I’m going to steal this shtick from Atrios, but I don’t think he’ll mind…

So I make myself some coffee and open my dead tree version of the NY Times this morning only to see a call for blogger ethics on the front page. How interesting. Another call for "managed civil speech" (which is claimed to be "freer" than unfettered free speech.) There was no word on who would be the managers of such speech, but I think we can count on those who call for it to be the ones who feel they are most qualified to define and enforce it. (Apparently, this will all be done "voluntarily" and will be dealt with through purges and link boycotts and the novel concept of moderated comment sections. Or something.)

Meanwhile, on the media page is a story about the execrable Don Imus and the fact that he routinely makes racist, misogynistic and eliminationist jokes on his show while half the Washington press corps spends time there kissing his ring. For some reason that kind of "incivility" doesn’t upset the journalistic prima donnas half as much as the uncivil blogosphere does.

So what’s up with this? The blogosphere is admittedly an uncivil place. Nobody disputes that. But it is comprised of a bunch of disparate individuals who are arguing amongst themselves with varying degress of seriousness and talent as part of the national (and international) dialog. There is a corner of it that is despicable and revolting, as the misogyny that set off this latest debate clearly demonstrates. But for inexplicable reasons it’s the liberal blogosphere that is being particularly attacked for our alleged incivility by the mainstream media. (I suspect it’s the fact that we drop the "F" bomb too much, which is simply shocking in American life)

However, for almost two decades now, talk radio has been spewing vile racist, misogynistic and eliminationst spew — and their stars have been feted and petted for it among the highest levels of the capital cognoscenti. I don’t know for sure why that would be, but I have my suspicions.

Go Read the whole thing…  

This has been another edition of What Digby Said… 

Via Atrios…via Digby…  Okay…Now I understand why that gutter crawling bigot Don Imus is so popular among the Washington Beltway glitterati.  I was always puzzled by that, always kept wondering how many times that babbling bar stool bigot would have to go over the line before someone finally booted his ass off the radio.  Yet every time I look in his direction I see that he’s just gotten bigger, and Even More respected.  What the fuck was it about this low-life crank’s power to attract big names onto his show?  Now I know.  His blessing on their books directly translates into book sales…

I can’t help but be reminded of the Imus profile of a year ago in Vanity Fair (not online, unfortunately) in which his psychotic freakshow was fully revealed. I’m sure all these disgusting sycophants read it. After all, it featured them in starring roles — being insulted by Don Imus:

"They don’t make good decisions," he says of MSNBC and its programming. "You can’t make idiotic decisions like (hiring hosts) Tucker Carlson and Ron Reagan." Of conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, he says: "He’s a twit. He’s a pussy." This is in the same spirit as an earlier comment on Senate majority leader Bill Frist ("a fucking criminal"). Similarly, when he looks up from his circular desk at a television monitor during a commercial break and sees Chris Matthews, the host of Hardball, silently nattering away, he says, "There’s that idiot," to no one in particular.

It makes you wonder why they continue to appear on his show and are making complete fools of themselves today assuring everyone that Imus is a "good man."This might explain it:

I can feel the high of becoming part of his incestuous circle of regulars-the media elite who have entree with the I-Man and have never seemed troubled, at least publicly troubled as far as I can tell, by the show’s forays over the years into homophobia and crudeness and sexism. I like this idea of being right in there with columnists Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich of The New York Times and NBC’s Andrea Mitchell and David Gregory and Tim Russert (husband of Vanity Fair special correspondent Maureen Orth), all Imus regulars. I wonder if there’s some secret media-elite handshake I need to learn, just so I can hear the jubilant sound of the cash register ringing when it comes time to sell my next book, because nobody (with the clear exception of Oprah) sells a book better than Imus.

He likes that power, enjoys going on Amazon to see just how much he can boost a book. During the week I’m there, he has Larry the Cable Guy on as a guest-Larry has just written a book called Git-r-Done. Before the show, according to Imus, the book was about 1,800 on the Amazon list. But when he checks on the Internet just after the show, it’s No. 122.

I wonder if the media elite’s failure to seriously take Imus to task for anything is due to a fear that their book-promotion pipeline will be cut off if they rub him the wrong way. In a 1998 New Yorker piece, Ken Auletta drew up a list, confirmed by Imus, of more than a dozen high-profile journalists who made contributions to the Imus Ranch. It’s hard to quibble with donations to a worthy cause. As George Stephanopoulos said on the air to Imus in 1998, with his book on the White House still in the works, "I’m not too proud to suck up for a good cause. So count me in for $5,000 on the ranch!"

I wonder what I would have done, had I been an Imus regular with a book to sell, when the previous sports announcer for the show, Sid Rosenberg, said on the air last May of a female entertainer who had been diagnosed with breast cancer, "Ain’t gonna be so beautiful when the bitch got a bald head and one titty." I wonder how I would have reacted to the cackling of various members of Imus’s ensemble over the next minute or so to Rosenberg’s remarks, as well as Imus’s own hardly outraged response: "There’s a reason I fire you about every six weeks." He did get fired from the show, and Imus distanced himself from what Rosenberg had said. He says the remarks were "horrible," but there seemed to be something disingenuous about Imus’s repudiation-complete bullshit, as he might put it-given that Rosenberg had already distinguished himself on the show in 2001 by calling tennis player Venus Williams an "animal" and noting that she and her sister, Serena, had a better chance of posing nude for National Geographic than Playboy. I wonder what I would have done had I been in the audience the night Imus made his crude and unfunny remarks about President Clinton and his wife. Would I have said, That’s it, never again. Or would I have been like Cokie Roberts of ABC television, who called Imus’s remarks "profoundly rude," vowed never to go back on the show, and then did several years later when the opportunity arose to push her new book, We Are Our Mothers’ Daughters.

It’s as if they believe we can’t read or are too stupid to figure out what they are doing. I read Vanity Fair. I hear his disgusting show and hear them on it, kissing up to him like he’s some sort of oracle instead of a spoiled, petulant bully with an incoherent worldview. And I also listen to their complaints about the vituperation on the internet, how the bloggers — especially the "angry left" — are horrible people who treat them disrespectfully. And I have to laugh because I know that Don Imus can call them and their colleagues twits and pussies in Vanity Fair and they come back licking his boots, begging for more. And we know why.

They have earned their reputation — even some of the good ones, the ones who write things I like. When you sell your personal integrity for money to a racist scumbag like Don Imus, you have to expect that people are not going to treat you with a lot of respect.

Well that about sums up the history of the mainstream news media ever since Reagan, doesn’t it?  They followed the big money into the gutter.  They followed the big money into the gutter.  And they’ve been busy trying to drag their country into the gutter along with them ever since, so they won’t have to know that they’re not living on main street anymore, but in the gutter.

Daniel Gonzales, formerly of ExGay Watch has created a little video about the anti-gay counter attack on the Day of Silence. Cynically named “Day Of Truth”, it seeks to legitimize harassment of GLBT kids in school by their classmates, in the name of freedom of religion. The problem is, as always, that the religious right isn’t on speaking terms with Truth, or anything even remotely resembling it. Their website, as the video shows, helpfully provides kids with cards printed up with informational resources on homosexuality that all link back to Ex Gay ministries and their usual myths, lies and superstitions. The party line is that this is all supposed to give gay kids “the other side” of the story. But as always this “other side” is actually a message directed not at gay youth, but to their heterosexual peers. The resources handed out to school kids are nothing less then a collection of handy excuses for them to treat their GLBT peers with disrespect, if not outright contempt.

We see in the video the t-shirt their poster child got tossed out of class for wearing on a previous Day of Silence, which tells gay kids to “Be Ashamed” and that God condemns them. On its face then, this is not a message of love directed toward gay youth, but an exhortation to their peers to treat them like human garbage. It is incitement that at some point is certain to result in outright physical assaults. And when that happens you can bet that like Pilot the grown adults who are instigating this will wash, wash their hands of the consequences. But you don’t paint a bulls-eye on children, tell everyone that those children are condemned by God, and not expect violence to result.

Who would Jesus throw the first stone at?

Via Atrios…  ABC News is now peddling the claim that Iran will have nuclear weapons by 2009.  Perhaps that’s true.  But your gay and lesbian neighbors have watched ABC whitewash the murder of a gay kid for the sake of validating republican party talking points.  And as Glenn Greenwald reminds us, it isn’t the first time the American Bullshit Corporation has looked its trusting audience in the face and fed them…bullshit…

At the end of the post I wrote last week about ABC News and Brian Ross’ new report that Iran could have nuclear weapons by 2009, I noted that ABC and Ross — back in October and November 2001 — were the driving force, really the exclusive force, behind news reports strongly suggesting that Iraq and Saddam Hussein were responsible for the anthrax attacks on the U.S. There are several very important issues arising from those events which I strongly believe merit real attention. This post is somewhat lengthy because it is vital to set forth the facts clearly.

Last week, I excerpted several of the Saddam-anthrax reports from ABC and Ross — here and here — but there are others. ABC aggressively promoted as its top story for days on end during that highly provocative period of time that — and these are all quotes:

(a) "the anthrax in the tainted letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle was laced with bentonite";

(b) bentonite is "a troubling chemical additive that authorities consider their first significant clue yet";

(c) "only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons";

(d) bentonite "is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons program"; and,

(e) "the anthrax found in a letter to Senator Daschle is nearly identical to samples they recovered in Iraq in 1994" and "the anthrax spores found in the letter to Senator Daschle are almost identical in appearance to those they recovered in Iraq in 1994 when viewed under an electron microscope."

At different times, Ross attributed these claims to "three well-placed but separate sources" and, alternatively, to "at least four well-placed sources." All of those factual claims — each and every one of them, separately — were completely false, demonstrably and unquestionably so. There is now no question about that. Yet neither ABC nor Ross have ever retracted, corrected, clarified, or explained these fraudulent reports — reports which, as documented below, had an extremely serious impact on the views formed by Americans in those early, critical days about the relationship between the 9/11 attacks, the anthrax attacks and Iraq…

The fact is, nobody can trust a damn thing ABC News says.  That’s a problem not only because Iran may indeed be a real threat to the world, but because any grave threat to worldwide peace and stability now has to be judged through the understanding gleaned now from the past six years of George Bush and his crony’s, that they govern by way of lies.  Who do we trust?  Well…not ABC News.  We all saw it in the course of their bogus anthrax reporting.  Your gay and lesbian neighbors saw it also, on November 26, 2004, when ABC News cynically gave a dead gay kid’s killers a public forum to spit on his grave a few times, so that the republicans could later argue that hate crime laws are unnecessary.

The claim that the anthrax was laced with bentonite, and that government tests detected the presence of bentonite, was simply false — a complete invention from Ross’s sources, eager to link Saddam and anthrax attacks. And separately, it was a complete fiction that "the anthrax spores found in the letter to Senator Daschle are almost identical in appearance to those they recovered in Iraq in 1994 when viewed under an electron microscope." That just never happened.

Equally false, really completely frivolous, was the conclusion Ross’s sources fed to him from this false premise — namely, that even if bentonite — which ABC referred to as a "troubling chemical additive" — had been found in the anthrax, that would be some sort of compelling proof linking Iraq to the anthrax attacks.

The very idea that bentonite is "a troubling chemical additive," let alone that it is some sort of unique Iraqi hallmark, is inane. Bentonite is merely a common clay that is produced all over the world, including from volcanic eruptions. Over the weekend, I spoke via e-mail with M.A. Holmes, a Geologist in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, who wrote:

Bentonite is mined and used for drilling mud (getting the rock chips out of a drill hole when drilling for oil or deep water) and now is mined for the clumping-type kitty litter ("swells when wet"). It’s also used to draw cactus spines put of the skin (sold as a product called "Denver Mud"). It has lots of other uses, like lining pits for waste disposal (because it "swells when wet" it forms a pretty good seal).

Bentonite is mined extensively in Wyoming and oh, yes, SOUTH DAKOTA. It is not "a chemical additive" and it is not unique to Iraq. It is widespread and common, and readily available wherever you can get "drilling mud."

Go read the whole thing.  The drumbeat to war is happening again.  Just remember whenever you hear something from ABC News about Iran, that this is the news organization that stooped to smearing a dead gay kid’s memory for the sake of republican party talking points.  Nothing is beneath them.  Nothing.

Another good song, for those days when old friends tell you to go back into the closet. This is The Travelling Wilburys version…

I’ve discovered that YouTube is a pretty good place to find all those good songs that iTunes still isn’t selling. I wonder how long That’s going to last…

Well I know whats right, I got just one life…In a world that keeps on pushin me around…But Ill stand my ground and I wont back down

So you’re a 53 year old gay man. You remember coming out to yourself in the early 1970s, when the only places you could go to buy a copy of The Advocate or the Washington Blade were seedy adult bookstores. You remember Antia Bryant. You remember when you heard Dan White had shot and killed Harvey Milk. You remember the first time you saw The Quilt. You remember making your first panel for it. You remember all the friends you lost. You remember the first March on Washington. And the Second. And the Third. You remember the day the Warren Court upheld the sodomy laws. You remember Rush Limbaugh bellyaching that Bill Clinton had allowed “human garbage” into his inaugural parade because the Gay Men’s Choral was in it. You remember Sam Nunn posing in a submarine bunk while congress debated Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. You remember the Hawaiian Supreme Court saying we could marry, and then 70 percent of Hawaiians passing a constitutional amendment saying we could not. You remember when Matthew Shepard was murdered. You remember Justice Kennedy’s words, overturning Hardwick v. Bowers…

And one Easter Sunday evening you find yourself writing a Go To Hell letter to that old friend, that once close friend, that once upon a time best friend you loved so very, very dearly, and who just sent you Yet Another EMail insisting that you need to stay discreetly closeted, and respect other folk’s cheapshit prejudices (cheapshit prejudices he’d never tolerate if they were racist ones directed at him) in order to get by in this world…and I should really shut up about my issues and stop being such a self-centered bore…

…what better song to compose that letter to then…

This One….

(This video alas does Not do the song justice…but you can stillDance to it…)

Okay…I have a temper. I admit it. But…swear to God…if some (x) friends of mine are going to keep acting like it’s still the late 70s and the only goddamn thing they know about gay people is what they learned in gym class or when they watched Richard Burton and Rex Harrison act like a couple of faggots in Staircase…well then…(ahem) I’m Not The Fucking One With A Listening Problem!

I never thought of myself as a Disco queen. There’s maybe four or five songs from the period I like at all. Thing is…music won’t make your heartaches go away, but sometimes it lets you dance over them…

We were born…born…Born to be Alive! (Born to be Alive) Yes we were born…born…born… Born to be Alive!

A shot taken in the library at Casa del Garrett. Well…actually, it’s my bedroom too. That’s my "Gay Studies" bookcase. I’ve got about five other bookcases in the bedroom. About a dozen more scattered throughout the house. Yes…I own many of the books the religious right likes to lie about…. 

Next time you hear one of these clowns yap, yap, yapping about how "a study" "proves" that homosexuality is this, or homosexuals are that…go look it up for yourself and give it a read. If it’s one of their own "studies" then go look up any legitimate science that it cites (if any). If nothing else, it will drive it home to you that these people are not on speaking terms with morality at all. 

So…here’s the scenario.  A young gay man is found brutally murdered.  The murder scene shows the classic evidence of overkill.  The killers, leaving behind not only a host of physical evidence, but statements to friends about how they’d just "killed a faggot", are quickly apprehended.  Then as news of the vicious murder percolates, first  through the gay community news channels, and then, somehow, manages to find its way into the  consciousness of the nation at large, and people recoil at the senseless brutality of it, we begin to hear that the gay victim of the crime had been out cruising for sex, or was looking for drugs, or some sort of criminal activity, had gone willingly with his killers, who by then look in their newspaper perp walk photos like they had "I Kill Faggots" tattooed on their foreheads…and you can almost hear the sigh of relief from one end of the country to the other…because now we know it wasn’t really hate that killed the victim, there is no hate in America, and especially not any systematic hatred directed at homosexuals…it’s their own stupidity after all, that keeps getting them killed…

Typical faggot…out cruising for anonymous sex…or drugs…gets himself killed by a couple of street punks…nothing here for the rest of us to worry about…

Sound familiar?  Matthew Shepard?   No…

Official Misstatements about Ryan Skipper’s Murder Have Been Propagated in the Media

One of the saddest aspects about the aftermath of Ryan Skipper’s murder is that no one outside his friends and family seems to care about the heinous manner in which he was killed.

Neither the governor nor the attorney general in Florida — both of whom are Republicans — has expressed concern about the fact that Skipper’s murder has been labeled a hate crime. National gay organizations have been largely mute, and coverage in the local and national gay press has been very slim, especially considering the brutality of his murder.

Sheriff’s Assertions Were Based on Killers’ Statements

It is likely that the lack of outrage stems from a series of misstatements to the media at the outset of the investigation that have been attributed to Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd and others in his office. One the face of it, the motivation for making these statements appears to be bigotry toward gay people.

On Friday, March 16, two days after Skipper’s body was discovered, the local newspaper, The Ledger, reported:

Skipper, 25, was driving around Eloise late Tuesday night looking to pick up someone when he met [his all edged killer, Joseph] Bearden, whom he took back to his home in Winter Haven, according to the Sheriff’s Office.

The next day, the paper ran a quote from Sheriff Judd that sounded like it could have been the basis of the earlier reporting:

“What we do know is that Ryan was out looking to pick up someone that evening,” Judd said.

Elsewhere, the full quote has been given as:

“What we do know is that Ryan was looking for someone to pick up that evening. And unfortunately for Ryan, he picked up the wrong person.” [Emphasis added.]

In fact — and as we have said in other coverage of this story — Sheriff Judd did not “know” this. It was immediately obvious to my colleague Trish, who reported the story here on March 18, that, since the victim was dead and could not speak for himself, the only source for this information had to have been the alleged killers.

But the slander against Ryan Skipper did not stop there. In its coverage on March 17, The Ledger published the trawling-for-sex allegation as well as three additional completely unsubstantiated statements:

[1] Skipper was driving around Wahneta on Tuesday night when he found [murder suspect Joe] Bearden walking along Sixth Street in Eloise about 11 p.m. Tuesday, and offered him a ride. [2] The two went back to Skipper’s house, where they [3] smoked marijuana and [4] discussed using Skipper’s [laptop] computer to copy checks, according to the Sheriff’s Office.

Three weeks later all four of these statements are in dispute:

• No one who knew Ryan Skipper believes he had a propensity for trawling for anonymous sex.
• The other alleged murderers, William Brown, was an acquaintance of Skipper’s. We have seen a statement from one of Ryan’s roommates that Ryan got a call after he got home from work at 10:30 that night, which appeared to have prompted him to go back out. It seems more likely that Brown phoned Ryan and asked for help in the form of giving him ride somewhere, and that the call was part of premeditated ambush plot by Brown and Bearden against Ryan.
• No evidence has been produced that Ryan was involved with these chuckleheads in a check forgery scheme — and no one who knew him believes he would do anything of the sort.
• Ryan’s roommate has said that after Ryan received the phone call, he left and never came back. She denies that he brought anyone home with him that night.
• Ryan’s friends and family all confirm that he had a desktop computer but did not own a laptop. And yet, early reports stated that Brown and Bearden were charged with stealing a laptop from Ryan after they murdered him..
• No one who knew him believes Ryan smoked pot.

That the "trawling for sex" story is so reaily accepted by the mainstream news media when it comes to gay victims of violent crime, Even When The Source Of The Story Is The Victim’s Own Killers, is all the proof you need that there is a climate of contempt toward gays right here in America, that is relentlessly fueling that violence.  No climate of hate in America?  Compare and contrast…a white jogger is raped and nearly killed in New York’s Central Park and the focus slams immediately on a gaggle of black teenagers who were said to be out "wilding" that night.  Nobody suggests the woman was out looking for rough sex.  Had that woman been a gay man instead, does anyone seriously believe that the Very First Thing out the gate in the mainstream press wouldn’t be that he was probably there looking for sex.

Ryan Skipper walks out the door to his apartment and is found dead hours later with 20 stab wounds in his body, and his car is found later with the insides soaked in his blood.  The killers are arrested, claim their victim was hitting them up for sex and anyway he was helping them forge checks.  It’s just their word at that point, but guess what the Accepted Narrative is the following day…

“What we do know is that Ryan was looking for someone to pick up that evening. And unfortunately for Ryan, he picked up the wrong person.”

And we know that how precisely?  We know it, because his killers said so, and because he was a gay man, and gay men always do something stupid to cause their own deaths…just ask Elizabeth Vargas and ABC News …

O’Malley was a detective with the Laramie Police when 21-year-old Matthew Shepard was brutally murdered six years ago.

He was one of several people interviewed for ABC’s 20/20 that aired Nov. 26. He said that the interview and the way the show was ultimately put together has left him angry.

O’Malley was notified about a week in advance of the ABC crew’s arrival for the interview. He invited them into his home and they stayed for “maybe three to four hours.”

He did not see the tape until the night the show aired.

The people interviewed for the show did not surprise him. He was, however, surprised that “a production as popular as 20/20 would hinge all of their support for their theory on meth addicts, Doc O’Connor and two convicted murderers … it did not surprise me the way the thing came out.”

O’Malley said that he did find out what the focus of the show was shortly after the interview was over and the crew left Laramie. Someone with the crew had left copies of e-mails on his dining room table — 10 pages of information discussing the overall focus of the program and “their pre-conceived focus that this was not a hate crime. This was a drug crime. That’s what they went with,” he said.

When he was approached by the producers of this particular segment, O’Malley said he had a weird feeling. “After 30 years, you learn to trust your gut instinct. I asked them specifically if they were coming to do something from a particular angle … I wanted to be able to answer intelligently, think things out.”

In the conversation with the producers, O’Malley was assured that the report would be objective, six years after the actual event.

Sucker. 

Prior to the arrival of the 20/20 crew, he had heard that the show might be more about the methamphetamine issue. When they arrived at his home, O’Malley asked a few questions of his own.

“I was trying to be comfortable … and I felt comfortable. But when Elizabeth Vargas got into the methamphetamine portion of it, it surprised me,” he said. “Actually, it made me extremely angry and, in my opinion, these guys lied to me.”

During the segment of the 20/20 program, O’Malley said that he believed that Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, the two Laramie men convicted in Shepard’s death, intended to rob the University of Wyoming student. But, for reasons only McKinney and Henderson know, something happened and the killing became a hate crime based on Shepard’s sexual orientation.

“My feelings have been that the initial contact was probably motivated by robbery because they needed money,” O’Malley said. “What they got was $20 and a pair of shoes. … then something changed and changed profoundly.”

But whatever that was, it couldn’t be hate.  No.  Never.

20/20 did not discuss the expertise of the arresting officer.

“Flint Waters is a trained narcotics officer. … in controlled substances,” O’Malley said.

Waters reported that Henderson exhibited no signs of being under the influence of meth, just an odor of alcohol.

O’Malley said that 20/20 failed to report on the jailhouse letters that McKinney had written — letters that added information that this could have been a gay-hate crime.

The 20/20 segment with McKinney indicated that he, along with his lawyers, had concocted this gay panic issue, but, according to O’Malley, police interviews with McKinney showed that he had already started that (the gay panic issue) without the benefit of council.

“The statements he made, the fact that after he was sentenced he was high-fiving other inmates and signing autographs in the jail — if it wasn’t motivated by bias, he was sure eating that up.” O’Malley said.

Shepard was struck between 19 and 21 times, all to the face and head area.

“It was a concentrated effort to destroy somebody,” O’Malley said. “I believe it was triggered because Matt was gay. I’ll go to my grave believing that.”

O’Malley said that “It is abysmal that they (20/20) don’t present the other side of the issue … to be objective in their reporting.”

But they had a job to do…not merely to whitewash the murder of Matthew Shepard, but more importantly, to undermine the fight against anti-gay hate.  The problem for ABC New and other Bush/Republican Friendly mainstream news media outlets, is that for the nation to finally begin to combat the kind of hate that killed Matthew Shepard means taking away one of the republicans better vote getting tools…

So Matthew Shepard’s murder, against all the evidence to the contrary, had to be a drug deal gone bad, and Shepard a druggy, or trawling for sex, or something.  And the payoff wasn’t just hope that his killers might be paroled, but breathing life into the cultural indifference to anti-gay violence, which at that moment in time was seriously in jeopardy of, finally, being taken seriously for the unmitigated horror that it is.  It’s not so much about the gay panic defense, as the gay panic vote.  You can’t drive voters to the polls with the gay bogeyman, without getting some gay people killed in the process.  It has to be their own damn fault they got themselves killed, not the climate of hate.  Never the climate of hate.

Typical faggot…out cruising for anonymous sex…or drugs…gets himself killed by a couple of street punks…nothing here for the rest of us to worry about…

“What we do know is that Ryan was looking for someone to pick up that evening. And unfortunately for Ryan, he picked up the wrong person.”

So ABC and Vargas’ did their job and you can see the results of it now, in the case of Ryan Skipper with sickening clarity. The meme that gay victims of violent crime always, somehow, bring it on themselves, were idiots who should have seen it coming, went cruising for guys who have "I Kill Faggots" tattooed on their foreheads, fell prey to a kind of crime that the rest of us need not worry about, because We’re Smart And We Don’t Do Things Like That, will probably live on for quite some time to come. Hate crime laws are unnecessary, because the victims of these kinds of crimes are always stupid. There is no epidemic of violence against gay people, just an epidemic of stupidity. You are now free to look the other way. Pay no attention to that blood on the floor…it doesn’t concern you…

I’m splitting this into two parts because it’s becoming a tad longish and I’m sorry.  Also, you may have to endure some of my efforts at writing fiction, which I don’t normally shove out onto my blog because I know my tastes in fiction aren’t everyone’s.  But something struck me as I read this story this morning, from Pam’s House Blend …

I have the names of the four women, and while some of them held some sort of Wisconsin Department of Administration position while Thompson was governor, they tend not to be public figures today; one was a Milwaukee-area state representative, one a county campaign manager, one a member of the gaming commission, one a staffer at the state Division of Health, one a Portage resident. While Thompson was governor, many of the liaisons allegedly occurred at Madison’s Concourse Hotel. One of my correspondents wrote, "After he moved into the [Governor’s] Mansion, Tommy quit the practice of logging in the names of guests and visitors. Can be verified by Mansion officers."
— reporter Jay Rath, about 2008 GOP prez candidate (and married man) Tommy Thompson’s colorful love life while Governor of Wisconsin. Apparently a lot of other reporters weren’t asking or telling about it back in the day.

It apparently gets better… 

"Tommy had an apartment in Madison before he was elected governor," read the June 22, 1994, letter. "He kept the apartment after he was elected [to the state legislature]. Supposedly there were several women who joined him there."

In fact, there allegedly were as many as four long-term affairs before Tommy Thompson finally left for Washington, D.C., to become secretary of Health and Human Services.

These are old notes in my files that suddenly are current again. Now that his hat is in the presidential ring, it’s time for journalists to finally look at the alleged extramarital affairs of the latest presidential candidate of the family-values party.

Reporters are a clubby bunch, and the problem in getting the story while Tommy was governor was that statehouse journalists — the ones who could most easily have reported on the allegations — historically tended to be part of an old boys network; everyone was pals, and so everyone looked the other way. The rumors were a "secret" that many working reporters knew about.

So…lessee…  To quote Pam, We have "Sen. John McCain (affair, divorce), former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (affair, divorce, affair, divorce), and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani (divorce, affair, nasty divorce)…"  And then there’s Rush Limbaugh, who was caught not that long ago taking a trip to the Dominican Republic, an island that I’m told had an active sex tourist trade going, with Viagra he hadn’t been legally prescribed.  Swell. Okay…now I know why my sex life is so tame.  I’m not a right wing Family Values republican…

Anyway…  I want to begin making my point, with a passage I wrote some years ago for my Skywatcher’s Of Aden fantasy series.  (I’ve had it offline for some time now for major re-writes.)  This particular passage is part of a still evolving backstory for one of my main characters, Daniel Tanner.  The scene is the room of Joshua Putnum, a student of theology at the Wallensden Seminary.  Daniel was sent there as a young boy by his father to insure he would never follow in his mother’s wickedness.  Daniel is being groomed to become a minister of his faith.  He is not a reluctant student.  His religiosity is real, deeply felt and part of his bedrock.  But at this point in the story, at 16, he is having a crisis of faith over his sexual orientation.  To further complicate matters, the older boy, Joshua, has been trying to take him as a lover, though he too is having his own crisis of faith and sexuality.

Daniel has thoughts of suicide when his sexual orientation becomes apparent to him.  But instead of going through with it, he becomes determined to understand why this curse had happened to him.  He begins devouring material in the seminary and town library…anything he thinks can help him understand why this is happening to him.  In the course of this research he meets Joshua, and falls in love with the bookish older student. 

The critical inner difference I am trying to illustrate between the two in this passage of Daniel’s story, is that at this point, when he actually falls in love, Daniel begins to realize that his sexuality isn’t a curse at all, but a blessing.  But Joshua, having rigorously conditioned himself to think of sex only in terms of lust, is still full of shame, even as he coaxes Daniel into bed with him. I was thinking as I wrote this, of the difference between someone whose spirituality is, as I like to think of it, "faith with eyes wide open" and that fundamentalism that constantly flinches away from the world like a frightened animal, and into the safety of ritual and dogma.

Understand that this all takes place in a fantasy world that’s vaguely similar to New England colonial America, but not as technologically advanced.  The various religious sects in this world, including Daniel’s and Joshua’s, are not ours, but merely akin to ours in certain aspects.

In the morning of his third year at Wallensden Seminary, in the sixteenth year of his life, Daniel Tanner awakened, and saw the earth anew, as though for the first time. 

He lay on his side looking across Joshua’s room.  Sunlight streamed though the room’s only window, bathing room in a vibrant morning glow.  Beside him, Joshua breathed steadily, still asleep, one arm flung possessively around Daniel.  Daniel sighed, luxuriating in Joshua’s embrace, while his eyes took in every detail of Joshua’s room.

His eyes strayed over to the open window.  A restless desire to see the world outside also awakening stirred in him.  Gently, Daniel rolled out from under Joshua’s arm.  He rose from the bed, and wrapped one of the light cotton sheets around him, not to hide his nakedness, but to feel himself still embraced by something from Joshua’s bed.  He stepped barefoot over the room’s only rug, felt the nap of it between his toes, and stopped to look down at it. 

It was a common household rug.  The trader’s son in him identified it at once as a local product, made not far from where it rested now.  Leeward Hills, second grade wool and remnant blend, northern single cross weave.  It’s market value fixed to the penny, he knelt down and ran a hand lightly over its surface, allowing his fingers to make their own assay.  First with, then against the weave, his fingertips delivered to him their own understanding of the rug, while he marveled at how carelessly he had dismissed so much of the richness of the world around him.

He rose and walked to the window.  The morning sun embraced him with golden light and warmth.  Outside, the main road leading into Wallensden was already busy with traffic.  The sounds and smells of the street below, annoying distractions to him before, arrived at his ears like a new music, and danced with his other senses like playful children.  There was a knife grinder rolling his stone up the street, gesturing to the butcher across the way with a simple, timeless hand sign that asked if there were any knifes to grind that day.  A local farmer carried a stick of tobacco hands from his wagon into a tobacco shop.  A man gave a penny to the paperboy on the corner, for one of his single-sheet newspapers.  Like a chorus to the scene he now beheld, came the smells from the baker’s shop across the street.  He breathed them in deeply, felt his body respond almost at once to their promise of nourishment.

Lord…my life is full beyond measure…  For an instant, he found himself trembling again, as at his lover’s first touch.  So this is what it’s all about…  

There existed no word in his language for ‘homosexual’.  Not until the far distant future, when clinical terms would be invented, would the idea of it as a state of being, and not a perverse habit, enter into his culture’s consciousness.  For generations to come, his kind would invent and borrow words from other languages and cultures to identify themselves.  Many in his and later ages, who shared his deep religious faith, would endure years of self hatred and torment, before finally achieving a small measure of self acceptance, if any.  But he had already grown up with the knowledge that he would never be good enough, because he was his mother’s son. 

Only hours before, his steadfast faith told him that to love another male in this way was wrong, dissolute, a grievous offense to the eyes of God.  Now that same unwavering faith lifted him to heights of spirit he had never known before.  So different from the warm and wonderful childhood feeling he’d had during prayer, when he felt that God was near.  So breathtaking, like the electric pleasure that ran through him when he saw Joshua smile. 

It was beyond questioning in him that the pleasures brought to humanity by the Jackal, the Despiser, the father of lies, to tempt humankind, were both transient and tawdry.  The drunkard’s bliss.  The gambler’s spoils.  The lecher’s thrill.  Deep in the bedrock of his nature was the certainty that only God could create a thing of beauty.  He thought of Joshua’s body, of the sensation of Joshua’s hands on him, and his own body shivered in remembrance, and in that moment he knew that no amount of thanks or praise to his creator could ever be enough.

He heard a rustling in the bed behind him, and knew that Joshua was awake.

Daniel is in love.  But Joshua is merely in lust, and now he’s made a night of it with another boy and like clockwork his crisis of faith starts tapping him on the shoulder. 

[Joshua] saw the boy standing there wrapped in the blanket, looking like an apparition from Pagan times, the sunlight shimmering over his pale blond hair like a halo.  His eyes darted away from the sight.  As a young humanities student, he once beheld a nude statue of Aster, the lost son of the Prophet Thomas, created by the legendary Mary Stephan.  It was Aster at the moment he realizes his father has abandoned him in the wilderness.  In the figure’s quiet courage in the face of sorrow, and its sensual beauty, Joshua saw everything within himself that he was struggling desperately to renounce.  He vowed never again to lay eyes on the work of Mary Stephan.  Now its living embodiment was in his bedroom, looking at him.

He took a breath, fixed a smile on his face, and blandly said, "Good morning sleepyhead."

They are both deeply religious, both passionately devoted to their God.  Their feelings about what happened the night before are inextricably wound up in that faith.  And yet their reactions to it could not be more different…

The theologian distrusted reason.  Daniel distrusted his emotions.  Reason offered Joshua no sanctuary from the fact of his sexual orientation, and so it was to his religion he turned, time and again, for solace, for forgiveness, for absolution.  He had become so successful at keeping his intellect away from his emotions, that now even the mildest of passions would always threaten to overwhelm him.  Guilt regarding his sexual nature, had long since become a secret humiliation that he could not control himself.  Daniel, when his emotions threatened his balance and self control, would flee them time and again, into a dispassionate monastery of reason and logic.  Emotions were, irrational, specious, misleading.  Reason was truth and light.  Daniel could endure anything but doubt.  Joshua, anything but certainty. 

In the fire the metals behaved differently.  The theologian, confronted by love, shrank away, utterly unable to distinguish it from debauchery.  Daniel, pulled by an ancient tide so certain and sure he could not rationally deny it, walked finally, with eyes wide open, into its embrace.  All the rest of it would have to be reasoned out later; it’s ethics and morality, what it meant to his faith, to his future, to the kind of life he would have to live.  That he would only know this depth of feeling for another male was a thing he had already acknowledged.  What changed matters irrevocably now, was that he knew it was good.  To act as if he believed otherwise would be self deceit, a thing his intellect would not permit and his conscience could not endure. 

Years later, Daniel would remember it, as akin to the moment he accepted God into his heart, and its spirit flowed immediately into every corner of his being, transforming and lifting him.  Joshua would remember only how completely he had misread the boy he had held in his arms.  But love’s ancient and arcane logic would remain a mystery to him throughout his life. 

Tentatively, Joshua placed his hands on Daniel’s shoulder’s.  He half expected, half secretly hoped, that the boy would turn away with revulsion.  Instead Daniel looked right into his eyes with the straight faced expression he had become known by in the seminary, save that now his lips bore a faint smile that Joshua had never seen before.  For an instant he was certain no one else had ever seen it either.

"Joshua."  said Daniel, as if his name were a prayer.

Joshua gently drew Daniel close and embraced him, disturbed; he did not want to be looked at that way, did not want his name to be spoken that way.  He took a moment to catch his breath.  "Are you all right with it, then?"

"Yes."

It was so simply stated, that for a moment Joshua doubted Daniel was being honest.  But Daniel’s embrace was firm and unequivocal, and after a moment he allowed himself a sigh of relief, hearing only the boy’s acceptance of their mutual need.  But Daniel was addressing another, giving it joyful thanks for the wondrous gift of his life of flesh and blood; a gift that had delivered him into an almost perfect exaltation of spirit which had brought him not to his knees, but to his feet.

The first person you come out to, is yourself… 

For years I thought of this "coming out to self" process along with the institution of the closet and all its self loathing and self destructiveness, as pretty much unique to gay people.  But now…in the light of all these recent right wing sex scandals I’m seeing it a little differently.  What I’m starting to see is a lot of this self destructive denial of one’s sexual nature, the shame and self loathing you see in someone like Joshua in my story, in heterosexuals too.  How many heterosexual men and women I wonder, comfortable with their human sexuality, have found themselves in relationships with partners who when the lights went out, treated sex like it was either a dirty joke, or a thing of shame, a sign of humanity’s brokeness and alienation from God, not a joyful, playful, delightful physical affirmation of the spiritual bond between them.

There’s a classic sort of compartmentalization that goes on in the lives and the inner world of closeted gay people, where their sex lives and their personal lives almost sometimes seem to be living on different planets.  You know the story…the all-american family man/woman god fearing sexual puritan by day who becomes the slut puppy by night.  Well…I think I’m seeing that now in the likes of thoroughly heterosexual people like Newt, and Rush, and Rudy and Tommy Thompson.  They rail against gays and sex and pop culture sexuality, even as their own sex lives are going down the toilet.  It’s the same sort of denial and compartmentalization I once saw constantly, and ruinously, in the lives of gay people, until something blows open their closet doors and there they are standing naked in the spotlight like a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming car.  Who?  Me?  Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain…

As H.L. Mencken once said, "The most costly of all follies is to believe what is palpably untrue".  It is also pretty goddammed faithless.  For untold generations gay people have been taught to believe pure unmitigated crap about themselves.  But as it happens, so have heterosexuals.  About sex.  About human sexuality.  About their own inner nature.  Looks to me like there are a lot of heterosexuals in the closet too…living in a state of denial about their inner selves and their own sexuality that looks more and more like the one gay people have been struggling to come out of for generations.  And it’s making them act out self destructively, and lash out at anyone comfortable with their sexuality, in a kind of transference of shame.

Anyway…  Give it some thought…while I gather my mind a tad more for Part II of this…

Something I just posted to my MySpace profile.  It’s a bit of an in-joke.  If you’re not on MySpace you probably don’t get it.  Gives you an idea what my no-junk diet is doing for me though.  I haven’t felt this good about my shape in a long, long time…

I’m no twenty-something anymore.  Those days are long gone.  But if I can be the cutest guy in a room full of single 45 to 50-something gay guys, that’ll do…

A few minor changes to my diet, and I can just about get back into my 31s again (that’s 31 inch waste jeans).  Except…I gave my 31s all to Goodwill in despair several summers ago.  Oh Ye Of Little Faith…

My diet has simply been to stop eating junk food and between meal Kit-Kat bars, potato chips, Doritos…that sort of stuff I basically snacked on all day long not too long ago.  I was used to getting the energy kick in the afternoons from the Kit-Kat bars, and Hershey bars, and Ghirardelli bars, and little did I know how many goddamned calories I was consuming in a day.  Now when I get a urge for something sweet I’ll go have a couple slices of apple.  I like the Red Delicious ones because they’re…delicious.  And…red.

That’s it.  I still eat out of the deep fryer on a regular basis.  Still eat mostly everything that I used to.  I’ve just cut out the junk stuff between meals.  And I’m using Splenda now instead of sugar in my tea.  And I’ve dropped from 170 to about 148 until just this week, when I’d dropped some more to 146.  My body has thinned out noticeably, and counter intuitively, by eating less, I feel more energetic.  I’m much more active during the day then I used to be.

A couple weeks ago, I noticed that a straight co-worker who had gained some weight had suddenly lost it and gotten back into shape again (straight guys put on weight too, after their wives give birth.  It’s true.  I’ve seen it with my own two eyes.).  He said that he was doing the South Beach Diet, and for the first time I got an explanation of what that was.  It struck me as a kinda-sorta modified Atkins, but instead of shunning carbs, it omits the ones that are absorbed quickly by the body.  It also makes a distinction between good and bad fats.  It emphasizes protein initially, and does not require counting calories.

So I adjusted my diet a tad, ate less fried potato and substituted more whole grain breads for the Wonder white I love, and added a tad more eggs and ham.  Nothing major.  Just minor changes.  I’ve heard the quickest way to fail at dieting is to jump into something radical whole hog.  In a couple weeks I’d lost two more pounds.  Just this morning it seemed, all my 32s were a tad too big. I keep this up and I’ll have to go out and buy a bunch of new 31s again.  And…new hip huggers.  It’s money I’ll be absolutely delighted to spend.

I want to emphasize I am not suggesting it will be this easy for everyone.  Nearly all my life I was thin as a rail, and then suddenly in my late thirties I started putting it on.  Sizing it all up now, I think my diet simply took a turn for the worse when I suddenly had money to spend, and I could eat all the junk food I wanted.  But my body just doesn’t want to be that heavy.  It was complaining to me in a number of different ways that I’d always put down to "getting old".  But…damn…I’m feeling just great now.  This is where my body wants to be, I just needed to feed it right.  Your mileage may vary.  I know it’s a real struggle for some folks.  They have to fight their bodies to loose weight.  I was, in a sense, forcing mine to put it on.  Now that I’m not, it’s slimming back down again.

When I was having to wear 33s, and they were starting to get too tight, I sensed my diet was a tad too rich, and I’d put it down to getting older and having a slower metabolism.  But that weight gain Just Happened To Coincide with my getting work as a computer programmer, and having that much better income.  I’m thinking now that it wasn’t my body slowing down at all, or not that much.  I could just afford to indulge my sweet tooth more, and my taste for fast food crap more, and it was wreaking my figure.

It is 1983.  I’m sitting with mom in her hospital room.  She’s in for a gall bladder operation and I’m chatting with her and her roommate, a lady about her age, but definitely not the sort mom would be seen with in church.  A nice lady, decent, smart…really smart…and very worldly.  She has a lady friend with her.  The four of us are chatting about the upcoming mid-term election.  I had picked up the mail before coming to the hospital, and in it was a campaign flier address to me from the Republican party.  It was in the form of a letter from Ronald Reagan.  "I need you to help win this election…" , says Ron.  "I need you…"  The lady and her friend suddenly burst into gales of laughter…  "Ronald Reagan sent this…" She gasps out, "I NEED YOU…to a homosexual!"

Their bright carefree laughter goes on and on.  It is a rich joke.  Eventually they notice that mom and I aren’t saying anything.  We’re both sitting there blank faced, not daring to so much as glance at each other…

(Uh…mom…just what have you been saying to this nice lady…?)

They calm down a bit, and tactfully get up to go get something from the hospital cafeteria.  On the way out of the room, as she passes by me, mom’s roommate gives me a look of quiet understanding and…places a gentle hand on my shoulder, as if to say "Hang in there kid…it’ll be all right…"

The door closes behind them.  Mom and I both immediately change the subject…

Last Sunday, the New York Times profiled a gay teen, Zach O’Conner, and his family, and his struggle to come out to them.

What was so heartwarming about his story, is how accepting his family was, and is.  Just look at those faces in that picture.  There is the kind of family every gay kid should have.

By sixth grade, he knew what “gay” meant, but didn’t associate it with himself. That year, he says: “I had a crush on one particular eighth-grade boy, a very straight jock. I knew whatever I was feeling I shouldn’t talk about it.” He considered himself a broken version of a human being. “I did think about suicide,” he says.

Then, for reasons he can’t wholly explain beyond pure desperation, a month after his Valentine “date” — “We never actually went out, just walked around school together” — in the midst of math class, he told a female friend. By day’s end it was all over school. The psychologist called him in. “I burst into tears,” he recalls. “I said, ‘Yes, it’s true.’ Every piece of depression came pouring out. It was such a mess.”

That night, when his mother got home from work, she stuck her head in his room to say hi. “I said, ‘Ma, I need to talk to you about something, I’m gay.’ She said, ‘O.K., anything else?’ ‘No, but I just told you I’m gay.’ ‘O.K., that’s fine, we still love you.’ I said, ‘That’s it?’ I was preparing for this really dramatic moment.”

Ms. O’Connor recalls, “He said, ‘Mom, aren’t you going to freak out?’ I said: ‘It’s up to you to decide who to love. I have your father, and you have to figure out what’s best for you.’ He said, ‘Don’t tell Dad.’ ”

“Of course I told him,” Ms. O’Connor says.

“With all our faults,” Mr. O’Connor says, “we’re in this together.”

This is what family is all about.  I am so happy for this kid.  And yet, still so sad in a way, for another one.

And that would be the kid I once was.  Me.

This paragraph in Zach’s story really struck me hard…

Cindy and Dan O’Connor were very worried about Zach. Though bright, he was doing poorly at school. At home, he would pick fights, slam doors, explode for no reason. They wondered how their two children could be so different; Matt, a year and a half younger, was easygoing and happy. Zach was miserable.

Now…I came out to myself at the relatively late age of 17.  But had I lived in today’s climate it would probably have been at about his age, looking back.  I saw it all, and yet I had a zillion ways of avoiding it.  And to be fair to myself, I was taught a lot of outrageous lies about homosexuals, and that had the effect not of making me hate myself, so much as convincing me I wasn’t that.  All through my adolescence I figured my crushes on the other boys amounted to nothing more then that pat phrase of the times, "going through a phase".   Whatever that was.

But by the time I’d finished high school I knew perfectly well how it was with me.  And then came the big problem.  Not accepting myself, but getting mom (dad had passed away shortly after I graduated) to accept it.  She finally did…sort of…but literally only months before she too passed away.  And even then she just didn’t want me to talk about it.  When I was a young man freshly out of high school, she all but insisted on a kind of "don’t ask, don’t tell" rule.  Whenever I ventured anywhere near the subject, she would grow cold and icy, which if you’d ever met her, you could guess how shocking it was for me to face it.  Mom was sunshine and light everywhere she went.  Everyone knew her as this cheerful, sparkly kind of person, the kind of person who could brighten the spirits in a gathering of misanthropes.  And she was.  It wasn’t an act like it is for some people.  I know, I lived with it.  She always had a good word for everyone, was always kind to everyone, even people who were mean to her.  Her religiosity was never dire and miserable like her Yankee Baptist mother’s.  She was sweetness and light.  Except when it came to that.

I couldn’t talk about my life to her.  I couldn’t talk about the things other kids can talk with their parents about.  She never browbeat me about it, never demanded I start dating girls, never once said any of the mean and hateful things to me I’ve heard other parents have said to their gay kids.  But we couldn’t talk.  And having no parent to confide in, at that critical stage of my life, I just had to hold it all in.  And it made me miserable.  I began having what they call these days, "anger management issues".

At home, he would pick fights, slam doors, explode for no reason. They wondered how their two children could be so different; Matt, a year and a half younger, was easygoing and happy. Zach was miserable.

That was so me.  And looking back on it after mom retired, I never really appreciated how bad I was.  Then when mom passed away, I inherited her diaries.  And I saw it all then.  It was very painful reading…

Bruce came home in a very bad mood.  Stomped into the bedroom…  So I called up J*** & went over to her place for the rest of the evening.  He had my stomach just tied up in knots…Oh how I wish he would turn back to the Lord & become like the little boy I once knew, kind, thoughtful, & love for all…

But I wasn’t her little boy anymore, let alone bloody likely to walk back into a church where I would be demonized as an abomination in the sight of God.  I was a young man with a young man’s needs and doubts and heartbreaks, all the more confusing and difficult to deal with not so much because I was gay, as that I couldn’t talk to the one person in my life who by all rights should have known me better then anyone, and who might have been able to give me some guidance, but mostly just love, when I needed it most.  And love she Did give me…but it had, or so I felt, strings attached.  Strings I was terrified to break.

She absolutely positively didn’t want me to come out to her. Every time I even went near the subject of my sexual orientation she would get cold and angry herself and throw up a wall. So I just accepted the fact that we could never talk about it, and I always had to keep that part of me inside when I was in the house.  So when my first love left me, and then my second try went very bad on me, and then my third, and I was a miserable desolate wreak inside, I had to keep it inside.  I grew increasingly sullen and angry. 

Even my friends back then, who were mostly straight, saw it.  It was a time before the Internet, and easy access to information about the greater gay community beyond my doorstep.  I only knew of a few seedy bars downtown, where I really didn’t want to be.  To get my weekly copy of the Washington D.C. gay paper, The Blade, or the Advocate, I had to venture down to this really squalid adult bookstore in nearby Wheaton.  Gay kids nowadays will, thankfully, never know how alone and isolated it felt to be gay back then.  Most of my friends were straight kids I knew from my high school days, and I really couldn’t talk much to them either, as counter-cultural tolerant as they were (though some of them not so much really).  But none of them could have given me what mom might have been able to, had we both lived in a different world.

If only I’d had a chance to open up to her about what was going on in my life, if only I’d had her to talk to then, I might have been a lot less angry, a lot less miserable. My temper was always flaring. I would storm into my room and sulk for hours. I knew I was having "anger management" issues back then, but in retrospect I never thought I was as bad as I was, until I read her diaries. She was a lot more upset then she let on back then. But even in her diaries, she never spoke about what she knew my sexual orientation to be (her friends would later tell me things she told them). She knew, she just didn’t want me to say it. The really sad thing about it all is that she’d have had a much easier son to live with back then, if I could have been open with her about it.

After she retired and moved south I was able to strike out finally on my own and get some of it all worked out.   When the first computer BBS systems came along, I was finally able to connect to the gay community at large, and make gay friends, and talk about all the things in my life I never could with mom.  By then mom and I would talk weekly on the phone, sometimes for hours. But we never talked about that part of my life right up to the day she died. My visits with her were seldom and short.

As close as she ever got to acknowledging my sexual orientation, and voicing a little motherly support, was one day on the phone, just a few months before she started having the heart trouble that would kill her.  It was August 2000.  She asked if I was coming down to the annual flea market and I told her then that it was hard to enjoy it, hard to really enjoy any vacation really, without someone to share it with.  And she sighed like she always did when I brought that up, and after a moment, finally said, "I know…I know you’re so lonely.  I wish you weren’t.  I hope you find someone of your own…(pause)…it doesn’t have to be a girl…"  I was a bit stunned.  Before I could say anything she changed the subject. 

So I know a little about what that poor kid was going through. It’s so good he was able to get it out, so wonderful that his parents are so supportive. And…look at what it did for him.

The O’Connors say middle-school officials were terrific, and by eighth grade the tide turned. Zach was let out 15 minutes early and walked across the football field to Daniel Hand High School to attend the gay-straight club. Knowing who he was, he could envision a future and felt a sense of purpose. His grades went up. He had friends. For an assignment about heroes, a girl in his class wrote about him, and Zach used her paper to come out to his Aunt Kathy.

He still wasn’t athletic, but to the family’s surprise, coming out let out a beautiful voice. He won the middle school’s top vocal award.

There’s a lesson there for all parents.  A big one.

Love your kid.  Just…love them.  Just as they are.

Rachmaninov.  Symphony 2.  Says it all.  Tonight anyway.

Most other days it’s Vaughan-Williams’ 3rd.

Peterson Toscano, Ex-Gay therapy survivor himself, has teamed up with Christine Bakke and SoulForce to create a set of resources for other ex-gay therapy survivors.  There is a new website he’s co-hosting with Christine, BeyondExGay.com.  And there will be a gathering of survivors, The Survivor’s Conference–Beyond Ex-Gay which will be in Irvine, California from June 29 to July 1 this year.  I’ll let the SoulForce press release take it from here…but this is good.  This is great.  People who have been through that horrible wringer should be able to find safe spaces here on the net, and offline, where they can talk to each other.

SOULFORCE PRESS RELEASE: April 2, 2007
For Immediate Release
Contact: Paige Schilt, Media Director
Cell: 512-659-1771
paige@soulforce.org
Peterson Toscano, Beyondexgay.com
Cell: 860.680.0639
email: peterson@petersontoscano.com

(Austin, TX)-Survivors of ex-gay programs can take advantage of two new resources this week.  Beyondexgay.com, an online community for those who are healing from ex-gay experiences, will go live today.  Simultaneously, online registration will begin for The Survivor’s Conference: Beyond Ex-gay, a face-to-face event scheduled for June 29-July 1, and sponsored by beyondexgay.com and Soulforce.

Online registration is now available for The Survivor’s Conference: Beyond Ex-gay, a face-to-face event scheduled for June 29th through July 1st, sponsored by beyondexgay.com and Soulforce.

Recent events have brought national attention to the existence of programs intended to modify same-sex desires. While much of that attention has focused on whether sexual orientation is subject to change, beyondexgay.com and The Survivor’s Conference are the first efforts to move beyond that debate in order to focus on the community of "survivors"-people who feel they have experienced more harm than benefits from ex-gay programs.

"We use the term ‘survivor’ because we want to emphasize the very real psychological trauma that these programs can cause, and also because we want to highlight the strength of the men and women who, in spite of enormous pressures, come to accept themselves as they are," says Jeff Lutes, a practicing psychotherapist and Executive Director of Soulforce (www.soulforce.org).

The creators of beyondexgay.com (www.beyondexgay.com), Peterson Toscano and Christine Bakke, talked to hundreds of fellow ex-gay survivors. What they heard, again and again, was that ex-gay experiences brought inner turmoil, confusion and shame.  

Many survivors acknowledge that some good came of their ex-gay journey. "We grew to understand our sexuality better and in some cases even overcame life-controlling problems," says Toscano, but he is quick to point out that the harm most survivors experience far outweighs the help they receive. The consensus of the major medical and mental health organizations is that homosexuality is not a disorder and, therefore, does not need to be cured. The American Psychological Association identifies "depression, anxiety, and self-destructive behavior" among the possible risks associated with ex-gay therapies.

Toscano spent 17 years and over $30,000 on three continents attempting to change or at least contain his unwanted same-sex attractions. He ultimately endured two years at the Love in Action residential ex-gay program in Memphis, TN.

"In the end I was still very gay, but also depressed, isolated and nearly faithless," he says.

Toscano, now a Christian Quaker, has since created a one-person comedy about his ex-gay experiences and has presented Doin’ Time in the Homo No Mo Halfway House and his other work throughout North America, Europe, West Africa and the Caribbean. In spring 2005, Bakke contacted Toscano after attending one of his performances.

Christine Bakke herself spent more than 4 years trying to change her orientation. She moved to Denver in 1998 to become ex-gay and participated in a program affiliated with Exodus International, the largest network of ex-gay ministries. In 2003 she realized that while she had changed in many areas, her sexual orientation remained the same. Bakke’s story will be featured in the May issue of Glamour, which hit newsstands April 10. Toscano will appear as a guest on the Tyra Banks Show on April 12.

Bakke and Toscano continued to dialogue, and last spring they decided it was time to reach out to more ex-gay survivors through the Internet. Together with assistance from their friend, Steve Boese, they form the perfect team: Bakke-a graphic designer, Toscano-a writer, and Boese-a web guru and founder of MyOrgHost (www.myorghost.net).

Beyondexgay.com currently features diverse narratives from ex-gay survivors. It also provides an array of resources, including original articles and art by survivors, as well as links to other sites. Soon survivors will have the option to join the community and create a profile. Through an on-line form, they will document and share their own ex-gay experiences. Their responses will then be added to a database that will track the variety and scope of ex-gay experiences endured by survivors.

"The ex-gay experience is unique in many ways. No one understands it better than those of us who have been through it. Creating a communal space for ex-gay survivors to tell their stories allows us to share what led us into an ex-gay lifestyle and ways we have been able to recover from it," says Bakke.

Creating a space for survivors to come together and share their stories was also the impetus behind The Survivor’s Conference: Beyond Ex-Gay. The conference, which will take place June 29th through July 1st at the University of California-Irvine, is co-sponsored by the LGBT Resource Center at UC Irvine.

"We chose Irvine because the annual Exodus Freedom Conference is coming to Irvine that week," says Lutes.  "For Soulforce, beyondexgay.com, and the LGBT Resource Center at UC Irvine, it is very important to provide a positive response to the Exodus message that gay men and lesbians are sinful and disordered."  

If you want to stand in peaceful solidarity to lovingly confront the damaging consequences of the ex-gay movement – this conference is for you.  If you have ever been through an ex-gay experience or been damaged by the message that God does not love and affirm you – this conference is for you.  If you are confused about the Bible and homosexuality, currently in an ex-gay program, or thinking about trying to change who you are – this conference is for you.

 
Schedule of Events

Friday, June 29, 2007, 7pm – 9pm, Crystal Cove Auditorium (free and open to the public): Doing time in the Homo No Mo Halfway House: How I survived the Ex-gay Movement – a performance by Peterson Toscano, www.homonomo.com

Jason and deMarcoSaturday, June 30, 2007, 9am – 5pm. Registration online is highly recommended. Registrations at the door will be accepted as space allows.

7pm – Crystal Cove Auditorium (free and open to the public) Jason & deMarco in Concert! www.jasonanddemarco.com

Sunday, July 1, 2007 – Optional worship at a local welcoming & affirming church.

More events and housing options TBA

Soul Force’s page announcing the conference: http://www.soulforce.org/article/1226

Rowan Williams seems to be having some misgivings about the developing anti-gay pogrom in his church…

Church must be ‘safe place’ for gay and lesbian people, Archbishop of Canterbury says

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, has said that the churches of the Anglican Communion must be safe places for gay and lesbian people. His comments come in a welcome to an interim report on the Anglican Communion’s Listening Process, a commitment to listen to the experience of homosexual people.

Williams warns that the challenge to create the safe space for the voices of gay and lesbian people to be heard and for their dignity to be respected is based on a fundamental commitment of the Communion.

"The commitments of the Communion are not only to certain theological positions on the question of sexual ethics but also to a manifest and credible respect for the proper liberties of homosexual people, a commitment again set out in successive Lambeth Conference Resolutions over many decades," he said. "I share the concerns expressed about situations where the Church is seen to be underwriting social or legal attitudes which threaten these proper liberties.

The problem of course, is that even the local homophobes really don’t give a rat’s ass anymore what Williams thinks, never mind the ones in Africa…

Bishop blocks gay youth worker’s job

A leading bishop has fuelled the controversy over the Church of England and equality after being accused of refusing to employ a youth worker because he is gay.

The Bishop of Hereford, the Right Reverend Anthony Priddis, blocked the appointment of John Reaney, 41, Reaney’s lawyers say, despite the unanimous decision of an interview panel, including two vicars, to give him the job.

Reaney, from north Wales, claims he had been told after the interview that confirmation that he had got the job from Priddis was just a formality. Instead he was subjected to embarrassing and intimate questions about his private life before being informed by letter that he could not be offered the job because he was a practising homosexual.

On Wednesday the bishop will appear before an employment tribunal in Cardiff to defend his decision. In the first case of its kind, his lawyers are expected to argue that lay appointments by the Church of England should be exempt, as are clerical posts, from anti-discrimination laws.

Anni Holden, a spokeswoman for the Diocese of Hereford, said: ‘We expect the same sexual standards of behaviour from our support ministers or lay ministers as we do of clergy.’ The standard they expect is based on a statement from the House of Bishops in the Nineties which said it was acceptable for staff to be gay but that they must remain celibate.

Reaney’s lawyers will argue that his rejection was based purely on his sexuality, and heterosexual staff were never asked similar questions about their private lives.

The case will highlight the controversy in the Church of England facing Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, below, and could exacerbate the conflict between Christian beliefs and equality laws that are aimed at protecting the rights of gay and lesbian people.

Ironically enough, the problem facing his church, and Christianity itself these days, is pretty neatly summed up by Williams himself…

No-one reading this report can be complacent about such a situation, and the Church is challenged to show that it is truly a safe place for people to be honest and where they may be confident that they will have their human dignity respected, whatever serious disagreements about ethics may remain.

But it is precisely the human dignity of homosexuals that people in his church are having "serious disagreements" about, not ethics.  How you answer the ethical questions depends on how you answer the fundamental question of the humanity and dignity of homosexual people.  If you think homosexuals are some kind of human vermin, a cancer on the church, then you’re sure as hell not going to make your church a safe place for them.  And you’re not going to want anyplace outside the church be a safe place for them either.  Your calculation is simple: wherever homosexuals are safe, nobody else is.  Therefore, homosexuals cannot be safe anywhere.  You are going to do everything in your power to sweep them into the gutter where you think they belong, for the sake of your church, and your community.  Well…really…for the sake of your cheapshit prejudices.  But this is what Anglican archbishop Peter Akinola, is encouraging the government of his country to do.  It is what the Americans who have now aligned with him would wish their government could.  A safe place for homosexuals is the last thing these people want.  They want a purge, and not just in the church pews either.

The really sad thing is that even in this new document, Williams cannot bear to actually take a stand For the human dignity of gay people.  At a glance it seems that he is, but by glossing over the nature of the serious disagreement he’s undercutting the very stand he would like everyone to think he’s making.  You can’t simultaneously insist that the human dignity of gay people must be respected, and at the same time agree that it is debatable.