How To End A Telephone Conversation Before It Even Begins…
…with Me at any rate. Once again I am expecting a phone call on the land line, and once again I don’t have my glasses handy when the phone rings, to check the caller ID…
Me: Hello?
Oh-So-Friendly Telephone Voice: Hello…am I speaking to Mr. Garnet?
Me (warily): Are you with the landscaping company…?
Oh-So-Friendly Telephone Voice: No…I’m calling on behalf of…
Me: CLICK!
Garrett. Garrett.gar-it . Two ‘r’s, two ‘t’s goddamnit.
An individual’s body motion and body type can offer subtle cues about their sexual orientation, but casual observers seem better able to read those cues in gay men than in lesbians, according to a new study in the September issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
…
"We already know that men and women are built differently and walk differently from each other and that casual observers use this information as clues in making a range of social judgments," said lead author Kerri Johnson, UCLA assistant professor of communication studies. "Now we’ve found that casual observers can use gait and body shape to judge whether a stranger is gay or straight with a small but perceptible amount of accuracy."
Johnson and colleagues at New York University and Texas A&M measured the hips, waists and shoulders of eight male and eight female volunteers, half of whom were gay and half straight. The volunteers then walked on a treadmill for two minutes as a three-dimensional motion-capture system similar to those used by the movie industry to create animated figures from living models made measurements of the their motions, allowing researchers to track the precise amount of shoulder swagger and hip sway in their gaits.
Based on these measurements, the researchers determined that the gay subjects tended to have more gender-incongruent body types than their straight counterparts (hourglass figures for men, tubular bodies for women) and body motions (hip-swaying for men, shoulder-swaggering for women) than their straight counterparts.
In addition, 112 undergraduate observers were shown videos of the backsides of the volunteers as they walked at various speeds on the treadmill. The observers were able to determine the volunteers’ sexual orientation with an overall rate of accuracy that exceeded chance, even though they could not see the volunteers’ faces or the details of their clothing. Interestingly, the casual observers were much more accurate in judging the orientation of males than females; they correctly categorized the sexual orientation of men with more than 60 percent accuracy, but their categorization of women did not exceeded chance.
Emphasis mine. Why am I not asked to participate in experiments like these? This is the one area where my weak gaydar seems to work most reliably. I love to watch beautiful guys walk. There’s just something about the sight of the male body in motion. And in the gait, sometimes, I can just see it. Some guys just have a more beautiful, or at least a more attractive to my my eye, gait then others. The gay ones. Makes my heart beat.
There’s this Bob Segar song… I realize that, according to the story, he’s singing about about a specific person…but ever since it started playing on the radio, whenever I hear it I just mentally flip a pronoun and rock to it…
But oh, they love to watch him strut…
The play on words about how they all respect her, but…doesn’t quite work with the male pronoun so I end up mentally adjusting the lyrics further as the song goes on. But I seldom pay that much attention to the lyrics of a rock song anyway…it’s about the music, and the music of that particular song is just about right for watching beautiful guys walking. And sometimes you just find yourself following along…er…you know…to the rhythm of it…
But there’s a disquieting side to all this, that you also need to pay attention to…
The findings build on recent research that shows that casual observers can often correctly identify sexual orientation with very limited information. A 1999 Harvard study, for example, found that just by looking at the photographs of seated strangers, college undergraduates were able to judge sexual orientation accurately 55 percent of the time.
"Studies like ours are raising questions about the value of the military’s ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy," Johnson said. "If casual observers can determine sexual orientation with minimal information, then the value in concealing this information certainly appears questionable. Given that we all appear to be able to deduce this information to some degree with just a glance, more comprehensive policies may be required to protect gays against discrimination based on their sexual orientation."
The findings also are part of mounting evidence suggesting that sexual orientation may actually be what social scientists call a "master status category," or a defining characteristic that observers cannot help but notice and which has been scientifically shown to color all subsequent social dealings with others.
"Once you know a person’s sexual orientation, the fact has consequences for all subsequent interactions, and our findings suggest that this category of information can be deduced from subtle clues in body movement," Johnson said.
A lot of gay guys,,,myself included…just assume most of the time that we’re not really all that "obvious". In particular, those of us who grew up being fed a lot of stereotypes about swishing and limp wrists and lisping and that kind of crap, tend to assume that to the degree we don’t fit the stereotype, we’re probably passing. Well guys…it looks like they can see right through us anyway.
And in a world that’s been so relentlessly polarized, gays so relentlessly demonized by this kind of republican party crap…
…that can have, as the article points out, consequences.
Have you ever had a business interaction that all of a sudden just turned negative and you couldn’t quite put your finger on why? You’re talking to a clerk at a store somewhere, or trying to arrange to have some professional come and do some work on your house, or your car, or whatever, and suddenly they turn all cold and contemptuous and suddenly find a million excuses why they can’t sell you what you were looking for, or do the work for you that you need done? I’ve had that happen over and over again and usually I put it down to being a longhair in bluejeans and sneakers, and the lingering resentment some folks still feel toward the 60s counter-culture. But what if it really is homophobia?
It’s all too easy to fall into the suffocating trap of putting every negative reaction down to prejudice against gay people. But there’s another side to that coin and it’s called denial. I don’t think I have any obvious effeminacy to me, I’m no macho guy by any means, but I’ve always pictured myself internally as pretty much an average middle class, suburban American guy. Okay…so I don’t much care for sports. I love fast cars, firecrackers, and hard rock. I am a stereotypical male in so many ways, some pretty embarrassing. No…I don’t ask for directions. I hate shopping for clothes. Weekends when I’m cleaning house, I am always scolding myself for not picking up after myself like I should.
But maybe none of that matters anyway. Maybe none of it ever mattered. The clues are subtler, and they’re hard wired into us. The way we talk, the way we move, even according to this 60 minutes article, the way we sit…
Bailey and his colleagues set up a series of experiments in his lab at Northwestern University. In one study, researcher Gerulf Rieger videotaped gay and straight people sitting in a chair, talking. He then reduced them visually to silent black and white outlined figures and asked volunteers to see if they could tell gay from straight. The idea was to find out if certain stereotypes were real and observable.
Based on physical movement and gestures of the figures, more often than not, the volunteers in the study could tell a difference.
You can be flaming and you can be quiet and reserved and it doesn’t matter. You can be fabulous and you can be a geek whose clothes never seem to fit quite right and it doesn’t matter. The people we interact with on a daily basis may never even be aware consciously what it is they’re picking up on. They just know, somehow, that they’re dealing with a homosexual. And that can have consequences. Especially after so many elections where gay people were painted as the demons who were going to take over America, prey on children, spread AIDS and destroy marriage and family if the democrats won.
Uhm…I Don’t Think That Was God Telling You To Do That
Imagine a world where the major religions didn’t teach everyone that sex itself was innately wicked and sinful…that sin was only in hurting and taking advantage of others. Imagine a world where preachers didn’t teach people that their bodies are evidence of their fallen status, objects of shame, and not beautiful in their own right, to be taken care of and treated with respect.
SALAMANCA – A man cut off his own penis and threw it in a toilet ‘so he would stop sinning’.
The 30-year-old was recovering in the Hospital Clinico Universitario in Salamanca in western Spain.
…
The local newspaper La Gaceta reported when relatives called emergency services, he told ambulance workers he did it “so would not sin any more”.
…
He was bleeding heavily.
The newspaper said it was not known if the man’s penis could be sewn back.
There was also a suggestion he may be suffering from psychological problems.
I read crap like this and I just find myself shaking my head and wondering how the hell it ever came to this. What other creature on this good earth, besides us humans, punish themselves for feeling desire? I can’t believe that just having rational thought capable minds does this to us, because behavior like this just isn’t rational. If you could, in some imaginary laboratory, start the history of the human race over from day one, and run it as a simulation, would you still end up with the major faiths of the world teaching us to fear and loath our sexual nature, to the point where some people even mutilate themselves?
Trinity Preparatory School canceled its opening-night performance of La Cage aux Folles on Friday at the request of Bishop John Howe, head of the Diocese of Central Florida.
"His request was not to stage the production, and we decided to honor his request," said Headmaster Craig Maughan, who called off Friday’s and tonight’s planned performances. "I met with the cast and all the people involved in the production and announced the decision and explained it to them."
…
Howe, a leader of conservative bishops in the Episcopal Church, USA, has been vocal on issues of sexual orientation and in 2003 strongly opposed the election of an openly gay man as bishop of New Hampshire. That election, and the issue of blessing same-sex unions, has created a rift in the Episcopal Church.
I can appreciate Howe’s position regarding La Cage. The play has two central and very flamboyant gay characters in it. But the play is not about homosexuality. It’s about what happens when people are forced into pretending they’re something they’re not, to appease the cheapshit prejudices of others. It’s about the hypocrisy of the self righteous bigot. And even more unforgivably…it’s a comedy. It laughs at hypocrites. And as every pinched faced autocrat knows, it’s dangerous to allow students to laugh at hypocrisy.
I don’t know where, exactly, my copies of The New Yorker are printed, but I imagine it’s pretty far away. Yet somehow, each week, the magazine travels from the printer, to the warehouse, to the post office it is shipped from, then to my post office and, finally, to my personal mailbox. And then always, each week, as I take the new issue out of my mailbox, two subscription blow-in cards fall out onto the floor of the lobby.
I cannot figure out whether: A) the cards somehow know they’ve arrived at their final destination and refuse to fall out before then, or B) The New Yorker initially stuffs my magazine with dozens of these blow-in subscription cards and the others have all fallen out en route.
They aren’t stapled into the magazines of course, because the marketing departments figured out that when they fall out it makes you pay attention to them. Which really annoys me when they’re falling out of magazines I’m already subscribing to. And doubly so when it’s my monthly copy of Consumer Reports.
Warning…Fred’s blog post there also contains major earwormage. As you value your mental peace and quiet, Don’t Start That YouTube Video! Ask me how I know…
BROOMFIELD – It started with a simple question and ended with at least one student chanting "white power" in a classroom.
It happened Tuesday in a classroom at Holy Family High School, the Catholic school that sits at the corner of 144th Avenue and Sheridan Boulevard in Broomfield.
The classroom discussion started with the question: Why do students need to learn Spanish?
According to the Archdiocese of Denver, the conversation soon became about immigration and it turned ugly.
"It became a heated discussion and some rhetoric was used that was inappropriate for the classroom," said Jeanette DeMelo, spokesperson for the Archdiocese of Denver.
At least one e-mail sent to 9NEWS said that at least one student started a chant of "white power" and some said that all Mexicans should go back to Mexico.
There were Hispanic students in the classroom at the time. They asked to leave the classroom when the bigot explosion erupted. The school says they were allowed to leave. The students say they were forced to stay in the classroom and endure being trashed by the other kids.
The Archdiocese says they did not expect something like this to happen in their system, which has embraced its Hispanic students. Archbishop Charles Chaput has come forward several times in support of the Mexican community.
Right. Like you’ve embraced your gay students too I’ll bet. You teach contempt for one group of people, and next thing you know contempt just takes wing and flies wherever it damn well pleases, doesn’t it? Who’s your Jesus Charles…the one that loves all the children, or the one that loves some of them more then others?
Disgraced pastor Ted Haggard won’t be fundraising for a Monument nonprofit run by a sex offender, won’t be ministering to anyone and needs to get a job, his overseers said in a statement released this afternoon.
"Mr. Haggard’s solicitation for personal support was inappropriate," his church supervisors said in the statement.
The statement came one day after the four-member team of ministers responsible for overseeing the spiritual restoration of Haggard met with him in Phoenix.
Last week, Haggard had e-mailed a KRDO-TV reporter in Colorado Springs, asking that supporters send contributions to Families with a Mission, a Monument non-profit run by Paul Huberty…
Who upon further investigation, turned out to be…
…a twice convicted sex offender.
In his fundraising solicitation, Haggard said he was looking for people who would be willing to support him and his wife, Gayle, monthly for two years while they sought to obtain their counseling degrees from University of Phoenix.
Haggard had also told KRDO that he and his family were planning to move into the Phoenix Dream Center, a halfway house, where he and his wife, Gayle, would minister to the "broken people" there.
The overseers said Wednesday that Haggard will not be moving into the Dream Center.
"It was never the intention of the Dream Center that Mr. Haggard would provide any counsel or other ministry," wrote the overseers.
"Mr. Haggard will not be moving in or working with the Dream Center. He will not be doing any ministry. He will be seeking secular employment to support himself."
Take a bow, Dave Coffman. It was Coffman who discovered that Haggard had had directed his supporters to send him money via a convicted sex offender, and it was this revelation—which we broke here on Slog—that brought the wrath of Haggard’s overseers down on his head. Good work, Dave!
Oh, man. What a great day. I fucking live for the day when every asshole out there bilking gullible Christians out of their hard-earned dough—from the Nazi pope on down—is told the same damn thing: Get a fucking job, you parasite.
I’d just like to add that goes double for the folks who run PFOX, Exodus, Evergreen, and other assorted ex-gay ministries everywhere…and…especially you John Smid. Get A Fucking Job, You Goddamned Parasite!
Ninth Commandement? What Ninth Commandment…? (continued)
Oregon Magazine, they of such informative and thoughtful jourmalmalism like Hippies History Channel History is a Bad Trip ("They (the hippies) were all Leftists. Teenagers, young adults, old folks driving a spray-painted VW van — they were all the same."), the hard hitting online magazine bearing a picture of John Wayne standing in front of an American flag with the quote, "Now, just why in the HELL do I have to press ‘1’ for English?", brings us this alarming news about the Vast Homosexual Conspiracy…
Florida Mayor Jim Naugle has been under rapid fire assault from homosexual activists and liberal media for asking people simply to obey the law and to be responsible and respectful to families and children.
No shit…this crap showed up in Google News. And not just buried somewhere in the "all 3791 news articles" link, but right on the fucking news home page. I’ve noticed lately that whatever algorithm Google uses to determine what stories actually make the front page, it’s tracking a tad to the right…particularly when it comes to news regarding the gay community. Next thing I know I’ll be seeing press releases from PFOX. Oh…wait…I have. But more on that later…
Naugle, you may recall, is the prize jackass who in his last term as Mayor of Fort Lauderdale Florida, decided to go on an anti-gay jihad, accusing gay folks of making Broward County the nation’s AIDS capital and having public orgies in the beach toilets, despite being inconveniently contradicted on both counts by the Largest HIV/AIDS Healthcare Provider in the United States and his own police department. The Broward County Commissioners voted unanimously last week to remove the mayor from his seat on the tourism board for the damage he’s been doing to the attractiveness of the oceanside city to tourists, that they’ve worked so hard to cultivate since Naugle decided that Fort Lauderdale didn’t need to be a Spring Break destination anymore.
But the man has his defenders, at least in the "Now, just why in the HELL do I have to press ‘1’ for English" crowd, and Oregon Magazine would like us all to know that, in fact, having sex in public is just what the militant homosexual agenda is all about…
Members of the activist community in Fort Lauderdale and elsewhere are actually coming out in defense of public "gay"
sex. The homosexual legal group, LAMBDA Legal calls such public sex a civil right in their "little black book," and encourages such behavior.
The lousy formatting on that paragraph is theirs because I wouldn’t want to be accused of altering any of their breathless prose. And don’t bother clicking on the link they’ve provided because like the paragraph formatting and a lot of everything else that’s on the pages of Oregon Magazine, it’s a tad fucked up. But if you go to the Lamba Legal web site, and search for it, you can find the pamphlet they’re talking about, Here.
While Lambda Legal and other groups are fighting against the ways police target men who have sex with men, having sex where others might see you and take offense can subject you to arrest, publicity and other serious consequences. If you feel unsafe, you should leave.
Nowhere in that document is having sex in public called a civil right. The document is full of warnings about the risks involved, both legal and to your health, and the low probability of successfully fighting the charges.
Be aware that undercover cops may be “cruising” to arrest you. A cop doesn’t have to tell you he’s a cop, even if you ask. If you’re cruising for sex and an undercover cop hits on you, what you do can still be a crime. Don’t count on proving the cop “entrapped” you (which is difficult). Talk to your lawyer if you think you were set up.
How you can read the words "what you do can still be a crime" and think they say "public sex is a civil right", I’m not entirely sure, but I suspect it has something to do with wondering why you have to press ‘1’ for English. And it doesn’t sound very encouraging to me either. On the other hand if you’re the kind that thinks that just telling the accused that they still have…you know…constitutional rights…amounts to encouraging crime then maybe your mileage varies. Or maybe you’re just a dickwad. Say…what was that you folks were saying about hippies ….? Oh…yeah…
Hey, hippie. You want to see an authoritarian style, regimented, intolerant government? They’re all over the place. One type is dedicated to the ideas of Marx. The other is dedicated to the ideas of Islamic extremism.
Oh heaven forfend America should become anything like a Marxist dictatorship where people don’t have…you know…the right to talk to an attorney or anything…
And speaking of lying conniving dickwads…over at Ex-Gay Watch, it looks like they’ve caught PFOX telling another whopper giving people the facts about militant homosexuality…
This past Tuesday, PFOX posted some disturbing news. While innocently offering “materials on same-sex attraction and tolerance for the ex-gay community to a hungry public” at the Arlington County Fair, Arlington Va (Aug 15-19), they claim their representatives were viciously attacked, both verbally and physically, by “gay activists” who had also set up a booth at the fair.
Wow…that’s just so…so Wrong! Damn those militant homosexuals!
Since PFOX stated that the police were “summoned” and that they “ejected the gay man off the fairgrounds” we decided to check with the Arlington County Police Department. Focus on the Family reports through CitizenLink that “Officers kicked the gay activists out of the fair and encouraged the PFOX volunteer to press charges, but he chose not to.” So depending on the account, we have one or more officers responding to a complaint of assault, recommending that the victim file charges, and then ejecting one or more “gay activists” from the fairgrounds. Surely the Arlington PD would know if one or more of their officers participated in such an action. What good would it do to eject them if others in charge were not also made aware so they could make sure they didn’t come back?
We contacted the Arlington PD and ended up speaking with John Lisle of the Media Relations/Legislative Affairs Office. He had no initial knowledge of such an incident. After checking briefly, he again said that no one was aware of such an incident. So we sent a copy of the PFOX statement to him at which time he agreed to check more thoroughly. After over two days of research, there was nothing he could add to his statement; no report exists and no one recalls such an incident.
Whoops!
Ex-Gay Watch was also rude enough to check with Denise Marshall Roller, the Event Manager for the fair, who said that their call was the first she had heard that there were any problems of that sort at the fair…and she was there. Most of the time she said, near the officer in charge. So it would appear that not only do militant homosexual activists go around attacking decent people who only want to expose the sordid truth about homosexuality, they can also warp the space time continuum to conveniently hide their evil deeds after the fact. Or maybe they have the power to cloud men’s minds…
You will remember nothing of this incident…there was no vicious attack…
the PFOX booth was not disturbed…no homosexuals were at
the PFOX booth…there is no such thing as a homosexual…
Next thing you know they’ll be bitching about Why The Hell Do I Have To Press ‘1’ For Heterosexual…?
The best time for a telephone solicitor to catch me is when I’m expecting a phone call and I’m busy in the kitchen and the phone rings and I don’t have my glasses handy to look at what the caller ID is telling me…
Me: Hello…?
Oh-So-Friendly Telephone Voice: Hello…I’m I speaking to Mrs. Garrett?
Me: There’s no Mrs. Garrett here.
Oh-So-Friendly Telephone Voice: Oh…am I speaking to Mr. Garrett?
Me (icily): Who’s calling?
Oh-So-Friendly Telephone Voice: I’m calling from the American Diabetes Association…
Me(interrupting) : Oh….right…I still get those mailings… My mom passed away several years ago.
Oh-So-Friendly Telephone Voice: Oh. I’m so sorry. I’m just calling to thank you for your past support and to ask…
Me: CLICK!
The problem with cordless phones is you can’t slam them down when you hang up.
Sen. Larry Craig’s arrest shows that ‘Tearoom Trade’ is alive and well despite the progress of gay rights.
On June 28, 1969, when New York’s far-from-fashionable Stonewall Inn was raided, the patrons responded by fighting the cops. Although gays and lesbians had resisted before (often right here in Los Angeles), this Manhattan uprising served to jump-start the modern phase of the gay rights movement.
That movement, with its defiant insistence on being free to be as gay as all-get-out, quickly left the likes of Walter Jenkins and, if the cops were right, Larry Craig in the dust. They’re part of a subculture within a subculture that was memorably identified by the daring sociologist Laud Humphreys in a landmark sociological study titled "Tearoom Trade."
…
Published in 1970, "Tearoom Trade" is full of useful information about foot tapping, shoe touching, hand signaling and all the other rituals those so inclined use to make contact with one another in such places. Clearly no media outlet should be without a copy — especially Slate.com, whose editors revealed their cluelessness on the subject this week in a "real time conversation" rife with unintentional hilarity: "I can’t believe it’s a crime to tap your foot." "Can someone explain the mechanics of how two people are supposed to commit a sex act in a stall where legs are visible from the knee down?"
I have no idea either…and if you’re gay and you don’t either, then spare a moment of quiet thanks to all the street kids and drag queens who fought back at the Stonewall Inn that day in June 1969 (and now you know, in case you didn’t before, why Gay Pride Day (or Pride Week depending on where you live) usually falls in late June…).
It’s not making excuses for the likes of Larry Craig, to say that the behavior is understandable nonetheless. Ehrenstein is absolutely right about this:
…in the age of Ellen DeGeneres, Neil Patrick Harris, "Brokeback Mountain" and the smooching gay teens on "As the World Turns," bathroom cruisers seem almost antique. Today’s gays want to get married, and an airport men’s room is no place to propose.
Moreover, if what you’re "proposing" falls well short of marriage, there’s always the Internet. Larry Craig, meet Craigslist. In short, never has the admonition "Get a room!" seemed more apropos. It’s up to the I’m-not-gay(s) to discover the real freedoms fought for and won by the people they so fiercely claim they’re not.
I know what a lot of you guys were taught about homosexuals…I was taught a lot of that crap too. It’s bullshit. There is nothing wrong with you. You don’t have to keep flushing your heart down the toilet. The people you’re trying to appease by denying yourself, hate you anyway.
That stain you feel on your soul…it’s not yours. It’s theirs…the haters, the ignorant, the arrogant. They want you to think it’s a stain on you, they want you to feel unclean, every moment of every day. Because they hate you. They want you to consign your soul to the sewer, so they won’t have to look at the sewer they’ve made of their own souls.
You need to leave the toilet. Leave it to the purpose it was made for. The joy of sex does not belong there. Sex is wonderful. Sex is awesome. It is one of this life’s perfect joys. Get up. Walk over to the sink. Look in the mirror and say "I Am A Homosexual." You don’t have to say it with a flourish of pride, you just have to look yourself in the eye and say it. Then wash your hands. Wash them like you’re washing off every filthy lie about homosexuals you ever heard. Make yourself clean again. Because you Are clean. There is nothing wrong with you. There was never anything wrong with you.
Homosexual acts were punishable by death under Genghis Khan’s rule, according to researchers who spent more than a year compiling the legendary Mongolian conqueror’s code of laws, the official Xinhua News Agency said Thursday.
Article 48 of the code said men who "committed sodomy shall be put to death," according to experts at a research institute in the Chinese region of Inner Mongolia.
In the fall of 1955, the citizens of Boise, Idaho were told there was a menace in their midst. On Halloween, three men were arrested — accused of being part of a giant "sex ring" preying on teenage boys. There was no such ring, but the result was a widespread investigation which some people now call a witch hunt.
By the time the investigation ended, 16 men were charged with sex crimes — including men accused of having relations with other consenting adults. But countless other lives were also touched. In some cases, men implicated fled the area. At least one family actually left the country.
The investigation attracted the attention of "Time Magazine" and newspapers across America. In 1966, the book "The Boys of Boise" once again brought the cases to the nation’s attention. The "morals drive" — and the subsequent publicity — left scars which remain to this day.
When people scratch their heads over the behavior of men like Larry Craig, it helps to look back at the world they grew up in. I was lucky enough to have entered adolescence in the late 60s, just as the modern gay rights movement was taking shape, and so I was spared a lot of what those men had to live through. But I was close enough to it to have felt some of the venom, the relentless pathologizing of homosexuals by the culture of the 50s. When I was a kid, it was routine for newspapers, TV shows and movies to portray homosexuals in the ugliest, most psychotic ways possible. In films and on TV, the homosexual characters usually met violent ends, as Vito Russo documented in his landmark book, The Celluloid Closet.
What happened in Boise surely isn’t the only homosexual panic that occurred during the 1950s, that resulted in a witch hunt of gay men. The book, Sex Crime Panic, documents another one that happened, also in 1955, this time in Soux City Iowa. In that one 20 men were rounded up and committed for an indefinite period to a mental institution as "criminal sexual psychopaths", housed in a ward created especially to house homosexual men. Their only crime was being homosexuals, and having affairs with other consenting adults. Not one man incarcerated in that mental ward was there for the crime that originally set off the panic…the abduction and murder of two children. Those killers were never found and brought to justice. But nobody questioned the logic of rounding up a bunch of homosexuals and locking them away as a public safety measure.
It was most likely viewed back then, as the more humane alternative…
"Whoa, whoa, whoa. It ain’t goin a be that way. We can’t. I’m stuck with what I got, caught in my own loop. Can’t get out of it. Jack, I don’t want a be like them guys you see around sometimes. And I don’t want a be dead. There was these two old guys ranched together down home, Earl and Rich…Dad would pass a remark when he seen them. They was a joke even though they was pretty tough old birds. I was what, nine years old, and they found Earl dead in a irrigation ditch. They’d took a tire iron to him, spurred him up, drug him around by his dick until it pulled off, just bloody pulp. What the tire iron done looked like pieces a burned tomatoes all over him, nose tore down from skiddin on gravel."
"You seen that?"
"Dad made sure I seen it. Took me to see it. Me and K.E. Dad laughed about it. Hell, for all I know he done the job. If he was alive and was to put his head in that door right now you bet he’d go get his tire iron…"
-Annie Proulx – Brokeback Mountain
Larry Craig, born in Council, Idaho in July of 1945, would have been 10 when the 1955 Boise homosexual panic happened.
Phillips: And tell me about the type of people that you arrested. I mean, give – can you tell me – well, first of all, let me ask you, have you arrested anyone that is well known like a politician or someone of famous stature?
Tolleson: No, I wouldn’t say that. But we have arrested certainly some high-profile people. It ranged from CEOs, bank presidents…
Phillips: Oh, my gosh.
Tolleson: …professors, college professors. So, it really runs the gamut as far as who we actually apprehend and who has been involved in this in the past.
Phillips: Are they gay? Are all of them gay?
Tolleson: I can’t say. I can only tell you that a good majority of these men do have families. And that’s been a little bit shocking to us. You would think that it would be more of a gay issue. But overwhelmingly more and more we’re seeing that these are people with families.
(Emphasis mine) This is pretty much what a friend of mine, Jon Larimore who once ran the Gay And Lesbian Information Bureau BBS System back in the mid 80s to late 90s experienced. I did volunteer work on the BBS, which was created to be a news and information resource for the local gay community. It was funded by the non-profit Community Educational Services Foundation. Jon told me many times that he would get calls on the GLIB support phone line, late at night usually, from men who had just been arrested in a cruising zone, usually a men’s room that had been staked out by the cops, and were franticly looking for legal advice and support. Jon told me that almost without exception these were deeply closeted men who were terrified of their wives and/or families finding out.
It didn’t surprise me then, and it shouldn’t surprise anyone now. Even back in the 80s, before the Internet came along (and wiped out all the BBS systems), many of us who were out and comfortable with our sexual selves had already lived lives where we never felt compelled to journey into that pit. We had a burgeoning social scene, at least in the D.C. area, that was better then the seedy mafia run bars that were all gay folk had back in the early 60s, where we could meet other out and about gay folk. If all you wanted was sex, there was the bar scene where you could cruise to your hearts content, and sex clubs you could go to if you just wanted to dispense with the formalities. Even back then the tea room scene was almost exclusively populated by deeply closeted types who couldn’t imagine themselves being seen in going into a gay bar…and the kind who are turned on by the thrill of risk.
For those of us with a more Disney-esq yearning for romance and finding that soulmate to put your arms around, it wasn’t exactly the best of times, but it was light years away from the worst. And you could see a better place coming down the road as long as gay people kept fighting for the right to just be ourselves, openly, proudly. I stayed well away from the sex clubs, visited the bars infrequently, and mostly socialized online, and at parties and G.L.I.B. happy hours downtown with my fellow gay geeks. But I knew from hearing the stories, what was going on with the guys who frequented mens rooms. At least one vice cop is willing to acknowledge what his own experience is telling him. Which I guess is a good thing. But they should all know this by now.
…I would have been unable to resist saying that Republicans have shown no sign of believing in "the right to keep your own money" or in limited government or in a "strong defense". Allowing rich people and corporations to make use of (and often ruin) public services without paying for them is not giving you "the right to keep your own money"; in fact, it’s making you pay for the things they get more use from. Limiting the power of government to protect your Constitutional rights is not "limited government"; neither is allowing a president the power to summarily deprive individuals of those rights "limited government". Bankrupting the Treasury in order to give the DoD money it doesn’t need (and doesn’t spend wisely) while you go blow up other countries that posed no threat to the US is not "a strong defense".
Conservatives have always supported intrusive government, they have always endangered Americans by aggravating other countries, and they have always been very happy to collect taxes from ordinary working people and use that tax money to fatten the Malefactors of Great Wealth while depriving the rest of us of our freedoms. Those same people conned a number of libertarian-minded young people in the ’70s and ’80s into believing that conservatism was liberalism and vice-versa because a few intolerant lefties went overboard in their objections to morally reprehensible expressions of racism and sexism. I would have thought these kids would have grown up by now and realized that they’re still paying taxes but under the Republicans they’re getting less for them – and that’s before the bill for all that "strong defense" comes due. How dumb they have to be to think it makes sense to be both Republican and gay after all this just doesn’t bear thinking about.
I was one of those who were conned…right up until Reagan gave me a clear understanding of what kind of government we were likely to end up with when market forces become the moral standard and the rule of law bows to the rule of money. But I think the final nail in my libertarian phase’s coffin was the reaction of many of my ersatz fellow libertarians to the supreme court decision in Hardwick v. Bowers, that upheld the sodomy laws. I heard a lot of applause for the court standing up for state’s rights, while at the same time paying lip service to the proposition that individuals should be free to have whatever sex they wanted to, as long as it was mutually consensual. How, I asked them, don’t sodomy laws violate the fundamental libertarian principles of individual freedom and freedom of association? To which I got the standard "state’s rights" reply.
Me: But…sodomy laws are wrong…they’re evil…
They: The federal government has no business telling the states what laws they can pass.
Me: But…you Do agree that state don’t have the right to trample on the individual’s liberty…?
They: The federal government has no business telling the states what laws they can pass.
Me: But…states don’t have any more right to abridge the freedoms of the people then the federal government does…
They: The federal government has no business telling the states what laws they can pass.
…and so on. That was when I realized that a lot of libertarians were merely right wing conservatives cloaking themselves in libertarian rhetoric about individual freedom when it suited them. I’ve watched them play that game ever since. And amazingly, as President Nice Job Brownie has proven, they can rip the rights guarantees right out of our constitution, eliminate the right to a trial by a jury of our peers, eliminate access even to the courts, spy on Americans and laugh at the need to get a warrant, lie the country into war, assert that the government has the right to determine what is, and what is not a family, declare same sex couples to be legally strangers before the law with no recourse to marriage or even civil unions, and wave our tax dollars in our faces before stuffing them into their cronies pockets…and those gen-X knuckleheads who bought into it during the Reagan years will still insist that republicans and conservatives are for individual rights and democrats and liberals hate freedom and are for big government.
If Only You Didn’t Hate Us So Much…If Only You Could Just Not Hate Us Quite So Very Much…
Well you had to know this was coming. ABC News, the network that whitewashed the murder of Matthew Shepard, smearing a murdered gay kid as a meth addict who probably had sex with at least one of his killers, ABC News now tells us that the problem with Larry Craig isn’t so much that he was cruising for sex in toilets all the while promoting himself as a Family Values man, but that he was gay…and That’s What Gays Do…
Dig the headlines here. It’s the 1950s all over again as far as how ABC views the gay community. We’re all sex crazed perverts sulking around public toilets…
Public places like men’s restrooms, in airports and train stations, truck stops, university libraries and parks, have long been places where gay and bisexual men, particularly those in the closet, congregate in order to meet for anonymous sex.
Over time, people familiar with cruising told ABCNEWS.com, gay men began using a codified system of signals to indicate to others that they were interested in sex. In an effort to curb lewd acts in public — or as some gays argue, in an effort to persecute gay men — undercover police began sting operations in places known for sex soliciting and employed the same codes.
You have to read to the very end of the article before you get to this, sorta-kinda acknowledgment that this is a behavior characteristic more of the closet, then of gay people as a whole…
With many other options available for gay men to meet each other, Gershen Kaufman, a professor emeritus of psychology at Michigan State University and author of the book "Coming Out of Shame," said public cruising is practiced mainly by deeply closeted men.
"Cruisers are not sex offenders. They are deeply, deeply closeted. There is a lot of self-hatred and shame and they can’t allow themselves to come to terms with their sexuality.
The fact is that anonymous cruising areas are an artifact of the persecution gay people faced daily before Stonewall, when gay bars were routinely raided by the police, their customers rounded up like cattle and herded into paddy wagons, their names and addresses printed in the newspapers the following day. Back in those days you could loose your job, the roof over your head, be expelled from college or dismissed from a jobs program, be denied or have a professional license revoked, and be put on a sex offenders registry and be required to report any change of residence to the police…simply for being gay. This is why back then, many gay people gravitated to places where they could have sex anonymously: because being identified as a homosexual could have devastating consequences. Anonymous sex was seen as a safe outlet.
Back in the 50s, heterosexual sexuality had to conform to the nuclear family ideal, and gay sexuality was forced by fear and prejudice into a pattern of brief barren encounters. When the sexual revolution came along, heterosexuals broke free of the stifling conformity of the 50s, and felt free to explore their sexuality and find their own places of sexual joy and fulfillment on their own terms. I think a lot of gay people, seeing heterosexuals suddenly discovering the joys of sex for its own sake, mistook the culture of anonymous sex they’d been forced into for generations for a kind of liberation too. Well look at us…we were sexual pioneers all along and we didn’t even know it… No…we were outcasts, driven into the gutter by prejudice and hate.
While it may have seemed superficially back in the brutal 1950s that gays were having sex for its own sake, the fact was that we were a people whose sexuality was being brutally stifled. Gay people had sex in back alleys and parks and toilets back then, not because we were sexual pioneers way before the swinging 60s, but because the sex drive isn’t something that you can stifle in a mammal, let alone a primate, let alone a human being, for very long. It had to come out somewhere, and if that wasn’t in the normal human course of dating and mating, then it was going to be in quick, desperate assignations, because an instinct older then the fish was going to drive us, some how, some way, toward some sort of sexual joining, no matter how much fear and self loathing the culture managed to cram into our heads…and our hearts.
Sexual freedom was good for heterosexuals, and it was good for us too. But I think, especially in the years right after Stonewall, that a lot of gay people mistook the tea rooms for a liberation that we already had. No. It was repression. We are not a free people, if anonymous random hooking up is the only choice we are allowed. I get…trust me I get the fact…that there are gay people who feel that cruising for anonymous sex is liberation and getting married and settling down is a kind of sexual selling out. It’s bullshit. Anonymous sex is fine, whether you’re gay or straight, if that’s your sexual temperament. Not everyone is emotionally equipped for relationships, let alone monogamy. Fine. What was good about the sexual revolution, was that it gave our bodies and our libidos back to us. As long as people are decent to one another, to paraphrase Jefferson, it neither picks my pockets nor breaks my legs if the sex they’re having is not the sort of sex I would want to have myself. But we’re not all into that by any means, and if sexual freedom for heterosexuals meant that they could have all the casual sex they want, then it has to also mean that gay people can do the dating and mating thing if that’s what they want.
And that’s what’s been happening for the past couple decades, although you’d never know it to listen to ABC News. Gay couples have in a sense, and literally, been moving into the suburbs. They’ve been getting married. They’ve been settling down. Gay kids are playing the dating and mating game now, just like their heterosexual peers. Gay neighborhoods have coffee shops, grocery stores, boutiques, same sex couples walking their dogs, chatting about the weather, bellyaching about taxes and city services. The cruising zones have given way to online dating services.
I can see, in a really perverse way, how some gay men might think that holding on to toilet stall sex amounts to preserving some kind of gay cultural legacy. But it’s a legacy of repression and persecution, the verdict of bigots, not merely on our sexuality, but on our very hearts and souls. Homosexuals are filth… No. We are human beings. The men having toilet stall sex these days are almost exclusively deeply closeted people who are full of the fear and self loathing nearly everyone had back before Stonewall…back before Hooker’s study, and the APA removing homosexuality from its list of mental diseases…back when we almost all believed that we were sick, like everyone said we were…back when we hated ourselves.
"If only we didn’t hate ourselves so much…if only we could just not hate ourselves quite so very much…"
-Michael, The Boys In The Band
The fact that this kind of thing is still going on is proof that as far as we’ve come as a people, we still have a long way to go before we’re truly free. And if the likes of the republican party and their mouthpieces like ABC News have their way of course, we never will be. The problem wasn’t that we hated ourselves. The problem was never that we hated ourselves. To hate yourself is not the human condition. We were taught to hate ourselves. Because so many others hated us, and could never endure seeing us happy, contented, proud, and least of all…loved. What ABC News is trying to do here, is rekindle that hatred. So the day can come again when we can be taught to hate ourselves once more. So that one day we may once again come to believe that our sexuality, that our love lives, that we, belong in the sewer.
We’re The Moral Values Party…The Party Is The Moral Value…
Glen Greenwald has a good post up about the somewhat different reactions from the kook pews to Larry Craig’s first outing, verses his second…
The reaction to the Larry Craig story provides one of the most vivid illustrations yet of how the right-wing movement works. Last October, just weeks before the midterm election, gay activist Mike Rogers reported that the married, GOP "family values" Senator repeatedly had sex with anonymous men in public bathrooms. His report was based on "extensive research," including interviews with several men whom Craig solicited for bathroom sex.
As Rogers argued at the time, the story was relevant — just as the Vitter prostitute story was — in light of Craig’s frequent political exploitation of issues of sexual morality and his opposition to virtually every gay rights bill. Rogers’ story, as a factual matter, seemed relatively credible, both because of his history of accurate outings and because there is no discernible reason why, if he were intent on fabricating, he would single out someone as obscure as Larry Craig, who was not even up for re-election.
Nonetheless, it is hard to overstate the intense fury that this pre-election report triggered from the Right — not at Senator Craig for engaging in this behavior, but at Rogers for reporting it.
The "Then" and "Now" examples Greenwald gives make it sickeningly clear that the problem for the Party Of Moral Values was the election, and not Craig’s behavior.
Last year, in excoriating Mike Rogers for reporting about Craig’s bathroom sex, Dean Barnett said:
I’m sorry if this topic causes embarrassment to Larry Craig and his family, but I assume by now they’ve figured out that politics in 2006 is a thoroughly rotten business. . . .
THE FIRST LEFT WING PATHOLOGY "OUTED" by the Craig story is the relentless meanness that characterizes modern day liberalism. . . .BUT MOST DAMNING OF THE LEFT is the casual assumption of group-think that this exercise demonstrates. The logic is that if you’re gay, you must therefore support gay marriage. What’s more, you must support everything that someone like Glenn Greenwald supports. To do otherwise evidences self-hatred and a betrayal of the cause.
But today, Barnett — based on reports of the exact same behavior from Craig — demanded that Craig resign from the Senate and said this:
AS TO THE SERIOUS QUESTION OF whether or not Senator Craig should resign, that one’s a no-brainer for someone like me who thought David Vitter should have stepped down. To lead millions of people, one needs at least a modicum of moral stature. Both politicians forfeited that stature when they engaged in their off-campus hijinks . . . .
Vitter falls into the same category. You can’t preen as a moralist and then seek out the services of a prostitute. If Vitter (or Craig or Clinton) had positioned themselves as libertarian libertines, then their private diddlings would have been none of our concern. But all three made a habit of saluting good old All-American family values. How a ranking public office-holder can be so thoroughly revealed as a hypocrite and still cling to his position is beyond me.
I would honestly pay money to watch someone try to reconcile those two positions. Last October, Barnett depicted Rogers as an "odious presence" for violating Craig’s privacy based on purely private behavior that was none of anyone’s business. Today, the same Barnett demands that Craig resign from the Senate, and invokes exactly the rationale which Rogers and other "outers" use to justify these disclosures ("How a ranking public office-holder can be so thoroughly revealed as a hypocrite and still cling to his position is beyond me").
Finally, and rather hilariously, Barnett defends Hewitt’s demand that Craig resign but Vitter need not as follows: "Where one draws the line on such matters is arbitrary, so I don’t think anyone’s being hypocritical if they say Vitter can stay and Craig must go."
Apparently, what matters is to have moral standards, even if they are completely incoherent, arbitrary and applied solely to suit one’s personal biases and political interests [Vitter’s resignation would be for heterosexual encounters and would lead to appointment of a Democratic replacement (hence Hewitt opposes it), while Craig’s resignation would be for gay sex and would lead to a GOP replacement (hence Hewitt favors it)]. It might be totally "arbitrary," says Barnett, but at least it is a moral standard.
Right. As Garrison Keillor said after the 2000 "election" of President Nice Job Brownie, they’re republicans first, and Americans second. What benefits The Party is morally right, because it benefits The Party. That’s the standard. Everything else from God to Abortion to Same Sex Marriage is just a hook to get the rubes into the voting booths. They don’t give a good goddamn about any of that. They just want power.
This blog is powered by WordPress and is hosted at Winters Web Works, who also did some custom design work (Thanks!). Some embedded content was created with the help of The Gimp. I proof with Google Chrome on either Windows, Linux or MacOS depending on which machine I happen to be running at the time.
