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.

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 sweet little cartoon about a gay boy’s first crush was finally released to the public July 2017 and became an instant worldwide hit. It was shortlisted for the academy awards best animated short but of course it wasn’t even nominated because John Wayne was still rolling in his grave about Brokeback Mountain.

Go see it Here.

What struck me…as it always does…about the comments, how they were all divided between the oh cute oh how sweet oh how darling comments from (gratefully) so many heterosexual viewers who were in this day and age finally getting it how gay kids have crushes and fall in love too, just like everyone else…and then also the comments about why are you forcing sex onto kids. There was no sex at all in the cartoon…not even so much as a kiss. But the negative comments were all about sex.

And there it is. Or as Vito Russo once wrote:

It is an old stereotype, that homosexuality has to do only with sex while heterosexuality is multifaceted and embraces love and romance.

The cartoon short was about a gay kid’s first crush. And it was like a Rorschach test for homophobia.

Introduction.

Hafer begins the comic book with a brief introduction to get his main characters on the stage, and establish the plot of what is to come. He begins with a page that warns us thusly:

WARNING
This book has been written as a basic primer of the homosexual movement for those who do not know the FACTS.

Hafer warns us his facts are not pretty facts. We shall see in the chapters to follow how remote Hafer’s relationship with Facts is, pretty or not. But as a kindness to the reader he tells us he’s chosen to present them in an easy-to-read illustrated style. That’s one way of describing it.

We shall see that throughout the book Hafer keeps having trouble deciding whether to illustrate his facts as locker room jokes or as seriously awful truths. This repeated switch in perspective, from ha ha isn’t that funny, to darkly serious, and back again is jarring. But also…well…illustrative. The reader quickly begins to feel  as if Hafer doesn’t really believe half of what he’s saying, and Hafer’s problem with facts begins right away, almost at the very beginning of Chapter One. But first we have to get through the Introduction.

He ends his warning by praying that many young people will be diverted from “experimentation” by the facts presented in this book. But any gay kid living in the sort of fundamentalist household likely to hand this book to them is already living in terror of being outed. All reading Hafer is likely to do for them is push them closer to suicide.

So now we’re done with the WARNING. The Introduction opens with the character Chester sitting on his porch steps fuming about a newspaper article about the opening of a school for gay kids in New York City. 

I have a first printing of Hafer’s book and its print date is January 1986. So he’s complaining about the first Harvey Milk School which opened in the East Village of Lower Manhattan in 1985. Given the time it probably took for Hafer to get his comic book drawn, edited and sent to the printer (it was published by the Paradigm Company of Boise Idaho) he probably started work on it right after the school was founded. Maybe that was the match that lit his fuse.

Here’s what Wikipedia says about it:

The school was originally run by the Hetrick-Martin Institute (HMI), an organization that provides social support to at-risk LGBT youth. After becoming a fully accredited public school in 2002/3, the high school is now administered by the New York City Department of Education, separate from HMI. The school and the non-profit still share space in the same building, with the HMI providing a majority of the school’s arts and culture programming.

The school was founded in 1985 as a small, two-room program with just over a dozen students by HMI in collaboration with the New York City Department of Education’s Career Education Center. The Department of Education administers the school and is responsible for admissions. Harvey Milk was created as an alternative education program for youth who find it difficult or impossible to attend their home schools due to threats, violence, or harassment.

The school was opened to give gay kids a safe place where they could get an education. Hafer takes no notice of this Fact. In fact, throughout the book, Hafer takes no notice at all, gives no hint that he even knows or cares one whit about violence toward gay and lesbian adults, let alone to schoolkids. That’s not hard to understand, given the book is intended to be a warning that the very existence of homosexual people constitutes a danger to everyone. It’s right there on the cover:

What consenting adults do in the privacy of their homes CAN hurt you!

So presumably those gay schoolkids at the Harvey Milk School are endangering everyone just by going to class where they’re safe and not letting themselves get beaten up every day. Given that, Chester is justifiably angry.

Chester is one of the two foils for Larry, who is presented throughout as the voice of reason. Chester, initially, plays the part of the uninformed cranky crank, which allows Larry to recast what would otherwise be Chester’s knee jerk prejudices as reasonable truths. Chester is furious. “They opened a School for those people” he fumes. And Larry walks over to ask him what he’s grumbling about. Chester growls that “New York has a high school for Fags!”

Larry, taking on the mantle of the calm, measured, voice of reason, replies noncommittally. “The homosexual community has really made huge strides in the media and public opinion in the past few years”, he says. Chester isn’t having it. “I don’t want a bunch of homos living around me!!” Pay attention here…Chester is calling them fags and homos. Larry talks of “the homosexual community”. Hafer is pulling a fast one.

Now the other foil enters, stage left. A deliveryman cames along with a package for Chester, just as Chester is telling Larry he “liked ‘em better when they were in the closet.” The deliveryman tells them he couldn’t help but overhear them talking, and asks how many gays do you know? “I can’t imagine one would want to live near you.” When he reveals himself to be a homosexual, as if the way he’s drawn doesn’t telegraph it, Chester freaks out. “Larry! He’s one of them! Did he touch me?!!”

You have to have read the entire book and then come back to this introduction to see how shifty Hafer is being there. Chester is playing the part of the knee jerk ignorant bigot, which allows Larry to be the calm, measured voice of reason. “Easy Chet,” He says. “He might just have a point. How much Do you know about homosexuality?” And then “I think you’re both off the mark. Are you willing to learn what homosexuality is Really all about?”

And with that, Hafer has sprung his trap. Now the reader sees Larry as an impartial giver of the facts, as opposed to the ignorant knee jerk reactions of a guy like Chester. But by the end of the book, the distance between Larry and Chester is nonexistent, and they are both ganging up on the homosexual foil…because his role in the story is to be the two dimensional militant homosexual stereotype who really hates being a homosexual deep down inside. Because that’s what homosexuals are for in these tracts.

Another of Hafer’s devious little ploys is dressing the homosexual foil in a uniform. He appears on stage as a deliveryman, so naturally he’s in his work clothes…right? Hahahaha… Hafer clothes the foil in a uniform…because he’s a militant homosexual! Get it? Get it? 

The only name Hafer gives his homosexual foil is Sodomite. That comes in Chapter One.

So now we have our main cast of characters: Chester, Larry, and Sodomite. And we know that Larry is the giver of impartial facts, unlike the Archie Bunker character named Chester, and the militant homosexual named Sodomite. So when Larry says “Let’s start with what is a homosexual”, the readers is ready to uncritically accept whatever Larry tells them about homosexuality, because Larry is the sensible middle ground between two extremes.

And now we are about to discover that a homosexual is…starting in Chapter One. 

Stay tuned…

Working on A Coming Out Story and looking for quotes for the “last” episode eventually drags me back into Dick Hafer’s noxious swamp. Sigh. I ordered his Homosexuality: Legitimate Alternate Deathstyle some years ago for the gay studies bookshelves after seeing some of its jaw dropping panels online. If Growing Up Straight: What Every Thoughtful Parent Should Know about Homosexuality is a veritable encyclopedia of homophobia, the Hafer comic is it’s Classics Illustrated version.

And it’s a real doozy. But instructive. Think of it as an extended Jack Chick tract, even including the repenting sinner at the end, plus several pages of instructions as to what to say and what to do to get right with god. All that’s missing is the checklist.

Here’s the thing, and I’m really only noticing it more now due to Fred Clark’s recent posts about the mindset that joins into satanic panics, Q-Anon conspiracies, and suchlike. He writes: “It is always possible to recruit new members to join our cause by telling horrific lies about some group of Other People. But doing so makes those Other People themselves – the ones we’re telling nasty lies about – immune to recruitment.” And he points out the obvious: that’s because those Other People know the truth of their own lives first hand.

The first time you read Hafer’s comic book all you see is that guttural howl of unabridged bigotry and hate. All through the book he refers to gay people as sodomites. You see laughably cheapshit stereotypes of yourself and everyone you know that would be hilarious if you’d never read news headlines about gay bashings and murders all your adult life. But Hafer is at his most energetic when he’s describing our sex lives. The bulk of the comic book is this.

Vito Russo put it best when he said that “It is an old stereotype, that homosexuality has to do only with sex while heterosexuality is multifaceted and embraces love and romance.” Years ago I blogged about the time I had to walk a gauntlet of hard core heterosexual pornography just to get a current copy of my local gay community newspapers, because back in those days the only place you could find anything gay whether it was pornographic or not was in “adult” bookstores. I got an eyeful. But to read Hafer’s comic book you’d think our sex lives were nothing But hard core pornography.

Hafer begins his descent into gay sex hell by starting with…I am not kidding…kissing.

“Not only are their habits disgusting, but they are incredibly harmful and damaging”

“Such as?”

“Kissing”

“Ugh!!”

-Homosexuality: Legitimate Alternate Deathstyle, page 50

This is followed up with descriptions of commonplace sex that most heterosexuals enjoy but which is somehow made disgusting when same sex couples do it. Following that, every extreme sex practice is laid at our feet as though that was all there is to us. He’s very meticulous about it. But the tell is he can’t resist presenting it like it’s one great big comic book joke. The scenes of gay sex acts are presented as much for laughs as for shock value. He can’t resist doing that even when it comes to the routine accusations of homosexual pedophilia. On page 126 he quotes Paul Cameron’s (now regrettably named ) Institute for the Scientific Investigation of Sexuality (ISIS) that 80 percent of student teacher molestations are by homosexuals, next to his drawing of a deranged older man dragging a small boy by the arm and telling him that it’s time for his sex ed class, while the boy says “During recess?!!”. Ha ha ha.

It’s telling that Hafer doesn’t even bother with religious sermonizing in his comic book until near the very end when, like in a Jack Chick tract, the militant homosexual finally repents, followed by several pages of boilerplate step by step instructions on how to be saved. But the lies in the sixty plus pages preceding the sermon are so glaring, the dehumanized scarecrows representing those Other People so shockingly empty of any shred of humanity, what it’s likely to provoke in the gay reader is more shock, anger, and outrage than repentance. It does not hold up a mirror to them that they might be saved, it spits in their faces.

That is its purpose.

If I wasn’t actively collecting hate literature my first reflex would have been to throw it in the trash less than halfway through it. But Hafer’s comic book, like the Chick tracts, isn’t meant for gay people. That scene at the end, like every scene at the end of every Chick tract, is theater. It’s not meant to save anyone because long before they could get to it, the redemptee has become angered at all the insults thrown in their face and has already thrown the tract away.

No. The audience for these books and tracts is the true believer. These are Tijuana bibles for prigs, allowing them to ogle their neighbor’s sex lives, and indulge their own sexual fantasies, while feeling righteous about it, so they don’t have to reckon with the empty wasteland they’ve made of their own lives.

I think the one quote from Hafer that I have in the final ACOS episode is enough. I was sorely tempted to add another panel with that part about kissing though.

So many times over the decades have I seen this…one person’s political rampage against the gay community turns out to be motivated by a need to strike out at their gay children. But in this case the religious fanaticism seems to have already been there.

A Granbury mom’s campaign to ban library books divided her town — and her family

Weston, 28, said his heart was racing as he watched and rewatched the video — and not only because he opposes censorship. He’d instantly recognized the speaker.

It was his mother, Monica Brown.

The same woman, he said, who’d removed pages from science books when he was a child to keep him and his siblings from seeing illustrations of male and female anatomy. The woman who’d always warned that reading the wrong books or watching the wrong movies could open the door to sinful temptation. And the one, he said, who’d effectively cut him off from his family four years ago after he came out as gay.

“You are not invited to our house for Thanksgiving or any other meal,” his mother had texted to him in November 2018, eight months after he revealed his sexual orientation to his parents…

Go read the whole thing. Yes, it’s heartbreaking, but it’s also instructive. There’s this shifty religious right boilerplate that you hear over and over again when it comes to the current push to censor books with LGBT content, and you see it here in this article, that goes “we’re not anti gay we’re anti pornography”. But what you find when you drill into it is they regard everything about gay people, fiction, non-fiction, music, movies…Everything…is pornography. And that is true whether or not it has any sexual content at all, explicit or implicit. For example, that charming little short released a few years ago, “In A Heartbeat” was slammed repeatedly by the usual bigots for, so they babbled, pushing sex onto kids. But there was no sex at all anywhere in it, not even so much as a kiss or holding hands. There was barely any touching at all between them. But all the homophobes could see was it was about gay kids and therefore it was about sex.

Because the thinking is, always, homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. Or as Vito Russo put it:

“It is an old stereotype, that homosexuality has to do only with sex while heterosexuality is multifaceted and embraces love and romance.”

So when they tell you they’re not anti-gay, and they just want to keep pornography out of the schools remember: if it has anything to do with gay people, with LGBT people, anything at all, then by definition (their’s) it is pornography. Period. End Of Story.

And that is how you get from “We’re not censoring books about gay people” to “Everything about gay people must be censored.”

Which was always the point. Always.

Speaking of that joke about how, with the advent of self driving cars, the day is coming when someone writes a country western song about a man whose truck left him…  It seems the gay mayor of Fort Lauderdale Florida has stepped into it…

Antigay Florida Activist: Same-Sex Marriage Like Marrying a Volkswagen

After Fort Lauderdale, Fla.’s gay mayor honored an anti-LGBTQ+ church on its 60th anniversary, an activist who has a relationship with the church has likened same-sex marriage to marrying a Volkswagen.

At Tuesday’s City Commission meeting, Mayor Dean Trantalis presented a proclamation recognizing the 60th anniversary of the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church and the 50th anniversary of its affiliated private school, Westminster Academy. Both were founded by D. James Kennedy, an anti-LGBTQ+ minister, and are located in Fort Lauderdale.

Kennedy died in 2007, but his D. James Kennedy Ministries continues spreading homophobia and transphobia…

You have to wonder what Trantalis was thinking. Well no…we know what he was thinking because he said it when it hit the gay news networks earlier…

It’s time to build a future based on love and not hate. And it’s time for those who still harbor resentment to let go of it. I know I have. And I know our community is better off for it.

And just who would that community be Dean? Anyone who never walked among the Names Project quilt, terrified of spotting one someone made for their high school crush? Someone who doesn’t bother to read the newspaper stories about gay bashings and murders by young heterosexual males all hopped up on the religious hate fed to them by churches like Coral Ridge, because they know it will never happen to respectible and discreet homosexuals such as themselves?

But it gets better. When the wholly predictable torrent of criticism from the rest of the gay community came rushing in, naturally Coral Ridge just couldn’t keep its mouth shut…

Wright claimed that gay activists are pawns in a socialist plot to destroy marriage and the family, and make everyone dependent on government. “I hate to break it to them, but many of our gay and lesbian friends, they’ve just been used by the left to destroy the historic definition of marriage and changed the criteria to only be that of love,” he said. “If two people love each other, or some guy and his Volkswagen, he loves his Volkswagen, he ought to be able to marry his Volkswagen.”

I know how difficult it must have been for you to break it to us Frank. On a scale of 1 to 10 how painful was it? Less than zero?

I swear there are days when you start thinking that everything old is new again. But no…it’s still old. This is such an old trope among the kook pews. If a man can marry another man, why not let him marry a car…or a TV set…or a toaster…or his dog…? You say you love each other? Well I love my dog but it doesn’t mean I can marry it. I’ve been hearing this one ever since my days on USENET. And never mind how it speaks to their total dehumanization of the homosexual Other. Pull it apart and you find that it’s instructive as to how they themselves perceive marriage. If love isn’t critical to marriage, as it turns out neither is consent.

Automobiles can’t consent. They’re not living things, as often as we owners anthropomorphize them all the same. Yes, I’ve even given my car a name. I’ve given names to all my cars. But…hear me out now…they’re cars. Machines. Machines can’t consent. Nor can any other inanimate object or animal or child. And it seems in that subset of American religiosity, neither do wives. What wives do is gracefully submit to their husbands.

Real men take wives…they don’t do something as sissified as ask for their hand in marriage. That is why love cannot be the central fact of marriage. The central fact of marriage is the authority of the man over the woman. Nothing else matters. Certainly not love.

This post from the Hollywood Trade paper Variety came across my Facebook stream this morning…

‘Stargate’ at 25: How Roland Emmerich’s Sci-Fi Classic Overcame a Chaotic Birth

Where to I send the Condolences On The Birth Of Your Classic Evil Gay Who Must Die movie? I know lots of people like this one, I can see that fact every time it comes up, but it really stuns me how nobody notices the homophobia in the portrayal of the evil gender bending alien villain played by Jaye Davidson, just after his role in The Crying Game.

There’s a scene I particularly remember, where the Wimpy Nerd Who Needs To Learn How To Be A Real Man played by James Spader is ushered into the presence of Ra, who is seated on his glamorous bed behind a silken screen being attended to by his muscular nearly naked servants and young nearly naked boys. We see Ra behind the silken curtain slowly combing his long luxurious hair. Tell me this wasn’t meant to push the buttons of every teenage/young adult heterosexual male in the target audience. You know…the age group most responsible for violent gay bashings. Ra’s a godamned queer!! Ra must be destroyed!!!! Pass the popcorn…

I suppose it gets easier after you’ve made your first box office million or so injecting this poison into young males, to ignore the newspaper articles about violent gay bashings and murders. Vito Russo would have had a field day with this movie. God how I miss him.

I have a certain fondness for the old Burke’s Law TV series. It’s a very weird concept even for its day: a millionaire playboy police captain who investigates homicides among Los Angeles’ fabulously rich in his chauffeur driven Rolls Royce Silver Cloud II, in between makeout sessions with one lovely babe after another. And it’s certainly a product of its time in its regard for women. But all that went over my head when I was a kid. My interest in the show was I liked Gene Barry, having loved his stint as Bat Masterson previously, and the stories were pretty engaging mysteries that usually played fair with the audience. But the big draw for me at that age was that Rolls Royce. I was absolutely fascinated by that Rolls Royce.

Years later I’m sitting at home watching an episode from the first season DVD set. Because even with all the early 1960s sexist baggage I find I still enjoy the whodunnit mystery format, the writing is better than I remembered (at least two episodes were written by Harlan Ellison, and in one of them Sammy Davis Jr. Plays a suspect named Cordwainer Bird (!)), the Rolls Royce still fascinates me, and I get to watch a ton of famous dead Hollywood stars bring their magic to life again. The episode I’m watching is Who Killed Annie Foran? (the episode titles always began with “Who Killed…”).

The episode synopsis is thus…

Party girl Annie Foran is found strangled in the back seat of a customer’s car at the exclusive restaurant Club Nova. Suspicion falls on her ex-boyfriend, baseball sensation Eddie Dineen, who was there at the time in the company of his mentor, the acerbic columnist Whitman Saunders, and Saunder’s assistant, Milo Morgan.

Don Ameche does a killer job playing Whitman Saunders, a slimy Hollywood gossip columnist whose evil just oozes of the TV screen. The scenes between him and Gene Barry are electrifying in this one, and all the more when you consider that Saunders is a pitch perfect embodiment of the evil faux moralizing gossip columnist and Burke is a millionaire playboy giving Saunders all the righteous shade you could ask for.

Saunders has been playing up Eddie Dineen in his columns, and wrote a hit piece on his ex girlfriend Annie to get the couple to break up and get Dineen matched with the more socially glamorous and acceptable (I think…I’m typing this from memory at the moment) Mitzi Carlisle.  The episode begins at dinner party in a very exclusive club with Saunders, his assistant Milo, Eddie and Mitzi. Ameche just oozes evil as he pontificates about this and that, abuses the waiter over some slight he won’t even explain, while dictating his next column on Eddie to Milo. As they are leaving a valet pulls what they think is Saunders’ car around and when the valet opens the back passenger door Annie falls out, dead. Cue the screams from the ladies in the crowd. 

But the car didn’t belong to Saunders. It was another man’s car that was nearly identical to his. Burke quickly rules that man out as a suspect and quickly focuses on Eddie, who may have thought Annie was a drag on his career. Annie as it turns out, was a call girl, though this was 1964 TV and you didn’t come right out and say so. So it’s implied as Burke and detective Tilson search her apartment looking for her address book because…suspects. Burke finds a picture of Eddie he autographed for her. But maybe it was Mitzi, who didn’t want her respectable socialite name associated with Annie’s in one of Saunder’s columns. Or maybe Mitzi tried to set up Saunders because she really loves Eddie and hates Saunders for being such an evil manipulator but she dumped the body in the wrong car. Or maybe it was Eddie’s coach (played tough as nails by Jackie Coogan). Or maybe it was Fisk, the shifty night clerk of the hotel Annie stayed at, and worked out of (played by Sterling Holloway the way Sterling Holloway always plays anybody). Fisk tries to blackmail Eddie over his relationship with Annie and Eddie goes on the run and is eventually captured by Detective Tilson (the series young nerd to Les Hart’s hardboiled old school cop). But by this time Burke is convinced Eddie didn’t do it. He had arrived at the dinner party with Saunders, and couldn’t have put the body in the wrong car.

But Milo…meek mild deferential Milo, always dutifully writing down Saunders’ dictation arrived at the party late. In the Big Reveal at episode’s end, Burke confronts Milo in his apartment and asks why he did it. Milo as it turns out, worked at the same Chicago newspaper as Saunders and was a bright and rising star, slated to get his own column, until Saunders dug up some dirt on him. Remember, this is 1964 so the writers couldn’t come right out and say he’s a homosexual. You had to allude to it, just as they did in 1972, in that Hawaii Five-O episode I was bellyaching about previously, though with a bit more of a heavy hand. Words…bad words…about Milo…were thrown about, he tells Burke as he lounges in his evening attire in his piss elegantly furnished stereotypical homosexual apartment, and he lost his job and his career when no newspaper would touch him afterward. Then Saunders, who gets the column and the fame Milo would have but for him…graciously…offers Milo a job as his assistant. And if you’re thinking now that if it was the last job on earth you’d tell Saunders to go stuff it rather than work for him after what he did, you need to understand a basic fact about homosexuals on TV and in the Movies of the period…and well after: These are homosexual characters written by heterosexual men whose only understanding of homosexuals and homosexuality is everything their cheapshit bar stool prejudices tell them.

Milo kills Annie and tries to frame Saunders because all this time he’s hated the man’s guts (and Don Ameche plays a intensely evil stone hearted narcissistic man in this one). He killed Annie because she was a call girl. Evil, he tells Burke, destroying evil. Burke observes that’s a bit psychotic. Milo, being homosexual, doesn’t deny it. The one slim shred of decency the writer, Tony Barrett, allows him is to say if Eddie had been arrested for the murder of Annie he would have stepped up and confessed to the crime himself, to keep Eddie out of jail.

(I’m paraphrasing this from memory at the moment, and might replay the episode later to get it right…)

BURKE: Would you have confessed if it looked like Eddie was going to to take the fall for Annie’s murder

MILO: Would it help my case?

BURKE: Not in the least.

MILO: I would have confessed.

Somewhere, in some better place, maybe, Vito Russo nods his head…

Hollywood is too busy trying to make old formulas hit the jackpot again to see the future. Hollywood is yesterday, forever catching up with what’s happening today. This will change only when it becomes financially profitable, and reality will never be profitable until society overcomes its fear and hatred of difference and begins to see that we’re all in this together. –Vito Russo