Beware of lovers bearing gifts…

I’m seeing in my web server logs that people are finding a previous Mark and Josh Valentine’s day cartoon, one I did in 2003…this one:

…and so I’m getting another wee traffic spike around here. What’s interesting is that they’re finding it via Yahoo Image Search for Valentine’s Day cartoons. Sure enough, you go to Yahoo and click on images and search on “valentine’s day cartoon” and that cartoon is the very first image in the list. But there is no plain text anywhere on the page containing the word “valentine”. The caption is part of the image file. There is no clear text in the image binary besides my copyright notice.

So how is the Yahoo search engine indexing that page to the words “Valentine’s day?” Is it OCR-ing the caption? Is it indexing it based on the date of publication? The information systems geek in me is curious.

Just for grins I tried the same search string on google images and that cartoon does not show up at all in the results. Yahoo’s doing something different.

Anyway…I feel a tad gratified that I could give same sex couples a little Valentine’s day presence, if only in a search engine. Not my intent…I basically preach to the choir here…but it’s satisfying all the same. Yes, this should be our day too.

[Update…] Josh had somewhat longer hair in that cartoon. But just for that one day. I was drawing their hair mussed up and I must have gotten a little carried away. Swear I didn’t even notice it until just now…

So I was…like…over at the Love In Action site…doing a little online research…and I came across the new staff photo…and my jaw drops a little, and I stare at it for a little while, thinking has Smid gone completely nuts or what..? And then it dawns on me…

Well…the money’s got to come from somewhere…

All in all, I’d rather not have to. Far as I’m concerned the only redeeming thing about having to sleep is that you get to dream. Dreams are very cool things. But having to skip eight hours or so out of every day is something I could live without. Life is short enough as it is to be playing dead for about a third of it.

But our bodies demand it, and you never know that more then when you can’t sleep. I’ve had this chronic insomnia problem now for nearly a decade. It started out with occasional bouts of sleeplessness and now it’s at the point where a single good night’s sleep is a rare thing. My night consists of alternating periods of restless sleep and wakefulness, followed by a day that consists of many little naps that don’t refresh me at all.

It’s taking it’s toll. For the past year I’ve felt as if I’m living half a life and as I said, life is too short to be missing a lot of time out of it. I’ve tried meditation. I’ve tried diet adjustments. I’ve been prescribed sleeping pills, but the ones that actually work for me are horribly addictive. Something is wrong here. It’s taken me years to convince a doctor of the seriousness of it, but recently I finally managed it, and got referred to the sleep clinic at Johns Hopkins.

I went for the initial interview last month. They took my vitals and medical history, and asked me a battery of questions, not only about my sleep habits but my personal lifestyle. What kind of work do I do? How to I usually spend my evenings? Do I smoke? Do I drink? Do I exercise? How often and how much? Then they scheduled me for a sleepover, where I’ll be wired up and monitored as I (try to) sleep.

That happens tonight. Hopefully they’ll see it all happening, and then I’ll know what the problem is. They asked about snoring and since I’m single I haven’t a clue whether I snore or not. But the snoring question is I think, about sleep apnea, and I’m hoping it’s that, and not some kind of brain/sleep problem that requires drugs to treat.

See…the thing about my sleeplessness is that my mind is almost hyperactive while it is happening. It’s the oddest, most uncomfortable feeling you can imagine: my body is dead tired, almost immobile with tiredness, and yet my mind is quite active. I want to get up and do things but I can’t because I’m so dog tired. So my mind just wanders and wanders until I finally get a few moments of sleep and then I’m awake again. A diagnosis of sleep apnea would be a relief actually.

I pack an overnight bag and check in tonight. They said I could bring my laptop and books to read. I’m hoping there’s a wireless access point there somewhere I can connect to, but it isn’t required. I can live without Internet for one night. My iPod comes along but my white noise maker doesn’t because they need to listen to me. I don’t think that will make much of a difference since I expect this room to be pretty quiet. They say it’ll be like a motel room. I had to buy pajamas (ugh! But I’m modest around strangers…) but I don’t think that will make a difference in my being able to sleep or not either. They say the wiring won’t bother me. I suppose they have it all down.

I’ll post about it when I get back. I’m curious to see how it all works. But then that kind of thing keeps my mind active, and my active mind is what I think is keeping me from getting sleep…

Tom Tomorrow has found an utterly charming way of dealing with comment thread bilge:

Also, a comments week rule arising from the Colbert thread: anyone who suggests that the hostís choice of a given topic is too frivilous when there are Serious Issues in the World To Be Solved will have their comment run through a pirate translator and reposted.

Sample comment: How can you waste time writing about your new book when there are children starving in the world?

Sample comment run through pirate translator: Yarrr! How can ye waste time writiní about your new book when thar be sprogs starviní in tí world?

Like that.

Yeah. Like that. But more so. I want people to feel free to speak their mind here, but you need to be engaged in what you’re talking about, even if I regard it as just a lot of mindless idiotic babble. Morons on the other hand, who just want to flit around from web site to web site posting crap in random comment threads like a bunch of bored street taggers can expect to be treated in my little corner of the world wide web as idle sport for carefree ridicule. It’s just the kinda guy I am. Hi Brian. Arr.

Spammers will be shot on sight, deep fried, rolled in sunflower seeds and fed to the birds.

Policy.

Via the Queer Action Coalition, this story in the Memphis Flyer about the teen who escaped Love In Action:

Last October, DJ Butler ran away from home. His father tracked him down and, instead of taking him home to Georgia, deposited him at Love In Action (LIA), a faith-based program for adolescents struggling with promiscuity or homosexuality.

"The people at LIA saw me get out of the car in handcuffs," Butler said at a press conference Friday. "My counselor at LIA said if you leave I’ll call the cops, and they’ll come pick you up and take you to a juvenile delinquent center."

While in residence at the program, Butler’s father obtained Prozac for him, yet he insists he never saw a doctor. "The counselors kept telling me I needed some kind of pick-me-up," said the 17-year-old. On occasion, Butler says, staff from LIA administered the medication.

Go read the whole thing. One disturbing aspect of it is that it looks like the state of Tennessee is going to punt on the charges that LIA was treating mentally ill clients without a license. They’re saying that as long as LIA isn’t admitting them any more, they regard the case as closed. Alarmingly the judge in the case seems not to buy that. If LIA eventually wins over the state, then it will be anything goes. The chatter I’m hearing on the networks is that Smid is planning a residential care facility for teens now. You can bet it will be fenced in.

So now they’re not only bringing kids to their doorstep in handcuffs, they’re giving them psychotropic drugs against their will too, illegally obtained perhaps…we don’t know how the kid’s father got that Prozac…and illegally dispensed, since it is a federal offence to give drugs like that to anyone who they weren’t prescribed for. This is what the war against homosexuality has brought them to. Dragging kids in handcuffs into a former church building turned ex-gay cult where they can be drugged into the holy spirit, away from the prying eyes of meddlesome child welfare agencies and heath care regulators.

Love In Action is supported locally, primarily by Germantown Baptist Church near Memphis. This is the church that gave Smid his title of "Reverend". I have been unable to determine if they sell them online as well. Once upon a time Baptists believed that you had to come to God of your own free will. Nowadays in the football stadium churches of the bible belt, Jesus is a drug pusher. If someone won’t confess the faith freely, they’ll just have to be drugged into it. If fighting the gay agenda means dragging kids in handcuffs to a quiet seculded place where an instant reverend can give them pills that make fucking with their minds an easier task, well then so be it. Jesus would understand. Jesus would tell them "Drug the little children to come unto me." And thus the war against homosexuality, turns churches into drug dens.

[Scene: Late Afternoon, a co-worker’s office] I enter, holding a tiny plastic cup of something that looks at first glance like it’s chocolate pudding, with a bit of whipped cream on top…

Me (Holding out cup): I just bought this in the cafeteria. If it was a cup of pudding, it would cost me about 75 cents. But being that its mousse, it cost me two bucks fifty. But since it’s late, and I need my chocolate fix, I have to pay up.

A Co-Worker: Is that really mousse?

Me (shrugging): I reckon. I don’t know. What’s mousse?

A Co-Worker: It looks like mousse.

Me: So what is mousse?

A Co-Worker: It has egg white in it, and they whip it up a lot more. Yeah…that looks like mousse all right.

Me: So I’m paying a lot more for less, since most of what’s in this is air.

A Co-Worker: Yeah. Pretty much. But mousse is good.

Me: Yes. Yes it is.

Things no one has bought for me since puberty:

• Chocolate.
• Flowers.
• Stuffed Animals.

Actually, I’ve Never been bought flowers.

(sigh) Valentine’s Day.

There’s a real good review of Brokeback Mountain in The New York Review Of Books now. I’ve read dozens of reviews and articles on Brokeback, and this is the only one I’ve seen that actually discusses what makes the film different from other "star-crossed lover" tragedies. For all that everyone is calling the tragic love story in Brokeback "universal", it isn’t in one very central respect and it is frustrating me no end that no one is talking about this, because it really needs to be talked about. Well, someone has finally talked about it:

Indeed, a month after the movie’s release most of the reviews were resisting, indignantly, the popular tendency to refer to it as "the gay cowboy movie." "It is much more than that glib description implies," the critic of the Minneapolis Star Tribune sniffed. "This is a human story."

…

Because I am as admiring as almost everyone else of the film’s many excellences, it seems to me necessary to counter this special emphasis in the way the film is being promoted and received. For to see Brokeback Mountain as a love story, or even as a film about universal human emotions, is to misconstrue it very seriously – and in so doing inevitably to diminish its real achievement.

Both narratively and visually, Brokeback Mountain is a tragedy about the specifically gay phenomenon of the "closet" – about the disastrous emotional and moral consequences of erotic self-repression and of the social intolerance that first causes and then exacerbates it…

It could be that nowadays people, especially young people, don’t see the closet as being a realistic option in their lives, and don’t experience its corrosive effect on a person’s soul firsthand anymore, either in their own lives if they are themselves gay, or in the lives of their gay friends, most of whom nowadays are out, even if not all that comfortably out. But there are more then gay teens being forced into Love In Action to learn to hate themselves. There are grown adults, hating themselves for what they are, who voluntarily check themselves into these places to have their homosexuality cured. Self hatred and it’s prison, the closet, is still there, is still very real in people’s lives, and it is Still destroying lives as surely as it destroyed the lives of the lovers in Brokeback Mountain.

In another review that decried the use of the term "gay cowboy movie" ("a cruel simplification"), the Chicago Sun-Times’s critic, Roger Ebert, wrote with ostensible compassion about the dilemma of Jack and Ennis, declaring that "their tragedy is universal. It could be about two women, or lovers from different religious or ethnic groups – any ‘forbidden’ love." This is well-meaning but seriously misguided. The tragedy of heterosexual lovers from different religious or ethnic groups is, essentially, a social tragedy; as we watch it unfold, we are meant to be outraged by the irrationality of social strictures that prevent the two from loving each other, strictures that the lovers themselves may legitimately rail against and despise.

But those lovers, however star-crossed, never despise themselves. As Brokeback makes so eloquently clear, the tragedy of gay lovers like Ennis and Jack is only secondarily a social tragedy. Their tragedy, which starts well before the lovers ever meet, is primarily a psychological tragedy, a tragedy of psyches scarred from the very first stirrings of an erotic desire which the world around them – beginning in earliest childhood, in the bosom of their families, as Ennis’s grim flashback is meant to remind us – represents as unhealthy, hateful, and deadly. Romeo and Juliet (and we) may hate the outside world, the Capulets and Montagues, may hate Verona; but because they learn to hate homosexuality so early on, young people with homosexual impulses more often than not grow up hating themselves: they believe that there’s something wrong with themselves long before they can understand that there’s something wrong with society. This is the truth that Heath Ledger, who plays Ennis, clearly understands – "Fear was instilled in him at an early age, and so the way he loved disgusted him," the actor has said – and that is so brilliantly conveyed by his deservedly acclaimed performance. On screen, Ennis’s self-repression and self-loathing are given startling physical form: the awkward, almost hobbled quality of his gait, the constricted gestures, the way in which he barely opens his mouth when he talks all speak eloquently of a man who is tormented simply by being in his own body – by being himself.

Some people would disagree that gay teens grow up hating themselves "more often then not", but it is still happening to kids, and it is the horror at the center of LIA’s teen program "Refuge". Smid wants to deliver gay teens into the wasteland of despair that Ennis and Jack experienced throughout their lives. This is what Smid, and everyone who is a part of the ex-gay movement, calls righteous. But it is a nightmare no one should have to live. Everyone needs to love, and be loved in return. It is a basic human need.

The real achievement of Brokeback Mountain is not that it tells a universal love story that happens to have gay characters in it, but that it tells a distinctively gay story that happens to be so well told that any feeling person can be moved by it. If you insist, as so many have, that the story of Jack and Ennis is OK to watch and sympathize with because they’re not really homosexual – that they’re more like the heart of America than like "gay people" – you’re pushing them back into the closet whose narrow and suffocating confines Ang Lee and his collaborators have so beautifully and harrowingly exposed.

You should go read the whole thing. It really gets to the central sadness of this story. I’ve read the short story it was based on and I am old enough to recall some of what it was like for gay people back in the 1960s, when the story opens. I wasn’t yet aware of my own sexual orientation back then, that wouldn’t come about until the 1970s and my late teens. But I know how it was. The disgust and contempt for homosexuals was nearly universal. You could be fired from any job, have a professional license revoked or not granted, tossed out of your apartment, arrested and thrown in jail simply for being in a gay bar when the cops raided it, or any gathering of gay people. There were laws on the books in many cities, forbidding bars and restaurants from serving known homosexuals. Your name would be put on a sexual offenders list, whether you had actually done anything to anyone or not, simply because of what you were. And every Every news story or article about people like you described you to the rest of the world in the worst possible terms. You were a pervert, a psycho, mentally deranged, a dangerous lurking sexual predator. In my 8th grade sex ed class back in 1968, they taught us that homosexuals typically killed the people they had sex with.

Thankfully it’s not nearly as bad nowadays. But what the right wing, what the religious right cannot do to society as a whole, they’re still trying to do at the local level, and to individual gay people whenever and wherever they can. They want us to hate ourselves. They want to take any chance for love and happiness away from us, no matter how small. Witness the bitter opposition to even allowing same sex couples the simple right to be with and care for each other in the hospital. And they want to make gay teens who are comfortable with what they are, come to fear and then to loath their sexual nature. That is why places like Love In Action exist. The closet is still a terrible reality in America today, and if the religious right has its way, it will once again be the dominant reality of gay people’s lives. What makes Brokeback Mountain different from other star-crossed lover stories, is how it is making accessible to the rest of America that uniquely gay experience of the closet. Now you know what it’s like to be in there. Do you understand now why we fight?

This needs to be discussed, because America needs to see, finally, that the monsters, the sexual predators, were never their homosexual neighbors. Some people take sexual pleasure from others against their will. But there is another, more depraved kind of sexual predator, who takes pleasure in destroying in others, that capacity for sexual intimacy, that capacity to love and trust, and receive the love and trust of another. They justify the emptiness in their own hearts by murdering the hopes and dreams of their neighbors. They witness the death of love in others, and are reassured that their own heartless souls are the essential human reality, and the quest for love and intimacy is a pathetic, if not a wicked illusion. There’s your monster.

So I’m noticing a big bump in my web sit hits suddenly…and I’m thinking to myself that something I wrote, or some cartoon I posted, must be a big hit out there. My ego begins to soar upwards. My public loves me…!

Ha! I dig into my logs and what I see is that one of my cartoons is getting caught up in a sudden interest in searching for cartoons about the Holocaust. Here’s the search string that’s generating so much traffic around here lately:

holocaust cartoon

That’s it. Swear to god that’s it. And sure enough, this cartoon of mine is appearing right on the first page of google image results:

It’s about right wing nutcase Minnesota State Representative Arlon Lindner, who in 2003 introduced a bill to eliminate penalties for discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and to remove offical recognition of homosexuals as victims of the holocaust. In defending his bill said among other things that it would save America from becoming “another African continent.” Previously, he’d compared same sex marriage, a’la Pennsylvania wingnut Rick Santorum, to someone wanting to marry their dog.

I think I know what’s going on. This is about the Moslem world riots over twelve Danish cartoons satirizing the prophet Mohammed. People are searching for equivalent cartoons satirizing the Holocaust, either to prove that Moslems have done the same in their own newspapers, or for something to wave back in the face of western liberal society. To both parties: welcome to my little gallery. Perhaps you hadn’t heard about the pink triangles.

Last week’s cartoon is still on the drawing board…not a good place for something as topical as a political cartoon. And I had another one for this week beside it (on a different drawing board…yes I really do use drawing boards). Then came the denoument in the case of the Puzzles bar attack and a different cartoon for this week came to mind.

I’ll have the others up sometime this week. In the meantime here’s this weeks. I trust it needs no further comment, but I have more on the cartoon page if you want to read it.

There is more on D.J. Butler, the teen who escaped Love In Action, on the Queer Action Committee website. I think these are links to the actual Memphis TV news reports that I posted earlier, but I haven’t looked at any of them yet because I’m waiting for something a little more detailed then you usually get from TV news. But QAC has posted something Butler said in one of them that is both heartbreaking and chilling…

The people at Love In Action brain wash, that’s what they do. They make you believe what they believe. They keep preaching until they make it seem true in your brain. I got so weak, I really was not as strong as I thought I was. They kept pushing and pushing…but thank God I got out of there before it was too late.

If this is love in action, then the mental hospitals where Stalin put his political prisoners were democracy in action. But theocrats like Smid and his religious right enablers don’t believe in democracy, any more then they believe in love. They despise both for their promise of spiritual freedom and wholeness. Tyrants know that it isn’t enough to imprison the body. You have to imprison the spirit. If you can do that you don’t have to put chains on the body. If you don’t, then chains will not long hold the body.

John Smid is gutting the heart from innocent teenagers, with no more compunction then slavers castrating their goods before putting them on the market. Many of the children who leave his prison do eventually re-establish their gay identities, but they do so wounded, and with what should have been the most wonderful, magical years of their lives an empty wasteland behind them. It is my hope that someday these kids, grown up, band together and sue the crap out of Smid and his enablers for what they did to them when they were young, and utterly at their mercy. I would contribute money to that lawsuit. I’m sure a lot of others would too.

And here’s what else I would do: I would volunteer to build the jail where John Smid can serve his time for child abuse. By hand. All by myself if necessary. Brick by brick.

[Update…] E.J. has more to say about this, in a post that includes some corrections from former LIA client Peterson Toscano.