So it goes…

A…B…C.  Always Be Checking. That is to say, Always Be Fact Checking.

But first…some beauty!

Some joy arrived in the mail today. One part anxiously awaited, one part completely unexpected.

The expected joy is this vinyl of an allegedly lost recording of Dr. Karl Böhm conducting the Berlin Radio-Symphonie-Orchester in Brahms Symphony No. 4 and Richard Strauss’ Death and Transfiguration. These are two favorites. Facebook has been waving these recordings in my face ever since I ordered a copy, and I haven’t minded a bit because I got to hear passages from them until this arrived. Those couple clips convinced me that these recordings will be treasured. I paused over the repeat advertising, and listened to the clips over and over. And now I have the complete music.

The Brahms symphony, his last, is unique in that there is no musical introductory passage. Instead he gets right into it. Everything that follows emerges from that hauntingly beautiful theme. His mastery of the sonata form is complete. It is an amazing symphony, but also a very melancholic one. I have heard it said that it is his eulogy to a musical form he saw as fading away.

I must admit I’m not much impressed by the first part of Death and Transfiguration. It’s that stunningly beautiful coda that really gets to a deep soulful place inside of me. 

There is a card with instructions for downloading a digital copy, which is nice because I want these in my iTunes library.

The unexpected joy is this McCall’s magazine back issue…

I ordered it on the basis of Dick Hafer citing it for one of his statistics in his antigay comic book, “Homosexuality: Legitimate, Alternate Deathstyle” I’ve been reviewing here.

I am nowhere near this part of the book yet, but in its chapter on homosexuality and the NEA, which is basically a rant that allowing gay people to teach schoolkids is inviting child sexual abuse, Hafer cites an article in this issue of McCall’s wherein he claims “In a study reported in McCall’s magazine among school principals, they received 13 TIMES (his emphasis) as many complaints about homosexual contact between teachers and students than they did about heterosexual teachers.”

So where does Hafer get this statistic? There is a cite (#4) that points to this entry in his appendix (which he labels as “Notes”):

G. Hechinger & F.M. Hechinger, “Should Homosexuals Be Allowed To Teach?” McCall’s, 1978 105(6) 100+

So I had to go order that back issue to see who wrote it and what their credentials were. What I found to my pleasant surprise is the article was a fair reporting of the controversies over gay teachers in 1978, and the homophobic prejudices motivating them. Time and again in the article they point out that students were more likely to be approached sexually by teachers of the opposite sex. Time and again they point out that much of the controversy is motivated by beliefs about homosexuality that have no basis in fact.

There is a text box labelled “How School Principals Feel” It contains an overview of a survey the magazine did among school principals. This appears to be the source of Hafer’s factoid that school principals received 13 times as many complaints about homosexual contact between teachers and students than they did about heterosexual teachers. So I dug into it.

That statistic Hafer reports in his book, that he says came from this issue of McCall’s, isn’t there.

Nowhere.

Not in the text box where they report their findings on how school principals feel.

Not anywhere else in that article either.

Hafer is telling his readers a flat-out lie.

I was stunned at the absolute mendacity of it. But that factoid, like most of them in the Hafer comic book, feels slippery the more you look at it. “a study reported in McCall’s” What study? Hafer doesn’t say but in fact it’s the magazines own study. He could have just said that, but I reckon it makes it sound more authoritative if you imply it’s a study the magazine is simply reporting on. Especially since McCall’s isn’t an academic journal.  It’s a lifestyle magazine. But what does it matter? Nowhere does the magazine article say school principals received 13 times as many complaints about gay teachers as heterosexual ones.

No. Where.

But there is a statistic given which goes…

“Not surprisingly, complaints of heterosexual contact between teachers and students were nearly twice as frequent – 13 percent of our sample reported such complaints.”

That is the Only number 13 in the entire article.

But wait…there’s more…:

“In most cases, the principals reported the total number of complaints, with no indication of whether or not they had been investigated and found to be justified.”

And…

“Only 23 principals (2 percent) knew of instances in which teachers discussed their homosexuality in class.”

It just goes to show…

A…B…C… Always. Be. Checking.

Coffee is for checkers!

You have to fact check these people. Every time.

But per my last blog entry on the Hafer book, I have to wonder did he actually read that magazine article and choose to lie about it, or did he get his information second hand from Paul Cameron. Cameron is cited over and over again in his appendix (labelled “Notes”). I don’t think it’s a stretch to believe everything in that appendix is all Cameron, and Hafer is covering over some of it so it doesn’t look like he only used one source and it’s not the deep dive into the facts he wants you to think it is.

So I just now unrolled the new area rug for my living room that arrived yesterday. It’s a mid century modern design to go with the mid century modern sofa and chair I bought to replace the old and dilapidated ones I inherited after I retired. My bitter Baptist grandmother chose most of the furniture in the apartments I grew up in but every now and then mom got something in that I really liked and it wasn’t until years after she passed away that I finally came to understand what that style she liked was. If I could I’d do the entire house in this style but I don’t have that kind of money, and probably my house was always destined to be random this and that like my mind. But I really Really like this style. Most likely that’s because it was everywhere when I was a boy in the 1950s and 60s. I think mom fell in love with it too, but she wasn’t in charge of the living space. 

This is my house however, and I am.

When I bought it the house had burgundy and pink wall to wall carpet in all the major rooms, including the basement man cave. I didn’t much like those colors but I figured I’d just leave it until I could figure out what I wanted to replace it with. 23 years later I’m on retirement income and if I had my druthers I’d take it all up and have the nice wood floor under it (I’ve seen what it looks like in my neighbor’s houses) refinished. But then I’d have to take up all the furniture and put it somewhere. Plus endure the fumes.

And I’d really like to replace that not optimal tile floor in the kitchen with a linoleum one in a 1950s pattern, which I think would go nicely with my 50s chrome table and chairs. But then I would Have to replace the boilerplate “country kitchen” cabinets that came with the house. I think maybe I could get away with just replacing the doors though.

So anyway, I decided to look at area rugs and I found this one at a very affordable clearance price. I’m really liking what it’s doing for the living room.

And now of course, I’m afraid to walk across it in my shoes.

I’ve been working on the new Home, Family, and Friends photo gallery. and so I’m spending more time in Affinity Photo, which will be my replacement for Adobe Lightroom. I was hesitant to dive into it without going through the tutorials because it’s UI and workflow is Very different. But I decided to just take the plunge because running Lightroom while I have my computer disconnected from the household network is becoming tiresome.

Why am I doing that? Because I don’t trust Adobe to not reach into my computer and turn off the software I bought a “perpetual” license for back before they went to their Rent Our Software Forever Or We’ll Turn It Off business model. They have already turned off the licensing servers for their stand alone versions and I’m pretty sure that means I can’t reinstall lightroom if I ever need to. Plus I’m also pretty sure they’ll be turning off all the old stand alone versions soon anyway, if they’re not already doing that. I was reading a thread on the AAEC members forum after the kerfuffle over Adobe’s new licensing terms, and how some cartoonists were keeping their copies of Photoshop…their legally licensed copies mind you…on machines they kept carefully isolated from the Internet just to make sure they could keep using the software they bought.

But I need to have my art room computer connected to my other household computers. So I can either turn off the Internet connection at my router, which still leaves me access to the other household computers and my NAS, but which turns off the entire household to the Internet, or I can just unplug the art room Mac’s ethernet cable, which means then I can’t reach my NAS and any of the data files I have on it, and I can’t reach the printers.

So I’m taking the plunge, finally, into the Affinity workflow. What I’m finding is this software is stunningly powerful…much Much better than Lightroom. But you have to get yourself adjusted to the very different user interface. And its document model.

Lightroom, like Aperture while it was still a thing (I loved Aperture’s user interface, but Aperture never really worked for us film photographers. Apple is not the software engineering genius it wants you to think it is), employs delta files that it keeps all your adjustments in. Things like exposure, contrast, dust removal, cropping, resizing, and such. This way it never changes your original image file, unlike a straight up image editor like GIMP. This is important for a photography workflow because, and especially with a digital original, that file IS your negative (in a sense). You want to keep it untouched or you’ve lost your original.

So what you see on your screen in Lightroom is the original image, plus the deltas. When you make a print, or export to a file to put out on the web or social media, Lightroom and Aperture would apply the changes you made in the delta file to the original, then do the export or send the print stream to the printer. When you Save, you are only saving the delta file. Your original image remains untouched.

Affinity does it differently. If you Save instead of Save As, thankfully it first gives you the choice of overwriting your original, or saving to its own proprietary file format. Once you save it to its own file format Save always saves to that, and your original is secure. There is no separate delta file. What there is are a series of “layers” over your original that contain the adjustments you make. Affinity calls these “adjustment layers.” So in a sense the deltas are included in the Affinity file, not as a separate file that’s merged with your original as needed. You can see all the adjustment layers in a layer toolbox similar to the ones in GIMP or Photoshop. If you want to remove an adjustment you remove that adjustment layer. You can also deselect each adjustment layer to see the effect they have on the original.

I am very impressed with Affinity’s handling of my photos. It is a big step up from Lightroom, although granted I haven’t updated my copy of Lightroom since Adobe went to its rent it forever business model instead of just selling you the upgrades. Maybe Lightroom has improved. I don’t care.

Affinity is still maintaining its version 1 which works on my older Mac Pro. Version 2 needs the newer Mac or Windows operating systems and thereby the newer hardware. But it is also not rental software. You buy a license just like in the olden days. I’m almost completely free of Adobe in my art room workflows now. All I need is to write a program to make my web galleries.

Still slogging through chapter one, moving on from lying about Bell and Weinberg’s Homosexualities, now we commence to lying about Kinsey. You knew Kinsey would show up here sooner or later…right? But actually…no. Because the more you dig into Hafer’s “facts” via his cites, the more you find yourself with…a very familiar name that is not Kinsey.

First…some links the the previous episodes…

Deathstyle by Dick Hafer – A Review

Hafer’s Homosexuality: Legitimate Alternate Deathstyle – A Personal Review

Hafer’s Homosexuality: Legitimate Alternate Deathstyle – A Personal Review (continued…)

Hafer’s Homosexuality: Legitimate Alternate Deathstyle – A Personal Review (continued…)

In our last episode, Larry…the sensible middle ground between raving bigot Chester and loathsome Mr. Militant Homosexual Sodomite…was saying that anyone who had the three to five hundred sexual partners in a lifetime obsession with sex that homosexuals do (but which Homosexualities Does Not in fact claim), they’d be considered a pervert. To which Sodomite responds that he can’t help being gay, it’s how he was born.

Notice how deftly Hafer does this. One moment sensible middle ground Larry is throwing out a completely false factoid from the Bell and Weinberg study and in the next panel Sodomite just lets it stand without even addressing its factuality. Of course I have hundreds of sexual partners…it’s a service I provide along with package deliveries… So now the reader will likely go along with it, like Sodomite just did.

You wonder if this really is some sort of mendacity on Hafer’s part, or just the reliable blindness of the bigot mindset. Of course it’s true. Everyone knows homosexuals are perverts. So let’s just move along…

So Sodomite, agreeing without saying so, that having hundreds of sex partners is all just part of being a homosexual, says that anyway he can’t help himself because he was born that way.

“THAT’S A COP-OUT!” shouts middle ground Larry. Because “Kinsey and company”, as Larry/Hafer tells us…

“…made two studies by polling homosexuals in the 1940s and again in 1970.  Guess what percentage of them believed THEMSELVES that they were “born that way.”

(the scare quotes are Hafer’s)

“Ninety percent?” offers Sodomite.

“No…ONLY 9%…! The least objectionable answer and only 9 out of 100 could bring themselves to claim it.”

To which Chester asks, “What did they claim as the reason for their deviancy?”

And saying “Look for yourself,” Larry/Hafer provides us with a chart

Early homosexual experiences with adults or peers: 22%
Around homosexual a lot, homosexuals, friends: 16%
Poor relationship with mother:15%
Unusual development (sissy, tom-boy, didn’t get along with own gender, etc) 15%
Poor relationship with father: 14%
Unavailable heterosexual partners: 12%
Social ineptitude: 9%
Born that way: 9%

…all of which adds up to 112% I’m pretty sure that’s not 9 out of 100. But let us pause and take note that even Hafer seems to understand that all the other causes of homosexuality listed in that chart are…objectionable.

Let’s talk about cop-outs. Hafer provides us with two more cites…just not to the source he’s claiming these factoids came from. And I need to point out here how difficult it is to even notice the cites in this book. You have to look closely. Very very closely. The cite numbers are tiny. Probably intentionally so, because they’re only there to add respectability to the bullshit Hafer is shoveling, and the reader is supposed just gloss over them and passively accept what they’re being told.

The first cite is to a paper A.P. Bell, one of the co-authors of Homosexualities, presented at the Nebraska Symposium on Motivation in 1973. If you’re wondering how 1973 can be in the 1940s and also 1970 you are not the target audience of this book. I cannot locate this paper, but the abstract in a subsequent paper by Bell in 1975 might be relevant to this factoid Hafer throws out at us…

Before addressing ourselves to the question “Where do we go from here?” with respect to research in the area of homosexuality, we would do well to take stock of where we have been and where we are. In this regard, I cannot think of a more comprehensive statement than what is to be found in the preface to Weinberg’s and my annotated bibliography of homosexuality. In our summary of the 1265 items which were included in that volume, we pointed out that:

…discussions of homosexuality have consisted primarily of speculations prompted by theoretical models or statements whose constructs have not been tested in any systematic manner…

Studies designed to test these assumptions about the nature of homosexual development have been few, while those which have been conducted have usually included small, biased samples as well as measurements which have been subjectively derived. Little attention has been given to the wide range of homosexual orientation and adjustment; most have viewed homosexuality-heterosexuality as a simple dichotomy…most of their subjects have been those who eschew their homosexual orientation and whose functioning in other areas of their lives has been marginal.

(Emphasis mine)

As I pointed out in the previous installment when Hafer started waving around Homosexualities as some sort of proof that homosexuals were wildly promiscuous, the authors made an effort in the introduction of their study to inform their readers that…

It should be pointed out that reaching any consensus about the exact number of homosexual men or women exhibiting this or that characteristic is not an aim of the present study.

Why? Because for one thing they knew they didn’t, could not, obtain a representative sample. It’s the problem that plagued sex researchers all through the decades. How do you do science, actual, verifiable, reproducible science, on a subset of the human family that is generally terrified of being discovered? Bell and Weinberg had to recruit volunteers from the gay bars and baths because in the early 1970s for most homosexuals, the closet was a matter of survival. How do you reach potential subjects for scientific research that are trying very hard not to be seen? What sorts of subjects does that leave you with? Bell understood that and was warning about it in 1975. He would have known it in 1974.

So there’s Hafer waving this factoid he pulled out of a paper published in 1974, that almost certainly suffered from the same sampling problem that bedeviled Homosexualities, and all those studies Bell is warning about in his 1975 paper. But is Hafer even citing that paper?

It’s a good question because the next cite, tucked away at the bottom right hand corner of that chart above, is this:

Paul Cameron, “What causes homosexuality?” Lincoln NE – Institute for Scientific Investigation of Sexuality, 1984.

That now regrettably named Institute for Scientific Investigation of Sexuality (ISIS) is Paul Cameron’s vanity press. It eventually morphed into The Family Research Council. So that nine percent figure was a Paul Cameron factoid. It did not come from any part of the Kinsey Institute.  The figures in that chart are Paul Cameron figures. Hafer is saying they’re from the Kinsey Institute but his cite says they’re from Paul Cameron.

They came in other words, from the same guy who asserted based on reviewing the obituaries in two gay community newspapers, that the average lifespan of a homosexual is just 46 years.

In further words…

In 1984 the Nebraska Psychological Association issued a statement disassociating itself “from the representations and interpretations of scientific literature offered by Dr. Paul Cameron.”In 1986 the American Sociological Association passed a resolution stating, “The American Sociological Association officially and publicly states that Paul Cameron is not a sociologist, and condemns his consistent misrepresentation of sociological research. “This was based on a report from the ASA’s Committee on the Status of Homosexuals in Sociology, which summarized Cameron’s inflammatory statements and commented, “It does not take great analytical abilities to suspect from even a cursory review of Cameron’s writings that his claims have almost nothing to do with social science and that social science is used only to cover over another agenda. Very little of his work could find support from even a bad misreading of genuine social science investigation on the subject and some sociologists, such as Alan Bell, have been ‘appalled’ at the abuse of their work.” In 1996, the board of directors of the Canadian Psychological Association approved a position statement disassociating the organization from Cameron’s work on sexuality, stating that he had “consistently misinterpreted and misrepresented research on sexuality, homosexuality, and lesbianism.”

-via Wikipedia – Paul Cameron

So here is Hafer citing Bell, and then citing Cameron. Most likely why Hafer isn’t actually citing Bell for the chart itself, but Cameron, is exactly because Bell’s work doesn’t get him where he wants to go. So instead he cites Paul Cameron, not Bell who was among sociologists appalled at the abuse by Cameron of their work. But he introduces these “facts” to his readers as if they came from Kinsey.

Which makes it a fair question: Did Hafer get Any of the figures in this book from the sources he claims he is citing, or did he get them all from Paul Cameron?

Stay tuned…

This came across my Facebook stream just now, by way of Craig Kennedy in the Gay New York 1970s and 80s page, accompanied by a photo of Richard Gere in Martin Sherman’s play Bent…

I went with my bf shortly after the opening, end of 1979. From the opening moment when Rudy crosses the stage naked, we knew we were in for a wild ride. (The 2nd act “sex scene” with Max and Horst facing forward motionless 10 feet apart in the Dachau concentration camp is nothing short of brilliant.)

A quote from the playwright:

“The gay world then was somewhat brutalized–it was enormously sexualized,” Sherman recalled. “New York was absolutely wild. People were just [having sex] all over the place, literally. But nobody was actually free; it was all an illusion. The laws were terrible. I did not see a society that was progressing. It was extremely commercial; people were making a lot of money out of it. It was in its way not dissimilar, I thought, to what Germany was like in the Weimar era.”

But nobody was actually free; it was all an illusion. The laws were terrible. Yes. At least in the urban enclaves like New York City.

Larry Kramer wrote a novel about that period in NYC, titled Faggots. It got a lot of static but he had a point, distilled down to this one line toward the novel’s end:

The fucking we’re getting is not worth the fucking we’re getting.

You could understand why the freedom to be our sexual selves was so important. The sodomy laws practically defined us as criminals, sexual deviants, that needed to be isolated from the rest of our communities. If many of us fixated on sex it was because that’s what we were told was all that was all there was to us. But there was a necessary element of Yes We Are defiance to it. Progress is made by the unreasonable man. And woman.

It was never just about sex. We needed wholeness. Getting the sodomy laws off our backs was a big fight, but there was still the rest of it. Making that space for our sexual lives was important. But also the space for our love lives. Our whole lives. We couldn’t be neighbors so long as we were criminals. We couldn’t be people so long as we were sodomites.

So, a wee update on that new photo gallery I’m working on…

I found a roll from 1975 I really need to scan in. It involves our work installing a monster TV antenna on a friend’s house. Back in the day, before cable TV was everywhere, a directional antenna on the roof, mounted on an antenna rotor, got you the best picture, and maybe even good signal from other cities like Baltimore or even maybe possibly Harrisburg. And my classmate-friends were all in with bigger is better.

The project…had an unexpected outcome.

I saw these shots in my archive contact sheets and knew I had to include them in this first new gallery. But there is a problem. The film is Ilford, which I wasn’t used to using over Tri-X. And according to the catalogue I developed it in D76- 1:1 as a one shot. It looks like I over developed. Probably because I just blithely assumed that since the Ilford roll was ASA 400 it developed just like Tri-X.

So these negatives are very dense. The scanner can handle that and give me something I can work with. But lord have mercy it takes a long time to scan. The first set of 12 negatives took sixteen hours to scan.

So I’ll be scanning this roll in for the rest of today too. And I have four more rolls (that should scan normally) with shots on them I want to include that I need to scan. So maybe by the weekend.

But when this roll is done I’ll throw a couple shots from it up here as a teaser. I can think of three or four classmates on here who will remember it well.

It began with my needing to find a place on my website for the shots I took of the wind damage in my neighborhood. I realized that they needed their own gallery in my photo galleries pages, and as it happens I have a gallery specifically there for random home, family and friends photos.

But if you ever clicked on the link to that gallery you got a 404 because while I set aside space for that I never actually created the main page for it. That link has gone nowhere for over a decade now. Sorry.

So I set about creating the main page for that photo gallery. In the process I discovered a change I wanted to push to the four other gallery pages. So I spent some time working on that.

I spent the better part of a day working on creating that Family and Friends gallery’s main page and its banner. The gallery main pages are all basically alike, but there is a banner graphic for each and I need to create one for the Family and Friends gallery.

I don’t use a web page creator. I do all this by hand in your basic HTML…because I can. My blog is WordPress and the actual photo galleries are generated by Lightroom (which I’m still stuck on alas…). Everything else is hand rolled by me in HTML.

I had to dig to find a Photoshop file I’d originally used to create one of the banners, so I could maintain the look of all the others. There’s a bunch of layering in there to get me to the look I want. But the Photoshop file I was looking for wasn’t where I expected it to be so I ended up doing a lengthy search on the art computer data drives and my NAS.

Finally I found it, and put it where it needed to logically be. Then I opened it in GIMP and saved it as a GIMP file because I despise Adobe more than you want to know.

I had to spend some time in GIMP fiddling with the new banner, selecting just the right image files for it, getting it all to look the way I wanted it. While I worked I jumped back and forth between GIMP and FireFox to make sure the new page and it’s links were forming up the way I wanted.

Then came pushing the new pages to the web server. For some reason I haven’t debugged yet, Free File Sync balked at uploading some of the files and I had to upload them manually. So there was that tangent.

If you look you’ll notice a placeholder thumbnail there that doesn’t go anywhere. I’ll have the real thumbnails and links up soon. Hopefully.

So then, because having only one gallery of neighborhood damage shots in there didn’t seem like starting it off right…it’s supposed to be Home, Family, and Friends not Neighborhood Disasters…I set about creating a first proper set of photos for that gallery.

I figured first I’d do a set of my friends from the early days. I figured I might follow that up with a set that’s just from my Woodward shots. So I started going through my archives for those shots, only to discover that some of what I thought I’d scanned in I hadn’t.

I knew I had some really good Deep Creek Lake shots, and Ocean City shots that needed to go in the new gallery.

So I spent a bunch of time looking in my negative archives for shots I knew I had but…did I scan those or not…and if I did, were they loaded into Lightroom (which alas I am still stuck with for now). It took me some time to figure out I still needed to scan some negatives in.

I have a Lot of negatives from back in the day I Still haven’t scanned. And because I run the scanner at max resolution and noise reduction (because why wouldn’t you?) it takes about a business day to scan in a roll of 36 exposure 35mm film.

So the new Home, Family and Friends galleries won’t be up until at least the middle of this week. Not bad for a job I thought I’d just dash off in an afternoon’s work. Stay tuned…

Last Saturday as I write this, Baltimore City experienced a pretty violent set of wind storms that took down a lot of trees and caused a lot of damage, particularly to power lines. Here at Casa del Garrett I was without power for 14 hours (I thought it was 12 but when I checked the alarm system logs it was more like 14). On my street several cars were damaged by downed tree limbs. The little old lady across the street had no telephone service because Voice Over IP which is about all you can get anymore for a landline, stops working when the power goes out. I let her use my cell phone to call her family.

I’m fine, my house is fine, my car is fine, but I ended up losing a bunch of food because the fridge and the chest freezer stopped working. I had a plan to use the freezer packs I keep frozen and handy, plus maybe buy some ice when the power went out, and save as much food as I could in the big IGLOO travel cooler. But I’d put the travel cooler into storage because it takes up space and I thought I could always go get it whenever I needed it. I have a small storage room in a facility within walking distance of the house. But the storm brought down so many  power lines the outage compassed a large part of the city and my storage facility was also without power. So I couldn’t get into it, so I couldn’t get the travel cooler back home. 

Lesson learned. The travel cooler stays here at home now. I’m also looking into having a whole house generator installed, but those are expensive and the best plan at this retirement income stage of my life might just be to take what food I can with me and go find a motel room somewhere there’s still power. I might buy a small portable generator just for the fridge and freezer though. I’m still thinking it all over.

Of course I took a bunch of photos of the local damage. Post some of those here later.

This screen cap from BlueSky just got flagged by Facebook for potentially violating their community standards, which I take it, were written by a committee of centarist pundits…

Blogs people. Blogs! Blogs! Blogs!

It seems Tucker Carlson and his guests know their gays…

Tucker Carlson accuses Pete Buttigieg of being ’not gay at all’

In a recent episode of his online show Tucker Carlson Today, comedian Ari Shaffir and disgraced formerFox News host Tucker Carlson engaged in a candid conversation that veered into a provocative discussion about Transportation SecretaryPete Buttigieg’s authenticity as a gay man.

During the program, Carlson and Shaffir questioned the legitimacy of Buttigieg’s sexual orientation. Carlson recounted a conversation with one of his producers, suggesting that Buttigieg’s identity might be a political fabrication.

“Do you remember Pete Buttigieg ran for president? He’s supposedly gay, and now he’s transportation secretary. And I had one of my producers who’s gay, and he goes, ‘He’s not gay,’” Carlson said. He continued, “I was like, are you serious? He goes, ‘No, that’s complete bullshit. All gays keep very close track of that stuff.’”

I am So behind on this. I get daily updates on All That Stuff from Gay Mafia Central. But I tend to just let them accumulate in my mail folder until there’s so many I have to mass delete it all.

And Buttigieg is a policy wonk. This why those of us in the geek-not-fabulous-peacock stage-crew-not-stage tribe need to wear our pride items loudly every June because otherwise we might be mistaken for just your average everyday dorks.

The Mighty Ethan on Flickr

All kidding aside…Carlson and the rest of them really can’t deal with the world as it is because it does not validate their bar stool conceits. There are as many different kinds of gay male as there are left-handed ones. But the insular mind cannot handle that. If you don’t fit the pigeon hole they put you into they just try harder to squeeze you into it and failing that, declare you’re a fake. But it’s their reality that’s the fake.

Man…what happened to Utz?? I recently bought two bags of Grandma Utz’ kettle cooked potato chips (a favorite). One to put away and the other to snarf down on with a sandwich. The chips in the first bag tasted horrible. Then I looked more closely. The bag now says “Kettle-Style”.

Uh-Oh. The bag used to say “Hand Cooked”. So now “Kettle-Style” joins the Assembly Of Foodstuffs That Are Not What You Think They Are. Cheese Food Product. Lemonade Flavored Drink. Hershey’s Chocolate.

I dumped most of that bag of potato chips thinking okay maybe I just got a bad batch. But the second bag was no better. I double checked the sell-by date and that bag was supposed to be good until September. I’m tossing it nearly full because it is just uneatable.

A friend was complaining some months ago that in his opinion Utz was using a new cooking oil that tasted rancid. I just thought he’d got a bad batch, or that his aging taste buds were going rogue on him.

Maybe that’s my problem. But I think not. American corporations care more about what Wall Street thinks of them then their customers. Something was changed not to improve the product, but to improve the bottom line for Wall Street. That’s sad. Utz used to be my go-to potato chip. Nobody, absolutely nobody made them as good as Utz. That is, until I discovered the ones Trader Joe’s sold. Guess where I’m going this morning…

[Update…] Another good place to get potato chips that don’t taste like they’ve been fried in furniture polish is your local Amish market if you have one. There is one in Cockeysville just up I-83 from me, and also one in York PA.

“That was Percy Faith and the 101 Strings playing Holiday In Cambodia, and you’re listening to WGAY, 99FM, Washington’s beautiful music station…”

I’ve been systematically removing my artwork from Facebook whenever a “Facebook Memory” presents it to me, because I’m disgusted with the way its automatic censor handles other people’s artwork, as well as mine at least once. But I think I’ll leave this Work In Progress note up…

…at least for another year maybe…and also put it here too…because I don’t have any other copies of this particular piece in progress. And I’m still very happy with how this one-off turned out. I called it The Rain, The Park, And Other Kids, riffing on one of the ultimate 60s songs by The Cowsills (The Partridge Family TV show band was modeled after them). The cartoon about growing up gay in a world that refuses to acknowledge that gay kids like you exist, and you end up mentally changing some pronouns as you’re listening to the radio, so you can imagine the songs are speaking to you too.

Because those teenage feelings are pretty universal…

It is an old stereotype, that homosexuality has to do only with sex while heterosexuality is multifaceted and embraces love and romance.
-Vito Russo, author of The Celluloid Closet

…but the world around you tells you that homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. And there you are anyway…crushing on a classmate, listening to all the pop tunes about being in love, and on the one hand those songs are making your heart sigh, and on the other they’re telling you that your feelings aren’t real because you’re never in them. At best you maybe got a few gender neutral songs. Eventually you gravitate to female vocalists who could sing songs about being in love with a guy and nobody thought anything about it and you could imagine yourself into those songs. Stevie Nicks. Carole King. Carly Simon. Janis Ian singing At Seventeen.

I’m certain The Cowsills never intended anything like that about their gay and lesbian audience. They were just writing and singing songs about their own lives as artists do. It was the music industry, and the culture at large, that decreed back in the 1960s that songs about gay love and romance were unfit for the airwaves. That said, The Cowsills did do one song that hit me so hard I wore out several 45 rpm copies playing it over and over: In Need Of A Friend.

While I was working on this cartoon I decided to do something out of the ordinary for me and try to get it published. But it seemed then that nobody was doing a gay comics anthologie like the one Howard Cruse began a few decades ago. I asked Howard if he could point me to someone who was and he graciously gave me a pointer to someone I could ask. He would give me lots of encouragement on A Coming Out Story. But when I asked the person Howard pointed me to about submitting this one, they politely told me to go away (just self publish it). So I ended up putting it on my website that nobody reads. It’s okay…at least I got it out of me.

I have another one like it in the works, but it’s a struggle to get it out of me now. I just don’t have the energy I used to. And if I am honest, the interest. I haven’t touched my cameras or the film I still need to develop in almost a year either. Grant Snider, who is light years better than me at getting his stuff out there, has one with Dickens three ghosts, only they’re the ghosts of creativity. The last one, the Ghost Of Creativity Past, is telling him “Nobody will remember you unless you make something lasting.” I saw it just now, right before I saw this Facebook Memory, and it kinda hit me.

Fear of being forgotten is not why you make art of course. that’s just another way artists have of tormenting themselves. Social memory is a tricky thing and often what is remembered isn’t what actually was. But it would be nice if the artwork has a life after mine. Probably it won’t, and I’m getting too tired to make more.

I take a retrospective look at some of my stuff (there’s a bunch of it here on the website) and I see that I was actually pretty good at it. Then I regret not making more of it. But I had no focus, and dragging an emotional ball and chain around with you all the time doesn’t help. I needed a friend. A boyfriend. I never found one.

I did what I could.

The first thing to know is I am not calling out any one heterosexual person in particular in this post. Especially those I know personally. Mostly. You’re all good people. Mostly. This isn’t about you. Mostly

And the pulpit I’m thumping here probably only really applies to my own generation, and maybe a couple nearby ones. It’s not the 1950s/60s/70s/80s anymore. If you read the social media posts about this or that fictional same sex couple, or same sex celebrity couple, what you see is very heartwarming…

Fan art of Will Solice and Nico di Angelo, characters from
Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson & The Olympians

There is a lot of acceptance and friendship waiting for us out there now. The usual bellyaching by the usual suspects too of course…but anyway…

So…with that out of the way…

Long, long ago, in a Facebook far, far away, a straight friend I’d known since my teenage years finally signed up and friended me. I’d met him at a Jesus kids coffee hangout in the basement of the Rockville Baptist church mom and I used to go to. Back in the 70s, when coming out to Anyone was a risky business regardless of how safe you thought they were, he was one of the very few I felt safe coming out to. He was straight, but seemingly comfortable with the fact of my homosexuality. He just gave off that I’m cool about it vibe.

But it was an illusion. He was comfortable with me as long as he didn’t have to see or hear evidence of my sexual orientation. Which was easy because I had no love life. There was nothing for me to talk about. Much. But it was when he would talk about his current girlfriend, and I would try to talk about my own struggles trying and failing to find a boyfriend, that his discomfort would become apparent.

Instead of pressing it, I wrote it off as a learning experience for him, and I thought that eventually he’d figure it all out. After all, I was taught the same horrible myths, lies, and superstitions about homosexuals he was, that everyone in my generation was, and I reckoned he just needed some time to work through how wrong all of that was, because I was living evidence of how wrong all that was. Not that I was this straight acting lumberjack kind of guy…

I was a little art and techno geek. But we come in all kinds of flavors. I figured he’d eventually get that. But…no.

Before social media we hung out together lots. Then, shortly after he friended me on Facebook, he defriended me. When I asked him why he said he didn’t want to see any of that “gay stuff” on his Facebook page. I was sad and disappointed, but by then not completely surprised.

Nominally I probably appear to be pretty low key about my sexual orientation. Put it down to the times I grew up and came of age in, and also being raised in a Baptist household. Perhaps I should have been more…FABULOUS. But I am geek tribe gay, not fabulous peacock tribe. And that comes with some unexpected difficulties beyond knowing you will never be one of the cool kids and your clothes will never fit quite right.

I’ve been documenting in cartoon form my own coming out story. There’s a point in the story I Still haven’t got to yet, where I finally figure, rightly, that it changed nearly nothing, except now I better understood why I had no interest in dating girls. In retrospect, had I known guys could fall in love with other guys and it was okay, I would have been all about it. In fact it was crushing hard on a classmate that made me realize how it was with me. But in 1971/72 what we got was a torrent of contempt, loathing and outright hate thrown at us from all directions. That, and the horrible sex ed class I’d had in 9th grade ,made me believe I couldn’t possibly be One Of Those Queers. So when it hit me it came at me all of a sudden. I fell in love and it was wonderful. But thinking about it I realized it didn’t really change anything about me. Still a long haired awkward art/techno geek. And that’s okay.

So from that point on I just let the fact of my sexual orientation rest loosely on my shoulders. What I eventually came to understand was that mindset confused some of the people around me. I didn’t “act gay”. I found that entire gay acting/straight acting concept offensive. We are not the stereotypes we are often imagined to be, and regardless studies have shown that given enough time people will figure you out no matter how “straight acting” you are or make yourself. In one of those studies volunteers were shown photos of the faces of a bunch of men and asked to identify the homosexuals. The volunteers were accurate much beyond random chance.

It shows. Somehow. The people you think you’re hiding that part of yourself from either already know, or at least will figure it out pretty quickly. So just be yourself…however fabulous or unfabulous that might be.

I recall a job interview I had once that I thought was going well until I saw a sudden change of expression in the HR person’s face. It was something that I’d become familiar with by then, that sudden realization that the person they were talking to was a homosexual. And at that point I knew I wasn’t getting the job. But given that reaction it was for the best.

The only thing closeting yourself accomplishes is a kind of internal self destruction. I’ve seen it. I’ve sworn I’d never let it happen to me. But when you raise a gay boy in a Baptist household they tend to get a bit…well…reserved about that whole dating and mating thing. It just comes with the territory. And some people in my life misinterpret that.

Besides the Baptist reticence about sex (y’all know that old joke about why Baptists don’t dance…right?), the fact was I never had a love life to be loud and proud about anyway. If I’d had a boyfriend Everyone would have seen just how gay Bruce is…all the open declarations of love, all the PDAs, the unambiguous acknowledgment of a sexual relationship, the silly couples t-shirts (I love you / I know).

Oh there were the occasional political fashion statements…a lambda necklace here, a rainbow t-shirt there. For a few decades I did political cartoons on the subject of gay civil rights, but that was for a local gay community newspaper which none of my straight friends ever read…because why would they? Among them I was always open about my political beliefs, which included a rock solid belief in gay equality. But about my own sex life I said very little, because there was very little to say apart from being lonely, and gay or straight Nobody wants to hear you talk about being lonely.

I remember the sister of a friend telling me once, approvingly no less, that I was a “discreet homosexual.” I told her I’m single and it’s very easy to be discreet about your love life when you don’t have one. But I’m pretty sure that went right over her head.

So I wasn’t hiding that part of me, and I wasn’t trying to be discreet. But all the same a number of straight friends from back in the day, and one or two classmates I’d had since I was a teenage boy, suddenly became shocked, shocked, at what a militant homosexual I really am, when they read my blog or my social media posts.

What…didn’t you Know?

My bad I guess.

Here’s something I’ve said many times:

A militant homosexual is a homosexual who doesn’t think there is anything wrong with being a homosexual. A militant homosexual activist is a homosexual who acts like they don’t think there is anything wrong with being a homosexual.

That’s it. That is all there is to it. You don’t have to march. You don’t have to wave your pride flag. You don’t have to be loud and proud. You just need to have that There Is Nothing Wrong With Me mindset. Because with that comes a willingness to stand up for yourself…the same as anyone else would.

Let me repeat that: The Same As Anyone Else Would.

That’s all it takes. Just stand up for yourself and suddenly you are a militant homosexual.

In retrospect, the problem was that apart from my blog, which nobody reads (Hi…thanks for reading my blog btw!), and my artwork, which nobody sees…

…nobody ever really had to see that side of me because I had no boyfriend and no love life. It was as if…okay Bruce is gay, but only theoretically so I don’t really have to know it for a fact.

And then they catch a glimpse of it…maybe I’m gawking at some beautiful sexy guy that walks past, maybe it’s a casual remark correcting someone about some myth about gay male sexuality, or they read something I posted online, and suddenly it’s OMG Bruce Really Is Gay…and I get static. Which I don’t think I deserve, but in a way maybe I had it coming. Maybe I should have been louder about it all the time. But I’m not good at faking a loud personality. I’m not stage, I’m stage crew.

I like to think I have good manners. I might steal some glances at cute guys who happen by but I won’t be rude about it, even among other gay friends, although when among them I might point and raise a toast (something I’d probably also do if I was among heterosexual women). In a room full of males traditionally regarded as handsome I might not even glance at any of them, because my libido is so damn picky. But glance I will if I see a beautiful sexy guy and then it’s obvious. Like my jaw dropping obvious. That’s just how it hits me.

I remember a moment years ago…I was working as a mailrooom clerk for a data processing firm, and that afternoon we were all having a celebratory lunch at a nice restaurant. I was seated across from my supervisor and his deputy. A Very Cute waiter walked by and turned my head. When I turned it back to the table I caught the tail end of this short conversation…

Deputy: “What’s one step beyond a tendency?”

Supervisor: “I don’t know…actually being one?”

Then they see me looking back at them and they shut up. The very next day I got laid off.

Because I have never really had a love life, plus having that very picky libido, it probably made it a bit too easy for some of my straight friends and acquaintances to ignore the fact of my sexual orientation. Many times I have dug in my heels and been out with it when one of those sudden moments of truth hit me in the face. I’m intensely proud of those moments too. But apart from that I’m pretty low key I reckon.

So if you are new to my circle it may not seem obvious, but sooner or later you will have to deal with it. And then I get to see How you deal with it. What I’m finding is, generally, younger people deal with it very well, and that is very gratifying. There is hope for this poor angry world after all.

So that straight friend who I’d known since my teenage years that I met at a Jesus kids coffee hangout back in the 70s, called me the other week to ask about my maybe doing some video photography work for him. Then he asked if I’d seen the cat video he posted here on Facebook. So I went to look but he’d set it to friends only. I had to remind him that he defriended me and I couldn’t look at it.

So he messaged it to me. But didn’t change his mind about friending me again.

I’m fine with people I used to know keeping me at arm’s length as long as they’re fine with my keeping them at arm’s length too. I told him I was okay with doing some casual video photography work for him, largely because my photographic eye has been tightly closed since the trip to California, and I thought maybe that would pry it open a bit. But I never heard back. I’m okay with that too.

They say when someone tells you who they are, believe them. But also, when they tell you how close they’re willing to be, to the person you actually are, eventually you have to let them be that. The mistake I think a lot of us make is we keep reaching out long after it’s obviously pointless. Looking back on it, for decades while I thought I was teaching some of them that things they learned about homosexuals were almost all wrong, they probably thought they were teaching me to be discreet.

But I’m 70 years old now, and I’m tired of talking to brick walls.

If you get comfortable enough with someone that you were willing to let them into your heart, and they either bail when they see what’s in there, or just start keeping you at arm’s length, or Worse…being a friend only so long as you keep yourself closeted…just let them go.

Grieve about it if you need to. Then get on with your life. Your authentic life. The life you’ve already taken a lot of risks to live honestly.

They openly admit now, that the plan is to use the tools of democracy to destroy our democracy. But here’s the thing: only the tools of democracy can sustain democracy.

Resist. Not just fascism, not merely the tyrant, but also the beast within. When you fight fire with fire, everything burns. Defend democracy.