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…
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.
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.
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.
Aronda Kirby and Digit Murphy were once married to men, received the tax breaks for married couples and were legally permitted to take family leave if their husbands or children got sick.
Both women lost those protections when they came out as lesbians, divorced their husbands and set up a new household together with their six children.
Now, with couples like Murphy and Kirby in mind, some gay-rights advocates who previously fought for "marriage or nothing" are shifting strategies. Rather than fighting to legalize marriage for same-sex couples, they’re lobbying for the protections marriage provides.
Uh, huh…
They say they are testing whether lawmakers who summarily reject gay marriage will approve rights that enjoy more popular support.
No, and no.
This debate about whether spending our time and money and effort working to secure equal marriage rights or not is like a bad penny. It keeps coming up after every bitter setback we have to endure, and I guess the pain of having your hopes dashed time after time after time makes people forget why we got to this place in the first place. It is not because we got too cocky and overreached. It is not because we decided to go for it all rather then taking the careful incremental approach.
(WCCO)Minneapolis Being able to visit a loved one in a hospital is something many can take for granted. Gay partners say they can be denied access to their partners in critical situations.
A Senate committee will soon consider a new law that would guarantee that access at all hospitals.
"When someone takes their partner to the emergency room and they’re asked ‘what’s your relationship to this person?’ and they respond ‘I’m their partner’ and the nurse puts up her hand and says stop, your not family. You can’t go beyond this door,” said Ann DeGroot, who represents the gay rights group Out Front Minnesota.
Conservative groups are fighting the proposal. Their concern is not about visitation, but putting anything into law that acknowledges same sex partnerships.
"What we object to is the creation of these domestic partner statuses, which is really marriage by another name and that’s what we see they are attempting to do”, said Tom Prichard of the Minnesota Family Council.
Gay rights groups contend it isn’t about gay marriage, but support at a critical time.
“This is just a bill that has to do with something that we know could make people’s lives better”, DeGroot said.
Right. And you think the religious right and their republican enablers want to make the lives of gay people Better…? You’re wrong DeGroot…this bill Is about gay marriage, because that’s what the religious right has already made it. Without a doubt every politician in the state can see what the next round of attack ads will look like.
Probably something like this…
This is what the Republican National Committee was mailing out to voters in 2004. Or maybe it’ll look like these little charmers the republicans spit out in the New York 7th district race against Craig Johnson…
I’m 53 years old, which I guess is about 200 in Paul Cameron years, and I’ve lived this struggle for equal rights since I was 17 years old, and I tell you that our enemies will turn Everything We Do, to win Any Little Crumb off the table our heterosexual neighbors take for granted, into a fight over same sex marriage. It is the trump card they know they can use to short-circuit debate about any bill relating even remotely to gay people, their way of scaring the politicians and inflaming passions among the voters. When the Supreme Court ruled in Lawrence v. Texas that the sodomy laws were unconstitutional, the very first thing the kook pews began howling about was that it would lead to same sex marriage. But as far back as the early 1980s, when some gay rights groups in a few states were agitating for hospitalization rights, to prevent what happened to Karen Thompson and Sharon Kowalski and Juan Navarette, our enemies were bellyaching that giving us hospital visitation rights would lead to same sex marriage.
Juan [Navarett] and Leroy [Tranton] lived together in Long Beach for eight years. One day, Juan came home from the grocery store and found Leroy, who had fallen off a ladder, lying on the concrete patio. Leroy was rushed to the hospital where he stayed in a coma for several days. Although Leroy regained consciousness, he remained hospitalized for nine months. Juan visited Leroy once or twice each day, feeding him and encouraging him to recuperate.
Leroy’s estranged brother, who lived in Maine, filed a lawsuit seeking to have himself appointed as Leroy’s conservator.
When Juan accidentally found out, he showed up at court in Long Beach. Although Juan, who was not represented by counsel, stood up and protested, the judge refused to consider Juan’s plea because he was a stranger to Leroy in the eyes of the law.
The brother subsequently had Leroy transferred from the hospital to an undisclosed location. When Juan finally discovered that Leroy was being housed in a nursing home about 50 miles from Long Beach, he attempted to visit Leroy there. The staff stopped Juan in the lobby, advising him that the brother had given them a photo of Juan with strict orders not to allow him to visit Leroy. Unfortunately, no one else ever visited Leroy there.
It took Juan about two weeks to find an attorney who would take the case without charge. The attorney filed a lawsuit seeking visitation rights.
A few hours before the hearing was scheduled to occur, the brother’s attorney called Juan’s attorney, informing him that Leroy had died three days before.
Since the body had already been flown back to Maine where it was cremated, Juan never had an opportunity to pay his last respects.
Normal people might feel a twinge of conscience that such things could happen to couples in love, might even feel a bit of disgust at gutter crawling maggots like Tranton’s brother. But when bills giving same sex couples visitation rights were introduced in Sacremento, after Juan Navarette was denied his lover’s bedside, and then his grave, the religious right and the republicans turned it into a debate about same sex marriage. It was an eminantly predictable response back then. And…oh look…It Still Is Today.
And you know…they’re right. If it makes sense to give same sex couples some rights, Any rights, as a couple, why doesn’t it make sense to give them all the rights heterosexual couples enjoy? Children? If marriage was about children then why isn’t having and raising them a requirement? Social stability? What’s so socially stabilizing about placing some people’s love and domestic lives outside the protections of the law, while embracing others? While some in the religious right have tried to split that hair the hard core base has always understood perfectly well that it cannot be split. If homosexuals Can love, and if the love between same sex couples is as deeply felt, and as meaningful, and as life affirming to them as the love opposite sex couples experience…then what in God’s Name have we been doing to them all this time?
They can’t give an inch on that. It Must be, it Has to be, homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. Otherwise they’re done for, and they know it. So they will, they must, turn every bill seeking to grant same sex couples any rights whatsoever, into an argument about same sex marriage.
There are those in the gay community who absolutely detest the concept of same sex marriage. They regard it as assimilationist, as selling out, as a betrayal of the 60s promise of sexual liberation. Fine. Whatever. Whether you like the concept or not, whether or not you think we can or should spend our time and energy fighting for it, the fact is that we will be fighting over same sex marriage for as long as this civil rights movement has to go on, whether we want to or not, whether we even Like the idea or not. Every time we go to the statehouse, every time we go to Capital Hill, every time we take it to the streets, regardless of what we’re fighting for, whether it’s visitation, or equal access to jobs, housing, medical care, goods and services, whether it’s the right to be safe in school, or on the streets, regardless of what it is, we will end up fighting about the right of same sex couples to marry. Because the politician that so much as gives us the time of day, is going to be facing the likes of this in the next election:
The simple logic of it is this: If Adam and Steve can slow dance together with all the other couples, whether it’s in a gay bar or at Disneyland without being hauled off to jail for it, then there is no good reason not to let them marry too if that’s what they want. Our enemies have always understood this. It was never simply about sex. It was always about the honor and the dignity of our love. From the moment a group of young gay street kids, drag queens, and fed-up bystanders started throwing rocks at the police in front of the Stonewall Inn, we have been in a fight for the right to marry.
Cameron has now documented Early Gay Death Syndrome (EGDS). According to this new research, which Cameron claims is the largest random sex survey ever conducted, the oldest male that could be found who engaged in homosexuality was 54 years old and the oldest female was 49. According to Dr. Cameron the reason for this is because the average life span of a homosexual is 20 plus years shorter than for a heterosexual.
According to Richard Rothstein at QueerSighted, this new Paul Cameron propaganda offensive is bases on his sex survey of a single Canadian community of just over 120, 000 adults. And you just know you can take Cameron’s word for it, that his methods and his data on this were all top notch…
The best part of this story is that Cameron put out a press release that suggests that he presented his latest research during yesterday’s sessions of the annual Eastern Psychological Association Convention in Philadelphia. According to his press release, "Drs. Paul and Kirk Cameron told attendees of the Eastern Psychological Association Convention…" In fact, he did not present and was not on the agenda at this meeting. The fact is that he roamed the public corridors of the convention venue and "told" doctors about his research. Cameron was neither a registered speaker nor a member of the convention faculty.
Yeah…and he once cited a letter to the editor in the New England Journal of Medicine, in one of his publications, as if it were an actual peer reviewed article. Trustworthy guy, eh? The Morals and Values crowd just loves him.
Nonetheless he will present this research to lawmakers and judges as data that was "presented" at this legitimate convention and it will be published (@ $27.50 per page) in a so-called scientific journal, a publication that will be slapped down on desks in court houses and legislatures and successfully used against us.
Yes. That’s how the game is played by the Morals and Values crowd. Rothstein gives us an insight into how junk like this effectively poisons the political process…
As an aside, I rarely reference my professional life, but for the purpose of this posting I will tell you that I have engaged in professional lobbying on behalf of private industry both in Albany and in Washington. And this kind of crap really resonates. If it’s easy to read, can be summarized on one official and slick looking sheet of paper, lists titles like PhD, MSS and ARNP and was published in a journal with an impressive name, congressional and legislative staffers and their bosses will not look beneath the surface. Only two things really matter: how will it play with voters and will you be supporting my campaign efforts.
(Emphasis mine…) So the Morals and Values crowd has understood for a long time now, not only that lies are effective, but Why they are effective and How to make them even more effective. And you thought it was us godless heathens who made the best liars.
…from the daily grind, and just sit back and enjoy life. Life is good. And never more so then when we’re watching our old friend Reddy Kilowatt getting a little playful…
Why crane operators need to be careful around high voltage lines…
…is that you risk running across ones of an old crush wearing really, really sexy cut-offs like guys used to back in the 70s before American males became paranoid about being sexy below the waist.
I always had a pretty well organized filing system for my black and white negatives. My slides were another story. Since I wasn’t in a position to be able to afford a color darkroom back when I was a teenager, I just made do with keeping them in the boxes they came back from Kodak in. Occasionally I would develop my own color slide film, which you could theoretically do without a major darkroom setup. But the old Kodak E-4 processing kit was expensive and at the end of it was the tedious task of mounting all those slides yourself. So I didn’t do that too often. But I did it enough that I can at least say that, yes, I did some of my own color work back then. Just not prints.
So the slides had their own very haphazard filing system which was basically just numbers on the boxes, and a little info about what they were. Now that I’m well into the Big Scan project, I needed to get them a tad more organized then they are. See…the boxes of slides never had contact sheets associated with them like the negatives did. If I needed to find a particular black and white photo I would look through the contact sheets for it, and when I found it that contact sheet would have a number on it that corresponded to a glassine envelope with the negatives for that sheet in it. But to find a particular color slide I had to rummage through the boxes until I found the one I thought it was in, open it, and sort through the slides, eyeballing each one until I found what I was looking for. So searching for a slide always meant handling and shuffling through a lot of them, in a way that searching for a negative never did.
The end result over time was a mess. Over the years far, far too many slides ended back up in the wrong boxes. At one point there was a group of them I just gave up on, and tossed them all together into one big box. I tried buying projector trays and storing a few boxes of slides in those, so I could search using a projector or slide viewer, instead of handling them all individually. By the time I got around to getting all my old slides organized for the Big Scan, I had about three concurrent filing systems for them, and none of them were up to date.
So this weekend I’ve been sorting them all back together, into their original roll film groups. The problem was worst in the slides from the early 1970s to the mid 1980s. That bunch needed a lot of work getting them all back together in the right order, and it didn’t surprise me. That period of time in my life was right before the decade when I just put my cameras (and all my other art tools) away, because I just couldn’t cope with my feelings. As badly alone as I’m feeling now, I was really crushed emotionally back then. Life was just complete bleakness and I felt I had no future to look forward to at all. I just couldn’t bear to look at anything I did creatively because that inner desolation kept staring back at me from all of it…
…and ironically enough, that’s when I turned to computer programming as a creative outlet. So in a very strange way I’m earning a damn good living now, because of this horrible personal life crisis I had back then.
Anyway…It was like an intensely condensed review of that part of my life before a lot of darkness fell. And one-by-one all my old boyfriends and all the old crushes, all the guys who made my heart beat, and who one-by one broke it a little more, came popping out of the stacks of slides back at me. Including one I saw just a while ago, that I really, really wish I hadn’t, of one guy in particular who I became way, way too strung out over once upon a time, and who told me a year ago that I needed to stay in the closet if I wanted to make more friends.
I was sorting through some slides I took on a visit to see him when he lived down in Florida back in the early 1980s. We were strolling along the beach and I snapped a few shots of him. He’s just wearing a light short sleeved shirt and these really nice cut-offs. Sometimes he’s smiling back at the camera. Sometimes he’s looking handsomely off into the distance.
Funny how beautiful a tornado can be to behold. I guess that’s why there are storm chasers. But they know to keep their distance. I didn’t.
Stephanie Conntz’ Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage just came in the mail today, and already it looks like a completely absorbing read. I suppose when I get done with it I’ll be even more disgusted whenever some yahoo starts babbling about how same-sex marriage completely outrages the Long Held Traditional Understanding Across All Societies And Cultures Of The Meaning Of Marriage Being Between A Man And A Woman.
The problem with knowing chapter and verse how and why that those jackasses are completely wrong is that you still have to listen to them, and they don’t really give a flying fuck whether they know what the hell they’re talking about or not.
And I mean, completely different. Leper colonies for Sodomites anyone…?
You get the distinct impression he is only marginally less offended by Catholics then by sodomites. I think he’d probably fill in the chunnel too if he could. And it sounds like there was at least one other person in there, possibly more, while he was venting for the camera. I wonder if they’d all just been drinking or something.
Oh…and he used to be a policeman. Good thing for British gays that’s in his past isn’t it?
The upgrade to Bagheera’s secondary hard disk went…okay Mostly. I mean…I got everything working and I’ve gone through worse. Much worse actually. All in all I have to say that upgrading the hardware on a Mac is not a bad experience at all. But it threw me for a couple pretty big loops nonetheless.
I needed to increase the capacity on Bagheera’s secondary hard drive. Bagheera is my art room G5 tower (PowerPC), and I use it for both my cartoons and my photography. I have both the good scanners attached to it, including the new Nikon Coolscan 9000 that I’m using for the Big Scan project (basically, I’m scanning in every negative and slide I ever took since I was a teenage camera bug)
I did one last backup of the old drive and then turned off Bagheera and let its innards cool down for a bit. Then I opened it up. I swear every time I open Bagheera I just have to marvel at how cleanly and…stylishly…its innards are laid out. I often think of Apple as the Bang and Olufsen of the personal computer world. The old drive came out and the new on went right in and I had it all connected in a snap. Then I gave the insides a good dusting with some canned air and the big Kirby vacuum (with the hose attachment of course!). There wasn’t much dust. I’d had it apart just a couple months ago for the memory upgrade. Then I put it all back together.
OSX booted right up and instantly saw that there was a disk inside that hadn’t been formatted, and offered to start up the disk utility. I formatted the new drive with the same file system as the old (Mac OS Extended), and gave it the same volume name. Then I started up Retrospect, which is my backup software, and let it do a restore overnight.
The following morning everything was done, and I rebooted…twice. For some odd reason Retrospect doesn’t properly reset some file permissions it mucks with during the backups when its done, and OSX always asks if I want to fix them during boot up, which requires a restart. So… reboot… reboot… Once that was out of the way I tried starting up iTunes, to see if it could read from my music library. I had a concern that the change out of the hard disk its library was on would cause the iTunes DRM crap to balk. But…not. It seemed to be playing things just fine. But it was not what it seemed. (sigh) More on that later…
Then I started up Aperture, and here’s where it first started getting weird. Aperture found its special library folder on the new drive just fine, but it insisted that the drive where it thought all my master image files were on was now "offline". Crap. Somehow it knew the old drive wasn’t there anymore, and it wasn’t buying the same volume name on the new one.
Here’s why that mattered: Aperture is among a new category of image editing and management software aimed specifically at photographers. Another one is Adobe’s Lightroom. I happen to like Aperture much better, but your mileage may vary. The difference between it and, say, Photoshop, is that it begins with the photographer’s understanding of the negative (or slide) as the master, the source, from which all begins, and from which everything flows. The negative contains everything there is to know about that particular image. You cannot add information to it. It is your source. To alter it in any way removes information from it. That’s damage. Every print you made from then on, would be limited in scope by that damage to that negative.
So unlike Photoshop, or most other image editing software, these programs for photographers perform non-destructive editing on the original image file. Basically, changes are stored in separate files almost, but not exactly, like deltas. More like recipes for making a final image off the master. This leaves the original master files untouched, and allows infinite versions of it to be created and saved in the deltas. When you create a new version of the image, the software reads the master image file, applies the changes it finds in the deltas, and writes out an entirely new file, leaving the master untouched.
In a way this is similar to how it works in an actual darkroom, where you load your negatives into an enlarger (or if they’re big enough, a contact printer) and you make prints. Perhaps you choose a particular paper contrast grade, or use a certain kind of filter on the enlarger. Perhaps you expose the paper a certain way or develop a certain way, for a certain desired result. Perhaps you crop the image just so, or burn and dodge certain areas of the print while you’re exposing the paper. The important thing is that the print is a version and the negative is the master.
For this non-destructive form image editing to work in software, the program needs to always have the master image files where it can get to them. Otherwise the delta files won’t be of any use, since all they contain are the edits. So I needed somehow to convince Aperture that all those files on my new hard disk were really the masters it was looking for. Otherwise I’d have to rebuild its library from scratch, loosing all my previous edits (Like the ones I made for the Rehoboth Beach photo gallery I currently have up).
So I asked a few questions on Apple’s Aperture support board, and came to find that Aperture doesn’t go by the volume name, but by the "hidden" volume ID, which is a kind of unique serial number. This, I was told, is in case the user decides to change the volume name. Swell. Another case of the software protecting you by making simple chores a lot more difficult.
I was pointed to a "manage referenced files" function inside Aperture, which I’d actually used before but on a much more limited scope. For an Apple dialogue it is very, very counter intuitive, especially for ‘reconnecting’ an entire library tree. First you point to the top level of the Aperture Library in the Projects panel, and then File -> Manage Referenced Files. The Manage Referenced Files dialogue comes up and at the top are the available drives and a list of all the managed files. I note that now have two drives in the list of available drives with the same name…one I guess, that will forever read ‘Offline’. So you need to select the first file in the list of referenced files. In the bottom panels in the Manage Referenced Files dialogue, is something like a column file system listing like you might see in Finder. You need to drill down to the location of the file you’ve just selected in the list above and select that. Basically you’re now telling Aperture where to find the file. After a few moments the ‘Reconnect All’ button activates. But it looks from there like you’re telling it to look for files from the point in the directory structure you’ve just drilled down to…not the entire tree.
I…guess…what’s going on is there is some code in Aperture that compares the difference between where it thought the file was, and where you’re telling it that it is now, and it goes like…ohmygod…only the Volume ID changed…maybe I can find all the other files I’ve lost by Just Changing The Volume ID too…!!!! Which is fine because it really saved me a lot of work, but I’ve never, never in my life seen a dialogue this confusing from Apple. It’s very weird considering how lovely the rest of Aperture is. I am absolutely in love with Aperture. I guess there is a period of adjustment in every relationship.
It took Aperture about a half hour to reconnect everything (I have a lot of master images already in there from the Big Scan), but when it was done I had my library back and everything was working.
So I figured I was done. I had some changes I wanted to make in the Dreams of Baía cartoon I posted the other day (mostly just to make the text in my thought balloons clearer…and also to reformat the song text a tad more nicely), so I started up Photoshop and started working on that. All my cartoon scans for the past five years were still there and readable on the new drive as far as I could tell. Photoshop came up and loaded my cartoon panels without complaint. While I was working I decided to bring up iTunes so I could listen to some music. That’s when I got my other unpleasant surprise.
iTunes began complaining that it couldn’t find about four-fifths of the music I had in my iTunes library. WTF!!!
Computers. They’re like children. They don’t break things because they hate us, they just do it to make our hair go gray. It’s part of their job description.
It seems that on the initial reboot after I’d just installed the new drive, and before I even had a chance to do the restore, some part of iTunes was running and when it couldn’t find its library, it reverted to the one it installs by default on the main drive, which I’d left there when I moved the music library to the secondary drive some time ago, because I was afraid there was some DRM crap in there that I didn’t dare delete. It apparently still had copies of all the music I’d put into it before I moved it, and that was what I’d been testing on, unbeknownst to me, the first time I brought iTunes up after the drive restore. So I only thought it was all working.
I opened the iTunes preferences dialogue and in ‘Advanced’ there is a field where you can tell iTunes where its library is. I pointed it back to the one on the secondary drive and a little button labeled ‘Reset’ activated. I gritted my teeth and clicked on it, and iTunes did a scan of the Library on the new drive and one by one all the little I Can’t Find This icons disappeared from my music list. Then iTunes offered to consolidate my library folders and I let it do that too and then iTunes was happy again and I could stop sweating.
So for the moment I think I have it all working now and I have an additional 300 gigabytes of storage that I can fill up with the Big Scan project. But in the meantime I’ve taken the old hard drive and put it carefully in the box the new one came in and stored it safely away. Just…in case…
On the March 20 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, Michael Savage discussed a San Francisco Chroniclereport detailing the murder of a transgender woman whose body was found naked near a freeway outside San Francisco. Savage read a sentence from the article stating that "it appeared the victim had been in the process of becoming a woman," to which Savage replied: "Yeah, process of becoming a woman — psychopath. [She] should have been in a back ward in a straitjacket for years, howling on major medication." He went on to say, "And what’s this sympathy, constant sympathy for sexually confused people? Why should we have constant sympathy for people who are freaks in every society?" adding, "But you know what? You’re never gonna make me respect the freak. I don’t want to respect the freak." Savage concluded: "The freak ought to be glad that they’re allowed to walk around without begging for something. You know, I’m sick and tired of the whole country begging, bending over backwards for the junkie, the freak, the pervert, the illegal immigrant. All of them are better than everybody else. Sick. Everything is upside down."
There’s a link to the audio on the Media Matters page there, and to other gems of wit and wisdom from Michael Savage. And he is far from the only one out there inciting pure, unadulterated hate on the radio. Take a nice long cross country drive someday, through the heart of red state territory and listen. It’s why I got the satellite radio installed in my car; so I would have something to listen to besides hate, hate, and more hate. But you need to listen. This is the republican base. These are the people the republican party knows it cannot win elections without.
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