy” Pilchen, one of the radio personalities who invented the contest. But it wasn’t a shock.

“I was waiting for that,” Pilchen said this morning in a telephone interview from the Urbandale radio station. “While it’s very popular and, I think, ingeniously creative, it makes sense that this would be just the thing that conservative, politically-correct people would be up in arms about.”

Pilchen said they don’t intend to go away quietly.

“I would hate for it to have to end, because it’s gained so much notoriety,” he said. “Our take on it is that we’d like to continue to do it and will, up until the state fair board tells us we can’t.”

Competitors — so far it’s only been women, and all were required to be at least 18 — are given 30 seconds to demonstrate erotic techniques on the staple state fair treat.

“We stress technique,” Pilchen said. “There’s a lot of simulation.”

Condiments are available if the women want to get creative, he said. “We had ketchup and mustard, but the big hit was mayonnaise.”

Mayonnaise.  Right.  Good thing they weren’t running a booth advocating same sex marriage or the radio station would have been boycotted, their advertisers would have dropped them like flies, and the DJs run out of town on a rail…

Courtesy Dan Savage…who certainly knows what evil lurks in the libidos of men. Don’t say I never gave you anything.

Stop drooling on your keyboards…perverts…

From our department of It’s About Fucking Time:  The Amazing Randi calls bullshit on the golden ear cult…

James Randi Offers $1 Million If Audiophiles Can Prove $7250 Speaker Cables Are Better

Our rant about those $7,250 Pear Anjou speaker cables found its way to the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF), and Randi offered $1 million to anyone who can prove those cables are any better than ordinary (and also overpriced) Monster Cables. Pointing out the absurd review by audiophile Dave Clark, who called the cables "danceable," Randi called it "hilarious and preposterous." He added that if the cables could do what their makers claimed, "they would be paranormal."

Long ago Harry Pearson and others like him not only injected cultish mysticism into the audiophile world, Pearson in particular dragged the conversation into the gutter with his grotesquely venomous personal attacks on anyone who showed the slightest respect for objective testing and actual measurement of how audio equipment actually behaves.  So what replaces objectivity in a high end audio review nowadays?  Mostly a system of cult leaders and cult followers.  Randi’s offered them a million dollars if they can prove in double blind scientific studies that their favorite equipment actually does what they claim it does for sound reproduction.  Unsurprisingly, none of the cult leaders are biting.  Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain…

Before there was an Internet, there were computer BBSs.  It was on a gay BBS, the Gay and Lesbian Information Bureau (GLIB), that I finally found my little subset of the gay community, and began settling in.  It was during one of our GLIB happy hour gatherings that I had my eyes opened about transgendered folk.  This was sometime in the late 1980s as I recall.  A group of us were sitting at the bar and this really cute guy, not a GLIB member but a friend of one, joined us.  He seemed almost a stereotypical D.C. K Street type.  He had on his Power Office Worker suit and tie, and his expensive walking sneakers because it was rush hour and you leave your good shoes at the office and put on your Nikes for walking to your Metro stop.  And he had his Franklin-Covey Day Planner with him, and as he chatted with his friends there, I kid you not, he would glance in his appointment pages to see where his free time was. 

At the time I was working as a contract software developer, and as this was a time before PDAs were mated to cell phones, I also had a paper day planner, mostly so I could keep track of my billable hours.  Mine was the Daytimer product, largely because it had twenty-four hour day pages, and my workdays were anything but nine to five.  And being a techno-geek, and more interested in the technology of managing time then actually managing my own, I asked this guy what he liked about the Franklin-Covey product.  After a while he and I were enjoying a nice chat.  I about the technology of time management, and he about how busy his life was.

Eventually he went off to make a phone call.  As I sat at the bar a GLIB member who knew him came over to me and asked me what I thought of him.  He’s real cute, I said.  But a bit too much K street for me.  Does he have any friends, I asked jokingly, or are they all business contacts?  The GLIB member asked if I knew ‘he’ was really ‘she’. 

I was stunned.  I hadn’t a clue.  Not clue one.  He was, I was told, female, but living as a guy because that’s what he felt he was.  He’d had no surgery, not even merely cosmetic, and apparently had no interest in it.  He was just living as a man, because that’s what he felt he was really, regardless of the physical sex he was born as.   And when he came back and sat down next to me, and we resumed our conversation, even knowing that he was physically female, I could not help but believe, somewhere deep in my gut, that I was talking to another guy and it wasn’t an act.  He just gave off guy vibes. 

That was, I think, when I saw for myself that there really could be a difference between the sex of your body, and the sex of your mind, and that it was something distinct from one’s sexual orientation.  But that’s not to say that the struggle of transgendered folk is separate from our own. 

Homosexual.  Bisexual.  Transgendered.  What do these people have in common?  One thing: we don’t fit the gender stereotypes of the majority, and that has had profoundly negative consequences for our lives.  This is why we need EDNA, and why it’s at root, our struggle for equality.  All of us.  Not some of us.  Our life struggles are different in the particulars, the obstacles we face are not always the same ones, but the hate has, I am convinced, a common root.  People who hate gays and who would deny us jobs, housing, a decent life, the freedom to be, hate transgendered folk just as much, just as deeply, just as passionately, and really don’t see a distinction between us.  We’re all sexual deviants, and they wish us all gone from this world.

Which is really why there is no point, none, in splitting EDNA into gay protection verses transgendered protection.  It has to be Our protection, or it protects none of us.  Don’t believe me? Take a look at what Lambda Legal discovered about the new and improved EDNA rewrite that the normally sane Barney Frank signed off on…

Preliminary Analysis Summary:

• As a point of clarity for the community: The recent version is not simply the old version with the transgender protections stripped out — but rather has modified the old version in several additional and troubling ways.

• In addition to the missing vital protections for transgender people on the job, this new bill also leaves out a key element to protect any employee, including lesbians and gay men who may not conform to their employer’s idea of how a man or woman should look and act. This is a huge loophole through which employers sued for sexual orientation discrimination can claim that their conduct was actually based on gender expression, a type of discrimination that the new bill does not prohibit.

Do you see the problem with leaving out protections for transgendered folk now?  If your employer can fire you for not acting like a normal All-American heterosexual, as opposed to simply for being gay, or bi, then the bill does exactly nothing.

Let me reiterate…the problem isn’t that we’re homosexual, the problem is that we don’t conform to the gender norms of the majority.  You can’t craft a law that protects homosexuals, and not the transgendered, and end up with a law that actually protects homosexuals.  It has to outlaw discrimination based on gender expression, real or perceived, or it won’t be worth the paper it’s printed on.

I have to say I’ve lost a lot of respect for Barney Frank in this.  His reputation is as a shrewd politician, and in fact he tried to justify doing this to ENDA on the grounds that it made better political sense.  It was something he averred, that he could get more agreement on…maybe enough republican agreement that Bush would either sign it, or his veto could be overridden.  Damn Barney…  God Damn…  Haven’t you fucking learned yet, that when you shake hands with these people, you need to count your fingers afterward…?

• This version of ENDA states without qualification that refusal by employers to extend health insurance benefits to the domestic partners of their employees that are provided only to married couples cannot be considered sexual orientation discrimination. The old version at least provided that states and local governments could require that employees be provided domestic partner health insurance when such benefits are provided to spouses.

• In the previous version of ENDA the religious exemptions had some limitations. The new version has a blanket exemption under which, for example, hospitals or universities run by faith-based groups can fire or refuse to hire people they think might be gay or lesbian. 

The problem with negotiating in good faith with people who have no conscience, should be obvious.  Even to people on Capital Hill.  Or so you’d think anyway.

My love of driving, of the simple, singular act of driving a car down the road, never mind where I’m going, or if I’m going anywhere in particular, believe it or not actually makes me an oddity in this country.  That’s right.  In a country where they say the automobile is god, a nation of car worshipers, when I tell people I regularly take cross-country drives to visit family out in California, that I’d Much rather drive it then fly because for me the road is the vacation, people look at me like I’m crazy.  You drove all the way to California…??? 

Oh yes…we love our cars.  More precisely I think, we love the independence they give us.  We don’t have to construct our lives around bus or a train schedules.  We can go where we want, when we want, live where we want, shop where we want, play where we want.  The car made the suburbs possible.  The car is an integral part of our economy.  And we make our own cars into statements about ourselves.  They are our status symbols, our tricked out souped up air conditioned chrome and burled walnut accented inner child.  We love our cars.  It’s driving we hate.  Mostly.

And to tell the truth I hate it myself when it’s heavy commuter or weekend shopper congestion I have to wade through.  I hate traffic so much I bought a home within walking distance of work, and two good supermarkets.  I could have bought a nicer one elsewhere in the city, but then I’d have to drive to work and I hate commuter traffic.  With a passion.  I don’t very much care for weekend shopper traffic either.

I’m just pondering all this because of a discussion I came across on another blog I visit often.  Brad DeLong writes, "Time to Whomp the Drivers!", riffing on Megan McArdle. riffing on James Joyner…

Megan McArdle: I think James Joyner is absolutely right here:

I’m now commuting into D.C. on a near-weekdaily basis. According to GoogleMaps, the office is 13.5 miles from the house. I can usually drive there in 45-60 minutes during off-peak hours, although it can sometimes take much longer if there’s an accident. I can park in the garage next to my office for the day for $12. Conversely, I can drive 15-20 minutes to a Metro station, pay $4 to park, wait as long as 15 minutes for a train, pay another $2.65 to get two blocks from the office 35-50 minutes later, followed by a 5-10 minute walk to the office.

So, in order to save $2.70 (plus a nominal amount of gasoline), it would cost me 30-75 minutes each day for the round trip, plus the privacy and autonomy I enjoy in my own vehicle. Given that I earn enough that $3 is poor compensation indeed for that much of my time, I drive unless there’s a really good reason not to.

And they’re about to raise the rates for Metro fares and parking, further skewing the calculus in the direction of “drive.”

The massive subsidy provided to drivers in the form of free roads is obviously producing highly inefficient outcomes, which is why DC feels like a prison from which it is impossible to escape unless one wants to spend four hours on the Beltway. We clearly need to institute comprehensive road tolls combined with a congestion pricing scheme. Plus, of course, a carbon tax to compensate for the negative externalities drivers are imposing on those of us who use primarily mass transit.

I have a suggestion.  Why not make cities more livable?   In fact…I made this suggestion in the comments, where I said in part…

Driving long distances, for many hours out of your life a year, in stress inducing commuter traffic, already makes driving unattractive. Weekend shopper traffic is equally ugly and stressful. But as long as where people work, where they shop, and where they live are kept in separate corners people will just keep driving, and keep absorbing the cost of it. 

My comment was promptly ignored, and a discussion of driving costs verses public transportation costs ensued.  It’s not just that I’m a boring conversationalist…I’ve seen this happen before whenever this topic comes up.  The obvious solution to traffic congestion, and the national gasoline bill, is to put jobs and basic needs shopping and housing within walking distance of each other.  For bonus points, add an enjoyable night life to the walkable mix.  Not everyone will want to live in the city, not everyone will want to be that close to work.  But as traffic keeps getting worse and worse, and the cost of oil keeps going up and up, people will begin migrating back to the cities, if the cities are made livable.  And that’s fewer cars on the roads, and less oil consumed.  But they’ll only do that if the cities are made more livable.  And this country doesn’t seem to want to have a conversation about doing that. 

Even in cities with a thriving economy it’s a problem.  My understanding is that D.C. doesn’t want to put housing, never mind affordable housing, near the major office zones.  One neighborhood in D.C. that approaches livability very nicely is (surprise, surprise) the little gay neighborhood near DuPont Circle.  It’s got housing (if you have to ask you can’t afford it housing, but still housing), shopping, and an active nightlife.  It’s streets are walkable and it’s atmosphere is casual and welcoming.  Metro is nearby.  It’s a nice enclave close enough to some of the major office spaces that you could conceivably work and live there.  I’m sure there are other enclaves like it elsewhere in the city, but not enough of them.  The big downtown office zone is dead at night, except for a few bars scattered around the fringes.  Anytime you see dead zones in a city, that almost certainly happened because some jackass city planners decided to make the area homogenized in some unnatural way. 

In an area with as much traffic congestion as D.C. has, there’s probably tons of people who would be interested in living in the city, and within walking distance or a short Metro ride from where they work.  But for one reason or another they feel they can’t.  The availability and cost of housing.  Fear of crime.  Nowhere to go and nothing to do evenings and weekends.  Streets that aren’t walkable.  Schools that are run down.  City services that are inadequate.  Few safe places for kids to play.  They don’t see city life as being viable.  That’s the problem.

Suburbanites for some reason though, want to complain about traffic, and greenhouse gases, and carbon usage, and gasoline taxes, and highway construction (pro and con) but they don’t want to talk about making cities livable.  Go figure.

Via Box Turtle Bulletin…  You need to understand this…particularly if you’re a younger enough gay person, that you don’t remember much before the Clinton years, and the Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas, which nullified the sodomy laws: When the homophobes start talking about the "good old days" when homosexuals stayed in the closet, this is what they mean:

In our final extract from his autobiography, Pete Price reveals what Liverpool was like when ‘coming out’ could land you in prison

I SAT down in Dr Lansley’s surgery. “Well, what seems to be the problem?” he asked.]

I came out with what I’d been saying over and over in my head. This man, with the film-star looks and smart suits, was the first person I had told in my life.

“I … I think I’m a homosexual.”

He looked at me and froze. What was he going to do? I’d heard homosexuals could be sent to prison – was this going to happen to me?

Finally he spoke. “Don’t be stupid. You’re 12 years old. How could you possibly know?”

He smiled. “You’ll grow out of it.”

I left, feeling wretched. Now there was nobody I could tell– certainly not my mum. I was terrified of losing her: one mother had already abandoned me and, as much as she reassured me, I thought she would do the same.

Two years later, I went back to say I was still a homosexual. This time, Dr Lansley gave me some Valium. “Take these, you’ll be all right,” he said.

They made things even harder, as I was terrified of mum finding them, and the way they made me feel scared me. I poured them out of the bottle and flushed them down the toilet.

…

As time went on, there had been one man down in London who had been writing to me regularly. I’d gone off him and he had taken it badly. He had sent me one letter threatening to kill himself if I started going out with someone else – typical drama queen stuff.

I’d read it and hid it in my bureau as I was late in for work at the Cabin club. But it must have slipped out as I closed the door behind me.

After work that day I got a lift back with my boss. It was 3am and I crept into the house. Walking up the stairs, I saw a light on. I thought mum hadn’t been able to sleep, and went in to say goodnight.

She was white. In her hand was a sheet of paper, and she looked absolutely destroyed.

Mum handed the love letter to me. “What does this mean?” she asked.

I felt sick. The letter had fallen out where she could see it. Everything was there, plain as can be. Did I try to lie my way out of this? Did I tell her I was bisexual, even though I knew I wasn’t? It might soften the blow if she could think her son might still settle down and give her grandchildren. No, I thought, that would be another lie – and this has to stop now.

“It’s true, mum,” I said. “I’m a homosexual.”

It was a decision which would lead to me being checked in for aversion therapy – the most horrible experience of my life – but it was something I had to tell her.

She looked at me, then screamed: “Get out of the house!” Then she rushed to the toilet and I heard her throwing up as I ran down the stairs.

How the doc tried to turn me straight

I SAT down in the doctor’s room in a psychiatric hospital in Chester. An old-fashioned Grundy TK 20 tape machine was sitting on his desk.

He started to interview me about sex acts between gay men, taping my answers.

“Don’t you feel degraded about what you are doing?” I remember him asking me.

After he stopped the recording, he told me we would start therapy the next day.

“We’re going to try and put you off looking at men,” he said.

In the morning I was shown into a windowless room with a male nurse. A crate of Guinness arrived, and I was given a stack of dirty magazines showing body builders – not the sort of thing that would have turned me on in a million years.

The nurse started playing the tape of my conversation. I sat and listened, flicking through the books with a pint, not knowing what the hell was going on.

Then he gave me an injection and suddenly I started feeling sick.

“I think I’m going to vomit!” I yelled out. “I need a basin.”

The doctor smiled. “Then be sick.”

“I think I’m going to go to the toilet.”

“Just do it on the bed.”

I screamed: “You’re joking.”

All the while the tape of the doctor’s questions was playing in the background, over and over: “What you do is disgusting.”

It continued for 72 hours – the drink, the injections, the vomiting and excrement – hour after hour.

All I could think was that I wasn’t going to get out alive.

When it ended, I lay there sobbing, the doctor came in.

“Now you’ve got to have the electrodes … ” he said.

Peter Price is a radio personality in the UK.  Click on the link above to goto the Liverpool Echo for more, including a link to a place in the UK selling his book.  I just checked Amazon and it isn’t there, which makes me doubt you’ll be able to find it at your local gay bookstore either.  But hopefully the book will make it to these shores too.  This is history every gay person should know.