Good thing this little life blog doesn’t get a lot of traffic, especially from anyone I ever loved.
I swear it’s the biggest joke or comedy or tragedy or whatever of my life that the one guy out of all the other’s I’ve ever loved, who turned out to possibly be the best match, is the straight guy. He was visiting briefly on his way here and there and in that short time we talked as I’ve never talked with any of the others, and felt a deep soulful synergy as I’ve never felt with any of the others. And I can see clearly now that none of the others were really a good match. We never talked like that. We never shared ourselves like that. And he’s straight.
Maybe that’s not entirely true. I know I talked lots with the others. Strike one and I talked for hours on the phone after we reconnected…for a while…before others began listening in. We would talk for house past closing time at his place of work. But that had to stop too. Strike three and I lived hundreds of miles apart and would talk on the phone for hours between visits. Before cell phones strike three and I would talk so long the batteries on our cordless phones would die and we’d have to switch to the wired landline. The cordless phones were a godsend. We would talk for hours while we each went about our household chores, untethered by a wire, like we were there together. But then it stopped and I got dumped.
It always stopped. I never stopped wondering what was wrong with me.
For a moment, for a few short hours, I had it back with number two. It was wonderful. My heart sang. And he’s straight.
Good thing I’m an atheist, because if I died right now, right this moment, and there actually was an almighty god creator of the universe, I’d spit in its face. But there is no god. So it’s all good.
This year on my 71st birthday, I signed the letter I got from HR at the Space Telescope Science Institute offering me part time work. I am happy to return to the office. No…delighted. I am part of the space program again.
Part time was initially what I wanted to transition into instead of belly flopping into full time retirement, but I was told at the time that it was not a possibility. Then a couple months ago my project manager contacted me and asked if I was interested in coming back part time after all. So whatever the difficulties were they’ve been worked out now and I’m back starting late next month.
I did an interview onsite with my project manager and a co-worker who’d been bumped up the ladder and while I was there people I knew would wave and smile and made me feel like I was home again. Everyone was happy to see me again. It was a great feeling.
I’ll be basically doing what I was doing before for James Webb, but now for the next space telescope, named after Nancy Grace Roman. I’d done some work on that one just prior to retiring so it’ll all be familiar ground. I’ll have to reestablish all my clearances probably, and get all new access cards and security tokens, but that’s all familiar ground too. I’ll have the same benefits and since I’ll be getting a paycheck I can stop feeding from my 401k and just let it grow. Social security and an annuity take care of the gap between a part time paycheck and what I was making before I retired.
At my age I’m pretty sure I don’t have the stamina anymore for full time work but I feel now like I can do part time indefinitely. And this puts some structure back into my life. You retire and you suddenly have all this free time you didn’t before and you think about all the projects you want to work on, but eventually you become a bit aimless and unfocused. And at this age being able to take a nap any time you want is a dangerous thing. I’m single, I live alone, and the solitary life wears you down without a place of work and the human contact that comes with it.
I Would Often Wonder About That Kid…And Now I Know, And Sorta Wish I Didn’t
It was the late 60s and I was just barely a teenager. I loved with mom in an apartment along Parklawn Drive in Rockville. Back then, before they built the Metro system all the way out to Twinbrook you could walk across the railroad tracks to get to places along Rockville Pike. I used to visit Congressional Plaza that way often, walking up to Fishers Lane where the big HEW building was built (later to be called Health Resources and Service Administration) and walk across Twinbrook Parkway to where Fishers turned into a narrow road barely a step above gravel. It went almost right up to the railroad tracks and then took a sharp right and connected to Halpine Drive where there used to be a railroad crossing that was since taken up because it was too dangerous.
Not entirely happy with the left hand panel there because it doesn’t quite get it, but I was trying to get it out. I might revisit it later. All of that is mostly gone now since they built the Twinbrook Metro station and a bunch of other commercial buildings in that field to the left. As you can see there used to be some small houses on the right. In one of those houses lived a boy only a few years younger than me, who looked to be severely handicapped.
His legs were visibly withered from unuse. But instead of a wheelchair he moved around laying on his chest on a small board on wheels. I would see him from time to time as I walked down Fishers and wonder why his family didn’t provide him with a wheelchair. Were they too poor or was there some problem with his back also that prevented him from sitting upright. I felt sorry for him, but also confused. Why did it have to be a board? Couldn’t someone do something for him?
Later I noticed that I hadn’t seen him for a while and he never showed up again, at least while I was walking down Fishers. Eventually I concluded that he’d most likely passed away due to whatever medical condition it was that was severe enough it kept him out of a wheelchair and on a board.
But he hadn’t…
I came across this on a Rockville memories Facebook page the other day and I read the Post article and the comments to it hungry to know what had become of that kid I’d seen on the board. There’s more images from that Post article but I won’t put them here. But judging from that Post article, and all the angry comments on that Facebook page, his memory isn’t a very good one.
He seems to have been brutally mean to everyone he crossed paths with, sometimes venting racial insults, sometimes pulling out an “Old Timer” knife and getting into it. If it’s like the one I have carrying that thing on him all the time says quite enough about the person he was. I only used mine for wilderness backpacking because it’s useful as an all around woodsman’s knife. As a personal weapon it’s way overkill. But that was probably the point. He would roll up behind someone and trip their legs then flop on top of them. One of his knife fights earned him 20 stitches. His wheel tracks were often found around the sites of recent burglaries. The police and courts in Rockville knew him so well that they informally named the handicapped access ramp to the courthouse after him.
He earned a living apparently as an automobile mechanic, and he drove and raced cars by way of a device that allowed him to manipulate the pedals with his hands, though sometimes according to the article it was family and friends working the pedals while he worked the steering wheel. This tells me he could have used a wheelchair if he’d wanted to, but I reckon that board had become a part of his outlaw persona. According to the Post article he’d won several racing trophies. But he had no brakes. Not just emotionally but so it seems not literally either on the night he died, killing another man. He’d been was cited at least once according to the article for driving along the centerline. That night he was driving 100 miles an hour in the wrong lane. He just didn’t care.
That Post article provoked a bunch of letters to the editor complaining about fairly canonising this guy (“a man of the fiercist pride…”) and ignoring the good man he killed. It didn’t have to be. But then, maybe it did. I’m 71 now (as of a couple days ago), and I’ve met people like that…mean, racist, quick to start fights, as willing to steal as earn their money…who were whole in body and rotten to the core in mind and spirit. And also people who were severely handicapped and did great things with their lives. It wasn’t his body, it was him.
I kinda wish I didn’t know the rest of the story. I’ve been thinking back to that time in my life since. It was a time before the Metro, when I would walk everywhere and let my eyes behold horizons that were full of promise, and I still believed like Anne Frank that people are basically good at heart.
Seeing some hits in my website logs on early blog posts, I took a walk down memory lane and re-read a post I made back in November 2008, concerning a small not mormon church in Utah that wanted to place a monument to the Seven Aphorisms of its faith near a Ten Commandments monument in a public park in Pleasant Grove City. The following exchange took place in the Supreme Court according to the New York Times (which I was still reading back then…)
The following is excerpted from that blog post…
“The questioning suggested that the justices were finding it hard to identify a principle that would compel the city to accept the Summum monument without creating havoc in public parks around the nation.
“Would it be all right, Justice John Paul Stevens asked, for the government to exclude the names of gay soldiers from the Vietnam memorial?
“Mr. Joseffer had to be pressed to answer the question about excluding the names of gay soldiers. In the end, he said the First Amendment’s free speech clause, at least, places no limits on whom the government chooses to honor.
“Justice Scalia agreed. “It seems to me the government could disfavor homosexuality,” he said, “just as it could disfavor abortion.”
Dig it. This was back in 2008 but nothing has changed apart from the hate being even worse now than it was then. If the government wants to exclude the names of gay soldiers, who gave their lives for their country, from the Vietnam memorial, that would have been fine with Scalia, and never doubt it, it would be fine with the soulless creep that McConnell made sure would replace Scalia, and all the other Trump/McConnell justices. They would have people like me erased.
I reread this post and it sent a chill through me. A friend who was visiting asked me what I thought of the current political situation. I told him it scared the hell out of me.
So via my blog reader (Feedly) I’m looking at this post from a blog I only follow occasionally, but this particular post interested me when I saw it in the feed. Its author, a rock musician, is writing about posing nude for a rock magazine he’s often written for. Supposedly it was a turnabout is fair play issue, since the magazine often features lovely ladies wearing not very much if anything.
I was curious because throughout my life whenever the opportunity to get naked, at a clothing optional resort for example, I just could not, though I remember once skinny dipping with some friends. In retrospect I think I managed it by mostly staying in the water. That discomfort I have is the punchline in that first episode of A Coming Out Story. I actually had a conversation about this with a friend recently back from Burning Man where the celebrants wander around in various stages of undress if they want.
So I’m reading this blog post because after all these years I am still intensely curious to know how it is that people who can do this manage it. And I came to the following verbiage…
Having been on stage nude several times it was both a no-brainer to ask and a no-brainer that I would consent to doing so for their publication…But swanning around the room nude, very much in my element I had had a thought. Since nothing is quite as disappointing as the nude male…
Huh? Really? Really?? Okay…tell me you’re a heterosexual male without telling me you’re a heterosexual male.
I kinda skimmed the rest of that blog post, but I think I get a better sense of my own reticence now.
When I started getting actual W2 work as a contract software developer (as opposed to freelance work for pay I did initially for one of the GLIB admins) I began keeping a work diary on planner pages I initially bought at an office supply store. Those are the small three ring binders at the left. One of those is just a bunch of free form notes about my work on the BGE Home work measurement system.
Later I discovered DayTimer’s 24 hour two page per day planner and that worked for me LOTS better than the Franklin-Covey business day only Planner (because Highly Effective People only work business hours I reckon). A software engineer’s work is almost never just nine to five, and there were times while I was working on James Webb that I pulled some overnights.
(Sometime around then I started a New Yorker-ish cartoon I was going to submit to Christopher Street showing two guys on a first date sitting across the table from each other at an outdoor bistro, and one is saying to the other “I’m sorry hon, but it won’t work. You’re Franklin Planner and I’m DayTimer” But then Christopher Street went belly up…)
Then, just before I retired, DayTimer got bought out and the 24 hour two page per day desktop refills became lost in the mists of time and the new company’s business model. I was really PO’d, but eventually accepted an almost as good but only barely good enough substitute. I keep complaining about it on the new company’s website. They’re actually Still making the pocket size wirebound 24 hour two page per day planners but those don’t work for me.
Anyway…I keep my planners because I’m weird about things like that, and sometimes you need to have that paper time machine.
So I’m trying to tidy things up at Casa del Garrett (east) in anticipation of a very dear friend coming for a short visit, and I wanted to organize these a bit better. What you see in this photo compasses my entire working life as a (W2) software developer/engineer.
You can see where I was storing them on their sides under the bookshelves and dust accumulated. I’ll be tackling that with the Kirby later.
I was browsing through the old pre-Daytimer entries when I found the day in 1994 I put a deposit down on the last and best apartment I ever lived in, and a bunch of work I did for BGE Home when they were transitioning away from paper timesheets to a mobile data terminal system. There are repeated entries about a batch editor that I had to think about for a moment to remember what exactly it did (it processed the field tech’s digital timesheets to make them ready for ingest into the work measurement system). I see in there a problem I had to address when timesheets crossed day boundaries and the system wasn’t picking up on the fact that the tech was still on overtime after midnight.
I’ve had trouble with squirrels at my bird feeders ever since I bought the house and started putting the feeders out. I’ve had to relocate them multiple times to try and find a location where the squirrels couldn’t jump from the trees to the feeders, all to no avail. So I started buying “squirrel proof” feeders. The only one I found to be effective is the Yankee Flipper from Droll Yankees. But I like putting suet feeders out for the woodpeckers too, and the squirrels would get at those. So I started using hot pepper suet. The pepper has no effect on the birds but the squirrels take one bite and run off.
It was getting tiresome. So I decided to bribe them. I put out a corn cob squirrel feeder and once they figured it out the squirrels were all over it. And that seems to have worked. I’ve seen no more attempts at the bird feeders.
So just now I was watching a squirrel going away at one of the corn cobs and thinking to myself it’s getting fat and happy. But no. An instant later the little dickens starts burying the kernels in the ground nearby, like they were acorns or something. I guess its a reflex with them when there’s a surplus.
So maybe next year I get corn growing in the front yard.
Yesterday afternoon I took a walk to The Space Telescope Science Institute building on the Johns Hopkins Homewood campus to be interviewed for a job there. I haven’t done that since the week before Thanksgiving in 1998.
A few months ago the project manager I had when I retired asked if I would be interested in returning to the Institute to work part time. I told him yes, definitely. That was the way I wanted to retire initially; not belly flop into full time retirement but gradually, starting with part time work. But at the time my project manager said that part time work wasn’t a possibility. So I retired full time. Now it seemed it was on the table and yes I was still interested. Very much so.
So then he and I talked on several occasions about my coming back part time. We would meet for lunch or dinner at one of the local eateries. He indicated that part time work was something they were working on setting up and was I still interested. It would be, he said, for the same work I was doing before I retired, but mostly for the next generation space telescope, named for Nancy Grace Roman. I’d already done some initial work on that project, coding a progress report in python, that was to be sent to NASA.
For a while I heard nothing, and began to wonder if the idea had been shelved. Then about a month ago I was informed that a part time position I could apply for was being posted, doing basically the same work I had been doing when I retired. There was also a full time position of the same kind opening. So I applied for the part time position.
About a week ago I got a call from HR to schedule an interview with my project manager and another co-worker who’d been bumped up the chain. That was the interview I had yesterday. It went very well.
They still have some people to talk to, but I think I’m in a good place to get the position because it’s doing stuff I was involved in when I retired, so I won’t need any training on any of it, and a lot of the work will be tweaking code and systems that I either wrote myself or helped to build. I know the culture at the Institute and how things are generally done. I think I’m a pretty good fit.
But nothing is final yet, and so I was told, most likely won’t be until possibly end of September to mid October. But this felt good. In fact, I’ve felt more alive since the interview than I ever have since retiring.
Retirement has a lot of perks, but I’ve found it to be very confusing too. There is always housework to do, and I can travel more freely. But some days I just don’t know what to do with myself and at this age that isn’t good. I don’t think I have the stamina for full time anymore, but part time is good. They say it’s a permanent, not temporary position. I could see working it all through my 70s if the position stays viable that long (space work is always at the mercy of the Federal budget) and my health stays good. Maybe even longer. And I keep getting excellent reviews from my cardiologist so there’s that.
It’ll mean no more months long stays in California anymore, but I’ll still get vacation time so it’ll be more like it was all along when I was working. And supporting two different living spaces on two different coasts was starting to stress my budget. It’ll also mean I can stop feeding from my 401k and just let it grow which is Very Good. They’ll be making contributions to the 401k again and I can make my own as well. And I’ll still be getting social security and my annuity to make up the difference between a full and park time check.
And I can enjoy a morning walk to the office again, weather permitting. Not having to deal with commuter traffic was one of the best perks I worked out for myself by getting this house so close to Hopkins.
So we’ll see. I think I’m a pretty good fit for the position but I’m not going to count my chickens before they’re hatched. What I’d really like is to be working on Space Stuff again, and having that purpose and structure back in my life. It was a great trip. I could take it again.
A Pleasant Surprise…Beautiful Music Restored…Ugly Lies Debunked…
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.
Butthere 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.
Hafer’s Homosexuality: Legitimate Alternate Deathstyle – A Personal Review (continued…)
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.
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 HomosexualitiesDoes 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.”
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?
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.
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.
