I’m doing episode #36 of A Coming Out Story in a different style from the rest of the series…kinda like how I did it with the “Conversation With God” story arc, where I used a lot of grey tones instead of my usual cross-hatching.

There’s a panel I finished this morning of me walking across the railroad tracks behind what was the old Radio Shack building, and I did a bunch of stuff with it I’d never done before, and made up a lot of new tricks for accomplishing certain textures and such. The lighting is harsh because I’m walking into the setting sun, low on the horizon, and it really pops out in a way nothing else I’ve done on the story does. I wasn’t sure why I was spending so much time and effort on it other than the tracks were an important part of my life there and that was a shortcut to Congressional Plaza that I walked often that doesn’t exist anymore. I wanted to do a piece of my history justice.

But looking at the finished panel I think I see how it works in the story. There was a meaning there that must have been working on me subconsciously and it’s about what this episode is about, and actually the entire story. This is me stepping across a boundary that cut between my neighborhood and that of almost all my friends back then. The old kid from the other side of the tracks stereotype. I’m a gay teenager walking from one world into another. From denial to…I dunno…something else…something much Much better…but still pretty iffy given it was 1971.

Some of my best work on A Coming Out Story is in the episode I’m going to post here soon. I’ve just one more panel to finish and I can put a link up.

Once upon a time not all that long ago, you could not find any merchandise anywhere in any of the Disney parks with anything like the gay pride rainbow on it, let alone the older lambda gay activists used to used as their symbol. Gay Days began in Disneyland back in the 70s as a response to same sex couples being thrown out of the park for dancing along with the rest of the couples. We did a “zap” and hit the dance floor en masse, everyone in on it wearing red shirts so we would know who was there for the zap. It worked, and after that it became a yearly thing that eventually spread to all the parks.

A certain someone who used to work here at Disney World once told me that gay days was one of their biggest yearly money makers. But there was no official recognition. Whenever culture warriors bellyached about it Disney’s response was that they’re in the hospitality business and everyone was welcome.

Back then the closest thing to a pride rainbow you could find around here was a specific Mickey pin with the peace rainbow on it that was close enough that gay visitors would wear it.

That was all there was for us. But in every other way the parks and the cast members made us feel welcome here during gay days. We had private parties at Typhoon Lagoon. We had hotel chains all around the parks vying for our business. Gay Days itself became a business. But coming out and actually acknowledging us was a step too far for corporate.

Then the massacre at the Pulse nightclub happened. It shocked the entire city, and especially the park workers and management. It seemed like everyone here either knew someone who was there that night, or knew someone who knew someone. I’d had a vacation planned for the month after and I saw the lingering shock on everyone’s faces here. And I heard stories. Horrible stories.

That changed things. The very next year they retired the peace rainbow mickey, and actual Pride rainbow merchandise appeared. And it seems that every year they add something new to what they’re calling here the Pride Collection. I especially like my coffee mug at home that says, “Belong, Believe, Be Proud.”

It’s a slogan they’re putting on other items now too.

Disney has taken a lot of grief for speaking out against DeSantis’ Don’t Say Gay law, and it looks very much to me like they are Not backing down and I am not going to walk away from the Parks simply because they are in Florida. And I’m pretty sure the DeSantis crowd remembers the day Pulse happened a little differently than the rest of us do, if at all. I remember some pulpit thumper yapping that he was sorry more of us weren’t killed that day. Given all the vitriol that’s been vented toward us since Disney spoke out I am certain it’ll be lots worse this coming June. There will be demands that the Pride merchandise go away. There will be demands to keep LGBT guests out of the park, or at least toss any of them out for something as simple as holding hands in public. Given the blood thirsty rhetoric coming out of the Florida GOP there could easily be violence. I am tempted to delay my California trip until after Pride just to come down here and document the goings on with my cameras.

So. I can appreciate the position that I shouldn’t be contributing to the Florida economy while the governor and the statehouse are so nail spittingly hostile toward us. But I am standing with Disney, because Disney stood with us, and still is. And if that bothers anyone I am not in the least bit sorry.

Here’s what I saw yesterday while strolling in Hollywood Studio.

A couple teenage girls, vaguely goth-ish, saw this and one of them remarked on how amazing it all felt to her. I saw the look of joy and wonder on her face. She looked like she’d been lifted up like she never had before. I remember how it was for me.

They can turn Florida into a ghetto of hate, but there is a world outside its borders and it’s a small world after all. And there really is a great big beautiful tomorrow shining at the end of every day. And we will not be shamed into silence anymore.

Belong, Believe, Be Proud.

…even while on vacation. Sort-of. What does “vacation” even mean when you’re retired? It means you needed a change of scenery. And I badly needed one. So here I am.

Garrett family of one, all checked in to Port Orleans Riverside. New Orleans slow jazz playing on the room TV.

I could get very used to going back to this way of staying here. This was how I stayed before I bought into DVC. The mid grade resorts are very nice, and being retired I can go whenever the rates go down. I’m only missing the kitchen, but I’ve ways of dealing with that.

Still working on ACOS #36 while here at Disney World. I’ve done this sort of thing many times before and I know exactly what to bring. Here’s the setup I had while I was staying at B.

Got another ACOS #36 strip done just now and posted to my website. That’s three done and three more to go.

I’m not posting a live link to the new episode until it’s all finished and I’m good with what’s out there. But those of you handy with all this Internet Web stuff can figure out what the link will be from how all the others in this project are constructed and see the work in progress as I post new ones if you want.

Think I might take a stroll around the resort now and decompress. Port Orleans Riverside is pretty nice. Going to Epcot later.

I had dinner at the Riviera with some friends from Space Telescope a couple days ago. The restaurant is on the top floor of a really nice DVC hotel and the view from the terrace is spectacular.

I had their signature fish dinner. No photo because I was too busy digging in. It was Wonderful. They took me to the steakhouse at the Yacht Club yesterday.

Not a lot of Pride merchandise here now, but it’s there if you look.

I’m guessing it’s because a lot of space is being taken up by the park celebration of Women’s History Month. And they’re really going all in on it with displays and (of course) merchandise celebrating the women who’ve contributed over the decades to Disney films and park designs. I stop to read all of it and it’s just stunning how much of it there is in Disney history that’s been behind the curtains all these years.

The new Magic Band+ is really something. It pairs with your smartphone and is rechargeable. You can check the battery level and update the software on your smartphone. So it’s not just a simple short range RF device that dispenses a serial number attached to your Disney account anymore, it’s yet another smart device.

Battery charge only lasts three days and they say to keep it on its recharger overnight while in the parks. The original Magic Bands lasted several years but they didn’t do much except dispense a serial number.

Of course making a big display for Women’s History Month isn’t going to make the MAGA morons any happier with Disney and that’s good (we’ve all read about how they’re blaming the failure of Silicon Valley Bank on its “woke” board of directors…right?). I expect the Pride stuff will come back out in June. We’ll see how DeSantis responds. It’s not generally understood how much he backed down from his threat last year to take away Disney’s special improvement district.

This is a hard one to get out, largely because I am so emotionally invested in it and I want it to be exactly right. So each panel of it is a Lot of work. And adding to that is I can’t use any of my usual time saving copy and paste tricks. Nearly everything in each panel is unique from all the others. The only exceptions are the backgrounds of three of them, one of which I’ll show you here. This is the second from the last strip up in GIMP, which I’ve been using ever since Adobe stuck an eight-hundred and fifty dollar knife in my back…

I’m breaking a rule I had when I started this cartoon story, that I would always use cross-hatching for shading and textures and such. I wanted the story to be a visual nod to the black & white underground comix back in the day. The printing they used wasn’t always the best, but they made it work, sometimes with zipatone, but more often just by painstakingly (really Really painstakingly) cross-hatching.

But for this one episode I’m using the paintbrush and grey tones here and there, to make some of it snap out, but also to create a distinctive change in mood. I used to do a lot of that in Photoshop, but you can’t depend on anything from Adobe, nobody can, so I switched to GIMP and other open source artist tools, and this is the first time I’ve done something like this with a gradient in GIMP. It worked perfectly.

This episode is forming up almost Exactly as I’d visualized it back in 2005, when I set out to do this story. It’s been a long road and I’ve rewritten many parts of the story as I’ve gone along, but not this part. This is, as The Doctor would say, a fixed point in time. This, and one other, which I hope to also get to soon. I’ve said the story I’m telling is one third what actually happened, one third artistic license, and one third pure imagination (as in the parts involving my libido and left/right brains as imaginary figures). This is the part that really happened just this way.

I was having a lot of trouble and frustration with one of the panels I was working on the other day, and when that happens it helps to work for a while on a different part. Some classmates might recognise the place I’m looking at into the sunset there. There, at the moment of truth.

Things I see whilst walking in my neighborhood…

Friend of mine says this place has Edgar Allan Poe’s autograph. I wouldn’t doubt you could hear the beating of a heart under its floorboards.

I can be stubborn. And especially when it comes to something like this. A few years ago at the Marketplace Co-op in Disney Springs I saw a display selling customized protective cases for your smartphone. You could get one with all sorts of Disney artwork on it, and you could buy it with your name printed on it. They had a machine that printed them up to order right there. In the display was one of their Disney Pride examples.

You have to appreciate how Disney’s marketing to gay folk makes a kid that came of age when I did feel. Sure it’s commercial, but I was there the month after the Pulse shootings and I saw how shocked everyone down there was. All that down low wink, wink unspoken acceptance of their LGBT guests changed almost overnight. It’s a small world after all.

So the moment I laid eyes on that smartphone case I had to have one.

It’s been on my iPhone Xs for years, but suddenly last December its plastic frame started breaking apart. I was in California and my brother did his best to glue it back together for me. When I got it home the frame simply started breaking apart in other places. I’ve had this experience before with other things made of this hard plastic, and I knew it would only get worse.

Many years ago I bought what was then a very expensive Minolta dImage 7hi. At the time the first affordable digital cameras were coming out and that Minolta had excellent specs. It was a great little camera, I took it with me on a bunch of road trips. But it was made of this same sort of hard plastic that just starts falling apart all of a sudden.

So there was no fixing that smartphone case and I started looking for a replacement. Disney sells a bunch of Pride merchandise including smartphone covers, but the iPhone Xs is so out of date now I couldn’t find another one. I tried looking for something like it from a third party but ran into the same problem.

Apparently the Xs is already vintage. It’s even hard to find generic cases for it, but I figured I’d try one of those and simply move the custom printed back panel to a new case. It took a lot of searching but I finally found a case that had a transparent back cover that I thought would do the trick. But…no. When the case came I discovered that it was so tightly fitted to the phone I couldn’t put the Disney Pride insert into it and close the case around the phone again. It was too thick. And…being made of that same hard plastic, it was also beginning to come apart at the edges.

So I went though the usual period of being distraught and then getting all stubborn. Okay, thinks I…maybe I can scan in the artwork and print it out on a piece of photo inkjet paper.

A little scanning and GIMP-ing and printing, a little X-Acto work (all those years spent as an architectural model maker still come in handy…) I had my new Pride insert. It fit…barely. And what I ended up with was artwork that was actually more vibrant than the plastic insert I got at the Marketplace Co-op.

I ever get a new iPhone I can probably copy the artwork to a new sheet of photo paper and put it into whatever generic transparent case I can find for it. I’m set. Yes, there are other newer designs out there for the new iPhones, but I like this one.

This is bouncing around on the schadenfreude channel…

Go read it Here. You wouldn’t need to have Mentor of Arisia’s visualization of The Cosmic All to know this was going to happen eventually. But you would have had to know where Dreher was getting his money from. Now we do. We can adjust our visualizations accordingly.

Seriously…what’s really significant about this article is something the public really needs to be more aware of. A good many of these high profile right wing republican pundits are funded entirely by a single hyper rich benefactor. Usually those benefactors stay behind the curtains and the pudit is seen to be paid for their work by the publications their columns appear in. But…no, and Dreher’s case is instructive. Most if not all of the right wing swamp publications operate at a loss. They get funding in various discrete ways from those same hyper extreme, hyper rich benefactors. Now we know those same benefactors also pay the columnists they love outright as well. Dreher’s columns appeared in The American Conservative, but his paycheck came exclusively from the hyper rich and hyper extreme Howard Ahmanson.

Ahmanson came across my radar long ago as a source of funding for anti-gay and religious extremist politicians and political action groups. Back then he was a supporter of R.J. Rushdoony’s “Christian Reconstructionism” movement, an offshoot of Calvinism, which holds that the second coming doesn’t happen until after God’s kingdom is established here on earth, neatly reversing what evangelicals believe the end times timeline to be. Reconstructionists intend the world to be governed by Mosaic law wherein blasphemers, adulterers, homosexuals and disobedient children, among others, would be stoned to death. Ahmanson almost never gives interviews…apparently he suffers from Tourette’s Syndrome…but as I recall, in one he averred he had moved on from Rushdoony. But who really knows?

That Ahmanson found joy in Dreher’s writing is highly unsurprising. That the breakup came when Dreher couldn’t stop himself from talking about black men’s dicks is also in its way unsurprising, given the rumors surrounding Dreher which I won’t repeat here. It You could say it was preordained.

This is making the rounds. I’m pretty sure what her religious reasons are for not wanting to use Windows and Apple computers. I used to joke that Leviticus forbids operating systems that support multiple threads, but this is about the LGBT friendliness of these companies, and perhaps to a degree the progressive/democratic politics of their boardrooms.

Employee claims she can’t use Microsoft Windows for “Religious Reasons”

I recently hired a new employee for my team. Everyone thinks she is a great addition, and she is clearly very talented as demonstrated in her interviews.

The problem came up during on-boarding when we supplied her with her company laptop. She said she would need it configured in a Linux based operating system because her religion does not allow use of Apple or Microsoft owned operating systems. We only currently have hardware configurations for MacOs/Windows and our expectation was that she will use Windows along with the rest of our team.

She says that she can fulfill all job duties without Windows and I am inclined to believe her but corporate policy dictates WINDOWS and my management is not on board with her request for Linux.

What actions can either (1) I take as a manager to protect her rights and get upper management onboard with her religion or (2) I take against her with management for failing to fulfill her job duties?

I’ve never come across any situation like this and am completely confounded as to how I should handle this.

Tell her your transgender IT support person will set her up with the computer of her choice. Then see what happens.

In the current issue of Consumer Reports I see that Mercedes automobiles are on their shit list again in terms of reliability. There entire US lineup is rated below average reliability. It’s like they’re back in the later 90s/early 2000s again. What a shame. On the other hand when it comes to used cars the E Class from 2013 to 2019 is in their “Used Cars We Love” list for better than average reliability. Those are the W212s, which mine is…a 2012…and it was always getting top marks on reliability, but CU isn’t going back that far in time now. I’m getting close to 180k on the odometer and the car is still a champ. But I do the maintenance.

I’m taking Spirit back out to California this spring. This time I want to try driving through a bunch of northern states bordering Canada that I’ve never been to. The big open road trip is what these diesels were made for. Hopefully I’m still up to it.

So soon after my one year of retirement anniversary, like a mugger, March 6 is waiting just around the corner. Where do the years go? 

I stayed so long after closing one night enjoying the company of someone in Germany (Epcot) that cast members had to escort stragglers away from World Showcase and toward the exits, lest we get eaten.

Just a couple short years later I was the one eating. Eating a Very Nice Kobe Steak at the Brown Derby, when I got your angrygram. Never contact me again in any way shape or form… I have a question. How do you contact someone with a shape? I can see ways, and I can see forms, but shapes? By way of reply to your tetrahedron of March 6 please review the enclosed dodecahedron… Thing of it was, I hadn’t said anything to you that day that I didn’t many times before. You knew. You remembered. It was okay. We would chat for hours on the phone, toss emails back and forth (hope you’re still enjoying the Nissan Leaf. Bunch of Teslas with charging stations in my alleyway these days) and photos (still not sure what you meant by sending me that picture of the beach), sit together for a while after hours and chat happily. But that was when our conversations were private.

So here comes another March 6. And oh look…in the New And Improved Rockville (Now North Bethesda!) there’s an upscale Brazilian steakhouse not far from the old homesteads! Perfect for a day of remembrance.

Such a perfectly styled coiffure. You should start wearing it long again, now that you don’t have the Mouse to answer to.

Finally…Finally…I got the pencils all done for A Coming Out Story episode 36. Tomorrow I’ll start on the inks and shading. The rest of it should go faster now. It’s the pencils, where the artwork begins, that I always have to struggle with the most.

Probably still another couple weeks before it’s up…

This from the Washington Post…

Musk defends ‘Dilbert’ creator, says media is ‘racist against whites’

The Tesla and Twitter chief blasted media outlets for dropping Scott Adams’s comic strip after the cartoonist’s rant against Black people

It’s to the point now where all you need to see is the name associated with the news item and you know pretty well what it’s going to be about before you even read it. Musk is is one of those and so is Adams and that still hurts a bit because I used to love Dilbert. But that was back when I saw it as Dilbert being a somewhat naive computer geek like myself, surrounded by assholes the cartoonist was making fun of. It seems that over time Adams began to identify more with the assholes than the geek. I think it was when I saw the cartoon comparing a woman breast feeding a baby in public with a man pissing on flowers to water them that I began tuning him out. It was one of those things that tap you on the shoulder saying look at that…no really look at that… But there was still the occasional cartoon strip I found hilarious. Then he went all in for Trump, who was like the pointy haired boss personified and amplified and I just closed the book on him, wondering how much of what I enjoyed in his cartoons was really there to begin with.

That’s the way it is with artists and creators you come to love and enjoy. What you see in their art is what you experienced seeing it and it’s mostly you. It isn’t necessarily what the artist themselves put into it or intended. But at least Adams was a creator. Musk on the other hand, is just rich.

He bought his way into Tesla and eventually kicked out its founders. SpaceX was born on his money and his need to cut the cost of rocket launches so he could start a garden on Mars. But it was built with the rocket engineering talents of others who came from the industry. Both those companies, so I’m told, had a board of directors and staff whose only job was to manage Musk’s mood swings and nutty ideas and try to keep him focused. In Twitter we’re seeing him totally in control and unfiltered, really for the first time. And it’s really a squalid sight to see. 

They say men don’t change, they reveal themselves. But if money is power, then absolute money also corrupts absolutely. This is a man who never really developed any internal brakes, and now all the possible external ones are gone. Maybe that’s what happened to Adams too, but with a lot less money.

Replying to tweets about the controversy, Musk said it is actually the media that is “racist against whites & Asians.” He offered no criticism of Adams’s comments, in which the cartoonist called Black people a “hate group” and said, “I don’t want to have anything to do with them.”

I’m sixty-nine years old and knocking on the door to seventy. You have to appreciate how familiar this all feels to someone who actually lived through and remembers the civil rights protests of the 1960s. The white backlash rhetoric has never changed. Every tiny improvement in the status of racial minorities in this country, every miniscule effort to uncover and learn from the history of slavery and race segregation in America, has been met with howling about reverse racism from the usual suspects. None of it sounds any different than it did back then.

I did not expect my golden years to look so much like my childhood…

We are not anti-negro…

I will usually let the calico stay inside when it gets close to or below freezing outside now. This has been a long time coming. It was several years ago she would not come inside at all, and just a couple years ago she would not stay for more than it took to look around and quickly exit. Now she will stay overnight if it’s really super cold outside, and she will come in for a while during the afternoon if it’s cold enough outside.

While inside, she usually stays on the first floor, though in recent weeks she has taken to exploring the second floor, and even coming upstairs while I’m in my den to insist on being paid attention to, and then maybe to be let back out. Often when it’s an overnight I’ll come out of the bedroom to see her laying on the floor at the top of the stairs. She’ll give me until about nine before she starts meowing that it’s time for me to get up and let her out.

But things have reached the point here, where if the calico is inside napping in her bed, and I’m upstairs working, and she hears me close the upstairs bathroom door, it isn’t long before I hear her yowling outside the door demanding I open it so she can see what’s going on. This morning it escalated to paws under the door.

(sigh) Cats! Everything you think is only a behavior of domesticated cats is a misunderstanding. None of them are domesticated. Some of them just choose to live among us, and we let the ones in that are too small to eat us.

Cute young guy trying to take a picture of himself in the kitchen mirror with his first 35mm SLR…

I was going through my archives looking for more shots around Congressional Plaza for the next episode of A Coming Out Story and I came across this and zoomed in and I thought…wow…did I really look like Finn Wolfhard back then??

This would be sometime in 1971. I’m either 16 or 17. I’ve got the Petri on a tripod in the dining room pointed at the large mirror over the kitchen sink. I’m guessing I did it that way because the light in the dining/kitchen was better than in my bedroom. At this point I’m still just finding my way around 35mm film photography. I may have just bought the Petri.

I dug up the roll and I can tell from the way I sectioned off the negatives I hadn’t even begun my catalogue system yet. The catalogue entry says “Date Unknown”, that it’s tri-x pan and that I’d developed the roll in D-76. “Date Unknown” is what I put on the stuff I’d developed and stuck into #9 letter envelopes before I got serious enough to safely store and work out a catalogue system for them. They’re not all in great shape.

I’m trying really hard to get the pencils and inks done, finally, for ACOS episode 36 done, and it’s really driving home how necessary it is to have reference photos. I took lots of photos of the apartments I lived in back then, but precious few of the area around them and so much has changed over the years I can’t just go visit and take a few reference shots.

Right now I’m really regretting I didn’t get some shots of the shortcuts I used to take to walk across the railroad tracks to get to the Giant or to Congressional and the Radio Shack before they started building Metro. Nothing there is like it was. There was an old wooden bridge over the tracks I could walk across to get to the Giant from Wilkins that they took down years ago. I discovered it was part of an old abandoned roadway that connected Rockville Pike (Montgomery Avenue back then) to the old school and then to Parklawn Cemetery. You could still see fragments of it in the woods and near the Pike back when I was a teenage boy. It’s all gone now. The entire area where I walked across the tracks to Congressional is now the Twinbrook Metro station.

Nothing is like it was. I can’t just go down there and take some shots of the old neighborhood. The old neighborhood, except for the apartments anyway, is not there anymore. Somehow I need to recreate it. Or at least a good enough representation that I can be satisfied with it.

Nothing is like it was. I’m not like I was. Just look at that photo! Wish I’d known how cute I was back then, I might have flirted with a little more confidence. Of course back in 1971 that could have got me killed.