Pancake City

I was reluctant until now to comment on Sen. Craig’s arrest in a Minnesota airport bathroom for allegedly trying to initiate sex with another man. It’s a whirlwind of homophobia and denial that isn’t pretty to look at.

It’s hard to believe that the Republican Congressional leadership would have reacted so quickly if Sen. Craig was caught cheating on his wife with another woman. I think the message they got from the Mark Foley scandal wasn’t “Don’t cover up your own who use their power to prey on others” but “gay + sex = bad.” Some of them don’t even need the “+sex” part.

Yet there is news that Sen. Craig is reconsidering his decision to resign and fight his guilty plea. By guilty plea, I mean his homo- or bi-sexuality.

While part of me welcomes the forthcoming amusement from the reinvigoration of a story that was already fading from the nation’s conscience, I don’t think this is what Dylan Thomas meant when we wrote, “Do not go gentle into that good night.” Or in Sen. Craig’s poetry book, “Do not go gentle into that good nightclub on bear night.”

I had my own issues with coming out as a gay man and still have work to do accepting my sexuality. I understand the great fear of shedding your old life and having to reconstruct your whole identity, who you thought you were for most of your life. But damn it man, you got in a public bathroom doing a homosexual Kabuki dance trying to entice the guy in the stall next to you to give you a reach around. It’s time to give it up and put on a pair of hot pants.

I know, gay men don’t wear hot pants anymore. But when your psyche is fractured to the point that when the national spotlight sends your gay side scurrying back into the closet, unscrewing the light bulb, and hanging a sign on the door that says “Out for lunch! Will be back in: NEVER”, you have to start somewhere.

I felt some sympathy for what has to be one of the worst coming out experiences ever. Now that it looks like he’s looking to fight the “charges” instead of starting the difficult process of accepting them, a lot of that sympathy is gone. It just reinforces an idea some people still have that being gay is an albatross that should be avoided and fought at all costs.

On a final note, what spurred this post was a throwaway line at the end of the aforementioned article:

“All three of Craig’s adopted children said Tuesday they believe their father’s assertions he is not gay and did nothing to warrant his arrest.”

Hey, here’s a sign that you may be gay: not being able to ejaculate in a woman. Other signs: actually, there are no other signs. That’ll pretty much do it.

I am very happy that one of the most anti-gay U.S. Senators will not be coming back for a second term.

Unfortunately, the same-sex marriage super ban was approved in Virginia by a solid majority. It’s already banned, but now it’s in the state constitution, written with unerasable ink.

It’s nice to know that when everything is going wrong, you can still pick yourself up by bashing a gay person. We’re the chocolate of bigots.

How homophobic is Virginia?

Gay marriage is already barred under state law. Enough? No. A constitutional amendment was proposed to prevent not only marriage for gay people, but any type of same-sex partnership.

The amendment has to be approved by both houses in the state legislature two years in a row before being brought to the voters for approval. It did so overwhelmingly both years. The governor, a moderate Democrat (or in Virginia, a left-wing radical) is against the amendment. His argument? The amendment is so loosely worded that it may deny the rights of other straight people.

Wow.

Canada, sorry for poking fun at you last week. We need a foreign exchange program. Half of Virginians for the same number of Canadians. We don’t have ice hockey, and our beer isn’t that great, but you can legally carry a gun in the state house (I found this out when one of the delegates accidentally discharged his weapon last week).

While the march for gay equality takes a few steps back periodically, things are significantly better than they were 20 years ago, or even ten. But there is still a lot of homophobia when it comes to male sexuality. Even in D.C.’s Dupont Circle, a supposed hub of gay life, most gay men don’t feel comfortable holding hands with their boyfriends.

For most of us, it’s not because we don’t enjoying showing affection in that way. It’s because the stares and more negative responses turn the act from an unconscious expression of love to a calculated decision to violate social mores. Not very romantic, is it?

That’s why I think we should have a National Hand Holding Day…for Gays! It will be sponsored by the Just for Men line of hair coloring products. On that day, gay men across the country, from states like Texas, Virginia, Georgia, Alabama…

Okay, gay men in D.C. and San Francisco will hold hands in public with their boyfriends. Gay men without boyfriends will grab the hand of a stranger and confuse him for a while. National Hand Holding Day…for Gays! will do much to reduce the latent homophobia that exists even in the nations’ most gay-friendly communities. It will be a rousing success.

Especially because it’s going to come after National Ass Grabbing Day…for Gays! Everything is relative. If we go straight to the hand holding, people will comment, “Eww, two men are holding hands! And neither of them is an oil sheik.”

But if we start off walking with our hands in each other’s back pockets, and then follow it up with holding hands, people will say: “Thank God they went back to the hand holding. The ass grabbing made me feel uncomfortable and confused.”

So there it is. National Ass Grabbing and Hand Holding days. I know gay women have their own unique issues with the public’s perception of their sexuality, so we will hold separate days for them. They will be identical to the days for the men, except during Ass Grabbing Day we’ll beat up anyone who whips out a video camera.

I tuned in late to President Bush’s SOTU address and entertained myself by getting a running tally of standing ovations vs. smirks. It was 17 standing ovations to 14 smirks when he said he supported a constitutional amendment against gay marriage and some Republicans leapt out their seats and erupted in glee.

I haven’t seen people get this excited about discrimination since the 1950s. It’s too bad our leaders don’t get as excited about reducing the budget deficit. Bush mentioned “deficit” once and “freedom” 21 times. If only someone could get him to view the issue as “Freedom…from deficits!” or to reframe tax cuts as “Freedom cuts” we would be getting somewhere.

I wonder how long the President’s mention of a gay-marriage amendment will go to satiate the religious conservatives who threatened to withhold supporting his Social Security proposal if he doesn’t submit an amendment to Congress. (Evidentially, Jesus hates Social Security and gays.) I almost feel sad for the conservatives that thinks he really cares about it. Bush is going on daily trysts with his Social Security privatization proposal, doodling hearts over its name, spending all his time daydreaming about it, fantasizing about gliding his fingertips over Privy’s rippling muscles that will tear Social Security apart out of love for him.

Then he gets home to Ms. Anti-Gay Marriage, her hair in curlers and covered by a fishnet cap, her pink bathrobe tightly knotted at the waist to squeeze in her corpulent belly. She is on the verge of tears. “I need to know: do you love me?” George sighs. “Yeah, yeah. Of course.” She grabs his shirt, almost pulling it off with her pudgy, chocolate-covered fingers on it. “Then take me.”

George muffles his revulsion. All that escapes is an almost imperceptible shudder. “How about next week? I’m really tired” he says and runs off to the bedroom before she can argue.

He pulls the covers tightly over his head. She pays the rent, but he won’t need her for ever. “Just a few more months. A few more months.”

Sometimes I wonder if James Dobson, leader of the religious nutjob group “Focus on the Family”, is secretly an athiest trying to tarnish religion in general. Every few months, he makes some loonly anti-gay comment under the name of God and it gets spread out through the entire media.

You may have heard of his recent attack against SpongeBob SquarePants and other cartoon characters for appearing in a children’s video designed to promote tolerance of all people, including EVIL GAYS.

The United Church of Christ came out with a hilarious response to him. I wish more religious organizations would repudiate Dobson as publicly.

For a month, just a month, we need to kidnap 20 million U.S. religious nuts, swap them with 20 million Canadians, and pass a telephone book worth of good laws. “Hey, fundies! Welcome home. Oh, by the way, while you were gone, we legalized gay marriage, laminated the Constitution so you can’t change it back, installed a laser system in government buildings that will destroy any version of the Ten Commandments within 50 feet, got Barbara Bush to spank George at his inauguration, and renamed partial-birth abortions God, at least until you make an exception for protecting the health of the mother. So if God is telling you to ban God, well, that Her business.

Yup. It’s Her now. We’re taking turns. But don’t worry. We’ll switch back in 1,000 years.

This is almost beyond words. NBC and CBS are refusing to air an ad because it makes the “controversial” statement that turning people away from a church because they are gay is wrong.

It’s a good thing Janet Jackson’s nipple wasn’t gay, or the villagers would have burnt the network down.

You can watch the horrifying ad here, and read about the networks’ justification for rejecting the ad here.

I thought I wasn’t going to write anymore about the debates. With the lack of novelty of the debates and some projects that are constantly swirling around in my head, the motivation just wasn’t there.

But in one of the fastest responses I have seen, Lynne Cheney has already commented on Kerry’s answer to the question, “Is homosexuality a choice?”

You can read her response here. In essense, she says this part of Kerry’s answer, “If you were to talk to Dick Cheney’s daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you that she’s being who she was, she’s being who she was born as” is a cheap, political trick.

Thank God she isn’t my Mom.

If my Mom chose to defend a man who, when asked is homosexuality a choice, said “I don’t know” over a man who said “No, it isn’t, and you should know better,” I’d have a big problem with her.

“I don’t know” isn’t a response. “I don’t know” means either “It is a choice, but I won’t want to seem like an extremist” or “It is how you are born, but I don’t want to piss off the bigots in my base.”

Maybe twenty years ago “I don’t know” was an acceptable response, but it doesn’t cut it today. I’d love to hear what her daughter has to say about this.

…the last time the terror alert level was green?

At least 9/11 didn’t happen in 1952. The calm color would have been white, and it would have escalated several shades of grey up to a dangerous black.

The blue to red color scheme we use is appropriate. One, it is consistent with the scheme for traffic lights, although at red lights most people don’t pee in their pants. Two, Democrats come from blue states, and Democrats are pussies about terrorism. They think the world is calm and Osama bin Laden is prancing around the daisy field. “La la la!” sings Osama. “I hope George W. Bush wins. Then John Kerry will hold a bake sale for my next al Qaeda recruitment drive. Dick Cheney said so. I love Kerry’s brownies.”

Yes, that is what Democrats think. But the third reason the terror alert color scheme is ideal surpasses the first two. It matches the spectrum of the rainbow. The terror alert system, in addition to protecting us from terrorist attacks through its irritating shades of orange and red, is also a gay alert system:

Gay people are A-OK.
Gay people help us dress.
I like the funny gays, but not the ones that have sex.
Dem people are going to destroy marriage like a pink Godzilla on Tokyo!
We need Alan Keyes as President.

The system ties in nicely with the red and blue states, doesn’t it?

Gay Street

Is there a gay porno called “The Passion of Chris”? Because now would be a great time to release it into theaters.
[15 minutes into the movie]
“Daddy, why is Jesus wearing a leather mask?”
“I thought crucifixion was supposed to hurt. So why is Jesus smiling?”

***

DOCTOR: “Mr. Ashcroft, as part of the pre-operation prep, we’re going to insert four thin cameras down your throat so we can map out your stomach.”
ASHCROFT: “But the problem is with my gallbladder, not my stomach.”
DOCTOR: [shoves cameras down throat] Yup. Welcome to Metaphor Hospital.”

I’ve been checking out a gay dating site, manline.com, recently. It has what has to be the gay dating site slogan ever: “Great men from top to bottom.”

It will be marriage in Massachusetts, not civil unions. The highest state court ruled today that the legislature cannot offer gay couples civil unions with full rights in lieu of marriage.

I’m glad this is happening, and I’m glad this is happening today. Some gay people are content with the word civil unions if it comes with the same rights as marriage. I’m not, for the same reasoning as the courts: it’s a return of “separate but equal” that creates a second class of citizens.

Some people would also prefer that we have this debate a few years from now, when society might be more accepting and there would therefore be less of a legislative backlash. I may have agreed with this 10 years ago, when the threat of constitutional revisions were much more of a possibility, but that’s not a big threat now. Even some people against marriage are against barring it by amending the constitution. The only other realistic option today to prevent gay marriage is legislative, and those laws can be struck down by the courts.

My other argument on why this decision comes at the right time in history is more subtle. The acceptance of gay people in our culture started at the direct experience level, e.g. a straight person finds out his best friend is gay, and has a conflict with his previous, socialized belief that being gay is weird and/or immoral. This isn’t an easy conflict to resolve. But once enough people did, the idea that we should accept gay people began bubbling up into the socialization process, through TV shows and other media. We’re at the point now that most kids are being socialized to accept gay people, almost a complete reversal from 20 years ago. In one poll on gay marriage, 61% of 18- to 29-year-olds favor it; 18% of people 65 and older do.

Here’s my point: having the courts establish the legality of gay marriage strengthens this socialization process, even if it’s just a bit. More importantly, it weakens the socialization process with the opposite message, that gays marriage is wrong. It is harder to make an argument that directly contradicts the law, whether it’s a good argument (blacks has a right to equality) or a bad one.

In the past, when the courts have made rulings that society wasn’t “ready” for (I’m thinking about civil rights here), society eventually adjusted to the ruling, much faster I would argue then if one just waited for people to change on their own. In other words, you may have to cram enlightenment down people’s throats, but once you do, they eventually swallow (who wants to extend this metaphor to puking?). And because I think there isn’t enough support for constitutional amendments today at either the national or state level, I feel this ruling comes at the right time.