For those of you who have been following it (which is likely only those of you who read the gay news sites), the 72 year old gay man who was beaten with a pipe the other day, by a man on his bus who asked him if he was gay, has died…
Andrew Anthos died Friday of injuries sustained during an attack last week outside his downtown Detroit apartment building. Family members said he was a victim of an anti-gay hate crime.
Anthos was on a city bus Feb. 13 when a man asked him if he was gay. The man followed Anthos off the bus at the stop in front of his building and beat him with a metal pipe.
Anthos, whose family said he was gay, was taken to a hospital and later fell into a coma.
Local and national gay rights groups condemned the attack. Police told The Detroit News in story published Friday that the department was investigating whether the attack was a hate crime.
This is what Love The Sinner, Hate The Sin, looks like in practice, or as one of Bill Donohue’s nemesis, Shakespear’s Sister, points out…
This shit doesn’t happen in a void. Like the sexualization and objectification of women in the media being psychologically damaging to girls, the constant drumbeat of negative stereotypes and exploitative hatred issued by the GOP and social/religious conservative leaders is dangerous for members of the LGBT community. And the hatemongers’ faux-naïveté at the reality that you can’t continually put a target on someone’s back but expect no one to shoot at it is growing really goddamned old. The hate-the-gays schtick isn’t just infuriating and spiteful and wrong; it’s irresponsible.
But it’s effective. It keeps winning them elections. It keeps the cash flowing in. And it keeps the gays fearful. A fearful homosexual is a good homosexual. Not perhaps, as good as a dead one, but it will do.
The reference to "Dome Man" comes from Anthos’ campaign to light the Michigan Statehouse dome in red, white and blue colors one night a year…
Photo by Lansing State Journal file photo
So he loved his country, and he loved his state. Too bad they couldn’t have loved him back.
Ugh. More sleet and freezing rain early tomorrow morning and then sleet and freezing rain all day tomorrow and then some more Monday morning. I’m serious…I’d rather have three feet of snow then half an inch of ice. Snow you can at least shovel.
That last batch of sleet and freezing rain left a ground cover that looked like just a little snow but was as hard as concrete and slippery as all hell. You just couldn’t walk on it…you got zero traction. There’s still patches of it out there now as I type this, but the streets and sidewalks had just gotten clear enough that you could move around outside almost like normal. Now it looks like it’s going to happen all over again. Urgh! I hate ice!
I spent the day at the grocery store and Costco stocking up on non-perishables, and at Whole Foods for a few things that will last a few weeks: a couple blocks of aged Vermont Cheddar…the jumbo brown free range eggs I like, and some buttermilk and regular milk so I can make some pancakes while I’m stuck inside…some lean ground beef and some deli meats. Olive Oil for cooking. Some peanut oil for the deep fryer. I also restocked on all purpose flour and some other baking stuff. But it isn’t entirely the pending ice storm that’s driving it.
Every November I buy a lot of bulk items so I won’t have to hassle with the crowds at the supermarkets every time there’s a snow forecast. I’m not into that survivalist thing, I just hate crowds. After I buy all that stuff I just feed off it until my stocks are back down to normal levels again in the spring. But it’s stories like this that have made me consider making that four month supply of food and sundries a permanent feature here at Casa del Garrett. Obviously I’m down to late February levels here…I normally only plan on having my overstock last through March.
I’m typically very skeptical of all the doomsday scenarios that scream at me from the papers. But my maternal grandmother used to tell me stories about the great flu epidemic of 1918 (she was a nurse’s aid back then) and maybe that’s why I’m a tad nervous about this one. During the cold war I always figured those of us who lived near Washington were all toast anyway if the missiles starting flying, and my folks and I never got caught up in that fall out shelter craze. Nobody I knew bothered with it either. Now I’m seriously thinking about keeping a four month supply of food here at home all year long. Welcome to the twenty-first century. Lets hear it for Spam.
I was checking over my web server logs recently and was pleasantly surprised to see that for another year This Cartoon got a lot of hits from people searching for Valentine’s Day cartoons. It’s still somewhat of a puzzle since there is no text on the page identifying it as a Valentine’s Day cartoon, and even the image filename, "by_the_way.jpg" doesn’t give any indication. Yet it turns up pretty reliably in the Yahoo search engine for Valentine’s Day cartoons. Either they’re OCR-ing the image itself, or they’re keying on the link to it on my archives page, which does say "Happy Valentines Day".
You can see the search strings people use to get to you in the server logs, so I know that many folks who found the cartoon, were searching on the string "valentine’s day cartoon". However, there were also a few cranky grouches in the mix:
homo valentines day
fuck valentine day
pervert valentine cartoon
Let’s just say none of you will be getting Valentine’s Day cards from me anytime soon. And then there was this from someone who needs a lover worse then I do:
valentines day on drugs
Oh, cheer up.
Anyway, there’s nothing quite like looking though the search strings that lead to your web page to give you a somewhat unsettling glance at the human psyche. So here’s another installment in our What The Hell Were You Thinking When You Googled That series.
Naturally, I get a lot of hits from people searching for cartoons of one sort or another…
nude cartoon sex
cartoon sex
sex cartoons
cartoons having sex
gay cartoons having sex
I’m sensing a pattern here…
homosexuality cartoon
Okay…I have a few of those… But I do politics, not pornography. I think you’re going to be disappointed.
republican gay cartoon
Now that’s disgusting!
Then there are the ones who just want sex, never mind the cartoon…
mothers caught on tape having sex and fucking
niece uncle wimp incest
fucking brides at their weddings story
kink questionaire
Next time some homophobic crackpot starts yapping about how sex is all that gay men ever think about I’ll direct them to my server logs…
"sandra jones" sex
solar woman is stripped and raped fantasy stories
Who the hell is solar woman? Well at least I’m not getting hit on by Sailor Moon fetishists. On the other hand, this post will probably attract them like flies now…
does sally fields wear bikini underwear?
If this is about The Flying Nun I don’t want to know.
"moan during sex"
I’m picturing a cute little geeky guy who just had his first sex ever and noticed his lover moaning and he’s searching Google to make sure that’s what’s supposed to happen. In a few more years we’ll all be wondering how humans ever had sex before the Internet. Like these folks who just seem to be searching for a clue as to what its all about…
having sex
sex=sex
Well that’s been my experience. If I was better looking and a lot more shameless it might equal money, but on the whole I think I’d rather sex just equaled sex. It’s complicated enough as it is.
That the underwear that’s weird, or the men? Or is it you?
alien impregnation stories
Okay…we’re in the Twilight Zone now.
how to undress a client with multiple trauma
I ran across this one in the server logs and thought, I’ll just assume that’s really a healthcare professional asking that. Then I thought, why would a healthcare professional be searching for instructions on Google? Okay…who the hell was asking that?
Behold the pure randomness of human curiosity…
plans for building reflex water distiller
free "brochure template", industrial monitoring
sombrero brontosaur
We must be on the alert for illegal aliens from the Jurassic…
can i take my big screen tv apart so it can fit in my basement
Sure. Try the hammer. I bet the hammer will work. Try the hammer.
show paragraph about drafting job what kind is job
Those who can’t write, draw…
inventor of the bowling ally
what do you think about aging
Compared to dying? Well I’m not all that keen on dying. Compared to bowling? I’m not so sure. Would I rather go bowling or get older? Hmmmm…. That’s a toughie…
rocket to venus baltimore
Venus Baltimore is that other Venus, where the aliens wear beehive hair-dos, live in a lot of tightly packed rowhouses, keep pink flamingos on their lawns and ceramic cats on their walls and call everyone ‘Hon’. You from earth, Hon?
how hamburger pattie is digested in the body
Bile. Probably.
plot summary of lot mine eyes have seen the glory by anita bryant
Bile. Probably.
how did ricard nixon abuse power?
Now this person came in from Google…and I just now verified that Google will prompt you with "Did you mean: how did richard nixon abuse power?", yet this individual persisted with "ricard" anyway and they got one of my blog pages in a search result that clearly indicated I was talking about Ricard Wagner. Yet they clicked on the link anyway. Go figure. But here’s a poor frustrated soul who really needs a few lessons in not only how to use a search engine, but when…
i give up all im asking is a simple question.i live in a house with a basement door in the front hallway gas furnace in basement now is it okay for door to be open
I’ve had the camera bug since I was an elementary school kid, but it wasn’t until high school that it began to get really serious, and the finger candy really expensive. Luckily mom was pretty forbearing about my turning the one bathroom in our little two bedroom apartment into an occasional darkroom. She always encouraged my creative outlets.
I’ve been going through my old high school negatives recently for a couple projects I’m working on here and I came across a few shots I took of myself in my bedroom mirror with the latest prized camera. Here are three documenting my climb up the SLR latter, from my first Petri FT to the professional grade Canon F1 I spent a summer working at a fast food joint to buy.
The Petri FT, circa 1970. I’m 16.
The Miranda Sensorex, circa 1971. I’m 17.
The F1, circa 1971.
Note the little plastic film canisters I’d taped to the camera straps. That was the style back then among us camera kids. It kept your spare film handy and it made you look hard core. But when I got out into the world and tried to make a living at it I found that they just got in the way…so I ended up taking them off.
Both the Petri and the Miranda had front mounded shutter releases instead of the usual top mounted, which was and is unusual (I don’t think any camera maker does that anymore), but I found I preferred it. The Miranda had full aperture semi-spot metering and a removable pentaprisim. But when I saw that first Canon F1 in the store I knew that was the camera I could spend a lifetime taking pictures with.
The flash you see on the F1 is just for show in this picture. I very seldom used a flash, even back then. Once I started developing my own film I pretty quickly gravitated to Kodak’s Tri-X Pan which was high speed for the time, but if you were careful about how you developed it you could get pretty nice not-so-grainy available light images off it. All these images are from Tri-X negatives. The only time I every really used the flash back then was when I was covering sports events for my school newspaper (it was called The Advocate… (grin)) Note how the flash hot shoe actually clipped on over the rewind knob on the original F1.
The Petri and the Miranda got sold, each one to help fund the purchase of the next. But I still have that F1 and I still use it and it’s been with me just about everywhere. It took all the 35mm color shots you see in my current photo gallery. That camera’s the best. I’d sell the house before I’d sell that camera.
Oh…and I still have the little stuffed tiger you see there perched in front of my dresser mirror.
The lawyer for a former Baptist church leader who had spoken out against homosexuality said Thursday the minister has a constitutional right to solicit sex from an undercover policeman.
The Rev. Lonnie W. Latham had supported a resolution calling on gays and lesbians to reject their "sinful, destructive lifestyle" before his Jan. 3, 2006, arrest outside the Habana Inn in Oklahoma City.
Authorities say he asked the undercover policeman to come up to his hotel for oral sex.
His attorney, Mack Martin, filed a motion to have the misdemeanor lewdness charge thrown out, saying the Supreme Court ruled in the 2003 decision Lawrence v. Texas that it was not illegal for consenting adults to engage in private homosexual acts.
"Now, my client’s being prosecuted basically for having offered to engage in such an act, which basically makes it a crime to ask someone to do something that’s legal," Martin said.
Both sides agree there was no offer of money, but prosecutor Scott Rowland said there is a "legitimate governmental interest" in regulating offers of acts of lewdness.
Latham’s lawyer has a point. And as a card carrying member I am happy to see that the ACLU filed a brief on his behalf. But if the government is poking its nose where it doesn’t belong, its louts like Latham who’ve made that inevitable. The pulpits bear a heavy responsibility for our culture’s dysfunctional attitudes toward sex and sexuality. I can see where people might not like having to navigate through a gauntlet of men out looking for sex when they’re just trying to walk down a street or though a park but that’s what you get when you treat sex like its something that’s radioactive, instead of a normal part of our flesh and blood lives. Here in America sex is either dirty or its cheap, but it isn’t allowed to be wonderful. And it’s mostly pulpit thumping jackasses like Latham who are to blame for that. They’re the ones who’ve made sex another three letter word for sin. They’ve taken what should be a wonderful, playful, joyful, part of our lives, and tainted it with guilt and shame. Then they cash in on the damage that does. It’s unforgivable.
I remember watching Phyllis Schlafly on TV babbling about how all you need to teach teenagers about sex is don’t touch anything inside your bathing suits. Well if that’s all you teach them, then don’t be shocked, shocked, when they grow up to be adults who troll the streets at night for random cheap anonymous sex, because an instinct they never learned how to deal with honorably, that’s hundreds of millions of years older then the human race itself, is dragging them out there by the cords on their bathing suits and they don’t have clue one why they can’t stop themselves. Just on principal I hope Latham wins his case, but I don’t feel sorry for him in the least. So called men of God like him have a lot of human misery to answer for.
Couldn’t You At Least Have Offered A Moneyback Guarantee?
…and…a blender?
Here’s Peterson Toscano and Lance Carroll on the Montel Williams show, briefly discussing how they came to find themselves in reparative therapy. Two things are worth noting here: Peterson went in of his own free will, while Lance was forced into it by his parents. Peterson left of his own accord, finally accepting himself just as he was, and remained very close to both his parents. Lance is now estranged from both of his.
This conversation is all too brief, but I guess that’s the format of the Montel Williams show, to flit from one topic to another to another during the course of an hour. Someone should sit those two down together for a long talk on camera where they can talk about their experiences in more depth, how it felt, what it did to them, what their lives are like now: the one who went in of his own accord out of devotion to God, and the one who was forced in against his will.
And here’s a clip from a Boston Legal episode about a man suing his ex-gay ministry. Great line at the end…
John…are you reading this? Have you given Lance’s parents back their money yet? Bring families together do you? Ever tell Lance you’re sorry? Ever find where you buried your conscience? You had one once…didn’t you? Do you remember what it was like…way back then…to have a conscience…?
Kevin-Douglas Olive responds to this post and to all your comments and mine, and he implores us all not to hate the Groffs. Quakers are some of the most decent people I’ve ever met in my life.
I’ll post my own response later…I want to take some time to think over what he wrote. But in the meantime you should go read his comment, and remember that a Christian wrote it, the next time you hear the kook pews hollering out for war and vengence and hate in the name of Christ.
A Little Friendly Advice From The Great Unchurched…
Here’s a remarkably sane bit of commentary about the Anglican schism-in-progress over at the London Times Online: Pray Lift Your Eyes Above The Belt. The author, Libby Purves, notes that this isn’t the first time there has been outrage in the pews over inclusiveness.
We have seen this crab-scuttle towards Rome before. When the Anglican Synod accepted women priests in 1992 numbers of high-profile Anglicans turned Catholic in disgust. The other theological differences — the Real Presence in the Eucharist, Papal infallibility, priestly celibacy — seem suddenly no longer to matter, compared with the horrible prospect of women priests.
The following is the sound of a nail being squarely hit by a hammer…
It would be refreshing if the Churches would step back from this stance, and make it clearer that the evil in adultery is not the sexual act but the betrayal of trust, the cruelty, the endangering of children’s happiness. The deep wickedness of rape and paedophilia is not about desire but about misuse of power, invasion, oppression and injury. The sinfulness of promiscuity and prostitution is not about sex but about using another human being for transient pleasure without caring for the physical and emotional damage you do. The Church’s ministry to gays could preach only honesty, gentleness, and commitment, rather than agonising about genital practices. Christianity could just grow up, and stop treating sex as if it were innately toxic or radioactive and yet irresistibly interesting.
Yes.
Let the Churches concentrate on condemning promiscuity, infidelity, exploitation, predation — whether gay or straight. Nobody asks them to go the full Gay Pride, bathhouse-culture route; but let them recognise kindness and mutual support as virtues, and bless all honest unions. Let them condemn proselytising from either side, making it clear that there is nothing cool or clever about random sexual tourism, any more than there is anything evil in being born gay. It just happens. Being gay can, without doing any violence to the Gospels, be accepted as a potential route to holiness.
It won’t be. They’ll squabble and fudge and cling to their hierarchies and their terrors, and some will scuttle to Rome and Rome will feel smug. And the rest of society will sigh and turn away, thinking that Christianity has nothing to offer. Howl, howl, howl!
Yes, yes, yes. Go read the whole thing. This has been your morning dose of Yes There Is Sanity In This World Now Go Get On With Your Own Life…
Friends who betrayed me with their votes for George Bush while the republicans were busy waging one of the most vicious anti-gay campaigns in American history. Family members who love the sinner while hating the sin. They smile in your face, and they stab you in the heart. In the wake of Tim Hardaway’s very public bellyaching about much he hates gay people, Arthur Silber posts a first-rate fire and brimstone sermon up on his blog titled, We Are Not Freaks. It’s addressed to all the ersatz liberals and progressives out there that Truman Capote was talking about when he said that "A faggot is the homosexual gentleman who just left the room", but he could just as well have been speaking for me on the day after I watched a gay teenager being shoveled into an ex-gay program simply for liking himself just as he was. That day I turned my back on all the people in my life who graciously extended their tolerance to me, but not, not really, their friendship and love.
My emailers agreed with my outrage, and they understood, at least in general terms, the source of my anger. Still, they wondered: "But, Arthur, why are you so angry? Do you think expressing that kind of anger will help to change anyone’s mind, or encourage others to try to look at these issues from a different perspective?" To explain my answer in part, I reposted yesterday an essay from two years ago: Living on the Inside…and Living on the Outside. In that piece, I detailed how and why it is undeniably true that those who enjoy the most privileged position in our culture — those who are white, heterosexual and male — cannot possibly understand, not completely, what it is like to be one of those who is shut out in different ways, and to varying degrees.
But even that essay is written from a perspective of some distance. It doesn’t fully capture the emotional reality of being marginalized, being excluded, and very often being ridiculed, and even demonized. This realization hit me once again with great force as I read a comment recently added to that lengthy thread at TAPPED. Here it is:
oh this is tedious, yet as mortally debilitating as any of the thousand cuts. what i feel, down to the core, is that i have again been brought to the fore of the class, denuded, so that the students can point and discuss the freakish example that i am, as if this were the anatomy class of In Human Bondage. except you are the freaking freak, pal. it makes me sick to hear you confess your elastic confusions, because i suffer them daily, but the primary sickness is your entitlement, your entitlement to be a jiving idiot, to muse in public about me, that I am expected to stand here as you cheerfully enumerate the social failings you participate in, do not regret, and therefore have no intention of changing. do you imagine that i live in any state of happiness because you have found room for me in your untested world view, or that I don’t know, every day of my life, that when push comes to shove you and your joshing buddies would shove me? do you somehow think, because a gay man describes your haircut, it somehow balances the force with which an entire being is declared revolting, and violently threatened, beginning with his very first memories? For your information you have not described me in any respect that is insightful, you have simply corralled me into a cage, whereby rudely pointing at me you demonstrate your limited understanding of the human heart and mind: I promise you that you are far from original in that enterprise. In fact, by so doing, you have described yourself. It is one thing to be ignorant, as we all are when it comes to fully understanding the prejudice that minorities we are not members of endure, but it is another to brag of it, which is the essence of your tone.
When you strip away all the verbiage, all the intellectual tap dancing, and all the efforts to "understand" and be "tolerant," that is the inescapable, the terrible bottom line: many of you think we are Freaks. Speaking for myself with regard to these issues, I don’t want you to "understand" me or to be "tolerant" of me. I don’t want you to "study" me, and try to graph all the various points of similarity and difference between us: I want you to recognize that I am completely and entirely a human being, just as you are. And I want you to understand fully what that means, and to genuinely mean it.
It is one thing to be openly hated and despised, as gays and lesbians are by many on the right. We’re used to that, and we got used to it a long time ago. As was required, we manufactured intellectual and emotional armor to protect ourselves. In the current climate, we have to put it on every single damned day. It weighs a great deal, and it exacts an awful price. But without it, we would suffer injuries too grievous to be borne.
But how much worse it is to be cajoled into taking off that armor — to hear you tell us that you understand we’re "just like you" in all the ways that matter, and that we’re really "just the same" — and then to read or hear about "how easy" you think it is to "make fun" of us, especially when our status as Freaks is too obvious. How much worse it is when we believe you, when you tell us you think we’re all equal — except that you can get married, while almost every leading Democrat will say, well, no, we can’t get married. But we can have "civil unions." Because, you see, Freaks don’t get married.
But we had believed you, so we took off the armor — and then you plunged the sword deep into our guts. You revealed that many of you actually do think we’re Freaks. Many of you don’t believe we’re really "just like you."
If you want to know exactly where I’m coming from these days, go on and read the whole thing. We are not freaks. We are human beings. What should have been the most wonderful, magical, life affirming moments of our lives…falling in love…finding that soulmate…making a life together…has been turned into a brutal nightmare for some of us, and a difficult, heartbreakingly painful experience for most of us, and I’m beyond asking why. The promise of love has been systematically ripped away from us for generations, and there are those who would take it away from us still, when we’ve only just begun to take it back for ourselves. We can cut your hair. We can decorate your house. We can be the butt of TV jokes. We can even have sex now. But we can’t love.
We can’t so much as kiss or hold hands in public without danger to our lives. This from a New York Times article on the controversy following the Snicker’s Superbowl ad…A Kiss Too Far?
Yet gay-bashing still occurs routinely, Mr. Patton of the Anti-Violence Project said, even in neighborhoods like Chelsea in Manhattan, where the sight of two men kissing on the street can hardly be considered a frighten-the-horses proposition. “In January some men were leaving a bar in Chelsea,” saying goodbye with a kiss, Mr. Patton said. “One friend got into a taxi and then a car behind the taxi stopped and some guys jumped out and beat up the other two.” One victim of the attack, which is under investigation by the police department’s Hate Crimes Task Force, was bruised and shaken. The second had a broken jaw.
“The last time I was called a faggot was on Eighth Avenue,” said Joe Windish, a longtime New Yorker who now lives in Milledgeville, Ga., with his partner of many years. “I don’t have that here, and I’m an out gay man,” said Mr. Windish, whose neighbors in what he termed “the reddest of the red states” may be fundamentalist Christians who oppose gay marriages and even civil unions, but “who all like me personally.”
Tolerance has its limits, though, as Mr. Windish found when he and his partner took a vacation on a sleepy island off the coast of Georgia. “I became aware that if I held my partner’s hand, or kissed him in public, the friendliness would stop,” he said.
Imagine living in a world where you could not so much as hold the hand of the one you love without being attacked.
(Scottsdale, Arizona) The reward for information leading to the arrest of a gang of men who attacked a gay couple outside a Scottsdale restaurant last December has been raised to $12,000 thanks to a donation from PFLAG.
Andrew Frost and Jean Rolland were set upon by as many as seven men as the couple walked out of the restaurant hand-in-hand.
Frost, 19, needed more than a dozen stitches to close wounds on his head and face. Rolland, 28, suffered many bumps and bruises.
Frost said that as he and Rolland exited the restaurant he heard someone yell "fag". He said he turned and saw two men.
Frost said that he replied to the slur and one of the men punched him. He said that at least five others rushed from the restaurant and joined the attack.
Frost and Rolland have filed a police report, but no one at the restaurant seems to have seen anything. The couple said they had never seen their attackers before.
…but no one at the restaurant seems to have seen anything. And that’s why I am not speaking now to a lot of people in my life that I used to speak to on an almost daily basis. Lovers are viciously attacked for daring to love openly and joyfully and as a warning to the rest of us not to even attempt it. It happens on the streets, it happens in the courtrooms, it happens behind the pulpit and in the pews, it happens on the campaign trail, it happens on the floor of congress and in the Oval Office and you don’t seem to have seen anything. May you be dammed.
This Is Either Good News For Gay Listeners, Or Very Bad News…
My first thought upon hearing this was, Okay…what happens to OutQ…?
To: SIRIUS Subscribers
Today is a very exciting day for SIRIUS customers. As you may have heard, SIRIUS Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio are merging to form the nation’s premier audio entertainment provider.
This combination of our two offerings will benefit you – our loyal listeners. As a single company, we’ll provide superior programming to you every day with the best of both SIRIUS and XM. Currently, XM and SIRIUS broadcast a wide range of commercial-free music channels, exclusive sports coverage, news, talk, and entertainment programming. Howard Stern. Oprah and Friends. The NFL. MLB. NBA. ESPN. CNBC. Fox News. Additionally, the combined company will be able to improve existing services such as real-time traffic information and rear-seat video as well as introduce new ones.
You see what’s missing from that list. No, no… Not just OutQ, but any indication that they’ve been providing something for people to listen to, who are sick and tired of all the right wing pap being broadcast out there, posturing as non-partisan news and information. Fox News? They tell us about Fox News (sic) and not Talk Left? But Clear Channel owns a major stake in XM.
I have a Honda Accord, and since it came with a factory installed XM radio, the first thing I did was bellyache to XM about their lack of a gay channel like Sirius had. I could have been shouting my complaints up at one of their satellites for all it mattered. So shortly after I bought the Accord I yanked the factory radio out and spent $180 plus the cost of a new radio plus the cost of installation so I could listen to OutQ on Sirius.
At the time Sirius had two other channels going for it that XM didn’t: Swing Street and Air America. But then Air America defected to XM and Sirius dropped Swing Street when they picked up Howard Stern, merging it’s programming into the god awful American Standards channel, which I think they call the Old Fart’s Channel internally. Now it’s a sickening combination of big band swing and 1950s lounge music and I hate it.
The Trance channel is now more a electro-pop channel except some evenings when it gets back to being hard core trance. The only thing that hasn’t changed for the worse since I subscribed to Sirius is OutQ. Well…and the 60s channel and the New Age channel (elevator music for my generation). Basically I’m paying their subscription fees now just to listen to Michelangelo Signorile and Sunset Cruse and a couple other channels I wouldn’t have yanked the old radio out for since XM carried them too. Actually, XM’s 40s channel is much better then Sirius’ god awful American Standards channel.
For me the promise satellite radio wasn’t so much that you could drive from one end of the country to the other without having to constantly retune your radio all the way, but that niche content that wasn’t profitable regionally, could work on a national scale. Radio that actually spoke to gay audiences only happened in some large cities, and then only for a few hours at week at most. But with the ability to reach the entire country from a satellite, my hope was that we’d finally have something that regarded us as its primary target audience, instead of "oh…yeah…and you gays too."
Ironically, there’s not a lot I actually like on OutQ. Derek & Romaine are way too crude for my liking. I just won’t listen to that. OutQ in the Morning is almost as bad sometimes. But I can forgive any gay channel that kind of crap that broadcasts Signorile and Sunset Cruse. Especially Sunset Cruse…which is a lovely gay dedicate-a-song-to-your-sweetheart program. I just love it. After a long week of reading about one goddamned attack on the gay community after another in the news, Sunset Cruse is just the thing I need to remind me that love still has a chance in this world.
My fear right now in this proposed merger is that all that will simply vanish just like my Swing Channel did when either the bean counters decide it isn’t pulling in enough listeners, or the stock block that belongs to Clear Channel (they own a major stake in XM), decides they don’t want any of that faggot stuff on their airwaves. The reason competition is a good thing isn’t to drive down prices, but to encourage producers to exploit markets their competition isn’t, and to keep the top dogs responsive to All their customers.
From The San Francisco Chronicle… An evangelical Christian minister from Missouri, has come to San Francisco to teach gays and lesbians how to become straight. And how to lie for Jesus …
The Brodeurs — who do weekly outreach in the Castro to encourage gay people to re-evaluate their sexual orientation — said they invited Desert Stream to use their church for the seminar. It cost $35 and drew participants from congregations around the Bay Area.
"Their message is about bringing the love of Jesus into people’s hearts," she said. "It’s not ‘Don’t do this. You’re evil, you’re going to hell.’ "
Well that’s certainly a welcome change from the usual hellfire and damnation spew isn’t it?
Not…
But a workshop handout written by Desert Stream founder Andy Comiskey ticked off a list of "wickedness," including lesbianism, sexual violence and child molestation, and stated: "For those who overcome the darkness, a rich and eternal inheritance. For those who refuse to overcome, eternal judgment."
Feel the love. One of the protesters outside the seminar related his story of how he’d been in an ex-gay program for eight years and it nearly drove him to suicide. But what you have to understand about these ministries is that what happens to the people in them doesn’t matter.
"I went through depression, major anxiety, panic disorder and attempted suicide."
They didn’t take him in to cure him. They took him in to use him in their little dirty war on the ability of people to freely love and be loved with or without the permission of the tribal witch doctor. There is no reverence for the sacred that begins with a lie. That seminar wasn’t about letting love come into a human heart, whether it’s the love a same sex couple find in each other or the love of Christ or the love of God Almighty. Love knows no authority but itself. That’s the problem with it. That’s why they want it out of our hearts altogether. Our hearts have to be emptied. So that they can fill them with their will. If it kills a few of us…so what?
A gay Baltimore man who’s fighting to keep his late partner buried in rural Tennessee may have to sell his car and home to fund the legal battle.
Kevin-Douglas Olive said the parents of his late partner, Russell Groff, have appealed a court ruling that granted Olive an early win in the case. The appeal effectively restarts the case, making progress a costly proposition.
Olive said he’s committed to continuing a case in which he’s already invested $8,000 — but fears his legal bills may demand another $20,000.
"I’ll do what I gotta do," he said, "but they’re telling me to expect to spend a lot more than I spent before."
Read more at the Washington Blade’s site Here. The article references the comments from the Groffs to this post on my blog that I’m pretty certain are genuine, and which if they are they show just how far into the gutter hate has led them. They’ve lied through their teeth pretty consistently throughout about the condition of Russell’s gravesite and the events that led to their lawsuit, claiming that it was neglect when it was the removal of their cheapshit insults to the man Russell loved that provoked them into going to court.
Olive said Groff became so weak that he couldn’t leave his bed to urinate. To best help the man he loved, Olive would hold the bedpan for him.
“This is my soul mate, so I just did it,” he said. “You don’t even think about it. You just do it.”
Eventually, a staph infection that originated in Groff’s gall bladder spread throughout his body, and on Nov. 23, 2004, he died.
"I just collapsed on the floor of the hospital, face down and shrieking," Olive said. "Part of me knew that was entirely inappropriate, but part of me didn’t care.”
And how does an all-American God fearing family treat the man who cared for their son in his last hours. Well…like dogshit of course…
In keeping with the burial instructions signed Nov. 18, Groff was interred in the West Knoxville Friends Cemetery outside Knoxville, Tenn.
Olive said the grave, located about 30 minutes from Groff’s childhood home, was to remain simple and clean. But Groff’s mother, Carolyn, made changes.
"She made it into this shrine that really offended the sensibilities of the Quakers," he said, "because we’re all about simplicity."
Olive said Carolyn routinely decorated the grave. At one point, she posted a picture of Groff with his female prom date, plus a poem Carolyn wrote wherein her son essentially apologized for being gay.
"I was so insulted by seeing this,” Olive said. "She was trying to paint him as this repentive person who was heterosexual, really."
After seeing that picture and poem, Olive said he could tolerate no more and cleaned his husband’s gravesite.
"When I cleared the grave, that was the final straw for her,” he said. “She filed the caveat and challenged the will."
Without a doubt Russell knew what was coming after he died, and that was why he had that will drawn up. He loved Kevin, and he didn’t want him to go through the kind of hell he knew his parents were going to bring down on him. And without a doubt, the reason why the homophobes want to deny same sex couples not just the right to marry, but Any legal rights whatsoever, is Precisely so they can twist the knife in our guts, just like the Groffs are twisting the knife in Kevin’s. There is no other plausible reason for the all-out assault on any and every possible legal status for a same sex couple, other then to facilitate this kind of grotesque scorched earth warfare where even our lover’s graves aren’t safe. None. When they talk about fighting to preserve the sacred institution of marriage, what they mean is they’re fighting to preserve the right to dig up your spouse’s grave.
A Maryland judge upheld the will, on the staringly obvious grounds that Russell knew what he was doing when he made it. Russell saw it coming. He did the only thing the law in Maryland allows a gay man do, to to protect the man he loved from it. But the Groffs are bound and determined to bleed Kevin as much as they can because now all they have in their lives is how much they hate him. He’s having to sell off possessions now, and perhaps even his house in order to pay the legal bills over this continuing fight.
I want to ask everyone reading this blog to help him out in any way they can, however much. Do you believe in love? Did it make a difference in your life? Do you remember the first time someone you loved took you into their arms? Do you remember that first kiss? Does it make you angry that some people feel as though they have a god-given right to spit in your face whenever moments like those bring you joy and peace and contentment? Kevin-Douglas Olive watched the man he loved and was loved by die, and now he’s having to fight over the ground he laid his body to rest, and I think even more then money to pay the legal bills, it would help him now to know that there are people out here who Care.
Donations can be sent via mail to the Kevin Olive Defense Fund, c/o C.W. Hardy, 715 Park Ave., Apt. B, Baltimore, MD, 21201.
As a point of interest, it looks like Kevin’s lawyer is Mark Scurti. In fact some years ago I had his law firm, Scurti and Gulling do my own will, and Medical Directives document. They’re good people, known and respected in Baltimore’s gay community for their work fighting for our legal rights.
ABC News’ Jonathan Greenberger Reports: Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney offered a new explanation today for why he supported a Democrat in 1992.
That year, Romney, then a registered independent, voted for former Sen. Paul Tsongas in the 1992 Democratic presidential primary. He told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, in an interview that will air Sunday on "This Week," that his vote was meant as a tactical maneuver aimed at finding the weakest opponent for incumbent President George H.W. Bush.
"In Massachusetts, if you register as an independent, you can vote in either the Republican or Democratic primary," said Romney, who until he made an unsuccessful run for Senate in 1994 had spent his adult life as a registered independent. "When there was no real contest in the Republican primary, I’d vote in the Democrat primary, vote for the person who I thought would be the weakest opponent for the Republican."
But 12 years ago, the Boston Globe reported that Romney was giving a different explanation for his vote for Tsongas.
"Romney confirmed he voted for former U.S. Sen. Paul Tsongas in the state’s 1992 Democratic presidential primary, saying he did so both because Tsongas was from Massachusetts and because he favored his ideas over those of Bill Clinton," the Boston Globe’s Scot Lehigh and Frank Phillips wrote on Feb. 3, 1994. "He added he had been sure the G.O.P. would renominate George Bush, for whom he voted in the fall election."
(Emphasis mine) Some folks unaccountibly find this a bit hard to believe…
Romney’s contention that his vote for Tsongas was a vote for the weakest opponent for Bush – a phenomenon that political scientists refer to as "raiding" – surprised Professor William Mayer of Northeastern University in Boston.
"That would have been a strange election to have done that in, in the sense that Paul Tsongas was obviously going to carry his home state" of Massachusetts, said Mayer. Tsongas won the Massachusetts primary with 66 percent of the vote.
Doubter. What’s not to trust in this fine upstanding man of God? See…he voted for the hometown candidate, whose ideas he liked. Except he didn’t. And that was then and this is now. I’ll say this for Romney…you seldom see a politician so blatantly telling the public that his word doesn’t mean a goddamned thing.
Buying a greeting card for someone’s birthday, anniversary or if they’re feeling under the weather is pretty straightforward. But what if they’re undergoing chemotherapy or struggling with depression? "Get Well Soon" probably won’t cut it.
Likewise, most cards lining the store shelves don’t work on occasions as someone leaving an abusive spouse, undergoing drug rehab or declaring their sexual orientation.
Hallmark Cards Inc., which has built its $4.2 billion empire on sentiments for life’s happier times, is releasing a new line of cards that will speak to those and other situations that the company says have either been ignored by greeting card companies or received only a smattering of attention from niche players.
Well I just know I’m going to enjoy reading the "declaring my sexual orientation" card that’s somewhere between the So Sorry You Have Cancer and Congratulations On Your Drug Rehab cards…
No topics were off-limits, said company spokeswoman Rachel Bolton, noting two cards that could be sent to gay people who have disclosed their sexuality. The cards don’t directly refer to homosexuality, only extolling the person to "Be You" or "This is who I am" or featuring a rainbow, a symbol of gay pride.
Bolton said the writing is general enough for other uses, however, with one focus group member saying they would send it to a friend starting a new job.
"Our findings determined that people didn’t want to be labeled or identified,’’ Bolton said. "We want to be inclusive and not exclusive."
Coming from the company that was protecting the sanctity of stuffed bear family life a few years ago (more about that Here), I’m probably expected to regard this as progress of sorts. Except it isn’t. Hallmark isn’t merely trying to grab a piece of the gay dollar here, they’re trying to position themselves as "inclusive and not exclusive". That card isn’t for gay customers. You don’t market a card that’s too scared to utter the word "gay" to gay people who’ve taken that difficult, nerve wracking, terrifying step of coming out to family and friends. Who the hell sends a card that can’t even utter the word "gay" to a gay person, congratulating them on coming out of the closet? Be Who You Are…Just Don’t Say It… That’s crap. The card is PR, nothing more. Here’s what’s going on…
The $7 billion greeting card industry already brims with tiny niche players who make and sell cards dealing with such things as serious illness or thanking caregivers, said Barbara Miller, a spokeswoman for the Washington, D.C.-based Greeting Card Association.
But she said none of them have the ability to reach customers searching for those types of cards across the country.
Oh yes they do, if they want to exploit it. It’s called the Internet lady. It’s been four years since a Hallmark store had security escort a same sex couple out the door for trying to buy a pair of boy bears they’d discovered kissing, even though the magnets weren’t supposed to allow that, and now all of a sudden the company is a tad concerned that all those little niche players are going to run away with a big chunk of their market while they’re busy appealing to the lowest common denominator. Having a Hallmark store in shopping malls from one end of the country to the other won’t keep the piles of cash coming, in an age where people can make or buy their cards online and print them out at home. Yet even in the face of that, Hallmark can’t bring itself to reach out to that potential market, to actually be "inclusive and not exclusive". On the other hand, that’s probably exactly why Hallmark gets it so right with their core market.
This isn’t progress, it’s window dressing. Cheap, insincere sentiment from your one stop shopping center for all-purpose cheap, insincere sentiment. What you send when how you feel about yourself is more important then what the person you’re sending it to is feeling. Why is it not surprising that it’s a Hallmark moment.
This blog is powered by WordPress and is hosted at Winters Web Works, who also did some custom design work (Thanks!). Some embedded content was created with the help of The Gimp. I proof with Google Chrome on either Windows, Linux or MacOS depending on which machine I happen to be running at the time.
