Of course, trying to avoid the hate when you’re a gay man is a little like trying to avoid the rain during monsoon season in India. I ran across this thread on Fark.Com…
I haven’t posted here lately because I’m busy with work and stuff. And I’m getting my Christmas cards ready to send. Every year since I started working at the Space Telescope I’ve made up my own custom Christmas cards with images from the Hubble Space Telescope on them. It’s been one of the joys of working on Hubble that I can do this and send them out to family and friends.
More later. In the meantime I need a break from the fight. Really. It is just such a major stress in my life to have to deal with all the hate out there toward gay people. It never ends. It never ends. And it’s draining all the joy and wonder from my life. I hate it. I never really realized how much it stresses me out until I spent that time in Disney World. When I came back home, several friends and co-workers remarked on how relaxed I looked. One even asserted that I must have gotten laid while I was down in Orlando. No…that didn’t happen. What happened was I managed to recapture some of the joy of life I’ve been missing ever since I took a walk through adolescence, and learned that I would always be hated for what I am, and that finding love was going to be a struggle that I’d probably loose.
I want that joy back. I need that joy back. So I’m going to do something I’ve always disdained: I’m going to drop out of the news loop for a while. Or at least try to. If I can. I’m such a news addict. Especially when it comes to news concerning the gay community. I need to back off for a while. So you won’t see me posting much here about gay issues for a while. Hopefully. Maybe.
I have a lot of vacation time accrued, so I’m taking another two weeks off this Christmas-New Years holiday period. I don’t think I’ll be going anyway…at least not far from home. I might take a few drives here and there…maybe to see an old friend in PA…if he’s free…maybe to Ocean City New Jersey for a while. I dunno. But I need the break. The relentless hate is just wearing me down. I need to ignore it for a while. I need to remember why life is good. Laugh at me, but I really enjoyed my stay in Disney World. When I get last Thanksgiving’s trip paid off, I am going back. No question about it.
I’ve been coding more this last few days, a thing I enjoy immensely. And working on the new virtual test center at work. And I’m feeling the pressure to assume more management kinds of roles. I’ve always resisted that because I like coding and working down in the guts of systems. But there comes a point where you have to just accept the path life is placing before you. I had it explained to me today in terms I was finally able to accept, that my value to the organization is tilting more now towards project management. I’m 55 years old…I’ve been doing this work since the first PCs came to market, and I have so much experience that it makes more sense for me to step up the chain and give the Institute the benefit of that, then keep myself down in the nuts and bolts of things.
There’s an irony here. Parents are always telling their children You just wait…when you have kids of your own you’ll see…! And, being a gay man and not wanting to raise kids of my own I would just shrug all that off with a laugh. But you can’t escape the responsibilities of age, like it or not. I can just hear every boss I’ve ever had now, wagging their fingers at me from the past and saying You just wait…when you have staff of your own you’ll see…!
Well…maybe. All that’s in the future and nothing is certain. But apparently I am being positioned for it on at least one project and I reckon it’s an inescapable part of having a career in a trade you love. And the work we do at Space Telescope is for the ages. You can’t beat that. At some point I realized that my work life and my personal life had become one and it was here, really, that it happened. I don’t do nine to five anymore. I haven’t for years. It’s a joy few people manage to find and I am so blessed that I did. I live and breath this stuff. Single and lonely though I am, I have that at least.
But I guess I can’t be a simple coder forever. At some point, you have to move on. But if it keeps me valuable to the Institute, then I reckon I’ll do it. There is no growing up…there is only growing. And I promised myself when I was a kid that I would never stop growing.
If you made yourself that same promise then I salute you, we are kindred spirits, and I wish you and yours all the best this holiday season.
Germans seem to just love to cobble German words together to make bigger German words. In German, there is no such thing as the word is too big. Sometimes a word isn’t big enough so another word gets added to it. Thus, gammeliges, which means rotten meat, gets combined with fleisch, which means ‘flesh’ to become gammelfleisch, which is German for, uh, "rotten meat". Somehow this new bigger word for rotten meat got coined during a recent food scandal, when it was discovered that some meat packers were shipping food that was past it’s use-by date to restaruants. I’m sure a certain someone could tell me why the one word just wasn’t good enough.
Germans also tend to be brutally direct in their opinions. And thus gammelfleisch, becomes gammelfleischparty…
Gammelfleischparty is German youth word of year
German is famous for its long words — and today’s youth are just as adept at creating new ones as their predecessors, to judge by a poll released Wednesday by the publishers of Langenscheidt dictionaries.
Judges chose "gammelfleischparty", or "spoiled meat party," — an unflattering term for a gathering of people over 30 — as the "youth word of the year 2008." The word "gammelfleisch" was in the news frequently during the year when it was discovered that meat packers had been regularly supplying some kebab restaurants with past-due products.
"Bildschirmbraeune" or "screen tan" — referring to the complexion of someone who spends too much time at a computer — came second, while "unterhopft," meaning "underhopped," or in need of a beer, took third.
How To Wrest News From The TV In 21st Century America
Yes, yes…network news is to news, like processed cheese food product is to cheese. But as it turns out, there Is a way to find out from your TV what’s going on in Washington. You just have to adjust your perspective a tad.
For example…have you noticed all those "clean coal" ads on TV lately?
The Environmental Protection Agency yesterday abandoned its push to revise two air-pollution rules in ways that environmentalists had long opposed, abruptly dropping measures that the Bush administration had spent years preparing.
One proposal would have made it easier to build a coal-fired power plant, refinery or factory near a national park. The other would have altered the rules that govern when power plants must install antipollution devices. Environmentalists said it would result in fewer such cleanups.
EPA officials had been trying to finalize both proposals before President-elect Barack Obama is sworn in Jan. 20. But yesterday, an agency spokesman said they were giving up, surprising critics and supporters of the measures.
Rule of thumb: When you suddenly start seeing a lot of feel good advertising from some big corporate interest groups, it’s a safe bet they’re trying to push something through congress.
What the coal and energy corporations want you to know, is that coal is clean. Swell. That’s really swell. Glad to hear it. But if coal is clean then why do they need congress to change the clean air act?
…In which our teenage hero discovers that the parts that make up a brain aren’t necessarily on speaking terms with each other.
Click on the image above to go directly to the new episode…or Here to go to the series main page. I did a little review of the panels I put up over the weekend and yesterday, made a few minor corrections, and started sending out the email notices. If you didn’t get one and want to be put on the mail list let me know.
If you checked in yesterday or Sunday you should know that I shuffled the upcoming episodes around a tad and there is a different one now listed as coming next. I’ll do the one on how I got my camera bug later…it doesn’t really fit at this stage of the story.
The series divides into three parts really. The first part is the one I’m still on right now, which is about how all these sexual feelings just suddenly seemed to start happening to me out of the blue and I started getting all twitterpated over one of my male classmates and all of a sudden I was just flailing around with all these really strong new feelings I was absolutely not prepared for, didn’t understand, and didn’t really want. The second is how I stumbled around trying to avoid having to deal with the realization that I was really sexually attracted to guys, and that I was actually falling in love with this one particular guy. And finally, how I finally came to terms with both of those things and how I moved from confusion and denial into self awareness and pride.
I have about 70 percent of all this scripted, but obviously I’m still working on it as I go along. For one thing, I added a bunch of material to this episode after I started working on the pencils and wasn’t really satisfied with it. But I really need to kick up the output here a tad…or I’ll still be working on this when I’m 90.
I just put the last of the pages up for episode 11 of A Coming Out Story…
Whew…
Now I’m off to bed. It’s late…I’m tired… But…satisfied. It’s a good sign when I can still stay up late working on this, and be chuckling to myself while I’m finishing it up…
More later… For now I’m just happy to finally have this one behind me. I really hope I don’t get this blocked ever again on this project…
I’m going to wait another day before I send out the email notices. I want to look it all over tomorrow morning with fresh eyes first, just to make sure there isn’t anything major I want to correct first. Then I’ll send out the email notices. But for all you folks who read the blog…it’s all there…finally…
I was hoping to have episode 11 of A Coming Out Story up by the end of the weekend, but I just couldn’t. I got to a point tonight where I knew that if I kept on going I wouldn’t be paying enough attention to what I was doing, so I broke off. I still have two pages to go, and half of one left to finish. But it’s looking good for tomorrow.
In the meantime, since this one Has taken so long, I’ve gone ahead and put up what I’ve finished so far. I’m so embarrassed that this one has taken me so long to get done, that I feel like I owe everybody who has kept on pinging this site for a new episode. So I went ahead and put up what I managed to get done tonight. The rest won’t be up until late tomorrow (Monday) though. So you can decide if you want to see what’s done so far and be left hanging until tomorrow, or go ahead and peek now. I won’t officially announce the new episode until it is all done. At which point I’ll send out the notice to my mail list.
And…I have a complaint. Firefox for Linux isn’t displaying the PNG files I put up correctly. At least not the version I’m running here at Casa del Garrett on Mowgli. I was being so careful to get the web files just right…and they looked great on Bagheera (the art room Mac). Then I come upstairs to Mowgli and bring them up and they look horrible. I’ve no idea if it’s a graphics library issue on my particular machine or what. But the panels seem to display just fine on Firefox running on MacOS and Windows. They also display just fine in the KDE Konqueror web browser that’s running on Mowgli. So it isn’t the files I have out there. If the lines look a tad fuzzy in your browser let me know what browser you are using, on which OS, please. I may have to change the encoding on them if there is a big enough problem.
Back in the 1950s, William Clayton and Fred Ladd combined several films into one they serialized and syndicated to local TV stations for use on their daytime children’s shows. I was a pre-schooler and the stars in the night sky were fascinating. Mom bought me a little “Golden Nature Guide” book on stars…
…which, as you can see, I’ve kept all these years. That book I think, was my first step into the world of learning, and what it taught me about the heavens above was a revelation. The sky above was beautiful, mysterious, and yet understandable. My world, which until then compassed only the backyard of the apartment complex we lived in, and a small shopping plaza just down the street, suddenly became huge.
There were other kid’s space shows on TV back then, but The Space Explorers stuck in my imagination…largely for the beautiful imagery and background music Clayton and Ladd chose. One of the films they used was a Czech Russian educational film titled, Universe, which lent The Space Explorers some absolutely riveting (to my pre-school eyes) artwork of the stars, planets and moons. I have tried for years to get a copy of the whole, thing, but I suspect all the various copyrights to all the pieces Clayton and Ladd used to make The Space Explorers are just too hard to get all in a row and still make it worthwhile to put on DVD. But I am stumbling across more and more of the parts on YouTube now, and what’s impressive to me at age 55, is how detailed my memory of that cartoon serial was, compared with other things I watched from that period in my life.
In my scrap books are some of my earliest sketches and drawings and that little art deco spaceship is there among them. I tried for years to find a model of it somewhere. Finally, a small enthusiast shop, Fantastic Plastic, has come out with a model you can build. If this is the sort of thing that strikes your fancy, then you might want to explore their online catalog, as it is full of all sorts of spacecraft, well known and obscure, from science-fiction films past and present. I ordered two…one for practice since I haven’t built a model anything in years. For most of the 1980s I worked as a freelance architectural model maker and built custom models of new buildings and parks from scratch. So I’m not entirely without some skills in that regard. But by now they’re probably very rusty. The kits came in the mail last week and unpacking them, and examining the pieces, I could feel the seven year old boy inside of me get all wide-eyed and excited again.
I won’t paint them quite like I see in the shots on the Fantastic Plastic page, but it’ll be close. I want to try for an effect that’s more like smooth aluminum metal then silver paint. That’s what’s going to take some time investigating and practicing and why I bought two kits instead of just one. And the windows should look like they’re being illuminated from within, not dark. But as I can’t install lights in this thing that’ll be a trick to accomplish with paint. But with the right touch of the brush I think I can do it. Eventually one is going down in the art room, and the other in my office at Space Telescope. I’ll post some shots of the finished work here.
One more thing: As I was composing this post, I decided I wanted to include a scan of that old book on stars mom gave me back in my pre-school days, because it was one of those small but important things, a touchstone, for the direction my life would eventually take. I’ve said before that I was blessed in a way, to have entered school shortly after Sputnik scared the hell out of The U.S., because suddenly there was an emphasis on getting America’s youth a good science education. When I went to scan the book, I took another look at the back cover. Here it is…
Each guide has been written by an outstanding authority on science education… A lot of the information in that book, printed in 1956, is dated now. But the spirit is even more relevant now after decades of republican party and religious right assaults on science, reason and knowledge, then it was even at the height of the cold war. Science is not a dry collection of facts on display in a museum or a textbook. Science is a way of knowledge, where knowledge is understood to be something you actively discover, not something you passively receive. A science textbook is not a bible. It is not a political diatribe. It Wants to be challenged. You are Supposed to have questions when you finish it. And you are supposed to be unafraid to ask them.
My little golden book of stars. A relic of the cold war. It was a time in America of stifling, absolutely stifling conformity. But for a moment, for one brief and shining moment, the nation understood clearly, in the shadow of a nuclear, not biblical Armageddon, that the way you fight totalitarianism is by teaching your young to how to think for themselves, and that the pursuit of knowledge is a great adventure.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Louisiana has displaced Mississippi as the unhealthiest U.S. state and other Southern states were close rivals due to high obesity and smoking rates in new rankings that deemed Vermont the healthiest.
…
Many Southern states were clustered near the bottom of the rankings. The region has some of the highest rates of obesity, which contributes to heart disease, stroke, diabetes and some types of cancer, as well as high rates of smoking, which causes cancer, lung disease, heart disease and other problems.
One in five Louisianians lacked health insurance, while 31 percent were obese. It also suffers from high child poverty, infant mortality, premature death rate and cancer deaths, according to the report.
And if you think all that counts as a black mark against Louisiana’s political leaders…well…the GOP has something to say to you about that…
CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa — Last weekend, 18 days after Barack Obama decisively defeated their candidate for president, a mostly Republican crowd of self-described conservatives received their first introduction to someone many prominent members of the GOP think could be the party’s own version of Obama.
Like the president-elect, Gov. Bobby Jindalof Louisiana is young (37), accomplished (a Rhodes scholar) and, as the son of Indian immigrants, someone familiar with breaking racial and cultural barriers. He came to Iowa to deliver a pair of speeches, and his mere presence ignited talk that the 2012 presidential campaign has begun here, if coyly. Already, a fierce fight is looming between him and other Republicans — former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who arrived in Iowa a couple of days before him, and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who is said to be coming at some point — for the hearts of social conservatives.
"The Republicans really have no choice except to look at some people more youthful if they want to have a better chance of winning," said Betty E. Johnson, an independent and the wife of a Cedar Rapids pastor, who voted for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004 but who went for Obama over 72-year-old John McCain. "I liked Obama’s energy and hope. I don’t know, but maybe a younger person would give Republicans a feeling of more energy, openness."
Jindalof is a religious right nutcase who is still trying to get creationism taught as science in the public schools, and who participated in an exorcism when he was in college. Yeah…he’s sure to get the vote of the faithful. And never mind all that stuff about the health and welfare of the citizens of his state. None of that is more important after all, then their spiritual well being. Which is why the bible belt states routinely, invariably, rank at or near the bottom of…well…nearly every measure of civilized, industrial nation progress. Literacy… education levels… teenage pregnancy… STDs… domestic abuse… infant mortality… the general health of both adults and children… But on the other hand they don’t allow the gays to get married…so that’s a plus…right…?
It’s an article of faith among the kook pews that gays live half as long as heterosexuals, spread filth and disease, and cause the general breakdown of family and society. I guess Vermont hasn’t figured that out yet. Or Massachusetts. Meanwhile the bible belt is killing itself with righteousness. But what the heck, the world is coming to an end soon anyway…right? Loose the bible belt, and the rest of the United States is right up there with the rest of the industrial world in all these measures. Include them in, and they drag us into into third world territory…
Dan Savage takes note of the case of the California teenager who escaped his captors with the chain still dangling from his ankle, and complains, thusly…
Paul linked this in Morning News, but more details are emerging…
A husband and wife have been charged with torture and other counts after a bruised, terrified 17-year-old showed up at a gym with a chain locked to his ankle, claiming he had just fled his captors, authorities said Tuesday.
Kelly Lau Schumacher, 30, and Michael Schumacher, 34, were arrested late Monday, said Matt Robinson, a spokesman for police in Tracy.
They had been taken into custody for questioning earlier in the day at their home in Tracy, where the emaciated boy was allegedly held against his will. A search of the home turned up evidence implicating the couple, Robinson said…. Robinson said the boy was confused when approached by detectives Monday, unsure where he had come from and how long had been held against his will. He was taken to a hospital.
"The wounds he had and his physical condition as well as having a chain around his leg corroborated his basic statement that he was being held against his will," Robinson said.
Kelly and Michael Schumacher are legally married—and they can stay legally married, even if they’re found to be guilty of this horrendous crime. They can stay legally married even if the decomposing remains of twenty other teenagers are found buried in their backyard. Their marriage license cannot be revoked. If Michael dies in prison, Kelly can remarry—even if she’s serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. If Kelly decides to divorce Michael, he can remarry—even if he’s sitting on death row. He can remarry and divorce and remarry and divorce and remarry and divorce until he runs out of prison pen pals. Because the courts have declared that marriage is so fundamental a right that it cannot be denied to convicted rapists or to serial killers.
But it’s a right that’s denied to me and my boyfriend. Because we’re both men and that ain’t right.
What you have to understand, and I’m sure Dan Savage understands this perfectly well, is that killing twenty teenagers isn’t nearly as big a sin as loving someone of your own sex. You can sit on death row for torturing, killing, and eating an entire classroom full of children and still get sympathy from the kook pews. They forgave Susan Smith the moment, the instant, it was discovered that she, and not the black man she’d claimed, killed her own two boys by locking them in the family car and pushing it into a lake and letting them drown. Her stepfather, Beverly Russell, who had abused her since she was 15, was a figure in the South Carolina republican party, and the Christian Coalition, and after all Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven. But if someone splits your head open because they saw you walking down the street with your boyfriend’s hand in yours, you had it coming.
ScienceDaily (Nov. 18, 2008) — Amendments that restrict civil marriage rights of same-sex couples – such as Proposition 8 that recently passed in California – have led to higher levels of stress and anxiety among lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender adults, as well as among their families of origin, according to several new studies to be published by the American Psychological Association.
…
Participants reported feeling not just alienated from their communities, but fearful that they would lose their children, that they would become victims of anti-gay violence or that they would need to move to a more accepting community. Some of these anxieties were mitigated by social support.
For instance, one interviewee said he became "petrified …of being raped or roughed up or killed, you know, for doing nothing, basically. I worry about being picked out as a gay guy because my mannerisms are not entirely masculine." Another said the marriage amendment supporters were using the Bible "like a brick on us. They are beating us with it."
Social support from religious institutions, families, GLBT friends and heterosexual allies led most of the participants "to greater feelings of safety, happiness and strength," the researchers wrote.
And in the third study, 10 family members of GLBT people living in Memphis were interviewed regarding how anti-GLBT initiatives and movements had affected their family. Their responses were also grouped into clusters of similar themes.
"Some participants identified so deeply with their family member’s experience that they felt equally attacked by these movements and policies," the researchers wrote. "They considered themselves members of the GLBT community and experienced rejection by others for being a GLBT family member."
"Typically, we tend to think of anti-GLBT policies such as marriage bans and Proposition 8 as affecting only GLBT people. However, our research suggests that others in addition to GLBT people are also impacted by this legislation and sometimes quite negatively. For example, we learned that some family members experienced a form of secondary minority stress. Although many participants displayed resiliency and effective coping with this stress, some experienced strong negative consequences to their mental and physical health," said Jennifer Arm, M.S.
Emphasis mine. Hold that thought for a moment…
But of course…this is what was supposed to happen. When louts like Lee Benson call us "sore losers" don’t be fooled. They know exactly how we feel about having the knife in our hearts. We’re supposed to feel that way. And they take a good deal of self righteous satisfaction in seeing the impact hit. We are supposed to be sore losers. What we’re not supposed to do is fight back.
What anti same sex marriage amendments are supposed to accomplish, particularly in states where same-sex marriages, and same sex couples, have no legal status to begin with, is further alienating gay people from their communities and their families. That is the point. Not that we aren’t supposed to marry, but that we are not supposed to exist. God doesn’t want us here on this good earth. The faithful are only doing their part to insure that we understand this.
At some point, it all boils over. The wave of anger and revulsion after H8 passed was just a taste of what is to come if the religious right keeps hammering away at same sex couples. Rex Wockner was getting a tad jittery a few weeks ago at all the rage being vented by gay people against their tormentors. But it wasn’t just gay people who were out on the streets. I suppose he was worried that the haters would start killing us in retaliation or something. It’s easy to forget, because the deaths happen one lonely life at a time, that gay people are being killed all the time. The struggle turned violent a long time ago. Before Stonewall even. And that’s not counting the suicides. Humans kill themselves for a variety of reasons, most of which are personal and private. But when a people are constantly and relentlessly driven to it, you have to ask yourself if that isn’t a kind of murder too. There is already a lot of gay blood on the pavement. What happens next, is that straight blood starts splashing down on it too.
Take another look at this article. The stress is noticeably affecting the families and friends of gay people now too. What happened after election night this year, was that hundreds of thousands of our heterosexual family members and friends stood with us on the streets, angry and outraged at what they can see now, finally, at long last, is happening to their gay family and friends. What you have to understand is that isn’t going to make the haters back off. It’s going to scare them. And like the guy in Easy Rider said, it won’t make them running scared, it’ll make them dangerous.
Over at Pam’s House Blend, Pam is reporting that some of the righteous folks behind Proposition H8 are planning to take out a full page New York Times ad, to accuse gay people of a campaign of violence…
According to our source, the ad will cite an incident where a white powder was sent to a church, and "document" disruptions of services at houses of worship. The Becket Fund is also allegedly contacting like-minded anti-gay organizations to request that they sign on to the ad.
Matthew Shepard. Nicholas West. Scotty Joe Weaver. Barry Winchell. Thanh Nguyen. Michael Burzinski, Gary Matson and Winfel Mowder and Billy Jack Gaither and Brandon Teena and William Metz and Carl Warren Jr. and Aaron Webster and all the others listed Here …and all the tens of thousands of tens of thousands more whose names we know and whose names we don’t. A campaign of violence has been going on and on and on for generations against gay people. It is considered so unremarkable by the bigots, and by most of the country still, that when gay people start fighting back they can accuse Us of creating a climate of violence without even smirking. They’ve been looking the other way at violence toward gay people for so long, they really think we’re the ones starting it.
What’s coming next, is that the families and friends of gay people will start dying too, because the bottomless hatred that moves the bigot is unable to distinguish between queers and queer lovers, anymore then it was able to distinguish between niggers and nigger lovers back in the 1950s. The crime that finally shocked the nation during the struggle against race segregation in America, was the killing of three young civil rights workers in Missisisippi, two of whom were white. I prophesy now, that somewhere, right this moment, their hearts beating, young and full of life, are one or more heterosexuals who have an appointment with a bloody and grusome death in the jaws of the same mindless sub-human beast that has been killing gay people for generations. They will die for the crime of loving their neighbor as themselves. And when love is put to death for loving, what is left within the human heart to take its place? It isn’t the rage of gay people Wockner needs to be afraid of.
People who have been enormously lucky in love, and think the only reason anybody is ever single most of their lives is because they haven’t tried hard enough to get out and mix, are like billionaires who think the only reason anyone is ever poor is because they don’t want to work.
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