Okay…now it’s making some sense. Today is National Coming Out Day. Which I guess is proceeded by National Life In The Closet Weekend. Sorta the reverse of how Mardi Gras is followed by Lent.

The Scene: A table in an upscale restaurant located in a trendy vacation resort.   Two old friends are sitting across from each other.   One openly gay since he was seventeen, the other a Happily Married Man having long since overcome the unwanted same-sex attractions of his youth.   They are discussing Openly Gay Friend’s problems finding someone to love and settle down with. Happily Married Man is finding it hard to believe that Openly Gay Friend has been single and struggling all these years.

Happily Married Man: Don’t you have any gay friends?

Openly Gay Friend: Oh yes.   About half my friends are gay.   I have a regular Happy Hour crowd I try to go out with every Friday.   It gets me out of the house.

Happily Married Man: How long have you known them?

Openly Gay Friend: Oh, most of them since the mid-eighties…

Happily Married Man: Wow…I can’t believe they haven’t tried to hook you up. Didn’t they ever even try?

Openly Gay Friend: Oh get me started…there was this one time…

Happily Married Man: You need to get some better friends!

Openly Gay Friend: They’re nice people. I think they just don’t get me…they just don’t get romantic types. They think I should just go get laid and that’ll make me feel better. They don’t get how random loveless sex might make someone like me feel a whole lot worse afterward, not better.

Happily Married Man: You need to get some better friends!

Openly Gay Friend: I want you to understand something…that isn’t just a gay thing. If I was straight and my happy hour group was a bunch of other straight guys I’d be getting the same advice. Just go get laid and you’ll be fine.   The cure for every lonely heart is to just get laid.   The popular culture pays a bunch of lip service to the idea of love and romance, but it’s all about just having sex in the straight scene too.

Happily Married Man: Sex is overrated…

Openly Gay Friend: I’m not saying that…

Happily Married Man: It’s just a bodily function.

Openly Gay Friend: Uhm…

Happily Married Man (emphatically): When you’re on your death bed it won’t be the times you had sex you’ll be remembering, but all the people you loved.

Openly Gay Friend: Yes…absolutely! That is so very true. But I would want my last memory to be the times I spent laying down with the one I loved. That one special body and soul relationship…that’s what you would be remembering. At least I would…if I’d ever had that. (looks wistfully at Happily Married Man, then looks away) But your life is what it is…

Happily Married Man (rolling his eyes): Stop whining….

Openly Gay Friend: I’m not whining…

Happily Married Man: You’re whining. You have to work with what you’ve got to work with and accept that. Stop thinking about what ifs. Sex is overrated…

Openly Gay Friend: Well yes, I agree completely that it isn’t all there is to life, but it’s still important…

Happily Married Man: It’s like a fart.

Openly Gay Friend: I’m sorry?

Happily Married Man: This may sound strange but think about it. It stinks for a little while, and then it’s gone.

(Openly Gay Friend looks blankly back at Happily Married Man)

Happily Married Man: Sex is like that.

Openly Gay Friend: Uhm…it helps if you’re having sex with a person you’re sexually attracted to.   (ironically) Then it’s actually a lot of fun…more engaging…more satisfying…(looks Happily Married Man in the eyes) and it makes a whole lot more sense that way.   You kinda understand then why everyone else is so into it.

Happily Married Man: You’re a piece of work…you know that?   Well it’s getting late and I have to go home now.   I’m a happily married man.

Openly Gay Friend (unhappily): So I see.   And I’m still single and unhappy.   And for gay men of our generation it will always be a time before Stonewall won’t it?

Happily Married Man: Stonewall?

(This was mostly a real conversation.   Some lines were edited for brevity, and Openly Gay Friend didn’t actually say his last two lines to Happily Married Man because just then his head was spinning.   But now he wishes he had.)

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.   Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.

-Steve Jobs

Answer: Their mouth is moving.   This, from Joe. My. God…

Yesterday we enjoyed the evisceration of anti-gay NC Sen. James Forrester at the hands of Michelangelo Signorile, who got rather incredulous at Forrester’s lack of HIV knowledge, especially considering that Forrester claims to be a Fellow with the esteemed American College of Preventive Medicine. As it turns out, THAT WAS A FUCKING LIE.

Pam Spaulding has the delicious dirt via contributor Scott Rose, who got this response from the ACPM:

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. The quick answer to your questions is that Dr. Forrester is not, and never has been, a member of ACPM (much less a Fellow, which is our highest designation of membership). However, this is troubling to us, too, that he’s apparently claiming to be a Fellow of ACPM, and we would like to know where Dr. Forrester is making these proclamations so that we can approach him and demand that he cease falsely using ACPM credentials in his campaign or wherever else he’s using it. If you can point us to some places where he’s using those credentials, we’d be most appreciative. Many thanks.

This you may recall, is the Upstanding All-American Heterosexual Christian Pillar Of His Community…

…who   introduced the current anti same-sex marriage amendment in the North Carolina Senate, and whose rational for doing that was in part, his longstanding work as a physician and Fellow at the American College of Preventive Medicine dealing with the medical problems of homosexuals.

When all is said and done, the only problem I have with bigots who live in their own alternate reality is they can’t actually go live there, they have to keep inflicting their fantasy world on the rest of us in the reality based community.   That said, it is occasionally sweet to watch reality bite them in the ass from time to time.   I stopped waiting long ago, for any of them to learn anything from the experience.   I just bask in the schadenfreude.   Can you at least take that little tin North Carolina Flag lapel pin off your jacket while you’re looking your fellow senators in the face and lying through your teeth?   Try to be respectful of your state flag man.

Continuing our gallery of morose, possibly horror story grade film or novel scenarios, here’s another based on the stream of thought I had contemplating the plot device in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. That’s the one you may recall, where the two lovers break up and one decides to undergo a procedure which erases the other from their memory, and the other, sad to learn of it, does the same.   Then they reconnect anyway which only goes to show they were really meant for each other to begin with and love isn’t always a fairy tale but a lot of hard work for both people. Yes, yes…so very romantic. Actually, I love that plot device. But somehow it always turns a tad dark in my imaginings…

I have an idea. It’s a story about a heterosexual man…

When he was a teenager he was well liked by his teachers and friends. He’s very open minded, somewhat more so then his parents who are mostly liberal, but with some hang-ups about class and gender and race. They’re not raving prejudiced, because that isn’t fashionable, and they try, really try their best, to teach their kid not to be that way.

In school he befriends a gay kid and right away they start to get along really well. He defends his gay friend from bullies and takes his part in political arguments about gay civil rights and same-sex marriage. They become very close friends. Brothers almost. But as often happens, not just in gay/straight relationships either, he finds his perfect girlfriend, and the gay kid finds a nice boyfriend, they slowly begin to drift apart.

The gay kid’s boyfriend turns out to be a real jerk, and as he grows older it becomes a pattern with him. He falls into a bitter cycle of one disastrous affair after another. Nothing seems to work for him.

The straight kid’s girlfriend on the other hand is his perfect match. They have a lovely, almost fairy tale romance that grows ever more beautiful over time. They marry, have beautiful kids, he finds the career of his dreams, they settle down in a nice suburban community with good schools and decent shopping.

Fast forward. The straight guy is in his late middle age, and he is reflecting on how happy his life has been. Especially compared to most of his classmates from way back when. Many of them have had it really hard. One day, he reconnects with his gay buddy from back in the day. His gay buddy has had it hard. Very hard. He’s still single, and bitter.

They have lunch together one day and they instantly reconnect like old and dear friends. The gay friend is happy that his old pal has had it so good and it is obviously sincere joy. Seeing how happy his old friend from high school is makes him a bit happier too, brings him out of his gloom and lifts his spirits. It makes him believe once more, after so long, that life maybe doesn’t have to suck after all. It can get better.

He decides to tell his straight friend that he’s re-considering something his parents tried very hard to talk him into back when they were teenagers. There’s a procedure…it’s frowned upon in more liberal circles, but not illegal…that can change a person’s sexual orientation from gay to straight. It’s just been so hard living my life as a gay man, he says, so lonely, so terribly terribly lonely... For all his accomplishments as a gay political activist, his private life has been completely miserable. I’m not sure I want to go on the rest of my life like this, he says. His straight friend is appalled. He urges his gay friend not to do it, it would be a sell-out, not just to the cause he’s long fought for, but to himself, to his soul. Yes, says his gay friend, but…it’s so hard being so alone. At least as a heterosexual, I’d have more of a chance at finding the kind of life you’ve had.

It is a sad conversation, but by the end of it the straight guy has mostly convinced his gay friend to hang on, and live an authentic life. Even if you change he says to his gay friend, how do you go on knowing that it isn’t really you, but something that was done to you? Then his gay friend lays one more thing on him. The procedure can be coupled with a memory wipe, so you never know you were once gay. New memories are introduced to make you believe you were always straight. That’s completely outlawed now against children, but he says, even on adults it’s a lot harder to do that to someone our age. Too many memories…the risks of complications are much higher. No…he finally says, it isn’t worth it.

They get up to go their separate ways and now it seems the gay friend has had a definite change of heart. No…it’s too late now to even think about changing. Better he had done it back when he was a teenager. But really…better still to live an authentic life. And anyway he says with a shy smile that takes his straight friend back to their school days, the worst thing would be having to forget you.

They part ways. The straight guy had always known his gay friend had a crush on him, and for his part he was always very fond of his gay friend. Back in school they were almost inseparable. Brothers almost. But it was always clear to both of them that it could never be. He is thoroughly heterosexual. He has always liked women. And now he has a wife he loves very much, and even at their age they still have a great sex life.

But now something is bothering him. He does a little digging into this ex-gay procedure. It was something he’d never really looked at before. He’d always opposed it, had always spoken out against it. There had been attempts to outlaw it completely that he had supported.   But activists had only succeeded in outlawing the practice on children.   Mostly he avoided the issue altogether.   And now that he thinks of it, that seems a little strange.   In his own low key way he is actually very politically aware and active. But his style was more behind the scenes then his gay friend’s upfront activism.

It quickly falls entirely out of his mind. Then he gets an email from his gay friend thanking him for the visit after all these years, and the encouragement. He writes that he’s redoubling his efforts to find a mate after all, and getting back into the fight for full gay equality. He would still like to see the ex-gay procedure completely outlawed, and he tells his straight friend he’s getting back into that fight now.

Oh yes…that. Now it begins to bother him how uncharacteristically he’d just put it all out of his mind. It was something that should normally still bother him about the world he lived in. His parents had raised him to be tolerant and progressive, even if they’d had their own repressed doubts and prejudices. Homosexuality wasn’t something they’d ever much discussed when he was a teen. But as an adult, often while remembering his gay schoolmate, he had always worked for the better, more inclusive world.

Now he looks more deeply into it, forcing himself at times, posting reminder notes just to make sure he follows up on things he finds out about the ex-gay process…its invention, its history of usage…the patterns of its use…the political controversy. Sometimes it’s a struggle to maintain an interest…he has so much else he’s busy with in his own life. But soon his wife, also very much the progressive and pro-gay rights person, gets involved and begins helping him with it. He has told her the story of his gay friend’s struggles and she is very sympathetic, and as disgusted by the very existence of the ex-gay clinics as he is. With her help, he maintains focus.

So he digs for information and learns more and more about the procedure that turns gay people straight and wipes their memories of ever having been gay. What he learns appalls him. He periodically writes his gay friend back and tells him about what he has uncovered…much that was never really fully aired in public. His gay friend is overjoyed to have his old pal back in the fight.

But at night the research is also causing him very unpleasant dreams…dreams about sudden violent arguments with his parents…or someone’s parents, he is not sure. He wonders if they are real memories or just his own projections of what his friend’s home life must have been like.

One morning, saying nothing to anyone of his plans, he goes to a private investigator, someone who he has read about, who has done much of the main investigation for various gay rights groups concerning the ex-gay clinics. This man has a reputation for uncovering secrets in not always legal ways, but his revelations were crucial in getting the procedure against children stopped. He asks this man to check to see if anyone in his high school class had been taken to one of the ex-gay clinics, and then had their memory of being gay wiped.

The investigator takes him into another room, stacked with filing cabinets, some bulging. Through various court cases, and a few not completely legal methods, he has acquired tens of thousands of what were once secret files, documents, recordings, some he is still not at liberty to disclose the contents of publicly. These files have proven critical in the search for victims, the investigator says, and the prosecution of some of the people who ran the clinics, as well as the outlawing of the procedure against children.

Tell me a little about the school you all went to, says the investigator. Tell me about the neighborhood, the area churches, politicians, community leaders. Certain ex-gay clinics were intimately connected to certain churches, and certain politicians. Tell me a little more about the students…and…about yourself… The whole sordid story of these clinics is in these files. Tell me what I need to know, and I can give you the information you are looking for.

He spends hours talking to the man, who all the while is entering data into a small computer. Then the investigator gets up, walks over to a filing cabinet, and after a little flipping through the files inside, pulls one out. He hands it to him. In it is a name and a case history. Somehow he is not completely shocked to learn that, yes, there was one kid from his high school that got sent to an ex-gay clinic.

Him.

He reads. The evidence in the file suggests it was done to him against his will. His memory of ever being gay, of ever even suspecting he was, was completely wiped. He checks the dates. It had to be he realizes, very soon after his parents found out about his gay friend.

And then and there in that office, reading the notes on his case for himself after all those years, he remembers it all in a sudden rush…about when his parents first learned about his gay friend. They had turned suddenly angry and suspicious. They’d had an awful argument. The next day some men had entered his bedroom in the middle of the night, and taken him to a place…somewhere…somewhere dark…

He can recall no more then that. But it is enough.

He walks back home in a daze. He loves his wife. Really deeply and truly loves her. And without a doubt she loves him. Their sex life is great, even in late middle age. They have beautiful kids, grown now and pursuing their own careers and love lives.

But…he loved his gay friend too. To his gay friend he has always been a straight buddy. Yes, his gay friend had a crush on him…that was always something they both knew, but it was always clear to both that it could never be, because he was straight. Except he wasn’t. At least, not born straight. He looks back to their teen years together and sees it clearly. They were always more then just friends. They were soul mates.

I…I loved you…

And he sees the life his gay friend had…his very lonely, bitter struggle…and sees now, clearly, the life he could have had…the life they could have had.

But…what does he do? What Can he do? Who does he tell? What good would it do to say anything to anyone at this point? His parents have both passed on…he, his wife, his gay friend, are all at the doorstep of old age. What good would it do to tell anyone? But there is more. The last words the private investigator spoke to him before he left the man’s office echo in his brain: You know don’t you, that the procedure can be reversed. You can be the man you were born to be again. If you want. Others, many others, have had the procedure reversed.

But could he really, after so much time has passed? And what would happen to his family then? What would they have? He loves them very much.

It’s not true that there is only one perfect soul mate out there for each individual. His gay friend still has a chance to find someone to love, and be loved by. They both know this. He decides to say nothing. The investigator had assured him that nothing would be said about him unless he specifically authorized it. Privacy laws forbade it. When he gets back home he finds an email from his gay friend telling him he’s dating someone new now, hoping that this time it would be different.

He agrees to meet them both for lunch somewhere, he and his wife and his gay classmate and his new boyfriend. And at that pleasantly cheerful little gathering of old friends and their lovers, he sees that this new guy is nice on the outside where it doesn’t count, but isn’t any better deep down inside where it does then any of the other guys his friend has hooked up with in the past. He can see another broken heart coming for his friend all over again.   And it makes him angry, angry at the new boyfriend/creep, angry in a deep dark place inside where he had never been angry before.

His wife sees the broken heart coming for his gay friend too. He’s such a beautiful spirit, his wife says to him later. It’s so tragic he never found someone. I hate how this world treats people like him. Not just that he’s gay, but that he’s such a beautiful spirit. It’s so hard for people like that to find love. So hard for everyone really. I’m so glad I found you.

Not all horror stories have blood splashing everywhere.

“Evil enters like a needle and spreads like an oak tree.”
-Ethiopian Proverb

Another one of the Big Three major loves of my life finally decided to get himself a Facebook account recently…I discovered during another of my periodic name searches.   I mentioned on my status update that I wished there was a Forget You pill I could take, but that I’d only take it for one of the Big Three (Hi Keith!).   A friend then directed me to the film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

I was already aware of that film, although I haven’t watched it yet.   But the central plot device is a beautiful one for a romance story: Two people who choose to undergo a procedure that makes them forget about each other, who then hook up again later anyway, which means they were really meant for each other to begin with. Yes, yes…a very lovely tale of true romance. And one I’d happily read myself, if it were presented to me in a gay context.

Writing it myself is another matter, and not just because I’d have to copy it outright from somebody else, a thing I regard with distaste when I see other would-be artists doing that.   On the other hand, Picasso himself said a mediocre artist copies and a great artist steals.   And this plot device is just brimming with possibilities.

Unfortunately for you dear reader, those possibilities always seem to take a dark and morose turn with me.   I can’t imagine why that is.   But in the interest of getting some of this stuff that has always been percolating in me ever since I can remember…I seem to be able to think up more ideas then I ever have time to follow through on…let me belabor you with a few scenarios for a novel or movie.   Go ahead and use them.   If they flop and everyone hates you for making them sit through it, you can always blame me.

Here’s Scenario 1…there isn’t much to it.   Call it, The Good Life…

It’s about a gay guy who tries all his life to find his soul mate.   Comes out to himself as a teen, but instead of going through fear and loathing about his sexual orientation, he accepts it, and tries extra hard to make himself worthy of a nice boyfriend.   Gets good grades, graduates near the top of his class, never cheats or lies or steals.   He’s no cardboard prude by any means, but he tries extra hard to be a worthy lover, so he can attract the man of his dreams.   Unfortunately for him, all he ever gets are the boyfriends from hell…the ones attracted to Nice Guys because they’re easy to manipulate and fun to cheat.

That’s his life.   One bad, failed romance after another after another after another.   His gay friends are no help either.   Oh they believe in love all right…but they think our hero is a tad childish to believe in Romance and finding that man of your dreams.   Better they keep telling him, to settle for Mr. Right Away instead of Mr. Right.   Who knows they say, that sexy rent boy you purchase for an evening might turn out to be a steady thing.   And if not, hey, he’s affordable at least.   Time and again, though he never finds out what the audience does, they fail to connect him to other guys who might actually be right for him.   Romance is for daydreamers.

Eventually he’s a very old man.   And one day he realizes this is all that will ever be.     He sees that he will never find that love of his life after all, that he is going to die alone and loveless, never having been loved, never having had that life affirming body and soul relationship with another person, never known that quiet peaceful joy of holding, and being held in the arms of the one you love.   Now, at the twilight of his life he sees, finally, the reason that there are so many beautiful love stories out there isn’t because there really are so many beautiful love stories out there, but that so terribly many people are like himself, lost and lonely and aching for a love that will never come.   He wishes he had never been born.

But all is not hopeless.   Modern technology has an answer for everything.   He takes the last little bit of his life savings and goes to a clinic, where they replace all his bad memories of failed romances with a fake memory of meeting his soul mate when they were both teenagers and they have a happy life together and then in their shared old age his soul mate dies (peacefully of natural causes) and he morns.   But then he goes on with his life because they both promised each other that they would if one of them died before the other.

He leaves the clinic knowing only that he had checked himself in for a very normal and natural case of depression after his one true love had passed away.   The doctors and nurses there he remembers, were all very kind to him, and all said he’d been a very lucky man to have found such a beautiful meaningful love, and he left the clinic feeling a little sorry for them, because they were still searching for it.

He spends his last few years peacefully remembering his lover, spouse and soul mate, and dies one day a happy man, knowing he had lived life to its fullest.

You see?   Even horror stories can have happy endings.

.

Via Good As You. Orson Scott Card retells Hamlet. Yes. Seriously.

Anyone who thinks they’ve witnessed the heights of bigotry, look…if you haven’t read any of Orson Scott Card’s rants about homosexuality you absolutely Have Not seen the pure unadulterated thing…

Outcry over Hamlet novel casting old king as gay paedophile

A small American press has been swamped with complaints after publishing a version of Hamlet by the science fiction author Orson Scott Card in which King Hamlet is a gay paedophile.

Hymned by the publisher Subterranean Press as a “revelatory” retelling which shows “what’s really going on” in Shakespeare’s play, the story suggests Hamlet’s father wasn’t murdered by his brother Claudius, but Horatio, in revenge for being molested by him as a child.

…

The book is not a new release, having been published twice before, for the first time in 2008, but an explosive review at the Rain Taxi Review of Books has unleashed a wave of criticism.

“Here’s the punch line: Old King Hamlet was an inadequate king because he was gay, an evil person because he was gay, and, ultimately, a demonic and ghostly father of lies who convinces young Hamlet to exact imaginary revenge on innocent people,” writes William Alexander. “The old king was actually murdered by Horatio, in revenge for molesting him as a young boy – along with Laertes, and Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern, thereby turning all of them gay … Hamlet is damned for all the needless death he inflicts, and Dead Gay Dad will now do gay things to him for the rest of eternity: ‘Welcome to Hell, my beautiful son. At last we’ll be together as I always longed for us to be.'”

For anyone who has read Orson Scott Card’s The Hypocrites Of Homosexuality and Homosexual “Marriage” and Civilization (the scare quotes are his), this is as unsurprising as the sight of the sun rising in the east. But bear in mind as you are reading all this, the National Organization for Marriage finds him fit enough for its board of directors…a man who once said that if same-sex couples are universally allowed to marry, every pledge of allegiance he ever uttered since he was a child becomes null and void…

“If America becomes a place where the laws of the nation declare that marriage no longer exists — which is what the Massachusetts decision actually does — then our allegiance to America will become zero. We will transfer our allegiance to a society that does protect marriage.” -Orson Scott Card, Homosexual “Marriage” and Civilization.

Perhaps someone should ask Brian Brown if he feels the same way about his allegiance to the United States of America. Oh…and civil war.

I honestly don’t think Card hates homosexuals. Bigotry isn’t always hate. The gutter has no bottom and there is a step down even from hate, where the complete dehumanization within oneself of the hated other is achieved. Did the architects who designed the gas chambers of Auschwitz hate the Jews, or were they simply doing their best to rid Europe of what they regarded as a pestilence? Hate is not the bottom. If your entire concept of “bigot” is such as Fred Phelps who wave their signs screaming that Matthew Shepard is burning in hell and Thank God For Dead Soldiers, it can come as a shock to see a human heart even more depraved, and worse, to see it so matter of fact about it, as if discussing the weather or last night’s baseball game. But the further down in the gutter you go, the more peaceful it seems.

Card doesn’t scream and shout. He doesn’t stand on a street corner and wave the bible and preach hell fire and damnation. If you sit him down to discuss it (ask people who have interviewed him) he will tell you calmly and matter-of-factly that gay rights is a collective delusion… that granting rights for deviant behavior is ridiculous… that homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex… that when two homosexuals start telling people they’re a couple they are just “playing house” (his words)…that they might think that they have deep feelings towards one another but that’s all that it is…just wishful thinking, just pitiful trying to convince themselves that their deviant sexual urges are something higher and nobler then empty lust. He will tell you calmly and matter-of-factly that a homosexual’s highest allegiance is to the community that gives them access to sex… that homosexuals recruit children into homosexuality by molesting them and that is how everyone or nearly everyone who ever was a homosexual became one.

He will tell you all of this simply, calmly, and matter-of-factly. So matter-of-factly that you do not, simply cannot doubt this man will never be moved from his prejudices, no matter how much evidence to the contrary moves past his eyes. He does not deny the evidence, he simply does not see it. He can’t. He’s a bigot.

Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. Homosexuals are a threat to children. Homosexuality must be actively suppressed by force of law, preferably in a discrete, non-confrontational way, brutally if necessary, or the homosexuals will eventually recruit so many others into homosexuality that civilization will collapse.

Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books, not to be indiscriminately enforced against anyone who happens to be caught violating them, but to be used when necessary to send a clear message that those who flagrantly violate society’s regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society. -Orson Scott Card, The Hypocrites of Homosexuality.

Orson Scott Card will tell you this, as if he is telling you the time of day.

Some prejudice is simply misinformed. Some prejudice is cultural…like the song says, you have to be carefully taught. Even in the most vehement of haters of that kind, there is humanity buried somewhere within. It can be reached. Maybe. Then there is the prejudice that is an abyss. You cannot move an abyss, you can only stare into it, while it stares back into you.

Le Dance Pathetique…as choreographed by MBachmann4Pres (Keith)…

Un…

I don’t hate anyone, I love homosexuals…

Deux…

…and pray for their salvation every night.

Trois…

But these beasts need to stop what they do.

Quatre…

Christians not only preach love & tolerance but the scripture.

Cinq…

I’m done arguing with the homosexual militants, I actually have a job to get to that doesnt involve prostituting my asshole in back alleys

Le Curtian…Applaus a vous…

[Update…] Le Encore!

Homosexuals were put here on this earth by Satan, not God, to bring evil into our society.

Le Curtian…Le Ovation Standing…

In my Twitter feed, Think Progress asks, “Is the media going to let Governor Perry get away with abandoning specific positions he detailed in a 9-month-old book?”

Yes.

This has been another edition of Simple Answers To Simple Questions…

I see from Jeremy at Good As You that NOM is doubling down on the Gay Rights = Pedophilia rhetoric.   On the NOM Blog they’re pointing to a post by Joe Carter that babbles that same claptrap about the B4U-ACT Symposium happening in Baltimore Brian Brown was a couple days ago…

Back in June I outlined how to destroy a culture in 5 easy steps.

An academic symposium in Baltimore comprised of just such a cluster of professoriate and perverts is meeting today to shift the acceptance of pedophilia from “unthinkable” to merely “radical”…

With the euphemism “minor-attracted persons” they are also including Step #2: “From Radical to Acceptable — This shift requires the creation and employment of euphemism.”… Remember when conservatives were mocked and derided for claiming that Lawrence would lead to the normalization [of] polygamy and pedophilia? Now some of those same people who sneered at us are using the decision to promote . . . polygamy and pedophilia.

It looks like they’re fixating on the use of the term “minor-attracted persons” by a group of mental health professionals, but you need to understand while you read it that they know their audience.   They are speaking to the kook pews…the ones who don’t know and don’t care what words mean so long as they help win the culture war.   Words are weapons, nothing more, nothing less, nothing else.   And science is the enemy that believes words have meaning.   What Joe Carter and Brian Brown know perfectly well, is that “minor-attracted persons” is not intended to obfuscate that meaning, but clarify it.   They know this.   But they also know their audience.

There is ephebophilia, which is the sexual attraction to mid to late adolescents…teens 15 and up.   There is hebephilia, which this symposium seems to view as the sexual attraction toward teens from post puberty to 14 years (I’ve seen this defined to a higher age range elsewhere). And then there is the ever popular (to the gay haters) pedophilia, which is the sexual attraction to children below the age of puberty. All these terms are used precisely and specifically by mental health professionals, whereas your usual right wing nutcase just says PEDOPHILE for all of it. And without a doubt that’s less because they are idiots with small vocabularies, smaller brains and even smaller regard for whether the words they do know mean anything, and more because they understand that screaming PEDOPHILE at gay people rouses passions and short circuits any possibility of mutual understanding. They don’t want understanding, they just want people to hate Teh Gay.

And that means science is the hated enemy.   More even, then Teh Gay.   It is the first enemy.   The enemy that must be brought down before all others, or else the war is lost.   Because the practice of science uses words for their actual meaning, not their tactical advantage.   Because science lets the evidence speak for itself.     Because science acknowledges no higher authority then the observable facts.   Let’s take a look once more, at the part of this symposium brochure that the kook pews are screaming bloody murder about:

This day-long symposium will facilitate the exchange of ideas among researchers, scholars, mental health practitioners, and minor-attracted persons who have an interest in critical issues surrounding the entry for pedophilia in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association. The symposium will address critical issues in the following areas:

• Scientific and philosophical issues related to the DSM entry on pedophilia and/or hebephilia
• Effects of the DSM entry on stigma, availability of mental health services, and research
• Ways in which minor-attracted persons can be involved in the DSM 5 revision process

It is crucial that the DSM be based on the most accurate and complete scientific information available, and on careful consideration of effects on the welfare of patients and society. This is especially true for the DSM entry on pedophilia; it has an enormous impact on the beliefs and practices of mental health professionals, the criminal justice system, the media, and the public. It also has a profound effect on adults and teenagers who are emotionally and sexually attracted to children or adolescents, on the availability of mental health services for them, and on relevant research.

It is crucial that the DSM be based on the most accurate and complete scientific information available, and on careful consideration of effects on the welfare of patients and society. No shit Sherlock. The problem is anything that tells us something real and useful about the human condition is almost certain to drive the kook pews into babbling hysterical fits.   Darwin anyone?

It is staringly obvious that the term “minor-attracted persons” in the context of this symposium is clearly intended to be an all-encompassing term for pedophilia and hebephilia together. To the world outside the anti-gay industrial complex, but especially the mental health profession, using the term pedophilia to describe all adults who are sexually attracted to minors is illiterate.   And to anyone who has followed the ravings of the gay-fixated kook pews, and especially crackpot wholesale warehouses like NOM and FRC, it would be easy to assume that illiteracy is the functional norm in there.   But it isn’t.   Not at the top.   Not where the money is being collected.   Not where the votes are being counted.   When Brian Brown and Joe Carter tell their readers that the term “minor attracted adults” is a euphemism signaling a desire to normalize pedophilia they know Exactly what they are doing.   They are rousing the mob.   And not just because the mob is the only tool they have left, to win the culture war.

The mob is their kinfolk, their kingdom, their shining city on the hill; cleansed completely of the hated Other, where no one rises above the prejudices of the many to remind them of the gutter they’ve turned America into, and which they are all living in.

Via Alvin McEwen, I see this post over at Equality Matters…

NOM President Claims Marriage Equality Will “Normalize Pedophilia”

On August 18, the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) posted a “NOM Marriage News” update, written by NOM president Brian Brown, to its blog.

You read that update and you really start believing that NOM desperately wants to be on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s hate groups list. Because now they’re just about saying flat out that legalizing Teh Gay means your children are going to get raped. Carlos Maza quotes a passage from Brown’s dirty little rant on the Equality Matters blog. I’m going to quote a tad more of it here, because you need to notice something about the organization Robert George Super Genius co-founded…

NORMALIZING PEDOPHILIA

When you knock over a core pillar of society like marriage, and then try to redefine Biblical views of marriage as bigotry, there will be consequences. Will one of the consequences be a serious push to normalize pedophilia?

The Daily Caller raised the question by pointing us all to a high-level academic conference in Baltimore this week, “Pedophilia: Minor-Attracted Persons and the DSM: Issues and Controversies.”

The DSM is the diagnostic manual that defines mental illness. You probably recall that a key moment in the gay rights campaign was the 1973 decision by the American Psychiatric Association, the organization that produces the DSM, to remove homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses.

Here’s how the brochure describes the goal:

“This day-long symposium will facilitate the exchange of ideas among researchers, scholars, mental health practitioners, and minor-attracted persons who have an interest in critical issues surrounding the entry for pedophilia in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association. The symposium will address critical issues in the following areas:

• Scientific and philosophical issues related to the DSM entry on pedophilia and/or hebephilia
• Effects of the DSM entry on stigma, availability of mental health services, and research
• Ways in which minor-attracted persons can be involved in the DSM 5 revision process”

See the brochure here »

When professors from Harvard and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine get together to discuss ways in which “minor attracted persons” can be involved in the DSM revision process—watch out.

Enquiring people want to know: Will pedophiles become “minor-attracted persons” in our culture? Will courts which endorse orientation as a protected class decide down the road that therefore laws which discriminate against “minor-attracted persons” must be narrowly tailored to a compelling government interest?

Here’s the fundamental truth: Ideas have consequences and so do words—because they contain ideas, because they are the vehicle through which and by which human beings describe reality.

NOM is pushing two old lies here. First, that gays and pedophilia go hand in hand. Anyone who has watched them since Proposition 8 knows that this is a regular song of theirs…The Gays Are After Your Children! Anyone who has studied the gay rights struggle since Anita Bryant knows that this is how the anti-gay industrial complex win elections. They go straight for the GAY=PEDOPHILE attack and the only question is do they do it overtly or do they dog whistle it. But the anti-gay campaigns where that scarecrow isn’t being waved in voters faces is the rare exception to the rule.

The other lie is that homosexuality was removed from the professional psychiatric association diagnostic manual of mental illnesses after a gay rights campaign. It was no such thing. The emerging science on sexual orientation brought about the change, much to the everlasting regret of the bigots in that profession, then and now. The science simply does not support the conclusion that there is anything clinically wrong with gay people. Evelyn Hooker in her her 1957 paper The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual, showed that sexually active male homosexuals were clinically indistinguishable from sexually active male heterosexuals. All the science done since then has confirmed that over and over again. There is nothing innately wrong with gay people. We are simply attracted to our own sex in the same way heterosexuals are attracted to the opposite sex.

The science drove the change in the DSM. The politics on the streets were the inevitable result of both the science, and the fact that gay people were beginning then to come out of a period of intense cultural isolation and persecution and were seeing for themselves that what the popular culture and traditional medicine were saying about them was simply wrong. When the popular culture keeps telling you that you are a monster, and you look around at the others of your community and you don’t see monsters, but fellow human beings, after a while you get angry about being told constantly that you are a monster. Sometimes you even get politically active about it. This is only surprising to people who still believe, who still need to believe, that homosexuals are either dangerous psychotics or contemptible faggots. They’re not human beings defending themselves they’re homosexuals desperately wanting social approval… But that gay anger did not drive the change to the DSM. It was the science.

Anyone who has studied the struggle for gay equality since the change to the DSM knows exactly what happened next, what the ones who could not let science override their cheapshit bar stool prejudices about homosexuals did. They started their own cottage industry of junk science to have something to support their prejudices against what the actual scientists were saying. Paul Cameron being probably the main example of that. But he is hardly alone.

NOM is with them, if not in generating their own junk science, then at least in cheerfully passing it along. But there is more to it. Take another look at Brian Brown’s alarm at this academic conference in Baltimore…

Here’s how the brochure describes the goal:

“This day-long symposium will facilitate the exchange of ideas among researchers, scholars, mental health practitioners, and minor-attracted persons who have an interest in critical issues surrounding the entry for pedophilia in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association. The symposium will address critical issues in the following areas:

• Scientific and philosophical issues related to the DSM entry on pedophilia and/or hebephilia
• Effects of the DSM entry on stigma, availability of mental health services, and research
• Ways in which minor-attracted persons can be involved in the DSM 5 revision process”

See the brochure here »

When professors from Harvard and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine get together to discuss ways in which “minor attracted persons” can be involved in the DSM revision process—watch out.

Yes. Watch out. Because science might happen. Note that there is nothing in that brochure or the bullet points he cites even remotely suggesting that this conference has any interest in normalizing pedophilia. But notice also that Brown doesn’t even bother trying to make that case. What Brown is saying there, clearly, sickeningly, is science can’t be trusted.

Science turned our world upside down when they said nothing was wrong with the homos after all. That is proof that science can’t be trusted. Next thing you know they’ll be saying rape doesn’t harm children. How do you know they won’t? Science always turns things upside down. Science can’t be trusted. Next thing you know they’ll be saying humans and apes have a common ancestor. Next thing you know they’ll be saying the earth isn’t at the center of the universe. This is, seriously, how the folks in the organization co-founded by Robert George Super Genius think.

It’s a mindset thing. It’s a worldview thing. Understand this: the attack on science by groups like NOM isn’t motivated by a simple matter of applying the best political tactics to the job at hand. That’s the mindset of a Karl Rove, but not the folks at NOM. NOM is to homosexuality and marriage, what creationists are to biology and evolution. They’re throwbacks to an age before reason and science, that still needs its demons, witches and scapegoats. Behind that mask of dispassionate logic and rationality George assumes, and the others like Maggie and Brown try to, is, demons, witches, and scapegoats.

Demons. Witches. Scapegoats. Homosexuals. That’s their world. When professors from Harvard and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine get together…watch out… If you ever wondered why none of them can bring themselves to simply look at their gay neighbors in this life and see fellow human beings, some good, some bad, some just trying their best, there’s your answer.

Le Dance Pathetique…as choreographed by Jerry Buell, Mount Dora High School’s Teacher of the Year…

Un…

Jerry Buell, a long-time Lake County social studies teacher, said during a recent Facebook exchange that he “almost threw up” in response to a news story about legalized same-sex marriage in New York.

Deux…

On the same July 25 Facebook post he said same-sex marriages were part of a “cesspool.”

Trois…

He went on to call the unions a sin.

Quatre…

“It wasn’t out of hatred,” he said in an interview with the Orlando Sentinel.

Cinq…

“It was about the way I interpret things.”

Six…

“I’ve had kids that I’ve known that have been homosexuals,” he said.

Sept…

“They know that I don’t hate them. I love them.”

Le Curtian…Applaus a vous…

I’m stressing more and more lately, and not just about the economy and the future of JWST and my livelihood.   Every little thing it seems adds to the stress level, every bit of news I read, every little thing around the house I see that needs fixing or working on…little worries about bills I shouldn’t have to worry about because at the present time I am making more then enough to pay my bills and there is plenty left over to plan the next vacation with…every little ache and pain, even though I just got the best possible result on the colonoscopy…everything.

I am a little tightly wound ball of stress lately.   Though nicotine has been a stress blanket I haven’t smoked a cigar in months, worried that my body just can’t take it anymore.   Though a drink or two will calm me down I haven’t had anything for days because if I so much as touch glass to lips in my present state I’ll be convinced I’m on the road to alcoholism.   So I just do what I have always done when I’m completely stressed out.   I sit on it and just wait for it to either go away or kill me.   So far it hasn’t killed me.   Probably, it is making me crazy.   Although some friends from my grade school days would say I’ve always been crazy.

Yesterday I indulged in something I know relieves stress without drugs: I took a drive around the Maryland countryside.   I love to drive.   I didn’t spend the money on a Mercedes-Benz because I wanted a status symbol.   Driving is a favorite pastime.   Just get in the car and go find a road I haven’t been down yet and see what’s there.   The lovely rolling green hills of the Piedmont are very relaxing to drive through and after some miles of it the stress began to loosen its grip on me.   I could feel it letting go.   It was nice.

I turned for home and got back on the Interstate, heading back into the city.   I wasn’t in a hurry and so I just sat in the far right lane at about the speed limit while to my left everyone else was zooming past me, on their furious way to somewhere.   I didn’t care.   This was a section of the Interstate I have driven hundreds, if not thousands of times before….in a part of the Baltimore suburbs I used to live in, and still frequently go shopping in because it is so easy to get to on the Interstate.     Traffic was light, and I was relaxing.

Suddenly in the rear view mirror I saw a Lexus blasting toward my car and I swear it nearly clipped me on the passenger side rear bumper.   It blew past…figure it was doing a good fifty mph faster then I was going and I was doing the sixty-five mph speed limit… and into the deceleration lane of the exit I was coming up on.   Scared the steaming shit out of me.

So I catch my breath and…

…and suddenly I don’t remember where the fuck I am.   I look around.   I don’t recognize anything I see.   I’ve been on this section of highway a zillion times before and it feels all of a sudden as though I have never seen any of it before in my entire life.   I don’t know where I am.   I don’t recognize anything.   I don’t recognize anything. I am in a strange place and nothing looks familiar.   Nothing.   I look around for a reference point.   There is nothing here I recognize.   Nothing at all.

My logical analytical mind is still functioning enough to get me out of it.   I pull a trick I’ve done ever since grade school when a teacher would catch me daydreaming…

…and what would you say the answer to that is Mr. Garrett?

Daydreaming doesn’t cause deafness.   You’re still hearing what the teacher is saying, you’re just not paying attention.   So, and quickly, I would mentally walk it back to the last thing I remember hearing, and then quickly walk it forward until I get to the question I am being asked, and then give an answer, usually pissing off the teacher who thought for sure that time they’d caught me day dreaming.

Where the hell am I???

So I walk it backward to the last thing I remember, which was getting on the Interstate.   The rest pops back into view.   Ah…right…I’ve just passed the Padonia Road exit and some jackass nearly hit me… And then it’s like the visual memory suddenly pops back also, and everything looks familiar again.

That has never happened to me before.   And so naturally I begin stressing out that I’m getting Alzheimer’s.   My brain is going.   I can feel it Dave…I can feel it…

I stress about it all night and all morning today.   Then while I’m discussing something with my current and former branch managers I do something I almost never do, because I don’t like bothering my co-workers, and especially my bosses, with my private worries, and particularly my private health worries.   I tell them what happened.   I ask them what they think is happening to me.   Has that ever happened to you?   Is it time for me to see the doctor about my memory?

And one of them says oh yes, that’s happened to my brother and you hear it happening to people all the time because of stress.   Stress does that he tells me.   Don’t worry, it isn’t age.   A lot of stress can make you loose the zone and you forget where you are for an instant and what you’re doing.   It happens.   It’s stress.   Your brain isn’t rotting…brains just do that when enough stress is applied.

In other word’s it’s expected behavior under certain conditions.   I hear this and the worry just melts away.   The relief for a moment is overwhelming.   Yes…yes, that makes sense!   And…I’ve read about that elsewhere.   Yes!   It’s kind of like when you get smacked in the head hard enough you loose a fragment of short term memory.   Stress does adversely impact memory.   I’ve read that.   The explanation makes sense.

I’m a geek.   I’ll probably dig around a bit more and research it some until I’m satisfied and can put it to rest.     But in the instant of that worry melting away I saw something else, something I’d seen before often enough, but this one time it really hit me.

Because, really, I”m not under an unbearable amount of stress all things considered. What’s bad is the level even minor things can build up to with me.   And that has been the case, for nearly all of my adult life, and particularly since Mom passed away.   Stress doesn’t go away for me like it does most other people.   I can’t manage it as well as other people can and do.   Because nearly every moment of my non-working life I am alone.   It’s not the stress, it’s the solitude.   It’s a lifetime spent in emotional solitude.

We are not solitary critters…we are social beings.   We need our packs, our tribes, our families.   We need most of all, in our adult lives, that other half.

It’s not the big issues.   It’s all the little day to day ones. All the little minor day to day things that happen and get discussed and hashed out in the casual chit-chat of lovers.   All of that just grows and grows inside of me and I can’t really stop it from doing that all by myself.

If only I had friends who cared that Bruce shouldn’t be so alone.   If only I’d grown up in a world that understood that some boys like boys and that’s okay as long as they find the right boy.   If only.

Oh well…     Artists are supposed to be crazy anyway.   It’s what makes us creative, and our works valuable long after we have died miserable and alone.

Self Portrait with Better Medium
1982

Think Progress tweets: GOP Rep. Steve King: Free birth control will make America “a dying civilization”

Right.   Because children aren’t ever conceived because parents actually want them.   Your parents reminded you of that fact often didn’t they Steve.

VLADIMIR: We’ll hang ourselves tomorrow. (Pause.) Unless Barack comes.

ESTRAGON: And if he comes?

VLADIMIR: We’ll be saved.

(Beckett…slightly altered…)