In commemoration of the Black Cat raid of 1966, celebrate this New Year’s Eve with a radical act. Kiss him "on the mouth for three to five seconds."
You should immediately go read his entire post about a page of gay history I hadn’t known about…
It all began exactly forty years ago this New Year’s Eve, on Sunset Blvd., in the Silverlake neighborhood of Los Angeles, in a small bar called the Black Cat. There were some sixty or seventy patrons gathered during those final moments of 1966, counting down the last few seconds to midnight. Couples gathered and stood next to each other, and as the countdown approached zero, they leaned into one other, and, amid the shouts of “Happy New Year!” and the opening strands of Auld Lang Syne, they did something all couples do all around the world.
They kissed.
And immediately at least six plainclothes officers who had infiltrated the gay bar began viciously beating and arresting the kissing offenders. As the melee widened, several people tried to escape to the nearby New Faces bar. Undercover officers followed and raided that bar as well. One of the New Faces workers was beaten so badly by police that they cracked a rib, fractured his skull and ruptured his spleen.
Six Black Cat kissers were tried and convicted of “lewd or dissolute conduct” in a public place, conduct that consisted of male couples hugging and kissing. According to one police report, one couple had “kissed on the mouth for three to five seconds.” Apparently, three to five seconds are what constituted “lewd or dissolute conduct” among the LAPD.
If I’ve heard bigots say once that they don’t care what we do "in our bedrooms" just don’t "flaunt it" in front of them, I’ve heard it a thousand times. And what is this "it" they’re so afraid of seeing? It isn’t that we’ll suddenly start having sex on the sidewalk in front of them. They’d care a lot less about us doing that even, then doing the one thing they simply don’t want to see, don’t want to know: that the objects of their hate are human after all. That we don’t simply rut, that homosexuality isn’t a lower form of lust, but that we are whole people, who not only desire, but love, and are loved.
If there is anything the bigots hate seeing us do more then holding the hand of the one we love, it’s kissing them affectionately, simply, lovingly. They’d hate us a lot less if all they ever saw in us was desire, because that would validate their ignorant barstool conceits that homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. You want to really get them pissed off, make them see red, make the veins in their pasty foreheads start throbbing, let them see the slightest hint, the smallest sign, that you actually love your intimate other. Because that makes you fully human and that’s the last thing they want to know. What was the first thing the bigots started babbling about after the supreme court overturned the sodomy laws? Not that suddenly a lot of homosexuals would start having sex, but that acknowledging that we had a right to sexual intimacy, might lead to giving us the right to marriage too. Marriage was the First thing they started yapping about.
That says it all. That really nailed down what this fight is really about, what it was always about right from the beginning. It isn’t about sex. It has nothing to do with sex. It has everything to do with our human spirit. Homosexuals cannot have love, we must be denied it at every turn, every door to it must be slammed shut in our faces, it must be beaten out of us if necessary, because to allow us love, is to acknowledge that we are human beings, with human souls. And so long as we must play the roll of scapegoats for the moral failings of heterosexuals, that cannot be.
Burroway concludes with this, and I couldn’t agree more…
Forty years after the Black Cat raid, men still cannot be seen kissing each other, unless ratings are tanking during the final season or one of them dies.
And yet, what are two lovers supposed to do?
And when two lovers woo
They still say, “I love you.”
On that you can rely
No matter what the future brings
As time goes by.
Go read the whole thing. And when the New Year rings in, if you’re lucky enough to have found your other half, or even just a happy partner for the moment, take them into your arms and kiss them…
Kiss him for all of those who were not allowed to kiss. Kiss him for those who were beaten and arrested for kissing, and for those who fought back to defend that kiss. Kiss him for those heroes who declared an end to the shame of kissing. Kiss him because now you can; because today your greatest freedom is in that kiss. Kiss him on the mouth. And for good measure, kiss him for much, much longer than three to five seconds. Kiss him hard and long, with a kiss of forty years and still counting.
From our Department Of Unsurprising Things… The judge who issued a restraining order preventing Oregon’s Civil Unions law from taking effect, was a Bush appointee whose nomination had stirred up some controversy due to his views on the status of gay people. Emphasis below are mine…
WASHINGTON—What once seemed like a slam-dunk nomination for the federal judiciary in Oregon could turn into a test of political wills for Oregon’s two senators, Republican Gordon Smith and Democrat Ron Wyden.
Michael Mosman, the U.S. attorney in Portland, is Smith’s choice for a vacant district judgeship and is still regarded as a favorite of the Bush White House. But recent revelations of Mosman’s views on gay rights, first expressed in 1986, have delayed his selection and what otherwise would likely be easy Senate confirmation.
…
Mosman, 46, emerged as the top candidate in January after Ray Baum, a lawyer for Smith’s family business, withdrew. But controversy erupted in March, when Basic Rights disclosed Mosman’s role in a pivotal 1986 case, Bowers V. Hardwick.
The group uncovered and presented to Smith two “bench memos” that Mosman had written as a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. Mosman urged Powell to uphold Georgia’s anti-sodomy law against a claim that police invaded a man’s privacy by arresting him in his home.
Memos to court’s tie-breaker
Mosman prepared the memos in March and June 1986, as it became clear Powell would be the court’s tie-breaking vote. He wrote that striking down the Georgia law would lead to an unwarranted expansion of privacy rights under due process.
Such a ruling would leave “no limiting principle” against prosecution of other sex crimes such as prostitution, Mosman wrote. It also would jeopardize rights that society previously had reserved to heterosexuals.
“Without belaboring the point, I am convinced that the right of privacy as it relates to this case has been limited thus far to marriage and other family relationships,” Mosman wrote to Powell. “So limited, the right of privacy does not extend to protect ‘sexual freedom’ in the absence of fundamental values of family and procreation.”
Mosman has declined requests by The Oregonian to discuss the memos. But in a recent book about gay rights and the Supreme Court, Mosman is quoted as saying that his feelings about homosexuality were secondary to his concerns about the law.
“The battle was really about . . . what direction the court was taking on due process,” Mosman said in “Courting Justice: Gay Men and Lesbians v. the Supreme Court.
Mosman added: “The (sodomy) issue could have come to the court as an equal protection case and would have had a better hearing. I would have been more receptive to it.”
…which is not to say he’d have been in favor of overturning the sodomy laws anyway. After all…having sex is a right that society had reserved to heterosexuals.
For Smith, the nomination could become a test of his credibility as an advocate for gay rights within the Republican Party. Smith won an important endorsement from Human Rights Campaign after supporting hate-crimes legislation, helping his re-election last year.
In a recent interview, Smith downplayed the significance of the Powell memos and suggested that given the opportunity, Mosman could explain himself to the satisfaction of critics.
“This is a decision that was rendered in 1986,” Smith said. “Isn’t it possible that Mike Mosman could also have an evolving view on these issues? I think Mosman is an outstanding legal scholar and an extraordinary U.S. attorney for Oregon.”
But let’s not lay this debacle entirely at the feet of the ersatz "gay friendly" republican. I think we all know by now that there is no such animal. But wait…there was a democrat involved in this too…
The stakes could be higher for Wyden. Although his party controls neither the White House nor the Senate, Democrats are regarded as the chief defenders of gay rights. If Wyden endorses Mosman, his decision could be second-guessed by colleagues, including a handful of Democratic senators running for president in 2004.
Democrats have threatened to filibuster high-profile nominees, and they might be emboldened to take on others if they succeed, said Moore, the analyst. In that case, Mosman’s nomination also could be held hostage to political concerns.
“It depends on what happens with the other filibusters going on,” he said.
Wyden hopes to avoid a national controversy over the nomination, said Josh Kardon, his chief of staff. But first, the senator plans to meet with Mosman to discuss the concerns raised by Basic Rights and decide whether to support him.
“Mike Mosman is someone Senator Wyden has supported in the past and someone he would like to support for the federal bench,” Kardon said. “But legitimate questions have been raised that require thorough consideration.”
"President Bush made an excellent choice when he nominated Mike, and the Senate confirmed that decision with its unanimous vote," Smith said. "He has long served Oregon and the nation with distinction, and I have the utmost confidence that he will continue to do so on the District Court."
"I am honored to have this chance to serve," Mosman said. "I have been impressed throughout this whole process with the fair-mindedness of everyone involved. I am grateful to the president for nominating me, and to Senators Smith and Wyden for their confidence and support."
"Mike has worked hard to show his commitment to equal rights for all Americans," Wyden said. "I believe his sense of fairness and his long and outstanding experience as a prosecutor in our state will serve the District Court and Oregon well."
I’m leaving soon for a holiday road trip to warmer climes, and I have one last huge post to make before I go. Consider it my end of year sermon. It’s about morality and what got me wanting to write about it was a post I saw the other day on Jim Burroway’s Box Turtle Bulletin about John Corvino’s new DVD recording of his “What’s Morally Wrong With Homosexuality?”, lecture. I’ve seen an excerpt of that lecture before it was yanked from YouTube and it looks to be a good one. But there is more to the moral question then the one he’s asking.
There are three writers whose ideas influenced me greatly in my younger days. One respectable, and the other two not so much. The respectable one is Jacob Bronowski, a man whose work I still treasure. The two not so respectable are Robert Audrey and Ayn Rand, whose work I am sometimes embarrassed to admit reading. But I have to give them credit all the same for lighting a spark of understanding in me about human nature, society and morality at a point in my life when I needed it really badly.
I found Audrey’s book, African Genesis in a corner of a warehouse I once worked in, wrinkled and discarded, and reading the first page of it…
Not in innocence, and not in Asia was mankind born…
…I had to take the thing home where I promptly devoured it. From Audry I gleaned the idea that the forces that move within our consciousness are understandable, and manageable, but only if we seriously study our evolutionary past, the better to understand the bedrock upon which the human identity was formed over vast, almost unthinkable time. Not to do so would be akin to trying to build a bridge with no understanding of the nature of the materials you’re constructing it from. Likewise, to construct workable human societies, and moral codes that actually and really benefit us, we need to undertake an almost brutal, unromantic, understanding of ourselves and that means looking also, to the past which brought us forth…
We are not so unique as we would like to believe. And if man in a time of need seeks deeper knowledge concerning himself, then he must explore those animal horizons from which we have made our quick little march.
At about the same time, from Rand I got the another completely radical notion: that morality is the one thing you absolutely have to question. I had heard all my life that the force, the authority, of a moral code comes from its absoluteness, and that to question traditional morality was to destroy it, leaving humanity with no guide, no moral compass, nothing to judge right from wrong. Rand, for all her faults, and she had many profound ones, showed me that in fact the exact opposite was true. If morality is a code of conduct we accept in order to guide us toward that which is good for us, and away from that which is not, then it must be, it has to be, constantly questioned and evaluated…judged…against that purpose.
Are we better off for abiding by this or that moral code…or are we worse off? Does a society that embraces this or that moral code prosper and thrive…do its people live in peace with one another…is their society stable…prosperous…peaceful…productive…? At best a morality that does none of this is irrelevant, at worst it actively diminishes our lives, degrades our existence. It is like teaching us to put poison in our food, and then telling us that our sickness is the result of not putting in enough poison. Our moral codes must be, have to be right, or they will destroy us. So as it turns out, morality is the one thing you absolutely positively cannot hold to be above questioning. It must withstand critical examination.
Ask the children of Marx and Lenin what happens to a society whose model of human nature, and the moral code flowing from it, is flawed. Ask the shades that walk nights at Gettysburg. Collectivism? White Supremacy? What is a human being? What is human nature? What is good for us? What is harmful? You have to get those questions right….or you could find yourself living in a nightmare. A nightmare made all the worse for your not really understanding why it’s happening to you.
Moral issues have preoccupied me for much of my life. I was raised in a very conservative Baptist household, with a strict sense of right and wrong always in the air. But there was serious conflict between the two sides of my family tree, and mom’s side, the Baptist side, was always telling me about how wicked dad’s side was, and warning me that I was likely to turn out just as badly as he did unless I embraced their teachings of biblical righteousness completely. I worried constantly over it when I was young. But I grew up to be a nature lover and science geek, and gradually felt myself pulled away from my church over its conception of God verses mine. I’d always loved the God I saw in nature, and never really felt comfortable with the God I read about in the bible, even while I was being constantly reassured that if I didn’t live by the bible I was doomed. By the time I entered my late teens, I’d left my church and had come finally to an honest understanding of my sexual orientation, and it seemed for a while that I was completely adrift in a world that science revealed to be so wonderful, so absolutely beautiful at a physical level, but which I could make almost no sense of at all at a moral one. Bronowski, Audrey and Rand gave me permission in those days to think about moral ideas objectively, in the same sense that I pondered the physical world around me as revealed by science, at a time in my life when I was beginning to despair that such a thing was even possible.
So…by the time I got my first computer back in the mid-1980s, and started debating gay rights issues online, I had already been giving the moral side of the issue a lot of thought. By the time I got my first Internet account, and was able to access the free-for-all then known as Usenet, I’d already been handing out a lot of fire and brimstone about morality, and gay rights…
Me, March 27, 1999, in yet another argument with a bigot, this one named Russ, on alt.politics.homosexuality…
R> My original statement, at which you took such great umbrage, was to
R> suggest that we ought not to have two different sets of moral standards.
R> It is apparent to me that if we say it is wrong for a person to have
R> sexual relations with another person of the same sex — *except* if they
R> are attracted to each other — then we are not saying anything very
R> rigorous at all, are we?
What’s not exactly rigorous here Russ is your attaching moral significance to gender in the first place. It’s a lot like your insistence
that marriage is between opposite genders…well…because it is. Real deep thinking there guy.
A homosexual relationship can be loving and devoted, or it can be greedy and manipulative…just as any heterosexual relationship can be. The moral question isn’t in the gender of the individuals, but the nature of their relationship to one another. Are they loving, kind, sympathetic? Do they trust, and are they trustworthy? Are they honest with each other, or is one partner, or both, deceptive and manipulative? There are your moral questions. The rest is detail
What’s morally wrong, is to lie to people, to use them selfishly for your own gratification and then discard them when you are through. That’s not only an attack on the person, but an attack on trust and honor…things we are all arguably put at risk, for their demise. Even worse, is to lie to someone who is in love with you. If there is a reason that the marriage vows mean something, it is because the breaking of them takes away from us all, things that societies can little do without. Love and devotion, trust and honor, compassion and sympathy.
The heterosexual who might have situational sex with a member of their own sex…simply for the sake of having a good time with another person who may actually be Gay and strongly drawn to them…is taking advantage of the Gay person’s nature, and their feelings. The word for that isn’t love, it’s greed. But the Gay couple that both desires and cherishes one another, is committing no crime, no sin. They are in fact cherishing the good within each other. It Is moral for two Gay, or bisexual people of the same sex, to have a sexual relationship, in a way it wouldn’t be if one or both parties were heterosexual. A same sex relationship between Gay or bisexual people, is inherently more honest, then one that is not between two Gay, or bisexual people.
Here’s the sick joke Russ: by pressuring Gay people into sexual relationships that are against their nature, you and your kind are encouraging deceptive, dishonest, sexual relationships…and you’re doing that in the name of morality. If anyone is taking the moral standards of the community into the gutter Russ, it’s you.
…one of many such confrontations I enjoyed from 1993 to about 2002 when the quality of the bigotry began to go way down, and I began to get tired of hearing the same goddamned crap rhetoric over and over and over again. But I can’t tell you how many times over a period of almost a decade, I would start arguing from a moral standpoint with a bigot who would smirkingly assure me that "you don’t want to go there"…that is, since obviously homosexuality is by definition immoral, I, a gay man, didn’t want to be dragging questions of morality into the argument. To which my reply was usually along the lines of "Oh yes I do." And when I did, I was never one for mincing words about it.
Because for all the bigots’ chanting about how they’re only acting out of the purest and most righteous of moral intentions, the fact is they are the ones who get cut up the most in a real argument over moral conduct…
October 24, 1998…
MJ> I wrote that people who saw that float, according to the network
MJ> report, were put in mind of the Shepherd murder. That’s what I wrote.
MJ> You might want to actually read it.
So might ‘others who judge’. Let’s let them. Here is just what you wrote, cut and pasted from
Message-ID: <36284435.14253044@news.pacbell.net>
"There was a parade nearby, about the time young Shepherd was being murdered, which featured a float on which a scarecrow was placed, with the placard or something which said – I’m gay. People didn’t appreciate it, in the parade. And it later suggested to them, in hindsight, the way in which Shepherd was left, by his killers."
"about the time young Shepherd was being murdered" "it later suggested to them, in hindsight" You were saying that the float could not have been a deliberate and obscene joke made at the expense of a brutal murder, because it happened While he was being killed, not after his body was discovered and the likeness seen by the two bikers who found him to a scarecrow was reported in the news. You said it was only in Hindsight that the people who saw the float made the connection. That could only have been categorically true if his body hadn’t yet been discovered. But the facts were that it had been discovered days before the parade. Like a holocaust revisionist, you rewrote the order of events, so you could make the following claim:
"In fact, what was done in that parade had nothing whatsoever to do with what some killers did, elsewhere."
According to local news reports people who saw it were shocked by it, knowing full well what it referred to. That didn’t happen ‘in hindsight’. What you did there, in plain sight of everyone here, was rewrite the chronology of events, in order to claim that no association with Matthew Shepard’s murder Could have been intended by the frat. And you did it so you could claim the fuss about it was all about ‘PC’, not the shocking obsenity of a college homecoming parade float that mocked the vicious kidnapping and torture of a Gay man only days previously.
Why do you bother? Because your reflex is to excuse hate, that’s why you bother. To cover it up. To deny it exists. The belly laugh here is that you’re accusing Us of not having self control, but the one thoroughly out of control and in the grip of a self destructive vice here is you, and here we can all see it clearly and sickeningly. Even when it’s obvious to everyone that you’re lying, you can’t stop yourself, you can’t help yourself. Your mortal enemy is that scarecrow of your own invention, ‘The Gay Activist’ and nothing can prevent you from striking at it…not Truth, not Decency, not Morality and Virtue, not Your Church, not any thought or impulse to preserve your honor and your name. If you have to ruin everything in you that makes you human, to get hand on the collar of ‘The Gay Activist’, and put your thumb in it’s eye, so be it.
But do we have to watch?
MJ> Gimme Catholicism . . any day.
Bless me Father for I have sinned…and sinned…and sinned…and sinned…and sinned…and sinned…and sinned…
It’s a great topic and one that’s rarely explored, which is a shame since the discussion of homosexuality as a moral mode of existence is every bit as vital today as it was when he started fifteen years ago…
Yes. It is. But there’s another side to this coin, and it’s one that needs tackling just as much. Here Burroway gives it a glancing blow…
But as Dr. Corvino points out, the Bible holds a lot of things to be immoral that we no longer condemn with such fervor (for example, divorce, or women speaking in churches or wearing slacks), and the Bible gives explicit approval — and even instruction — on some things that we today consider to be immorally outrageous. The best example of the latter comes from an equally unmistakable passage of Leviticus. This time it’s Leviticus 25:44-46:
Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. You can will them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly.
The passage is as unmistakably clear as the first one. And if one were to take everything from the Bible in a consistently literal light, then there’s just no way around it: the buying and selling and inheriting of people as chattel slaves is not immoral; it is instead expressly permitted — with rules laid down for its proper execution. But there are very few Christians who are so consistent in their literalism that they would always “approve what the Bible approves and condemn what the Bible condemns” when it comes to slavery. Only Christian Reconstructionists and a few other theonomists are able to sustain this kind of consistency.
So why is it that some people are consistent with literalist interpretations of Scripture where homosexuality is concerned, but when the subject of slavery comes up it’s suddenly all about context, original language and cultural norms? Corvino suggests that we either have to commit ourselves to the idea the authors’s concerns and ours might be very different, and understanding that difference is vital to understanding the text.
Er…no. Let’s why don’t we, stare that inconsistency in the face and call it for what it is. And no…it’s not hypocrisy, any more then Paul Cameron’s using his data one way when it suits him, and another when it doesn’t is hypocrisy. The word we’re looking for here is Mendacity. How often, how many times, do we have to see this out of both sides of their mouths behavior in anti-gay demagogues before we’re allowed to call it what it is? They’re not citing the bible, they’re using it like a condom. Jesus isn’t their lord and savior, he’s their excuse, their scapegoat, nailed to a cross, dying every hour of every day for their cheapshit sins, so they won’t have to look them in the face, and from there to the horrific landscape of human suffering all around them, that has their name written on every heartbroken acre of it.
And never mind the two-faced way they proof text the bible. A walk through the open sewer most of them call a conscience ought to be enough to disabuse anyone of the notion that moral righteousness has anything whatsoever to do with the anti-gay agenda. Here’s the current darling of the religious right, Huckabee on homosexuality, from a 1992 questionnaire…
“I believe to try to legitimize that which is inherently illegitimate would be a disgraceful act of government…I feel homosexuality is an aberrant, unnatural and sinful lifestyle.”
One issue likely to get attention is his handling of a sensitive family matter: allegations that one of his sons was involved in the hanging of a stray dog at a Boy Scout camp in 1998. The incident led to the dismissal of David Huckabee, then 17, from his job as a counselor at Camp Pioneer in Hatfield, Ark. It also prompted the local prosecuting attorney— bombarded with complaints generated by a national animal-rights group—to write a letter to the Arkansas state police seeking help investigating whether David and another teenager had violated state animal-cruelty laws. The state police never granted the request, and no charges were ever filed. But John Bailey, then the director of Arkansas’s state police, tells NEWSWEEK that Governor Huckabee’s chief of staff and personal lawyer both leaned on him to write a letter officially denying the local prosecutor’s request. Bailey, a career officer who had been appointed chief by Huckabee’s Democratic predecessor, said he viewed the lawyer’s intervention as improper and terminated the conversation. Seven months later, he was called into Huckabee’s office and fired. "I’ve lost confidence in your ability to do your job," Bailey says Huckabee told him. One reason Huckabee cited was "I couldn’t get you to help me with my son when I had that problem," according to Bailey. "Without question, [Huckabee] was making a conscious attempt to keep the state police from investigating his son," says I. C. Smith, the former FBI chief in Little Rock, who worked closely with Bailey and called him a "courageous" and "very solid" professional.
And then there’s Huckabee’s pardoning of convicted serial rapist and murderer Wayne Dumond, after the republican noise machine spun the tale that since one of his victims was a distant relative of Bill Clinton,
Dumond had been falsely accused. Gene Lyons has the rest of the squalid story of Huckabee’s moral righteousness…
Dumond became a right-wing cause celebre. Guy Reel wrote a book entitled “Unequal Justice,” parroting the same bogus claims. Most significantly, Jay Cole, a Fayetteville, Ark., Baptist pastor and pal of Huckabee’s bought into the delusion.
No sooner had Huckabee become governor after Kenneth Starr’s conviction of his Democratic predecessor, Jim Guy Tucker, than he began talking about commuting the presumptively innocent Dumond’s sentence. He clearly expected to be congratulated. Instead, prosecutor Fletcher Long erupted. How could the governor even think of doing that without reading the trial transcript?
Abandoning her anonymity, Ashley Stevens invaded Huckabee’s personal space: “This is how close I was to Wayne Dumond,” she said. “I will never forget his face. And now I don’t want you ever to forget my face.” Previous victims wrote agonized letters begging Huckabee to desist.
Today, Huckabee alibis that nobody could have predicted Dumond’s Missouri crimes. Many people did. Even this column warned that: “Rape’s not a crime of passion; it’s a crime of rage. Violent sex offenders, innumerable case studies show, keep at it until something stops them. If Huckabee doesn’t understand that, he’s got no business getting involved.”
Instead of backing off, Huckabee got tricky. He held an improper closed-door meeting with the parole board, several of whom say they’d felt pressured. Last week, Huckabee’s then-chief counsel, Olan “Butch” Reeves, basically seconded their claims. After the board voted to parole Dumond to Missouri, Huckabee wrote a “Dear Wayne” letter stressing “my desire … that you be released from prison” — the proverbial smoking gun he can’t now rationalize or whine away.
Angry Missouri cops say Dumond’s victims’ severed bra straps were like a calling card. They found his DNA under their fingernails. Huckabee’s latest book claims that Dumond died in prison before coming to trial. In fact, he was convicted of murdering Carol Sue Shields on Nov. 12, 2003.
It should make anyone with a shred of decency left alive within them want to vomit every time one of these gutter crawling creeps starts mouthing off about morality. Over and over again you see it…the rote declarations of faith, followed by the cheapshit lying, the bellicose digging in of heels rather when their own pathetic failures of moral character are pointed out, and more and more lately, the squalid details of their own personal lives rushing out like an overflowing sewer. Why do they single out homosexuals? Because they need someone to point their fingers at, someone to take the spotlight away from their own failed inner character, someone to distract everyone else from the stench of their own rotten conscience, someone to die for their sins, so they won’t have to take responsibility for the mess they’ve made of their own lives, and everyone else’s within arm’s reach. We have to bleed, so they can be righteous.
It’s good to see attention being given to the moral issue at the heart of the gay rights struggle. But the morality of homosexuality is only one part of that. The morality of those who would keep us second class citizens, outcast and vulnerable, is another. They are taking what should be one of this life’s most perfect joys, that of finding that intimate other, falling in love, body and soul with them, and making a life together, and they are twisting a knife in it, so that they can feel righteous. There is nothing moral about that. If that’s not sin, then the word has no meaning.
The argument I frequently hear is that, well, hurtful as their behavior is toward us, they do it in good faith. No. The ones who cut us through simple, mistaken ignorance don’t make a big issue out of it. They’re not on a crusade. Maybe they don’t have a gay family member, or at any rate one that’s out to them. Maybe they haven’t had the opportunity for their comfortable moral stereotypes about homosexuality to be challenged. We all have some crap in our heads, some ignorant or foolish beliefs that in retrospect make you wonder what you were ever thinking to believe such a thing. The honest person, the moral person, when confronted by a falsehood, by something patently wrong, accepts that they were wrong and acts accordingly. It’s not about being an uptight self righteous prick either. As H.L. Mencken once said, "The most expensive thing on this earth is to believe in something that is palpably not true." You don’t embrace reality to put yourself up on a pedestal, you do it because you don’t want reality to smack you upside the head. But that’s what morality is for!
No. The crusaders are Not acting in good faith, and their crusade is as immoral as they come, and it’s long since time that they got that fact pointed out to them by people who are willing to stand up to their plastic self-serving self righteousness and call it for what it is. A lie. A cheat. A fraud. They deliberately, willfully, hurt innocent people not out of any sense of doing good, but in order to polish their own shit stained vanity. It is obscene, positively obscene, how long decent, good-hearted gay and lesbian people have been cowed by moral runts who have been doing nothing more righteous then putting a knife into their hearts as a way of buying their own self-respect. We are not the ones who have to be afraid of arguments over the morality of our conduct. They are.
Morality, the hard work of learning the difference between right and wrong across the ages, is a powerful force in the human story. It is a tool that guides us to the good, and away from the bad. It is a tool that our enemies renounced long ago because it does not validate their conceits, their evasions, their bigotries. And every time they open their mouths with lies about us that they know damn well are lies, they tell us so. It is long past time to look that fact squarely in the face and acknowledge it. At some point in their lives, reality collided with their prejudices and instead of doing the moral thing, they sold out. And now morality turns on them, like one of those weapons in fantasy novels, possessed by the spirits of the old warriors who once bore it. Mike Huckabee. Larry Craig. Ted Haggard. David Vitter. And all the other right wing moralists who have been caught frolicking in the gutter recently. The more they yap, yap, yap about morality, the more you see how far away from it they’re running.
We don’t have to run from it. There is nothing wrong with us. There was never anything wrong with us. We have been taught for so long, for so very, very long, to hate ourselves, to be ashamed, so that a bunch of moral runts would have someone else to point their fingers at, someone else to bear the burden of shame that they’ve been evading all their lives. You can’t buy a decent, honest, moral life second hand. You can’t beg, borrow or steal it from your neighbor. Our hearts are not their stepping stones to heaven. Our enemies threw morality away, because they couldn’t get it cheap. Pick it up. You can afford it more then you know. The love of same sex lovers, our moments spent in simple straightforward, honest human desire and affection, are genuine and real and righteous and noble and beautiful, and that is why they hate us. Every time you take your lover’s hand and offer them nothing more or less then what you have, what you are, the best within you, what our enemies see in that is everything they could have had in their own lives, and every noble thing they could have become, that they are not, and that is why they hate us. Every time you smile into your lover’s eyes, rather then turn away in shame, you win the moral argument.
Mike Huckabee says he stands by his statements fifteen years ago about AIDS patients, though he concedes he might phrase them differently today.
How many different ways can you say "Death Camps" Mike…?
In some old candidate questionnaires the Associated Press has dug up, Huckabee suggested back then that AIDS patients should essentially be quarantined.
"Fifteen years ago, the AIDS crisis was just that. It was a crisis," Huckabee told reporters at a campaign stop in Asheville, N.C. this weekend. "There were a lot of questions back in that time as to just how the disease could be carried. There was just a real panic in this country."
A reader asks, “what’s the big deal?” After all, didn’t a lot of people advocate quarantine for AIDS patients early in the epidemic? Yeah, early in the epidemic some did advocate just that—and not just bigots salivating at the prospect of rounding up all gay people, diseased or not. But that was early in the epidemic, very early, 1984-86. By 1992 only raving bigots were still talking about quarantining people with AIDS or HIV. People like, you know, Mike Huckabee.
You need to pay attention to that, because even back in the early stages of the AIDS outbreak, people talking about rounding up and "quarantining" AIDS victims weren’t doing that out of concern with the spread of the disease itself, as with the ever growing visibility of the people they despised:
Huckabee said he also stands by his words that homosexuality is sinful.
What a coincidence, that. Huckabee was far from the only one still calling for an AIDS "quarantine" by the 1990s, and yes, the ones who were just also happened to have a bottomless bit of animus toward homosexual people. One they often dressed up in biblical rhetoric that was as cheap as it was transparent.
If AIDS had hit America in the early 1950s, the Huckabees of the world would have without a doubt gotten their wish and every homosexual the authorities could identify would have been rounded up and locked into concentration camps…and from there, isolated from the rest of the American community who didn’t have to see, didn’t have to care, didn’t have to know, a final solution to the sexual pervert problem would have been just one small step away. In 1986 William F. Buckley shocked even many of his fellow wingers by advocating the forcible tattooing of AIDS victims, once on the arm, and once on the buttocks, he claimed to prevent the spread of the disease via shared needles and sex. He only withdrew his suggestion after being forced to admit that the plan had an "unfortunate association" with the Holocaust.
AIDS didn’t happen in 1950, it happened in the early 80s, over a decade of gay rights activism after Stonewall, and the republican right wing theocratic base is deeply resentful to this day that they didn’t get their chance back then to let their hate run free and unfettered over the lives of all gay people, whether we had the disease or not, and gleefully stomp the human life out of us.
From Box Turtle Bulletin. I’ve mentioned before how Paul Cameron is often stealth-cited in right wing anti-gay propaganda, by citing someone else, who in turn cites Cameron. But this is a first …
As I went about organizing my library over the weekend, I re-opened the book, Staying the Course: Supporting the Church’s Position on Homosexuality (Maxie D. Dunnam & H. Newton Malony, editors). And as I often do, I take a quick glance through the bibliographies, and among the many things I look for is whether they cite Paul Cameron or not. Nope. His name was nowhere to be found.
Then, I skimmed through H. Newton Malony’s chapter, “Homosexuality In the Postmodern World.” And there it was:
Longevity is another area in which homosexuality has been a determining factor. A 1991-92 survey of newspapers available to homosexual communities found that among homosexuals not suffering from AIDS, the median age of death for 5,371 persons to be 42 years of age, [sic] with only 9 percent living to old age. Among lesbians, the average age at death was 45 years. Both these figures are dramatically below the life expectancy of the population in general.22
Footnote 22 was this:
22. Malony, Perspectives on Homosexuality, 37.
See? No Cameron. Unless of course, you happened to have access to Malony’s 1998 Perpsectives on Homosexuality: The Transforming Point of View from Integration Press. And if you could find access to that obscure and now out-of-print book, you would eventually discover that this nugget came from an earlier version of Cameron’s pamphlet, “Medical Consequences of What Homosexuals Do.”
There’s no doubt here about this one. Obviously, that you’re citing yourself to hide the fact that Cameron is the source of your "facts", means you know full well what you’re doing is deceitful. Now take another look at that title… Staying the Course: Supporting the Church’s Position on Homosexuality. A faith that needs lies to support it, is a faith that is already dead.
It’s not immediately obvious, but Robert Jensen and I have a lot in common. We both grew up as scrawny, physically inept boys with no aptitude for athletics. We were the kind of boys who were by default identified as “faggots” by our peers and, at least in my case, sometimes by teachers. On the playground and the streets, our status as “sensitive” boys made us easy targets for insults and physical abuse.
Most importantly, we both grew into men with deep dissatisfactions with what our society told us we were supposed to be, do, and think as men, and with an appreciation for feminism as a vital tool for both men and women to break free of old, potentially lethal gender scripts. And both of us can go on at length about what sucks about porn.
Actually, I can sum up what I used to dislike most about porn in a few words: there was very little romance in it. But that’s changing, no thanks to the likes of Jensen. I fit the same pattern of boyhood that Chris and Robert both seem to have had, and while I’m not sure that in porn lies, as Chris says, our salvation, I think he’s is absolutely right about this in general…
And yet, even as I calculate all the sins of pornography to the nth degree, and catalog the ways that I find it disappointing and trivial in taxonomies so detailed that the Library of Congress would have to invent a whole new indexing system, there’s something else: I think that in porn lies our salvation. For those of us who hate the ugly gordian knot of fear and loathing that our society ties our sexualities into, porn is essential. We need a genre of literature and art devoted to sexual arousal just as much as we need those that make us laugh, cry, or cringe in fear. And at the same time, we need to develop a critical language that we can use to think and speak about pornography. Without these things, we’ve resigned ourselves to remaining forever mute about our sexual desires.
Jensen’s book is supposedly a critical examination of the relationship between pornography and misogyny. Amazon describes it thusly…
Pornography is a thriving multi-billion-dollar industry; it drives the direction of emerging media technology. Pornography also makes for complicated politics. These days, anti-porn arguments are assumed to be "anti-sex" and thus a critical debate is silenced. This book breaks that silence. Alarming and thought-provoking, Getting Off asks tough, but crucial, questions about pornography, sex, manhood, and the way toward genuine social justice.
If calling anti-pornography arguments anti-sex has ever silenced the debate I sure haven’t noticed it. More often then not the retort is something along the lines of, Sure…sexual freedom is destroying family life and American morals. Children born out of wedlock, raised in fatherless households, rising crime and sexually transmitted disease… You’re damn right we’re anti-sex! It’s telling that the one reader comment still up on the book’s Amazon page comes from a self identified "biblical Christian". I guess that’s as opposed to…you know…one of those plain old ordinary everyday Christians or something. But as Chris carefully explains in his review, Jensen’s book is neither a critical examination of pornography nor a necessary breaking of silence. If anything, it wants the silence to continue.
Sexual desire is hard wired into us, is a normal, natural part of our flesh and blood lives, is an essential part of our nature. It is a drive that runs through the fabric of our being, older then the fish, let alone the mammals, let alone the primates. It is not a blackboard anyone can just scribble their will upon. Sweeping it under the rug, hiding it in the closet, burying it under layers of shame can only do us great psychological harm and put it utterly beyond our ability to manage decently and honorably. Witness the torrent of family values republican sex scandals lately. Just this morning I am reading on the news nets that four more men have come forward to testify to having had sex with Mr. (I Am Not Gay) Larry Craig. Sex is a powerful, ancient and venerable urge. You force it into the closet, and all you end up doing is insuring that it’ll come rushing out in inappropriate, and self destructive ways, taking you helplessly along for the ride.
Which makes this remark about Jensen and his kind toward the end of Chris’ review worth pondering:
There is not, in the end, so much difference between Jensen and the most misogynist, exploitative porn director; neither can imagine the sexual role of men as being anything other than to fuck, nor can they imagine women’s roles as being anything other than to be fucked.
You tend to find that most pornography is just plain trash. There’s a couple reasons for that. First..because it mostly Is trash. In that, it is merely obeying the relentlessness of Sturgeon’s Law that everything does. But porn is also vastly limited by its very purpose. It’s job is to happily push our buttons. But everyone’s buttons are different. And what makes one person all hot and bothered can positively disgust another.
When I was a gay young adult, trying to find my way around a gay community that was still mostly hidden from view back in the early 1970s, if I wanted a copy of the local gay newspaper, or The Advocate, I mostly had to go to seedy adult bookstores to find them. Wandering around the shelves of almost exclusively heterosexual pornography was eye opening, and pretty disgusting and I am certain that wasn’t because I mate to my own, and not the opposite sex. Even the gay pornography I saw turned me off far more then it turned me on. I began to realize then that what turned me on was an eroticism that was mostly sensual and not terribly explicit, and which included heavy doses of romance and emotion. That is me. My sexual response is inextricably knotted up with my romantic one. But back in the early 70s, sex was either heavily censored, or grossly explicit. Commercial pornography was about the money shot and nothing else. I remember one of my first porn tapes I’d bought on the basis of the very hot looking guys on the cover, only to end up feeling let down that there was nothing on display throughout but rote genital contact. They didn’t show the slightest bit of affection. It really was just like the bigots always said homosexuality was… Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. I can hear people laughing now at the idea that I went looking for romance on the porn shelves, and that’s part of the problem. It didn’t, and it doesn’t have to be that way.
It would be decades before I began finding erotic art that I could whole heartedly enjoy, as artists, more specifically, female artists, began to freely and unashamedly express their own human sexuality. I always found it interesting that my favorite gay male romance novels have been written by women. Now I find that my favorite source of erotic art these days comes from Japan, in the form of comic book stories of torrid gay male love affairs, that are largely written by heterosexual females, for heterosexual females.
This is, I think, important, because anti-pornography crusaders like Jensen like to posture that they’re about defending women from violent male sexuality. But if anything can be said to be responsible for the rote objectification of women in pornography, and the absence of images of tenderness and balanced relationships in it, it’s not unbridled male sexuality but the suppression of female sexuality. That only men, and never women, enjoy sex for its own sake, is a hoary old lie powerful men used to tell everyone so nobody would question their domination of women. The problem with pornography isn’t that it exploits women, but that women have never, until recently, been allowed their own erotic voice. That’s why the images you commonly find in pornography are unbalanced. But that’s changing, no thanks to the likes of Jensen.
Yes, most representations of sex are obvious; our sexual nature reduced to its lowest common denominator. But there are so many layers, intricate and sublime to human sexuality, to our sexual relationships, even when it’s not so much Mr. Right as Mr. Right Away. And nowadays, thankfully and I think mostly because more women are producing pornography now, artists are going there now, and when they do it can be awesomely beautiful, and powerfully life affirming. Ironically enough, if the anti-porn crusaders have their way, all of that will vanish, and we’ll be back to cheap, tawdry, sterile porn that degrades both men and women, that treats sexual desire as nothing more then urges that have nothing to do with the rest of our being, other then to drag it down into the gutter.
But that’s exactly what some people want. Better we feel ashamed then proud. Proud people don’t passively take orders.
There is a sad joke in calling Robert Jensen “radical” in any sense of the word. He has nothing to give us but the same bitter fruit we were fed by hateful priests and timid parents.
If there is anything we gay folk can teach our heterosexual neighbors about sex it’s this: shame rots your soul from within. It takes away your ability to love someone whole heartedly, body and soul and every playful and ecstatic and wonderful moment of joy you could ever have had in the arms of a lover. If there’s anything this poor human race doesn’t need any more of, it’s shame over our sexual nature. There is a place, a wholesome necessary healing place, for an art that is both erotic and humane. We need an art that holds a mirror to us of our sexual selves, in which we see the wonder and joy of our lives of flesh and blood untainted by fear or shame or guilt. That mirror is slowly coming to light, thanks I am convinced to the emerging sexual freedom of women. So naturally, the haters of humanity, and their useful tools, want to stifle that once more, and forever.
I’m headed for bed, and not even going to bother watching the republican debate. But scanning the blogs that are following it live, I’m seeing that a gay (former) general asked a question concerning gays in the military and he was apparently roundly booed by the audience…
…so I just want to re-emphasize something I put up on my Twitter bar a few hours ago, for the sake of a few certain someones I no longer speak to, and one who I’m still very much holding at arm’s length: If you can still vote republican after all the gay bashing they’ve been doing, then we are not friends. It really is that simple.
Someone put a fork in the party of Lincoln, it’s done. And…I’m going to bed now…
It has been an honor and a privilege for both of us to serve on the Human Rights Campaign Business Council. Since joining the Business Council in 2002 we have both played active roles in advancing workplace equality, providing education, guidance and leadership, and ensuring that workplaces in America are fair for ALL employees. Our collective work has been at the forefront of the successes that HRC has enjoyed in recent years, has affected the daily lives of GLBT employees throughout this country in profound and substantive ways, and is a continuing source of pride for us both.
Rather than rest on past achievements, the Business Council continues to develop critical new initiatives to support transgender employees. We are working to raise the bar on the Corporate Equality Index. We are planning to revise and re-publish the booklet Transgender In the Workplace: A Tool For Managers. We are planning a Female-to-Male educational DVD. We have been working on insurance issues affecting transgender employees. Never before have so many important efforts for transgender workers been underway and we are both heavily involved in all of them. That is why the decision we are announcing today is an extremely difficult one.
Recent HRC policy decisions – to actively support a version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) that excludes our transgender brothers and sisters as well as gender-variant lesbian, gay, and bisexual people – have placed us in an untenable position. On November 8, the day after the ENDA vote in the House of Representatives, we requested an opportunity to meet personally with HRC President Joe Solmonese to share our concerns and to discuss HRC’s strategy for addressing recent legislative shortcomings before making a decision to stay or go. As the only transgender representatives on the Business Council our community expects us to have some influence, or at least to receive the courtesy of a consultation. Almost 3 weeks have passed since that request and we have heard nothing in response. This lack of response speaks volumes, so we feel compelled to take this stand today.
(Emphasis mine…) After a while, you finally begin to realize that the reason you’re there is window dressing. And then…you’re no longer needed.
That the bill in question doesn’t really do anything is wrongheaded, only if you think it’s purpose to make a difference in the lives of GLBT Americans, and bring this nation a little closer to reaching its promise of liberty and justice for all. No. That’s not the purpose of this bill. What the bill does, is give Barney the place in history he’s always wanted, as the man who put through the nation’s first non-discrimination bill for gay and lesbian Americans. It’s not that it doesn’t actually protect any of us, it’s that its got his name on it. That is why transgendered Americans had to be thrown under the bus.
Charles and Harry could be many a bickering, thoroughly co-dependent couple who’ve been together for two decades, but life wasn’t that simple for gay men in the London of the ’60s. That’s what adds some dramatic meat and bite to Charles Dyer’s "Staircase," the otherwise schematic if waspish 1966 comedy that opened Saturday at Theatre Rhinoceros. The darker notes that creep into the last scene humanize the camp, bitchy-hairdressers couple and add depth to a fitfully funny show.
"Staircase" is of historical interest in any case. A late replacement for Mart Crowley’s unavailable "The Boys in the Band" in Artistic Director John Fisher’s 30th anniversary season, "Staircase" actually predates "Boys" (by a few months) as the first openly gay play on Broadway in the modern era. A hit in London (with Paul Scofield and Patrick Magee) in ’66, and a flop in New York (with Eli Wallach and Milo O’Shea) in ’67, it also bombed as a movie, starring Richard Burton and Rex Harrison, in ’69. In every case, the publicity stressed the heterosexual credentials of everyone involved.
If there was any doubt as to the heterosexual credentials of the makers of that film, watching it should have decisively hammered them to the floor. That rank piece of trash is even more offensive then Boys In The Band in the cheapshit stereotypes it trades in. It doesn’t need a fucking revival, it needs to be buried in the same grave as the blackface minstrel shows.
For two hours they moan and piss about their sad, wasted lives, never showing a sign of love or affection. We are meant to feel sorry for them, but after all their time together there is no sign of an emotional attachment between them, no indication of a commitment to the relationship. When they do cling to one another, it is in loneliness and desperation, emotions that have been used to characterize homosexual relationships in film and literature for a century. Throughout the film Charlie and Harry repeat how much happier they would have been if only nature had not played them such a dirty trick…
-Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet
Staircase mocks its aging gay characters, and invites the audience to join in. In that, Staircase was eminently typical of the films of its day that pretended to shine a light on the sordid homosexual underworld, and were in reality nothing more then freak shows. Played for shock value, and sporting a thin veneer of pity, straight audiences were supposed to come away from the experience happily horrified, and relieved that they weren’t like those poor twisted queers.
There’s a great movie to be made someday about the lives of older gay people back before Stonewall. It could have pathos, it could have comedy, it could be full of the human struggle of people living in an age when gay folk could only see monsters reflected back at them by the popular culture surrounding them…an age when most gay people themselves believed that they were sick in some deeply profound way. Maybe someday someone will do that story.
[Edited to add the Vito Russo quote, and some additional verbiage of my own]
So I see Rex Wockner, and Andrew Sullivan are in agreement with John Aravosis that transgendered people have basically hijacked the gay rights movement. Dan Savage is at least on board with the transgender free Barney Frank/HRC bill that just passed the house. Somehow, it’s…unsurprising…to see the "No Fems" contingent bellyaching that they just don’t get the transgendered. Here’s Wockner giving it his best attempt…
I’ve been sitting here sort of picking my own brain and asking myself if gay and trans people do in fact have some crucial thing in common. I’ve read tons of opinion pieces and blog posts on the ENDA war in recent weeks, but none of them really opened my eyes. What do I have in common with a guy who wants to remove his willy, grow breasts, become a woman and get married to a man? From where did this relatively new concept of "the LGBT community" come?
Any deeper then this and Wockner is in danger of getting his own reality TV series. Wille. Wille. You know, not all transgendered persons go the sex reassignment surgery route, but I wouldn’t expect anyone in the "No Fems" crowd to have picked up on that. Geeze…and I used to think I had a problem with things female, my libido and my emotions being so relentlessly polarized toward the male sex. But the worst I ever was, was indifferent. I didn’t dislike girls and I don’t now, they just don’t register on my radar like guys do. I like guys. I like being a guy. I like being around guys. I like being made sweet sweet love to by guys. But there really are males, heterosexual ones too amazingly enough, who just get deeply anxious when confronted with anything even vaguely suggestive of femininity, and never more so then when it’s within another guy. I guess they’re afraid of their own dicks falling off or something if they get too close. Notice Wockner’s problem is with "a guy who wants to remove his willy, grow breasts" and "become a woman". Notice further that he’s saying this right after talking up Shannon Minter, born female, now living as a man.
I do, in fact, count myself among those Americans who still don’t fully understand and "get" the whole concept of being born in completely the wrong body. I’ve asked Shannon for a personal, one-on-one crash-course the very next time we’re within range of each other on the national map.
Probably because Shannon is butching it up and Wockner can deal with that better then with a person born male but who considers themselves female. Well let me say I don’t "get" what the goddamned problem is here. Has Wockner, after all this time, never pondered what makes some people gay and others straight? There is a mountain of evidence building now, that sexual orientation is innate, something in our biology, that draws us to mate to our own sex. It’s not in our willies, but in our heads. Is it really that hard to look at this, and consider then that gender expression may also work in some similar way? And for Christ’s sake it’s not like issues of gender haven’t been animating American politics ever since…oh…the feminist movement. I know that serious questioning of whether gender expression is more nature or nurture, biological or sociological, have been tracking alongside the same questions regarding sexual orientation since at least my own teen years and I’m older then any of these three deep thinkers (Aravosis doesn’t seem to be thinking about any of this at all so much as machine gun jerking his knee…)
I think my eureka moment came some decades ago while reading an article on boys who had been born with deformed or missing genitals and were, shortly after birth, surgically assigned a female gender and raised as girls. Tragically, horribly, it didn’t work. There was one boy in particular, who said he’d kept on reflexively trying to pee standing up all through his childhood. That opened my eyes. As it turns out, it’s not what we have between our legs that makes us masculine or feminine, it’s what we have between our ears.
What T’s have in common with LGB’s is that primary opposition to all of you comes from your subversion of proper, binary, complementary gender roles. You may be quite different from the inside, but from the outside you look similar. I heard my southern baptist grandfather give a sermon in which one of the ills of the modern world was "men not wanting to be men." I’m pretty sure he had gays in mind.
Surely you know this.
To which Sullivan reliably babbles…
If we are defined by those who hate us, LGBT makes some sense, although it could also include straight women who don’t conform to traditional roles, straight men in the same position, and so on, which would mean LGBTSFSMQ or something. My point is that the respective experiences of being gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgender are very distinct and different. And I do not define myself primarily by shared victimhood. Indeed, as many angry LGBTQWhatever readers have insisted, I am not a victim. I am a privileged, white sexist patriarchal rich HIV-positive-with-meds guy. So why, then, pray, am I still regarded (in your acronym at least) as a part of your "community"?
Not to worry Andrew, a lot of gay folk don’t regard you as being part of our community either. Not after you swooned over the man who vowed to veto any attempt to repeal the Texas sodomy laws because he thought they were a valid expression of the morality of the majority of Texans. But, no you drooling moron, the entire point of anti-discrimination laws Is how other people view us, not how we view ourselves.
Yes, yes…we’re all different from one another in so many little ways. Men and women from other men and women. Whites and blacks and Asians from other whites and blacks and Asians. Gays from other gays. How many different sub groups within that vast rainbow of humanity that are homosexual? Bigotry on the other hand, ignorantly lumps people together. Since when did prejudice ever make sense? No, the color of your skin doesn’t say anything about the content of your character. Neither does your sexual orientation. Neither does your gender. Neither does your gender expression. And as for why ‘T’s are part of this movement too, well let’s let Jack Chick explain something you need very much to understand:
Now, look at that. No…Really Look At It. Anti-discrimination laws aren’t about how minorities see themselves. What they address is how popular prejudices view and treat minorities. Look At That Image. This is what the bigots see, when they look at us. They don’t see difference one between the ‘GL’s, the ‘B’s and the ‘T’s you idiot. They don’t even admit there is such a thing as sexual orientation. let alone something called transgender. To them, it’s all sex perversion. You’re a man and you’re having sex with other men and that means as far as they’re concerned, that you’re acting like a woman. Never mind you don’t think you are. It’s not about what you think. Butch it up until you’re growing hair on your palms and it still won’t matter to them. They see a man making himself into a woman. They see gender non-conformity. In my 8th grade sex ed class back in 1969, I was taught that as a literal truth: that homosexual men think they’re really women. You’ll always be a fairy to the bigots Sullivan.
None of us, the ‘GL’s, the ‘B’s and the ‘T’s behave according to the gender expectations of the majority. That’s why we’re discriminated against. That’s the stinking rotten core of it, along with a healthy dose of misogyny. Men rule, women serve men, wives gracefully submit to their husbands who are the head of the household and all is right with the world. Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals, Transgendered people all throw that nice neat little "natural order" into question and they can’t deal with it. But you need to understand that the problem from their perspective isn’t that you’re homosexual. Many of them insist there is no such thing as a homosexual to begin with, merely damaged heterosexuality. Their problem is that you’re a man who, by having sex with other men, makes himself into a woman. That’s the thinking going on here. They see no distinction, zero, zilch, nada, between a transgendered individual and a homosexual. None.
And this is why any anti-discrimination law that does not include gender expression in it isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. Incrementalism is fine I suppose, when it actually gets you somewhere. Civil Unions before marriage. Okay…I can dig that. I don’t like it but I can dig it. At least Civil Unions are a step forward; at least they’re something. The EDNA passed last week is nothing but hot air and a bunch of preening politicans and HRC lobbyists patting themselves on the back for appearing to be doing something when all along they were too goddamned timid to actually fight for something honestly worthwhile because that might be risky. You know…behaving like democrats always do these days. Any bigot with half a brain can simply say they fired you because you weren’t conforming to their company gender norms, not because of your homosexuality. And Barney Frank has given them the green light to do that, by insisting that the law Specifically omits gender expression as a protected catagory. Lambda Legal has been all over this big honking loophole, and Frank and HRC (say…I thought you didn’t like them Andrew) went ahead and did it anyway.
But then…why someone who doesn’t believe in anti-discrimination laws in the first place is bellyaching about including ‘T’s, when he thinks ‘G’s and ‘L’s and ‘B’s shouldn’t be protected classes either is beyond me. I guess you just have to jerk your knee at every fucking thing that liberals are for, or that you imagine they’re for. The guy who once said that liberals might mount a fifth column against the war on terror is certainly no stranger to how bigots think is he? And I see that the candidacy of Hillary Clinton has you back to nearly full time snarling at the Clintons again hasn’t it? Jesus Christ you are one big fucking bundle of surly knee jerk reflexes aren’t you?
Instead of writing the transgendered out of EDNA, maybe Barney should have just written "No Fems…" into it. That would have made you guys happy, wouldn’t it?
No fems please…we’re all manly cocksuckers here. Hey…don’t get me wrong…I’m a big fan of Y chromosomes myself. Just not the big stupid ones.
We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.
-Ben Franklin
A traveling collection of liturgical stoles will grow by one during its stop in the Toledo area this weekend.
Each of the 1,100 stoles represents a person in one of 26 Christian denominations who was either banned from ministry for their sexual orientation or who feels too threatened to publicly acknowledge that they are gay, lesbian, or bisexual.
The exhibit, called the Shower of Stoles Project, started in 1995 as a "witness of faith" by the Rev. Martha Juillerat, a Presbyterian minister in rural Missouri whose career ended after openly acknowledging she was a lesbian.
The local addition to the stole project is from the Rev. Michelle Stecker, an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and the only cleric in the local presbytery, or regional body, to openly acknowledge she is a lesbian. A second minister was to donate a stole but changed her mind at the last minute.
Although Ms. Stecker remains ordained and in good standing with the denomination, she said she cannot get an assignment because churches are wary of defying the denomination’s ban on gay clerics.
"Since coming out in the media in 2004, there’s no way that a Presbyterian church would call me right now," Ms. Stecker said from Chicago, where she is working for a nonprofit organization. "I know God called me to be a minister, but when I finally realized I had to speak out on social justice issues, I knew it was the end.
"It’s been very sad for me," she said. "I’ve lost my livelihood. I mourn that loss and continue to mourn that loss. I’ve had to retrain for a new profession and I’m starting all over again."
The Shower of Stoles Project will be on display from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. today [This article ran on Saturday November 3rd in the Toledo Blade. -Bruce] in the Wintergarden of the Main Branch of the Toledo-Lucas County Public Library, with members of the local clergy on hand to answer any questions.
"We wanted to have it in a public place where people might just stumble across it, not just those who were planning to see it," said the Rev. Cheri Holdridge, pastor of Central United Methodist Church.
After the library display, the collection will be divided up and stoles will be displayed in 16 churches in northwest Ohio, including those belonging to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, United Methodist, United Church of Christ, Unitarian Universalist, Unity, Episcopal, and Presbyterian Church (USA) denominations.
Ms. Holdridge said the number of churches participating this year is encouraging to people who support the ordination of gays and lesbians. The last time the exhibit came to town, in 2001, only three churches were willing to display the stoles.
"At least we’re making progress," she said. "Central [United Methodist] is on the far edge of being totally accepting. A gay couple can walk in and breathe a sigh of relief and know they can be themselves, but there are more churches at least trying to be welcoming."
Trying. Trying. Trying. Amazing isn’t it, how the simplest most innocuous of words can have such a bitter aftertaste in the mouth…
You’d think that the managers of a gay bar would understand that the climate of violence toward gay people can make their establishments seem to gay bashers, as a waterhole to a leopard…somewhere they know their prey will be. You’d think that they’d keep the safety of their customers (you know…the folks who pay their bills) in mind. You’d think that, at minimum, when a gay man is bashed right at their doorstep, that they’d give the man shelter inside and not have their bouncers throw him back out to the wolves. You’d think…
Two guys stood in front of us hugging. The usual New York traffic passed without dismay until the white Mercedes C-class appeared. The tall bald guy leaned out of the window yelling and screaming obscenities that no one would be proud of—the usual clichés spit towards gay men. It seemed like an incident that could easily be brushed off until he got out of the car. He came toward us, still yelling. He was angry, as if we had personally offended his entire being.
All I saw was a tall muscular man coming toward my friend and these other unsuspecting guys in the path of what seemed to be a disaster. He continued to yell, the couple broke their hug.
My instinct told me that I was the most beefy of all of the guys standing in the breezeway—a silly notion seeming I only stand 5 foot 6. He came within inches. I tried to ward him off by telling him that no one is trying to mess with him. I pleaded for him just to go away. He spit in my face and I knew that I was no match for him. I immediately ran toward the bouncers of the gay club. I got behind the huge door man. The guy was quickly in pursuit behind me, fired up. Out of nowhere a punch landed on the right side of my face. It was the basher’s friend from the passenger seat. I swung, at which point the basher kicked me in the stomach. The bouncers quickly yelled at me to get in the club.
I tried to keep my composure, but ended up in the bathroom stall, crying, ashamed that I wasn’t able to protect myself, my friend or my fellow gay brothers. And then the worst happened…
To my dismay, one of the bouncers found me and told me I had to leave. Leave, I said. I’ve been gay bashed by a stranger. I was protecting my friends and in turn was socked and kicked in the stomach. He stayed firm to his orders. As I walked up the stairs of Splash Bar NYC, I saw one of the managers. I pleaded with him not to kick me out because I was afraid the guy and his friend were still out there. His response: "I don’t know anything about that!"
Before I knew it I was outside and I started to tremble at the sight of a white Mercedes parked down the street. And then a hand grabbed my back and pushed me toward a cab. "Get in, I’m taking you home," my friend said. I hurried inside trying not to cry before the driver pulled off.
As I write this I don’t know what hurts worse: My stomach or my eye or the fact that a gay bar kicked me out and refused to help me. I’ve spent the past five years trying to empower gay men, hoping with all my heart that we can one day roam the streets without being afraid, and here I sit at my computer, hurting physically and psychologically. If we can’t protect ourselves who will? In five years I’ve managed to post nothing but positive comments about any establishment or gay product. During this time my mindset was that there is enough negativity out there for me not to join in and down other gays. Yet I sit here wondering why I even bother when a gay bar (albeit a tragic one called Splash Bar NYC) threw me out to the wolves.
Dig it. A gay basher vomits a string of obscenities at a couple he sees hugging…a thing opposite sex couples do in public every fucking day…and when doing that doesn’t fulfill him enough he and his passenger jump out of their car and one of them proceed to beat the crap out of the a gay guy who tried to protect the couple from being attacked. The gay guy takes refuge in the Splash Bar, only to be almost immediately thrown out back out the door. Luckily for him the attackers were gone by then.
The Splash Bar website has an "Under Construction" page up. No word yet on whether or not their conscience is still under construction too, or when it might be completed. But they have a MySpace profile Here. This reminds me of the contemptible indifference the bathouses gave to the safety of their customers during the initial AIDS outbreak in the early 1980s. But more then that, the history of the institution of the gay bar is more one of preying on the gay community, rather then catering to it, and that’s something we all need to keep in mind as we choose which businesses to patronize, where to spend our hard earned 23 percent less income then the average heterosexual makes.
Back before Stonewall, before the modern gay rights movement, most gay bars were run by organized crime gangs who payed off the local police in order to stay open and serve alcohol in a day when most states and cities had laws forbidding bars from serving known homosexuals. Back when any same sex dancing on the premises could get a bar closed down and it’s patrons arrested, the only gay watering holes that could stay open for very long were the ones run by mobsters who knew which hands to grease and when. Those bars basically treated their gay customers like dogshit, because they knew there were no other places where we could gather, other then back alleys. They served watered down bathtub booze and charged premium prices for it. The bars were pest holes, but they were all we had, and their owners couldn’t have cared less about the people who spent their money there. They didn’t have to. We had nowhere else to go.
Times have changed. I’m sure many gay establishments now are operated by people who feel a close connection to the community, and want us all to prosper and have the good life and enjoy ourselves together. Chasing the Almighty Dollar doesn’t necessarily mean treating your customers like rubes. In fact, that’s always a short sighted path to nowhere. Just ask Detroit. We have come a long way from the days of the seedy mob run bar. But it’s worth remembering that the people who serve us drinks, don’t necessarily give a rat’s ass about us, about our safety, about our basic human dignity. Some of them just want our money. If they could pluck dollar bills off our cold dead gay bashed bodies they would, and spend it the next day on their own cheap thrills without a twinge of remorse or care. You don’t throw someone who’s just been gay bashed back out the door to face his attackers again if you have a single solitary shred of conscience in you. However, if you’re afraid that giving refuge to a gay bashing victim inside your establishment might spoil the atmosphere you’ve so carefully worked to create, and maybe make people spend less money, or even worse, go somewhere else where they might feel safer, then out the door he goes like yesterday’s trash, and your conscience before it.
[Update…] From the comments to Ramone’s blog post…
I am so sorry about the bashing aspect of your story, but the only thing that I wanted to add is that SBNY has a tendency to REMOVE any drama from the bar at first glance. They did it to my partner who slipped on the steps and cut his had on a glass. The wrapped his hand up and told us to get in a cab. In retrospect – they never gave us an apology nor and sympathy or compassion, they just wanted us out. SBNY is lacking compassion and the days where is used to be a good ole neighborhood bar are gone. Now they just want gay dollars for shitty small watered down drinks, and they have no sense of community.
NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) – Gay men, but not lesbians, face discrimination at work, earning up to 23 percent less than married men in some jobs, according to a new study.
Researchers at the University of New Hampshire (UNH) Whittemore School of Business and Economics spent two years analyzing labor and wage data from 91,000 heterosexual and homosexual couples collected by a 2004 U.S. census.
They found that gay men working in management and blue-collar jobs make less money than straight men due to discrimination by their employers
"It was surprising to see how consistent it was that gay men tended to be more discriminated against in traditionally heterosexual male dominated professions — blue collar, labor, and management too," researcher Bruce Elmslie, professor of economics at UNH, told Reuters.
The study found that gay men who live together earn 23 percent less than married men, and 9 percent less than unmarried heterosexual men who live with a woman.
They looked at the top 10 occupations that gay men and lesbians tend to be in and found this discrimination showed up most clearly in management and blue-collar, male-dominated occupations such as building and grounds cleaning, maintenance, and construction.
The only thing that surprises me about this are the figures for lesbian households, because when I was doing volunteer work for a gay community service group, the lesbian households pretty consistently made less money then anyone else. At the time I always put the higher income levels of gay male couples verses lesbian couples down to the combined income of two males verses two females. Female wage equality back then was worse then it is now, but they’re still not making equal money overall with their male counterparts.
But that gay men are pretty relentlessly discriminated against in the workplace surprises me not one iota. I lived that myself for most of my life, and particularly at the critical time in my life when I was just starting to make my way in the workforce. I was ushered out of job after job when my sexual orientation became known to my managers. Mind you…I was never loud about it. But I also refused to actively closet myself either. I mostly just kept quiet about my love life and just tried to get by. But what you have to realize about that is that heterosexuals, particularly heterosexual males, are always bringing up their love lives at work…whether it’s family matters, this and that about the wife or children, or the weekend they just spent with their girlfriends.
I used to smirk whenever some homophobic bigot would go on a rant about teh gays keeping their sex lives out of the workplace because that kind of thing is inappropriate there anyway and if teh gays just kept quiet about all that that they’d get along just fine, because my experience is that usually by the end of the first day at a new job I knew exactly what heterosexuals were married, how many kids they had, and which ones that weren’t married had a girlfriend and which were single and looking, because they just talked about their personal lives as a matter of course. Everyone does. So you notice when somebody isn’t. The single guy who never talks about who he’s dating, sticks out like a sore thumb and it doesn’t take long before the gay rumors about him start flying. Then it’s either you close the closet door on yourself and lie through your teeth about some imaginary girlfriend, or you admit it or just don’t respond to the rumors and either way you’re labellings yourself as gay right there because almost no heterosexual male is going to just let people wonder if he’s gay or not.
So it’s either hide in the closet or let them know one way or another. And then comes the consequences. For me, it was never being able to hold down a job for longer then a year. I eventually gave up trying to find a staff position anywhere, and just began working various jobs on a freelance basis. I struggled for years, just to be able to pay rent on a room in someone else’s house and take the bus to and from work.
Now I’m working for an employer that takes diversity in the work force very, very seriously and I am finally able to live a nice, middle class life. I’m good at what I do. I give 100 percent to The Institute every day I work here. I earn my paycheck. I have a nice little Baltimore rowhouse now. I just bought the car of my dreams. I am not fabulously well off by any means but I’m living comfortably in a nice house, in a nice city neighborhood within walking distance of work. I’m able to help out with things in my community, support other folks who need it now. Life is good. All I ever needed was a chance. But for so long, so very very long, I couldn’t have that chance. Because I am gay. And that’s why we need laws protecting us from discrimination.
They won’t work perfectly of course…bigots will always find a way to weasel around them. But they’ll make a big difference in our lives. And that means prejudice in America wastes a little less of America’s human capital. What you have to understand about bigots is that for all the patriotic posturing they really don’t give a good goddamn about their country. They would rather live in an America that was poorer economically and more vulnerable strategically, then live in an America that was prosperous and secure, if that means they have to get off the backs of the people they hate.
In the mid-1980s, I was on one local BBS system that had a gay Fidonet echomail board. Called Gaylink, it had participating BBS systems on it all over the world. Back in those days, I had an uncle who was a HAM radio operator, and was trying to interest me in taking up the hobby. He kept trying to tell me about all the people all over the world he was able to communicate with via shortwave radio, and I kept trying to tell him about all the people all over the world I was communicating with via FidoNet.
Gaylink was mostly a social forum. We chatted about this and that…a little politics, a little dishing. It never really got very serious. Then one day a message from a BSS in the Netherlands appeared. It was short and to the point:
I’m 14 years old. I think I might be gay but I’m not sure. How did you know about yourself? What was it like?
And from literally all over the world this kid got coming-out-to-self stories. Some of them were painful to read. Some were hopeful. Some were amazingly nonchalant. There were folks whose parents disowned them. There were others whose parents completely accepted them. Some people struggled for years with it. Others seemed to have always known and accepted it. There was romance. There was heartbreak. I sat down and for the first time ever, really thought about my own experience coming to terms with my sexual orientation, and wrote it down for this kid, and the whole world to see. I could sense that something…wonderful…was happening.
It went on for two weeks. We never heard a peep from the kid throughout that entire time. And the stories, from all over the world, from people in all walks of life, just kept coming and coming. We all began talking to each other, seeing common threads in our lives that we all had, which set us apart from the heterosexual majority. Seeing those things that made each of us unique and at the same time those things we all seemed to share, no matter where we lived, no matter what culture we were raised in. Then the kid spoke up one last time:
Thank you. You’ve all given me a lot to think about.
That was it. We never heard another word from him. Maybe we gave him what he needed to accept himself. Maybe he was just confused about his own awakening sexuality, and what it meant to be homosexual. At that age, who knows? Maybe he wasn’t what he represented himself to be. But as I watched that event unfold I realized that apart from this one Dutch teenager, there had to also be hundreds of others, all over the world, generation upon generation, watching that conversation, hungry for those same answers to that kid’s question. And I saw then what this new technology could do for us as a people. We no longer had to see ourselves through heterosexual eyes.
When I came out to myself in 1971, nearly everything I knew about homosexuals and homosexuality, I’d learned from heterosexuals. In those days, before the Internet, before the World Wide Web, before Blogs and MySpace and Facebook, what you knew depended in large measure on what the popular media wanted to tell you. Before cable TV, there were only three TV networks. You had your local newspaper. You had your local radio stations. You had whatever books and magazines the local stores were selling. And that was it basically. I had to struggle, in a way most of you reading this now probably never had to, to dig up anything factual, anything at all, about homosexuality. The image the popular media put forward of homosexuals was relentlessly negative. We were perverts. We were psychotic deviants. We were dangerous, deranged sexual predators. We raped children and then murdered them. We skulked the shadows looking for unwitting victims. Even we didn’t enjoy the sex we were having. We were mentally ill, psychotic, perverted, sexual compulsives, unable to keep ourselves from engaging in horrible, vile, deviant sex acts that repulsed even us. There is a film, The Detective, about a homosexual murder: watch the murderer’s tortured confession at the end to see what sick monsters the popular media viewed us as being back then.
Now, it seemed in the blink of an eye, all of that had been swept away. Maybe not from the eyes of our heterosexual neighbors, but critically, finally, from our own. We no longer had to see ourselves through heterosexual eyes. You have to appreciate how revolutionary that was back then.
Vince Cervantes, an ex-gay survivor and one of the this year’s Soulforce Equality Riders (and an attender of this summer’s Ex-Gay Survivor Conference), has been sharing his experiences on his blog and through video. In the following two videos he goes into detail about the reasons he pursued a variety of ex-gay therapies and ministries. He really captures the mindset, the motivations and the conflicts that many us experienced when we lived ex-gay lives.
Now we can tell our stories via Internet TV. While the corporate news media is still telling itself its comfortable lies about us, we can tell our own stories, in our own words, to each other, no matter where we live, no matter what our circumstances are. And to anyone who wants to hear it from us, as opposed to heterosexuals talking to each other. You want to know why the gay rights struggle has made so much progress, so quickly, this is why. It isn’t the decline of civilization. It isn’t falling moral standards. It isn’t rampant godlessness. Once upon a time the only image we had of ourselves was the mask heterosexuals made from their own sexual guilt and paranoia to make us wear. Once upon a time they could make us hate ourselves. If you understand nothing else about the gay rights struggle, understand this: those days are over.
They were waning as it was, thanks to the changes brought about after world war II. Jet air travel. Interstate highways. Greater mobility. We could migrate to where it was safer for us to live. There was already a critical mass developing in the major urban centers of America and the western world, to push for change. Where we could live together in relative peace, we could see ourselves as we were, not as the scarecrows of other people’s sexual fears and self loathings. But then the personal computer came along, and computer networks with them, and suddenly no matter where you lived, no matter how isolated you thought you were, you could reach out in an instant, in a heartbeat, and connect to a community of other gay people. All over the country. All over the world. And what we saw when we did that, were not monsters, but people. The first person you come out to is yourself. The first eyes you open to the truth are yours. Your own story is a part of that truth. Every time you share it with another, you defeat hate.
I’m fortunate enough to be working for an employer that takes diversity in the workplace serious. I have never, Never, felt more comfortable as a gay man in the workplace as I have at Space Telescope. The work environment I’ve experienced has been pleasant, professional, and genuinely good-natured. But I have worked in a hostile environment too, so I know how it is. I’ve been told to my face that there was "no place for homosexuals in our company". And I’ve been let go in situations that I was certain were about my sexual orientation and nothing else, even when other excuses were being made. I’ve been harassed, I’ve been threatened. I’ve seen the atmosphere turn on a dime, the instant my sexual orientation became known.
365Gay.Com has a good post up today, about the Gay Glass Ceiling. There’s an interesting little tidbit in it…
In one ingenious study at Rice University, undergraduates were fitted with one of two hats: one of them said “Texan and proud”; the other, “Gay and proud.” The students didn’t know which hat they were wearing, but they were instructed to apply for retail jobs.
The researchers found something interesting: the gay hat-wearing students were just as likely to be hired as the Texan-hat wearing students. There was no hiring discrimination (and in fact, the students were in a municipality that protects against gay employment discrimination). But the interviewers were more hostile toward the gay hat-wearing students and more likely to end the interview early.
Most students were able to tell which hat they were wearing from the treatment they received.
I’ll bet they were. The difference between being gay, and being black or Hispanic, is that you can’t usually tell someone’s gay just by looking at them. Unless something in their job application or resume alerts them to it, a prospective employer isn’t likely to know that the person they’re interviewing for a job is gay. So white gay folks don’t generally experience job discrimination upfront. But unless the gay person is deeply, and I mean Deeply closeted, sooner or later their co-workers figure it out and then things change.
The glass ceiling is what you experience if you’re lucky. Otherwise you are simply ushered out the door. Sometimes they tell you to your face it’s because you’re gay. Sometimes they make some other excuse. When the religious right points to studies that they claim prove that gay people earn far more money then heterosexuals, what they’re really pointing to are studies that prove that rich people aren’t as afraid of being open about their sexual orientation on a job survey form as someone barely making ends meet has to be.
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