I’d really wanted to get the pencils for episode ten of A Coming Out Story finished by Wednesday.  But it was impossible somehow.  I swear I worked on one solitary panel all night Wednesday and that was all I could get done.  I would put down a line and it wasn’t right, erase, redraw, erase, redraw…over and over and fucking over again and it was so frustrating.  Finally I got that panel done and by the time I just had to go to bed for the night I was certain that I wouldn’t finish by Sunday like I wanted to.

Thursday wasn’t much better.  Then…tonight…somehow…I got another head of steam up and I finished the pencils, and then blasted through the inking nearly halfway.  And now I’m actually further along then I’d originally wanted to be.  Go figure.

So…barring some catastrophe, I’ll have episode ten up sometime Sunday after all.  I have no idea how professionals manage to keep to their deadlines.  I just don’t.

Nothing to get a good adrenaline rush going on the routine drive home (I drove today…too hot to walk these past two days…) like suddenly seeing a street light fall over onto the cars in front of you. 

I was stopped at a light along 40th street near the Rotunda, a large old brick Baltimore office building that’s been converted to stores and offices.  I was listening to Signorile on Sirius OutQ and waiting for traffic in front of me to start moving.  Then I see this big city streetlight on my side of the road, tip over in a long slow arc across the road several cars ahead of me.  It crashed down with a loud bang on the roof of a car in the oncoming traffic.  Because of the cars in front of me I couldn’t tell whether it had hit any of the cars ahead of me or not.

Imagine…you’re driving home from work and just…out of the fucking blue…a street light comes crashing down on top of your car.  The driver of the car that got hit probably didn’t even see it coming.  He’s looking ahead of him and just all of a sudden there’s this loud bang on the roof and the roof is buckling on on him and his windows are being smashed.

Before traffic had a chance to snarl I swung my car out of the line and down a side street and parked.  Then I walked back to the scene.   People were already taking care of the driver of the car that got hit and calling for an ambulance.  He looked cut on his arm but otherwise not badly hurt.  Just…stunned.  The windows on the driver’s side of his car were all smashed out and the roof of the car was badly, I mean really badly, dented in.  I was thinking as I looked at it that it was a good thing the light hadn’t fallen on a pedestrian.  There are two old folks homes near that scene and you see old people slowly walking up and down that sidewalk all the time.  On the other side of that street is a Giant Food grocery store and all the other Rotunda stores and that sidewalk usually has pedestrians on it, even very late at night.  It seemed unduly lucky that right at that moment there hadn’t been anyone walking nearby.

There was another car on the other side of the street further up that didn’t look to my eye like it was damaged, but it’s driver was carefully looking over the side of the car I couldn’t see so there might have been something.  Broken glass from the car that got hit and the street light was all over the street. 

There was a Baltimore Gas and Electric utility truck parked on the sidewalk where the street light had been.  It looked like they’d been trying to maneuver the truck into position to do some utility work and had knocked over a bus stop and the street light in the process.  But I didn’t actually see it happen so that’s just a guess based on what I saw.  The bus stop was right next to where the street light was and it was bent over under the front bumper of the truck.  How the driver didn’t see it or the street light I haven’t a clue.

A few seconds later and that street light might have hit me.

That’s something I was taught to consider in a structured analysis and design class I attended once and it’s the kind of thinking that we should all practice.  You really need sometimes to look critically at the obvious, the taken-for-granted, those "everyone knows such-and-such is true" truths.  They can be delicate, nearly invisible curtains hiding from your eyes the reality that’s staring you back in the face.

Via aTypical Joe, comes this story of 81 words that were once in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), and how they were there in the first place, simply because everyone just assumed they were true.  And this particular assumption got its first really critical looking at, when Evelyn Hooker, a psychologist at UCLA, met Sam From, a student…

Evelyn was a psychologist at UCLA and Sam was her student. He was also a homosexual. They started spending time together in the mid 1940s and Sam introduced Evelyn to his group of friends most of whom, like Sam, were gay.

Now, as I said, everyone in this group was homosexual but curiously, none was in therapy. They were all well-adjusted young men who utterly failed to conform to the traditional psychiatric image of the tortured, disturbed homosexual.

This, naturally, got Evelyn thinking.

Now, prior to Evelyn Hooker, all of the research on homosexuality – all of it – was done on people who were already under serious psychiatric treatment. Let me repeat that: In the history of psychiatric research, no one had ever conducted a study on a homosexual population that wasn’t either in therapy, in prison, a mental hospital, or the disciplinary barracks of the armed services.

Evelyn thought about this and decided that this kind of research was distorting psychiatry’s conclusions about homosexual populations. To test her theory, Evelyn came up with an experiment. Through her former student she located 30 homosexuals who had never sought therapy in their lives and matched those homosexuals with a group of heterosexuals of comparable age, IQ and education.

Evelyn then put both groups through a battery of psychological tests including a Rorschach Test, the famous ink-blot test. After disguising her subjects, Evelyn gave the results to three experienced psychiatrists and asked them to identify the homosexuals. She figured that if homosexuals were inherently pathological, the psychiatrists would be able to pick them out easily. But the judges were completely unable to distinguish the homos from the hets.

Equally important was the fact that the judges categorized two thirds of the homosexuals and the heterosexuals as perfectly well-adjusted normally functioning human beings. 

Hooker’s study challenged the idea that homosexuality was a pathology in the first place, and in doing this it not only called into question an entire generation of research on homosexuality, it also challenged psychiatry’s basic concept of disease. If you believed Hooker’s data the only conclusion you could come to was that psychiatry was deciding that certain behaviors were diseases, not out of any sort of scientific proof, but based on their own prejudices.

Beside Evelyn Hooker, psychiatrists who wanted to change the DSM really had only one other scientific study on their side: Alfred Kinsey’s famous 1948 sex survey which found that a whopping 37% of all men had had physical contact to the point of orgasm with other men, a finding which – besides shocking the hell out of 63% of the American public – seemed to suggest that homosexual acts were too common to be considered a disease.

In spite of all this work, psychiatry continued to maintain that the homos were sick and steadfastly refused to reevaluate the DSM. And then luck, or maybe fate, intervened.

This is but a small excerpt from a really good This American Life broadcast, which originally aired in January 2002.  It’s available for listening at the link above.  If you have iTunes it can also be purchased for ninty-five cents.  I highly recommend it.  The broadcast is the story of the DSM change as told by Alix Spiegel, the granddaughter of the man who was the president elect of the APA when the change occurred.  Like many profound historical events, this one is something more, and something less, then the mythologies that have grown up around it.  It involved political theater, and behind the scenes activism.  It involved many diverse people from many diverse backgrounds…most of them heterosexual, some of them gay.  Most of the gays in the APA at that time were in fact, deeply, deeply closeted, and what is probably a striking thing for modern ears to hear is how many of them accepted the prevailing assumptions about the pathology of homosexuality.

But if the internal behind the scenes politics, and the external pressure of gay activists accomplished anything, it was to hasten what the science would eventually compel them to do anyway.  That is not to ether dismiss, nor exaggerate the impact of the activism.  There is a scene near the end of Alix Spiegel’s story that needs to be in any film or TV recreation of these events, and it is that moment when Robert Spitzer is brought by one of the activists who had been protesting the APA’s categorizing of homosexuality as an illness, uninvited, to a gathering of the closeted gay professionals, and he sees how many distinguished and successful people of his profession are homosexual, people he would never have suspected, people whose accomplishments were considerable, people who would, every one of them, have been drummed out of their profession had their sexual orientation become known then.  For Spitzer, it is a profound revelation.  And then…a young man in uniform walks in the door.

You should listen to this episode.  It’s nearly an hour long but well worth it, to get to that scene.  There is a historian toward the end who says that questions of disease and pathology ultimately resolve down to moral questions, not scientific ones.  I disagree.  Science can certainly tell us whether or not something is or is not harmful to us mentally and physically.  And the moral question was answered millenia ago: First Do No Harm…  But there is a profound moral question at the bottom of every scientific one and that is the question of truthfulness and letting the evidence speak for itself.  Even if means you have to discard a cherished assumption you’ve held on to for years.  Even if that assumption has given you the recognition of your peers, fame, and made you a pretty good living. 

Robert Spitzer has taken a lot of justly deserved criticism for his so-called study of clients of ex-gay ministries, but you have to give the man credit for that one dazzling moment near the end of this report, when he let the evidence he could clearly see with his own two eyes, finally, speak for itself.  Charles Socrades comes off by contrast, as a man so blinded by dogma that he’s even willing to regard himself as a parental failure to his own gay son.  But as he says, his business was booming.  He speaks with pride toward the end about some parents who took their 16 year old gay son to one psychiatrist after another, only to be told there was nothing wrong with the boy…until they met him.

And now you know what happens to a soul that stops asking questions.

One thing that keeps attracting my attention when I’m looking at my server logs are the number of folks who hit my site after doing a search on my name.  I realize that I’m not the only Bruce Garrett in the world, but it’s frustraiting sometimes just wondering if any of them are old friends who were just randomly searching on my name just for kicks and grins.

Hey…if you knew me once upon a time…drop me a line sometime and say ‘Hi’.  Let me know how you’re doing.  Okay?  I still think of my old friends quite often and I’d love to hear from you.  Well…most of you. 

And…especially you tigapaw.  Yeah…you.  Wave back sometime.  Please.  It would make my day.

A politician’s candor always increases in direct proportion to proximity to retirement. That must be why Dick Armey, the departing house majority leader, so openly discussed his party’s version of pork-barrel politics with the A.P. "There is an old adage. To the victor goes the spoils," he said, explaining why Republican districts have received an average of $600 million more annually than Democratic districts since the Republican takeover. (By the way, that is nearly 18 times the partisan disparity that existed — in the opposite direction — when Democrats last ran the House.) It was good of Professor Armey to share his governing philosophy with us now, even if he and his pals Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay forgot to mention their partisan budgetary objectives when they were promoting the Contract With America in 1994. But their libertarian admirers may be disappointed to learn that these great statesmen were more focused on redistributing wealth upward than in reducing the size of government.

–Joe Conason, Salon.Com August 2002

To the victor belong the spoils.  Those of you who seriously thought that the republicans were fighting for smaller, less intrusive government, more personal freedom from the nanny state, and for fiscal responsibility, are now feel free to feel like they’ve been had.  What they wanted, simply, were the spoils.  Nothing more.  I’m sure historians will debate for generations how the train wreak that was the Bush presidency happened, and why it seemed that they always governed more like a gang of thugs then like the ideologues they presented themselves as being.  But it’s simple.  They’re governing like a gang of thugs, because that’s what they are.

The following story about our imperial vice president may seem trivial compared to Cheney’s unilaterally engineering the withdrawal of the Unites States of America from the Geneva Convention, but it’s everything that is cheap and squalid about the Bush Administration, and by extension the modern republican party, in a nutshell.  

Leaving No Tracks

Sue Ellen Wooldridge, the 19th-ranking Interior Department official, arrived at her desk in Room 6140 a few months after Inauguration Day 2001. A phone message awaited her.

"This is Dick Cheney," said the man on her voice mail, Wooldridge recalled in an interview. "I understand you are the person handling this Klamath situation. Please call me at — hmm, I guess I don’t know my own number. I’m over at the White House."

Wooldridge wrote off the message as a prank. It was not. Cheney had reached far down the chain of command, on so unexpected a point of vice presidential concern, because he had spotted a political threat arriving on Wooldridge’s desk.

In Oregon, a battleground state that the Bush-Cheney ticket had lost by less than half of 1 percent, drought-stricken farmers and ranchers were about to be cut off from the irrigation water that kept their cropland and pastures green. Federal biologists said the Endangered Species Act left the government no choice: The survival of two imperiled species of fish was at stake.

Law and science seemed to be on the side of the fish. Then the vice president stepped in.

With predictable results… 

First Cheney looked for a way around the law, aides said. Next he set in motion a process to challenge the science protecting the fish, according to a former Oregon congressman who lobbied for the farmers.

Because of Cheney’s intervention, the government reversed itself and let the water flow in time to save the 2002 growing season, declaring that there was no threat to the fish. What followed was the largest fish kill the West had ever seen, with tens of thousands of salmon rotting on the banks of the Klamath River.

Characteristically, Cheney left no tracks.

Other then the wreckage you mean.  Those of you who seriously thought that the republicans were fighting for smaller, less intrusive government, more personal freedom from the nanny state, and for fiscal responsibility, are now feel free to feel like they’ve been had.  Except you were warned.  Over and over again you were warned.  And the warning sign was this: instead of appealing to American’s hopes and dreams, they kept appealing to our fears, to our resentments, to our hatreds…

That should have told you everything.  These thugs, who live in a gutter of fears and resentments and cheap bar stool hatreds, if they know nothing else they know the language of fear, and resentment, and hate.  It’s their point of repose, their magnetic north, their absolute bedrock.  Fear, and resentment, and hate.  And you let them manipulate yours.  And you got what you voted for.  What do tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, liberated now from life itself, hundreds of dead Americans, mostly poor and black, floating in the waters of New Orleans, and the largest fish kill the American west has ever seen have in common? 

Next time, vote your hopes instead of your fears, or it’s your fears you’ll be living with after the election.

Bastards…

Pentagon: Gays encouraged to continue to serve nation after discharge

The Pentagon, in a policy obtained by The Advocate, has indicated that lesbian and gay military personnel who are discharged under the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell law are qualified to continue to serve the nation. A copy of the Pentagon policy, included in a statement released by the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, now states, "These separated members have the opportunity to continue to serve their nation and national security by putting their abilities to use by way of civilian employment with other Federal agencies, the Department of Defense, or in the private sector, such as with a government contractor."

We can do the work, we just can’t have the dignity and the honor of bearing arms in our nation’s defense.  And it’s not because these braying jackasses are uncomfortable working side-by-side with homosexuals.  That’s bullshit.  It’s because they just can’t bear to see the stigma removed from people they personally loath, yet know godammned well their country needs too. 

For sure the Pentagon’s Jack D. Ripper’s are all feeling very evolved now that they’re willing to let us do the work of keeping America secure, so long as we don’t actually get the recognition for it.  Some of them might even think they’re doing us a favor, since life as a highly paid DOD contractor is probably a higher calling in George Bush’s America then being in uniform anyway.

Note To Self: There are certain constants in your life that you need to pay attention to.  Never mind why they’re constants.  You know from past experience what reliably happens when you do certain things.  So it makes sense not to do those things.  Right?

For instance: working for insurance companies.  Every insurance company job you’ve ever worked became a catastrophe within a couple weeks.  Four different companies…four different and diverse sets of managers…and yet the same result.  And within weeks.  Wait…one of them didn’t even make it a week. 

No…you don’t really understand why that is…you have a really great resume from your other employers…lots of very nice letters of recomendation there.  But hey…physicists are still arguing about why gravity works too and they still know exactly How it works.  You know how this works: you and insurance companies just don’t mix.  When seeking employment, stay the hell away from them.

Here’s another constant in your life you need to pay attention to:  You have a string of heart wreaks that have “short and cute” written all over them.  The epitome of that was Dale.  You remember Dale don’t you?  Still hurts too doesn’t it?  Yeah…I thought so.  Gosh he was cute wasn’t he?  And a self-centered, devious little weasel too.  And so was Raymond.  And Twan.  And Trey.  See a pattern here?  Other kinds of guys have cut wounds into your heart, sure.  But they didn’t mean to.  They really cared how you felt.  Only the short and cute ones made you feel stupid afterward.

So…listen…this new guy who moved in down the block from you…  He’s got a really nice smile for you and seems like a really nice guy and everything…  But before you get yourself all wrapped around another Dale, I have a suggestion: hit yourself over the head with something hard.

[Edited a tad…]

I posted this on a MySpace discussion group just this morning, where a sixteen year old preacher’s son told the others that he was being sent to an ex-gay camp.  He said he doesn’t want to be gay, that it’s a sin, and that he hated the urges he was having.  This is my reply to him.

I’m reposting it here because you have to know that there are many other kids out there just like him, feeling alone and miserable about urges they’re having that they can’t seem to control, and which shame them deeply.  It just breaks your heart sometimes.  If there’s any shame here, it ought to be falling down hard on the shoulders of the adults in their lives who won’t teach them to reach for that higher ground where urges can become the beautiful desires two people in love feel for one another, because if gay kids can stand tall and proud and love wholeheartedly, then those adults just can’t feel righteous…

Yeah, some people say that simply being gay is a sin. Some people say that it’s just acting on it that’s the sin. And then again, some folks say the universe is less then nine-thousand years old too. Here’s what I say: when the bird and the bird book disagree, believe the bird.

I’m sorry you’re being troubled by urges. That’s not unusual at your age. Gay and straight alike, we all go through adolescence. And it can be a difficult time no matter what your sexual orientation is. It’s the walk from childhood into adulthood. And part of being an adult, is learning to deal with sex and sexuality. In your teenage years especially, that part of you can yank you around like a big yapping dog on a leash, always tugging you this way and that toward whatever it finds interesting, the instant it catches sight of it. It can be really hard to deal with, especially when you’re young.

Straight kids usually get to learn at this stage, about dating, and about love, and about what it means to become a worthy lover, and find someone to love and be loved by. The really troubling thing about how gay kids are often treated, even these days, is that their urges aren’t allowed to become anything more then urges, aren’t allow to develop into anything higher and more noble then lusts. They’re not told that they too can reach for that higher ground where two people can find a soulmate in each other, and nurture and share an intimate body and soul romance between them.

That is one of the most perfect joys of this life there is…to find your other half, and to love and be loved by them. But like anything else important in life, you have to learn how, you have to make yourself ready for it, and become worthy of it, and gay kids are taught only that all they have, and all they ever will have, are urges. A kind of acid is slowly poured over their capacity to love and trust and accept love and trust from another, and the possibility of finding that soulmate, that intimate other, is carefully and deliberately taken away from them. If there is such a thing as Sin in this world, capital S, then doing that to someone has to be a big one.

If you’re worried about being gay, you’re worrying about the wrong thing. Worry instead that you are trustworthy, that your word is good, that your friends can trust you, that you do your share of the work, that you never become the kind of person who takes advantage of other people who are weaker then yourself, or more vulnerable, that you care that your community, and your country are better for your having walked in it, and that the people you take into your arms, whether they’re male or female, are better for having been loved by you, and not worse. That’s the important stuff in life. The rest is detail. I tell you that if you take care of the important stuff, the detail will work itself out.

Looks like I’ll have the pencils for episode eleven done tonight…if I’m not being distracted by this really cute new neighbor that I have that is.  I’d hoped to have them done by Sunday night but it just wasn’t possible.  But as long as I can start inking on Wednesday I can have eleven up by the end of this weekend.

I hope those of you reading this series get as many giggles while reading eleven as I’ve had drawing it.  This one’s been a lot of fun to draw.  It’s about something your gay neighbors go through during adolescence…that period of time when (if you’re a guy, say) you start realizing that you’re looking at other guys in a sexual way and it’s embarrassing and you don’t want to and you keep trying to stop you’re utterly unable to stop.  Your eyes just keep straying back to that really cute guy, and then they wander all over his body like a pencil sketching out every line and curve…and you catch yourself doing it and you think ‘stop it’ and you look away and then a few moments later your eyes just start straying right back again…  I can laugh about it now, but back then it was very, very irritating…

People don’t always appreciate how the fascist right often cloaks its war against political opponents in terms of fighting indecency.  The Bush Administration crack down a couple years ago on broadcast indecency was usually taken to be a bone tossed at it’s fundamentalist base.  But it was of a piece with the right’s long war on dissent…

You might react by saying that the FCC fines only for exposure of certain portions of skin or particular diction, and it would never punish anyone for expressing a political view. I would respond with three facts.

First, in the 1950s FCC Chairman Doerfer started investigations against TV stations for showing reports done by Edward R. Murrow that were allegedly not sympathetic to famous republican anticommunist Senator Joe McCarthy.

Doerfer was a McCarthy man. McCarthy was such an important figure in the Republican party, similar to Representative Tom Delay today, that his behavior was tolerated by the Republican White House. Indeed, President Eisenhower put two McCarthy people on the commission, among one the Chairman.

Second, while the Washington Post was starting in on the Watergate story, President Nixon’s staff, perhaps at his request, apparently caused his appointed Chairman at the FCC to begin investigations into the Washington Post’s television stations in Florida. The idea, according to then Post publisher Katherine Graham, was to have the investigations cast a cloud on the Post’s continued ownership of the stations, so as to undercut the business model that was supposed to further her initial public offering. Of course, the Post saw this as punishment for its pursuit of the story of the Watergate break-ins.

-Reed Hunt, Regulating Indecency: The Federal Communication Commission’s Threat To The First Amendment (PDF) 

The political cartoonist Herblock used to draw Nixon’s FCC chairman and cronies with a big sign behind them that said "Fairness Doctrine: If It’s Not Pro-Administration, It’s Not Fair"  Even back then attacks on the media by the right wing were fierce and unrelenting.  Anytime a story that was critical of Nixon appeared in the press or on TV there were howls from the right about bias.  But back then the news outlets had a little backbone.  It wasn’t until the right managed to rewrite FCC rules on radio and TV station ownership, rules which once had bipartisan support on the theory that neither party should be allowed to dominate the public airwaves, that the right was able finally to shut progressive viewpoints out of the public debate.

Think Progress has a copy of a report from The Center for American Progress and Free Press posted that documents something we all already know about Radio: it speaks with an almost exclusively conservative voice now:

The Center for American Progress and Free Press today released the first-of-its-kind statistical analysis of the political make-up of talk radio in the United States. It confirms that talk radio, one of the most widely used media formats in America, is dominated almost exclusively by conservatives.

The new report — entitled “The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio” — raises serious questions about whether the companies licensed to broadcast over the public radio airwaves are serving the listening needs of all Americans.

While progressive talk is making inroads on commercial stations, right-wing talk reigns supreme on America’s airwaves. Some key findings:

– In the spring of 2007, of the 257 news/talk stations owned by the top five commercial station owners, 91 percent of the total weekday talk radio programming was conservative, and only 9 percent was progressive.

– Each weekday, 2,570 hours and 15 minutes of conservative talk are broadcast on these stations compared to 254 hours of progressive talk — 10 times as much conservative talk as progressive talk.

– 76 percent of the news/talk programming in the top 10 radio markets is conservative, while 24 percent is progressive.

Note that those top ten markets are either in solidly blue states, or in blue areas of blue states.  The exception being Texas.

Two common myths are frequently offered to explain the imbalance of talk radio: 1) the 1987 repeal of the Fairness Doctrine (which required broadcasters to devote airtime to contrasting views), and 2) simple consumer demand. Each of these fails to adequately explain the root cause of the problem. The report explains:

Our conclusion is that the gap between conservative and progressive talk radio is the result of multiple structural problems in the U.S. regulatory system, particularly the complete breakdown of the public trustee concept of broadcast, the elimination of clear public interest requirements for broadcasting, and the relaxation of ownership rules including the requirement of local participation in management. […]

Ultimately, these results suggest that increasing ownership diversity, both in terms of the race/ethnicity and gender of owners, as well as the number of independent local owners, will lead to more diverse programming, more choices for listeners, and more owners who are responsive to their local communities and serve the public interest.

Along with other ideas, the report recommends that national radio ownership not be allowed to exceed 5 percent of the total number of AM and FM broadcast stations, and local ownership should not exceed more than 10 percent of the total commercial radio stations in a given market.

Read the full report here.

I bought a satellite radio receiver for my car mostly so I didn’t have to listen to hate radio whenever I took my yearly road trips out west.  Anyone who really thought back when the rules were being changed that letting big business rule the airwaves would result in a more consumer choice and more responsiveness to what consumers want to hear either knows now that they were sadly mistaken, or they never listed to radio in the first place and aren’t now.  Of course, anyone who’s paid a utility bill recently in a deregulated market knows exactly how much consumer choice big business wants to let us have. 

It’s true.  Some years ago, after Maryland started allowing us to view our grade school records, I took a trip to my old High School and asked to see mine.  Reading all the comments in my file from all the teachers I’d had over the years was a real eye opener.  Two of them stood out in particular: one from a fifth grade teacher who wrote Bruce "Takes excessive interest in personal art projects".  The other was a write-up by one of my first grade teachers for a discipline infraction.  I’d been caught kissing other boys.

It wasn’t until I read her words that I even remembered the incident.  Perhaps I’d just shut it out of my mind all those years because the embarrassment was too much for my little first grade sensibilities.  Or perhaps I just let the incident slide on by because I hadn’t thought it was any big deal at the time.  All I remember of it, was getting scolded for kissing a boy.  But that particular teacher was always scolding me and then dragging me into the coat closet, where she dragged all the kids at one time or another to make them pray for forgiveness because of something they did, or that she though they’d done.  I still remember how livid she was when the Supreme Court ruled that public schools can’t force the kids in them to pray.  Picture a first grade teacher standing stone faced in front of her classroom of small children, and telling them that the Supreme Court had just taken God away from them.

Which is all to say that my sexuality, even at that age, was probably already beginning to surface in various little telling ways, and that some of the adults in my life were already starting to brand me for it.  There’s a really interesting article in this weeks’ Village Voice about parents and teachers struggling to cope with developing gender and sexuality in grade school children and younger in a culture that simply doesn’t want to aknowledge that children have any such things.  But if there is a bioligical basis to sexual orientation, then its a no-brainer that they do.

But why not? We know almost nothing about gender and sexuality in young children, but what we do know is that they both emerge in children quite early.

"It varies, and development varies from child to child, but awareness of sexuality begins in elementary school," says Caitlin Ryan, a researcher studying LGBT families with the Family Acceptance Project in California. "Even though adults who work with children or adolescents are typically not aware of this as part of their professional training, regardless, it’s happening. It’s very common for young people to have attractions to same-sex peers if they’re young."

I remember my grade school crushes to this day.  I often drove my friends back then crazy with my heated emotional attachments.  In those days though, strange as it may sound today, a young boy was almost expected to dislike girls and find more emotional gratification in his male pals until he got to a certain age.  There was a saying for it "Going through a phase…"  As time went on and my male pals began their first tentative efforts at courtship, I would reach for that saying to describe myself and my own emotional responses to the same and the opposite sex, over and over again like a mantra.  "I’m just going through a phase…just going through a phase…just going through a phase…"   I had no idea what it meant, but it sounded like a good enough excuse to avoid dating girls…something I was really really not interested in.

If only someone had told me that I could date boys instead.  Oh…I’d have jumped right on that… 

Just ask the parents. "In their kindergarten class, I’ve definitely observed three or four of the boys being flirtatious, with both girls and other boys," says the mother of the little boy who wants to marry his "god brother."

Ryan says that elementary school health teachers have told her that they hear children talking about crushes beginning as early as kindergarten. "Children can describe thinking of Valentine’s day and of having that little special feeling of having butterflies in their stomach," she says. "Why would we think that this is only something that takes place in their twenties?"

And why would we think that only straight kids are getting twitterpated? Is it because we still think gayness is such an undesirable outcome?

Twitterpated.  I love it.  Describes my schoolboy crushes perfectly.  Twitterpated.  Except I had no idea what it was all about, because I wasn’t allowed to know that boys could fall in love with other boys.  Those years could have been a lot happier for me then they were.  Every kid should be allowed to get twitterpated without getting dragged into the closet to pray for forgiveness.

It’s a British guy, but someone finally steps forward as a proud, and very annoyed tobacco user…

A lot of people who, like me, have hitherto been keen smokers have suddenly started telling me that they are glad the government is stepping in to discipline them. These are people who were until recently aware enough of their own pleasure centres to know that the act of smoking can be, and often is, so much more than feeding a greedy addiction. It does relieve stress; it does deepen the pleasure of a sociable evening, as it relieves the alienation of a lonely one; it does help you think.

That’s actually the first time I’ve ever seen anyone acknowledge that smoking can alleviate the sting of loneliness for a while.  Yeah.  It does that.

And yes, unlike other intoxicants, tobacco does does help you think.  It can also give you cancer and heart disease.  But we make these trade-offs all the time in life.  You can get heart disease from the regular consumption of certain kinds of food.  You can get killer VD from having sex.  You can be crippled or killed in an automobile accident.  Same thing with any of a dozen or more active sports.  There’s this puritan strain here in America, and I guess in places overseas too, that regards any kind of drug use, and nicotine is certainly a drug, as wicked and which admits no limits on its right to stop other people from doing it.  Whether what someone is doing is putting other people at risk isn’t the point, although it’s often the rhetoric.  The point is that they like doing it purely for the pleasure of doing it and they have to be corrected.  It’s not drugs that are evil, it’s pleasure.

Anyone who ever had to deal with an alcoholic or a drug addict knows there are times when you need to step in and put a stop to it.  But people who can handle their sinful pleasures responsibly ought to be left alone, simply on the principle that our lives belong, ultimately, to us and not a bunch of finger wagging pinched face nags.  That goes for sex, it goes for drag racing, it goes for tobacco, it goes for anything someone might do, purely for the pleasure of doing it.  I work twelve hour days sometimes, and weekends through.  I’ve postponed vacations when work related matters needed my attention.  Sometimes, life just gets like that.  I pay my bills, I pay my taxes, I always try to get the best deal for goods and services, but I won’t try to cheat anyone.  George Washington could not tell a lie…I just won’t.  I respect the rule of law, and I keep an eye on my neighborhood, and I look out for my neighbors.  If I want to fucking enjoy a good cigar from time to time I damn well ought to be able to, as long as my smoke isn’t bothering anyone else.  I’m fine with the concept of smoke free zones.  Not so much with outright bans.  Maybe it’ll kill me someday.  On the other hand, maybe a mugger or a gay basher will get me first.  Life is too risky a business not to have some fun with it while you can, even if it kills you.

If I could live to be a thousand, and smoking was likely to cut nine hundred and forty years off that, then I probably wouldn’t do it.

The walk home…
through the park, then up the hill
90 degrees…hot…
My daypack full of stuff
heavy
Noticing that my usual fast pace is making me tired
again.
Tired
Pausing for a while
to steady myself
I never had to before.

Blue Mountains high and valley low,
I don’t know which way I should go,
One Summer Dream, One Summer dream.

Warm summer breeze blows endlessly,
Touching the hearts of those who feel,
One Summer Dream, One Summer dream.

Bird on wing goes floating by,
But there’s a teardrop in his eye,
One Summer Dream, One Summer dream.

Just saying…

So I’m checking the headlines on Slashdot…

Microsoft Pleads With Consumers to Adopt Vista Now

"Microsoft has admitted, in an email to the press, that ‘some customers may be waiting to adopt Windows Vista because they’ve heard rumors about device or application compatibility issues, or because they think they should wait for a service pack release.’ The company is now pleading with customers not to wait until the release of SP1 at the end of the year, launching a ‘fact rich’ program to try to convince them to…

"Fact rich"?  "Fact rich"?  "Fact rich"?  Well that certainly helps me make up My mind about running Vista.  Hell will not only have to freeze over, it’ll have to turn into ice cream too. 

Fact rich…  Fact rich… 

I finished episode nine of A Coming Out Story last weekend, and I have a road trip coming up in another couple of weekends.  I’ll be on the road for most of the month of July, first going to visit some friends in the mid-west, then out to the Four Corners area to explore a tad more, then to California and a visit with my brother, then to Portland Oregon and the O’Reilly Open Source Developer’s Conference.  Given my past performance getting out new episodes it seemed a sure bet that I wouldn’t have anything more up until August at the earliest.  But I have a head of steam up now, and I really really want to get episode ten up before I leave for the west.  It’s one of several upcoming ones I’ve been chafing at the bit to do since I started scripting this series in 2005.

So I’ve been trying hard to push everything else in my life aside for a couple hours every night after work.  Naturally several things suddenly popped up that needed my immediate attention and I thought I was once again letting precious drawing time pass on by.  But somehow I’ve managed to finish half the pencils on episode ten already.  I’m shooting to have all the pencils done by the end of this coming weekend.  Then I can have the episode up for sure by the following weekend.  Or even sooner.

I’ll probably take my portable drawing board (it has a parallel attached to it), my small scanner, the Wacom tablet and drawing supplies along with me on the trip.  I might be able to get another episode out while I’m on the road.  It really bothers me that I’ve been working on this thing since 2005 and it’s 2007 I only have nine episodes up.