Darkside Rainbow

Since today is the first day of the new year, you’d think I’d have resolved not to sleep past noon. Ah, well. One less resolution to break. Since I’m not even technically supposed to be working today (day off and all, natch) and I’m not feeling particularly talkative, you won’t be getting a rant/dissertation/sudden and prolonged case of diarrhea of the mouth today. Here’s a few points of interest in the news, instead:

Huckabee admits that homosexuality may be involuntary, but says that practicing it is a choice: In a move typical of good ol’ Huck, he proves that he has no bloody idea what’s going on and will say just about anything to give himself an excuse to continue being an ignorant schmuck. (Me? Claws out this afternoon? Never.) I suppose since he managed to smooth out that debacle from the nineties about isolating AIDS patients (yeah, about as smooth as rocky road ice cream), he’s just going to keep going until he finally says something that’ll eclipse it.

This isn’t quite that bad, but it does raise the question: if Huckabee indeed believes that we’re born gay, does that mean that in his eyes we’re born into sin and there’s no hope for salvation? Or are we born into sin but can be saved as long as we don’t engage in any homosexual activity, thus denying who we are and accepting a hateful belief that to love others according to our nature is wrong?

See that? That crap is one of the many reasons I’m an atheist. We ask the easy questions.

“Do you believe in God?”
“Nope.”
“Okay, that wipes out 99% of the ‘Life Guidelines’ questionnaire. Let’s just cover the key basics, then. Are you a viable, self-supporting member of society who contributes to the economy?”
“Yep.”
“Do you hate anyone just because an invisible man in the sky tells you to?”
“Uh…no.”
“Are your actions in any way causing harm to yourself or others?”
“Nope.”
“Are you engaging in mass destruction of property or any other criminal activity possibly involving napalm?”
“Not the last time I checked.”
“Okay, you’re good to go, then.”
“Nifty.”

See? Problem solved. (Of course, you could also argue that atheists are lazy and take the easy way out, while people of faith follow a more difficult path, which brings up the subject of why despite my sarcasm I actually respect many people of faith for choosing the more difficult road, but…that’s not a topic for this column. Moving on…)

New Year, New Unions for Gay Couples: When the ball dropped at the start of the new year today, it didn’t just signify the beginning of a new year; it signified the beginning of new rights for gay partners who wish to engage in legalized unions. New Hampshire’s legislature on gay partnerships went into effect at midnight, and dozens of couples lined up to tie the knot. While the cynic in me says half of them were just doing it for the novelty and will be divorced by 2009 (hell, I was tempted to grab R and drag him up there just to make a statement, but I think within a month I’d have been on my knees begging him to sign the divorce papers)…the rest of me hopes that those couples find the happiness they deserve.

Remind me to never visit Spain: The Pope is at it again, this time with a Dec. 31st broadcast that apparently went over quite swimmingly in Madrid. In it he said the family was “based on the unbreakable union of man and woman and represents the privileged environment where human life is welcomed and protected from the beginning to its natural end.”

Privileged environment.

Jay-sus, I feel like it’s the segregation days all over again. Or at least my college years in Alabama. Elitist b*****d.

I’m starting to feel like the Pope and George W. are joined at the brain. The Pope is playing hard on this traditional family bit and rallying against gay marriage until he’s about to give himself a hernia from the strain, and GW is still spouting off one of his favorite catch phrases: “sanctity of marriage”. To quote one of the Andies: “change the f***in’ record.”

The sad thing is, repeating something over and over again doesn’t show faith in one’s convictions. It demonstrates an inability to adapt, an inability to discuss one’s stance from a logical standpoint with valid reasoning to back it, and an inability to accept that the world might not actually operate according to one’s hidebound beliefs. It’s another example of not wanting to own up to the fact that one’s prejudices are wholly one’s own responsibility, rather than hiding behind dogma as a shield.

That’s it from me. Just that little bit and I’m burnt, spent, and done - longer than I intended, but still not quite one of my usual sermons on a single topic. I need some verbal Viagra or something, as long as it doesn’t make me go deaf.

Screw it, I’m goin’ back to bed. See you tomorrow, hopefully before noon.

~Adri

mike huckabee, homosexuality as a sin, gay marriage, new hampshire, civil unions, new year, pope benedict xvi, george w. bush, sanctity of marriage, traditional family, madrid

Today is not a day to discuss gay news.

Today is a day to discuss world news, and the death of a woman who accomplished many things in her life and will now influence even more in her death.

If you’ve kept even one ear open to the news, you know that yesterday former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated, killed by a bullet to the neck before a suicide bomber detonated near her vehicle, killing at least twenty other people at the election rally she’d attended. Bhutto was the first democratically elected female PM of Pakistan, and a voice of opposition against other Pakistani political leaders.

Her death has sparked worldwide concern over the fate of elections, Pakistani democracy, and even the overall stability of a nuclear-armed country - and has thrown Pakistan into chaos. Over a dozen have died in protests and riots; buildings and vehicles have been bombed, burned, and ransacked. Police have been called out in force to suppress violence. Supporters are already pointing fingers and handing out political propaganda accusing her rivals, including Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. The grief and anger of a nation are felt on every street, in every home. Across the globe, people hold their breaths and wait for the tide of chaos to ebb, to see what will remain washed up on shore.

Bhutto’s life was one of turmoil and unrest as she sailed through unstable and even dangerous political seas. She represented change and progress - but even more, she represented choice. In her absence and with her strongest rival boycotting the elections after her death, there will be little choice for the Pakistani people and the upcoming elections will border on a farce.

Here in the United States we watch, we listen to the statements of our president, and many of us find it difficult to comprehend that the death of one woman could possibly change the political tenor of an entire country. We thank whatever deity we believe in that such things rarely happen here. We cross ourselves and pray that Pakistan’s unrest will not spread to touch our shores, and whisper over nuclear capability in what-if situations that change little but that make us feel as if we’re “on top of things” by discussing them. Little in our world has changed. Little in our world would change, if we found ourselves in the same situation.

If Hillary Clinton was assassinated before the 2008 presidential election and the nation suspected rival Mike Huckabee, we wouldn’t riot in the streets. We wouldn’t protest. Very few of us would take action at all. We would press our fat, soft fingers to our mouths and make distressed noises. We would stand on our soapboxes and preach angrily, and yet rally to do nothing. We would talk about it over business lunches and coffee breaks. We would point fingers from the comfort of our sofas and wait for the television to tell us who did it, to give us our neatly-packaged daily dose of current events. We would obey any edict that our governing bodies laid out, and accept their promises that they would handle everything even if we didn’t quite believe it. In a nation of millions only a small few would gather to raise their voices, to speak their hearts and minds - and they would quickly be silenced and sent to their homes by police officers, riot armor at the ready.

Why? Because we are complacent, compliant, and even a little afraid. We are afraid to lose the comforts of our lives, and know that the death of but one politician cannot strip the nation of said comforts - but the acts of one in response to that death can strip that individual of his or her possessions, freedom, possibly even their life. We weep in the name of patriotism, but these are no longer the days of JFK. We feel little for our leaders. They are neither beloved nor trusted. Most people don’t even know exactly what it is they do, or care. This is not the nation of our fathers.

And this is not Pakistan, where the silencing of a single voice can change the political face of an entire country - where the death of one woman can shape the lives of a nation.

You can view this in whatever light you want, positive or negative. You can say that we’ve grown apathetic, or you can say that we are stable. You can say we’re blind followers, or you can say that we have faith in the process, and that our nation is so large and so secure that not even the death of a major political figure could shake it beyond dominating news headlines and initiating changes in federal security policy that the people would have little say in. We are safe from riots, and from mass violence. We are safe from everything, because we are everything and while headlines are interesting, we’re more worried about making it to work on what little gas is left in the tank. We play the short game, the nine to five, the game of life and all its minutiae. We are the trees, and we rarely take notice of our existence as part of a greater arboreal entity that is comprised by us and yet at the same time encompasses us.

We are people of small lives and small concerns - but our nation is a large and slow-moving beast, ponderous and difficult to sway in its path, often little caring for what other creatures it tramples underfoot.

And I think that, even if we could see clearly that our path wound its way towards a long and unforgiving cliff, very few of us would try to change the beast’s direction.

Would you?

benazir bhutto assassinated, pakistan, pakistani president pervez musharraf, nawaz sharif

I hope you all had a lovely holiday/government-sanctioned day off of work yesterday; for the most part, I did. Christmas dinner yesterday went swimmingly, even if my mother just had to call before bed last night and make sure she said just the right things to ensure that the grand tradition of tears on Christmas continued for a 27th year. She still didn’t spoil dinner; nor did she entirely spoil my night, as an absolutely lovely man did a stunning job of cheering me up. Thank you.

Dinner began as just R, one of the Reds, and I. When it got around that I was cooking (and what I was cooking), suddenly it became R, Red, girl!R, girl!R’s girlfriend, C, and C’s girlfriend (and J stopped in later to get a nibble of what was left). I made rainbow trout stuffed with watercress and chestnuts, then wrapped in more watercress and baked in a white wine, lemon, and butter sauce, a spinach and cheese bake with pecans, lightly sweetened beer bread, baklava, and cinnamon and nutmeg cupcakes with whipped almond icing and little almond slivers on top. I was expecting to have leftovers. I wasn’t expecting to feed so many hungry mouths.

We had a generally good time; some of us got mildly tipsy, while R! and Red had enough sherry to end up lip-locked on my couch before passing out (and this morning, waking up with shrieks of “oh my god, I made out with a man!” “oh my god, I made out with a WOMAN!” Who needs to mess with glutamate when they have alcohol?). We watched Deja Vu (horrible film), chatted, and everyone except C’s girlfriend enjoyed themselves immensely.

C’s girlfriend sat in the corner, sulked, threw in nasty comments whenever she could, and demanded to leave over and over until C was forced to excuse himself before the film was even over lest she stab him with a fork. She’d been happy to come before, but wasn’t so pleased once she arrived. Why?

She was the only straight person there, and it made her uncomfortable.

Even C is bi; he just happened to fall for a woman this time. His girlfriend has always been nervous about his bisexuality, wondering if it meant he needed to fool around with men on the side and couldn’t be happy with just her, but for the most part she’s not homophobic - just a little sheltered and somewhat ignorant. She’s the kind who’ll ask an offensive question not out of a desire to be malicious, but because she really doesn’t understand and wants to learn.

Okay, she’s also a raging b*tch and I can’t stand her, but I’m trying to give her the benefit of the doubt here. She was being nasty, yes, but we did make her feel ostracized without meaning to. We talked about old same-sex partners, there were a few raunchy gay-themed in-jokes, we even talked GBLTQ politics over dinner, and those inclined to (read: everyone but me) talked gay gossip in TV and films as well as in our local community’s little circle. We didn’t mean for it to become a “gay old time”, pun intended, but since it was a common thread between us, it did dominate perhaps 30% of the conversation with other topics liberally sprinkled in - topics she could have joined in on, but that she was sulking too much to participate in.

When people started to notice that she was pouting and withdrawing, we asked if she was all right, made efforts to draw her out and cheer her up, but by then it was too late. Once we finished dinner and took dessert with us to watch TV, she’d retreated to a corner of the couch to hide behind C and refused to talk save for to lean over to whisper to him until, 20 minutes into the film, he abruptly stood up, apologized, and escorted her out. She spoke only to thank me for the lovely meal and then threw on a rather snottily-toned “and the hospitality” as an afterthought, glared at everyone, and then left.

We just sat there and stared at each other.

While it was her choice to behave brattily and I have zero tolerance for that, I couldn’t help but feel bad for her. How many times have I found myself in an uncomfortable situation as the only gay person there, in which many aspects of the conversation went beyond my realm of experience and I wasn’t comfortable joining in to add my own experiences? Hell, that’s one reason I avoid my family. Only one other person in the family (that we know of) is gay, and so at family reunions we inevitably find ourselves dealing with uncomfortable heterocentric questions about when we’re going to bring home an opposite-sex partner, or becoming the circus sideshow of the gathering with people interrogating us about our “lifestyle”. Gays everywhere deal every day with being the odd man out in a predominantly heterosexual society, and we all know how it is to feel utterly isolated even in a group of our peers.

So even if I can’t stand the girl, I felt horrible for turning around and doing the same to her.

Just as a thought exercise, I wrote a post about heterophobia quite some time ago. This situation wasn’t as extreme as the one described, but it was one in which a heterosexual person was left out of the loop and made to feel uncomfortable because she wasn’t “like us” - the same thing that heterosexuals do to us regularly, whether intentionally or unintentionally.

What could we have done to make her more comfortable? I don’t know. We could have avoided anything gay-oriented in our conversation, but then that deliberate stifling would have ruined the mood and made everyone uncomfortable. We can’t help that most of our friends are gay and thus the majority in any gathering will be gay, lesbian, or bisexual; we tend to cluster together just so we can avoid feeling ostracized among our heterosexual friends - so we can have somewhere where we are the norm and we don’t have to feel left out. It’s a vicious cycle of self-segregation that causes us to perpetuate the same social divisions that made us so uncomfortable in the first place.

Whether we realize it or not, we’re part of the problem.

I, for one, would love to try as many solutions as it takes to fix it.

No such thing as a flawless fricking Christmas, happy effin’ holidays, heterophobia, social isolation

When I woke this morning to the sounds of very loud carolers wandering through my apartment complex, my first thought wasn’t “Yay, it’s Christmas.” My first thought was “If they don’t shut up, I’m going to take my cat” - who has not, by the way, been declawed - “out there and stuff him down the front of someone’s pants. It’ll certainly improve the quality of that bloody yowling.”

Yeah, I’ve got the Christmas spirit, don’t I?

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate Christmas. I hate the materialism of it, I hate that people use it as an excuse to shove religion down my throat, and oh dear gods, do I hate the crowds of Christmas shoppers.

But I love the smiles on my friends’ faces when they open their gifts, even though just a week ago they were scowling because I absolutely forbade them from buying anything for me. I love the way the city looks at night, when you can walk down the street and see Christmas lights in almost every window. I love the sense of exhilarated peace that seems to come with the season, once the sun sets and those artificial stars twinkle from every rooftop and every lawn. I love the general spirit of the holiday, even if I don’t believe in the current Christian principle behind it.

And I love that this is the first time in recent memory that I haven’t had to deal with a boyfriend’s parents on Christmas.

I can not stand the “meet the family” ritual around Christmas. They always seem to think that since I don’t particularly want to spend Christmas with my drama-llama family (where it’s not unlikely that someone will have to separate my mother and aunt Mary before they draw blood in a front-lawn fistfight over something or other, usually something related to pie), I have to spend Christmas with someone’s family. Just once, I’d love to drill it through someone’s head that I am not a family person.

Especially since my boyfriends’ mothers inevitably hate me.

Fathers, brothers, sisters, etc…we all get along great. The maternal units, on the other hand, view me with unbridled loathing no matter how polite, gentlemanly, and respectful I am. I dress nicely, tie the hair back, make myself look presentable enough to meet Mother Theresa at the pearly gates, but it’s never good enough. Arturo’s mother pitched a fit at the dinner table when he brought me into the room; I suppose I’d have been more upset if I’d understood enough Spanish to catch anything she said beyond a sudden English burst of “harlot”. Patrick’s mother took one look at me and said “Oh, dear, I didn’t raise you to date wetbacks.” That offended the hell out of me, and I’m not even Hispanic. I’ll spare you my response, as it involved more ethnic slurs than you can likely imagine.

There has not been a single “meet the family” Christmas gig where I didn’t show up with a smile on my face and determination to make a good impression only to quietly excuse myself within minutes, ostensibly on the polite premise that I didn’t want to disrupt the family’s happy gathering - but really so they wouldn’t see me struggling to hold back tears at being so viciously attacked by these women for doing nothing, when I was trying my damnedest to do the whole family-holiday thing for the boyfriend’s sake. The only matriarch who ever liked me was the mother of the British-Chinese boy that I dated in the years between Try #1 and Try #2 with The Ex, and with her overseas in England the closest I came to meeting her was voice conference via Skype. Maybe if I’d met her face to face, she wouldn’t have been nearly as welcoming.

I don’t know what it is about me. Since other people don’t generally have that sort of vicious reaction to me on sight, I can only conclude - for the sake of my self esteem, among other things - that it’s not me at all. It’s what I represent: a visual confirmation that yes, her son is gay, and no, baby boy likely won’t be bringing home any fat, happy grandchildren any time soon.

Either that, or I just date men with really rude mothers. It’s gotten to the point where if anyone says “I’d like to bring you home to meet my family”, I start wondering if I should carry a concealed weapon or just show up with blades out, ready to tussle, because it’s going to get ugly.

In the case of Arturo’s mother, at least, I know it was the grandchildren thing. Nevermind that he had an older brother and sister, both happily married and pumping out babies at exponentially growing rates. Arturo was her youngest, her baby boy, and she wanted grandchildren out of him. I was just some man-harlot keeping him from finding the right woman.

And then they wonder why I won’t bring anyone home to meet my family. As if the varying degrees of insanity among my relatives aren’t enough, who knows when someone will start with the snide comments about not having children, never getting married, and of course embarrassing the family. I already got that when I would show up on my own, back when I was still willing to cross the Louisiana state line and risk my own sanity by dealing with those people (and it’s been at least five years since the last time, thank gods).

At least my mother is giving up on the grandchildren thing. My older sisters are hopeless, chasing off men with teeth and claws every chance they get. The only one of them who actually wanted children is now past healthy childbearing age and doesn’t even want to risk artificial implantation, with the next in line nearing that age rapidly. I’m a lost cause as far as impregnating anything with ovaries is concerned. And my mother…well, let’s just say that right now she’s had enough of children to last her a lifetime. My cousin is on an active tour of duty in Iraq (and you wonder why, despite my stated apathy towards my family, I’d like to just bring the soldiers home?), and my mother’s taken on the responsibility of looking after her kids while she’s overseas. The boy and girl, ages 10 and 12, are driving her out of her mind. She’s actually told me, “God, I thought I had it bad with you and the girls? I didn’t know what bad was. They’re going to drive me into an early grave, but on the positive side they’ve made me realize that I had good kids.”

Frankly, I’d rather have that admission than any high-priced Christmas gift.

But in truth? I’m happy to forget that it’s even Christmas. I…honestly don’t have any good memories of Christmas, not even from my childhood. It was always family drama, people sniping at each other, people using each others’ unwitting children to be nasty to each other. The one time I spent Christmas with my father’s family was horribly uncomfortable, because my stepmother and I made a vague pretense of ignoring our loathing for one another and I got to meet the predominantly-white members of my family tree for the first time. It’s lovely to be introduced to an aunt-something-or-other only to have her look me over and then turn to speak to my father as if I wasn’t even there:

“Why, honey, why didn’t you tell us your other baby was colored?”

…

What’s so great about Christmas, again?

Today, I intend to try to find out. This is my first Christmas alone, my first Christmas where I have the freedom to do what I want, to enjoy the season, to just relax and enjoy the day off. I have a few friends coming over tonight; I’ll be cooking, and we’ll be having dinner and then sprawling out to hang out like we always do. Maybe for once I’ll get those warm Christmas fuzzies everyone else talks about. Or maybe I’ll just enjoy a great night with some of my closest friends.

Some people think it’s sad that I won’t have family with me on Christmas - neither mine, nor a loved one’s.

I’ll have a family. A family that I chose.

And I’m happy that for the first time in my life, I won’t be spending Christmas miserable, humiliated, and in tears.

Christmas with the family, happy effin’ holidays

You know what? I’m not in the mood for serious discussion this morning. It’s Friday, it’s been a horribly long and busy week, and I have one more day of work to get through (and about six articles to finish) before I can go anywhere near my Don Rodolfo Malbec and a few chunks of nice, aged asiago. So you’ll have to pardon me if today, I randomly blurt out pretty much anything that comes to mind, tongue firmly in cheek and heavy on the snark. It will likely be silly and pointless, but most of life is anyway.

First, I really can’t imagine why anyone would care if Lindsay Lohan is potentially swinging from the fence. Who gives a rat’s? Celebrities play on ambiguous sexuality all the time, especially those noted for bouncing in and out of rehab like yo-yos on Prozac (or LSD, or heroin, or whatever the trendy drug of the week is…). They’re not gay/bi, they’re just vapid and indiscriminate in their partners, and think a girl/girl kiss makes them as edgy as Madonna. This is news pretty much only to Slashdotters and other such socially inept dwellers in the parental basement, who’ve just found new fodder for their Lindsay Lohan girl-on-girl fantasies. Make sure to lotion up, boys. Your palms will start to chap pretty quickly.

Despite aggressive spam filters, I routinely get hundreds of spam e-mails a day. The majority of them are overly concerned with the size of my endowments, with a fixation oddly reminiscent of my cat’s unhealthy obsession with watching me undress. (Or unsure of what they want to say about my pen, as they start out so often with “Your Pen Is…” My pen is what? It’s right there, on the desk. What about it?) The concern is admirable, really. Too many men aren’t concerned enough about their sexual health, so all these lovely solicitous e-mails are a heart-warming reminder to schedule my annual doctor checkup.

I’m horribly distressed to see, though, that my spam e-mails just aren’t politically correct enough. They always assume that I have a girlfriend or a wife, or am desperately seeking one, or just “want to know her how she is from the inside”. For shame, spammers, for shame. Have you ever thought that I, your target customer, may not be interested in the young woman whose image you’ve kindly provided to illustrate your point, however lovely she may be? What if I want to know him how he is from the inside? I’m shocked and hurt by your lack of consideration, really. Especially since your constant comments that Concetta has a conspicuous f***stick are really quite insensitive to MtF transgenders.

Or is it a veiled compliment? Are you somehow implying that not a single gay man on the face of the earth needs your enhancement products, and that our online profiles tell the truth and we are, in fact, all gifted like John Holmes?

A weighty point to ponder, indeed.

Any transgendered individuals who read Darkside Rainbow will no doubt be relieved to know that, according to American Daily, your gender dysphoria is just an affliction indicating a disconnection from reality that should be treated and ultimately cured with therapy and prayer. Liberalism is also a mental disorder, transgender rights are ridiculous, and gender identity is pure nonsense. Prayer should be able to fix that, too. The FtM gay male he’s talking about in the article? Just a confused straight girl in plaid shirts and dockers who’s an absolute fool for trying to do anything that would allow her to live more comfortably with the lot she’s been given. There. Don’t you feel better now that Matt Barber’s cleared that up for you? Run along now, pray for a few hours, and maybe his God will be kind enough to “cure” your gender dysphoria and make you so happy with your birth gender that you’ll happily fall into your appropriate 1950s-esque gender role. Remember to start your prayers with “Dear Lord.” He likes being called “Lord.”

To close things off on a more serious note: I’m not a praying man despite my seeming familiarity with the Captain’s Almighty’s titular preferences, but if any of you out there are (well, or praying women, considering the demographics of my reader base) , keep Mehdi in your thoughts; the young gay Iranian is awaiting the decision of a Dutch court over whether to return him to the UK, where he will likely be summarily packed up and sent right back to Iran - and we all know that gays don’t exist in Iran.

I’m done, and out. See you Monday. Yes, I’m posting a comic on Christmas Eve. Just call me Scrooge, baby, and get your plebeian butt back to work.

~Adri

lindsay lohan, gay celebrities, spam e-mail, gender dysphoria, transgenders, transsexuals, mtf, ftm, m2f, f2m, gender identity disorder, matt barber, gay iranians, mehdi

When I was in university, I had to walk to classes - twenty miles, barefoot through the snow, uphill both ways. We weren’t allowed to have clothing; my school’s uniform was the meal sack, with a few holes cut out for the arms and head. If you didn’t follow tradition you were flogged and made to walk across a bed of broken glass to the school monument, which was forty miles uphill both ways. And they only fed us on alternating Tuesdays.

…

All right, maybe not. But at the risk of being called an old geezer, in my generation kids were raised to know better than to pull the kind of stunts this Princeton University student almost got away with:

Cops: Anti-Gay Leader Faked Own Attack - 365gay.com

(Mount Laurel, New Jersey) A Princeton University student who argued that his conservative views were not accepted on the campus confessed to fabricating an assault and sending threatening e-mail messages to himself and some friends who shared his views, authorities say.

Princeton Township police said that Francisco Nava was not immediately charged with any crime, but that the investigation was continuing.

Nava claimed to have been assaulted Friday by two men off campus, police said. But he later confessed that scrapes and scratches on his face were self-inflicted, and that the threats were his work, too, said Detective Sgt. Ernie Silagyi.

[...]Nava, a 23-year-old junior politics major from Bedford, Texas, found himself at the center of one campus controversy recently when he wrote a column for the student newspaper criticizing the school for giving out free condoms, which he said encouraged a dangerous “hook-up culture.”

A short time later, Nava made his first report to the university public safety office that he was receiving threatening messages in his campus mailbox. A friend says Nava told him one message read, in capital letters: “ONE MORE ARTICLE AND YOU WON’T LIVE TO SEE THE LIGHT OF DAY.”

Other members of the Anscombe Society, a conservative student organization, who have spoken out against premarital sex and same-sex marriage, said they received similar threats. So did Robert George, a professor in the politics department.

Robinson-Brown would not say exactly how the university responded to the threats. But she said that, in general, when students are threatened they are given access to counselors, assured that the campus security force will take their calls right away and can be moved to new dorm rooms.

Another student wrote in the campus newspaper Friday that the threats Nava received did not get the same forceful response as anti-gay graffiti that appeared this semester outside the dorm rooms of some gay students.

Brandon McGinley called it a double standard, which made it seem OK to “use intimidation tactics to silence the voices of morally conservative students.”

If I’d ever pulled anything like that and been caught - and you can bet I would have been; my parents always knew when I’d done something, even if they didn’t know what just yet - my mother would have torn me a new one and my father would have taken a belt to my behind (yes, even at 18+, for something like that). Once they were done, my grandmother would have taken me out in the back yard, made me pick my own wooden switch, and then given me a good lashing with it. College kids from any generation are known for stupid antics, but there’s a line you just don’t cross, not if your parents raised you to know what’s good for you. Francisco Nava crossed that line.

In a way I can see what he was trying to accomplish, by proving that there’s a double standard regarding discrimination and protections for those who face threats for their beliefs or simply for their state of being. There was a strong reaction to anti-gay graffiti; people were roused in support of gay rights. There was a lesser reaction when he faced supposed threats for his articles, as if his rights weren’t as important.

But he botched it in more ways than one, coming at it from the wrong angle - and I don’t just mean by getting caught. One, while the article isn’t wholly clear on this, he didn’t seem to make it apparent that the faked threats were because of Nava’s anti-gay stance and participation in an anti-gay group on campus, which removes the double standard right there. It’s only a double standard if gays are threatened for being gay and receive better responses than anti-gays who are threatened for being anti-gay, rather than just being threatened on general reasons of being “morally conservative”. As far as I can tell, the article written before he started his hoax wasn’t even about homosexuality; it was just about promiscuity in general, encouraged by the dissemination of condoms on campus.

Two, it’s hard to make a solid case for directly parallel discrimination when gays are discriminated against for what we are, while anti-gays are discriminated against for what they believe. I think Nava and many of his ilk may have problems grasping that because they believe being gay is a choice and a lifestyle. While causality doesn’t make discrimination against any group any less heinous and certainly doesn’t justify threatening anyone (if there were real threats involved, anyway), people tend to be roused more by those victimized for traits they can’t help than those victimized for something they chose and that, in turn, discriminate against others for who or what they are.

The third problem is that doing something like this weakens the case for believability where a double standard is concerned in the first place. There is a double standard, even with the point above regarding the difference between a state of being and a choice; we, as gays, are widely seen as the victims, and anti-gay groups as the aggressors - but in terms of rights, as we struggle to find equal footing we all become victims of attempts to completely remove our rights in order to grant them to the opposition. Because gays have fewer rights, though, we’re given more benefit of the doubt, more support, and more sympathy.

Few people see our struggle for equality as an attempt to take rights of expression and belief away from anti-gay groups. They may see things differently. Does that mean that I think our struggle for equality is wrong or that their attempts to suppress said equality are right? Not just no, but hell no. Something’s got to give, and I’m sick of it always being us. They have the right to their beliefs, but we have the right not to have them enforced on us. So yes, there’s a double standard. It’s an unfortunate necessity and it can’t be avoided in any situation of opposing groups struggling to win out against one another; that’s just life, and fairness really has no place in it. But in between that double standard, there is a balance to be found somewhere, if we can try to find a happy medium that recognizes equal rights for all without discriminating against anyone - meaning each side’s got to give a little and take a little.

But valid points regarding that double standard, which may actually open ground for talks between opposing groups as each side recognizes the viewpoints and concerns of others, are completely eroded when one has to fabricate acts of persecution in order to prove it.

princeton university, anti-gay groups, francisco nava, hoax

During Sunday’s live webcast, I addressed a reader question asking what I think of the Iraq war; I pointed out that Americans don’t understand enough about Iraqi culture to even try to govern it. After reading the news this morning…I can’t help but conclude that we don’t even understand enough about Iraqi culture to comprehend the slightest effect that we have on their society. Unfortunately, I think most of us don’t really care, either. Many Americans are of the opinion that Iraq will be fine once it’s become a homogenized little mini-America, just another annexed territory with a bit of a transAtlantic leap between.

Hopefully for the Iraqi people…that will never happen.

Gays Living in Shadows of New Iraq - NYTimes.com

BAGHDAD — In a city and country where outsiders are viewed with deep suspicion and attracting attention can imperil one’s life, Mohammed could never blend in, even if he wanted to.

Mohammed, 37, has been openly gay for much of his adult life. For him, this has meant growing his hair long and taking estrogen. In the past, he said, that held little danger. As is true throughout the Middle East, men have always been publicly affectionate here.

But, at least until recently, Mohammed and many of his gay friends went one step further, slipping into lovers’ houses late at night. And, until the American invasion, they said, Iraqi society had quietly accepted them.

But being openly gay is not an option in the new Iraq, where the rise of religious extremism has left Mohammed and his gay friends feeling especially vilified.

In January, a United Nations report described the increased persecution, torture and extrajudicial killing of Iraqi lesbians and gay men. In 2005, Iraq’s most revered Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, issued a fatwa, or religious decree, calling for gay men and lesbians to be killed in the “worst, most severe way.”

He lifted it a year later, but neither that nor the recent ebb in violence has made Mohammed or his friends feel safe. They yearn to leave Iraq, but do not have the money or visas. They agreed to be interviewed on the condition that their last names not be used.

They described an underground existence, eked out behind drawn curtains in a dingy safe house in southwestern Baghdad. Five people share the apartment — four gay men and one woman, who says she is bisexual. They have moved six times in the last three years, just ahead, they say, of neighborhood raids by Shiite and Sunni death squads. Even seemingly benign neighborhood gossip can scare them enough to move.

“We seem suspicious because we look like a cell of terrorists,” said Mohammed, nervously fingering the lapel of his shirt. “But we can’t tell people what we really are. A cell, yes, but of gays.”

His hand drifted to his newly shorn hair. He had lopped it off days earlier. There had been reports of extremists stopping long-haired men, shearing their hair and forcing them to eat it.

It is impossible to say how many gay men and women face persecution in Iraq. According to an Iraqi gay rights group, run by a former disc jockey in Baghdad named Ali Hili who now lives in London, 400 people have been killed in Iraq since 2003 for being gay.

Set against the many thousands of civilians and soldiers killed in the war, the number is small. But for Mr. Hili, and Mohammed and his friends, it is a painful barometer of just how far Iraq has shifted from its secular past. [Read more for a description of gay life in Iraq before the occupation.]

Truth told I, like anyone, often don’t fully appreciate the impact of something until it touches on something deeply personal to me. This, more than anything, more even than the body counts and the horrific news reports of bombings and siege, has made me realize the profound and lasting effect that the American invasion has had on Iraqi culture. It’s sobering, it’s painful, and it’s probably entirely selfish that it took that for me to view the occupation through such personal eyes and really take a moment to feel something for the Iraqi people beyond logical assessments of why Americans shouldn’t be occupying Iraq. I can’t help that. That’s human. Willful blindness, self-absorbed preoccupation.

That’s the way many of us are, to some extent. Iraq is “over there”; it’s a political issue, not a matter of real people with real lives that have been forever altered by something beyond their control. We feel strongly about the politics, about the people who agree and disagree with us, but we don’t extend our compassion and our understanding of the Iraqis as people unless we’ve been there or unless we find something that strikes a chord in us and makes it so very deeply personal.

Mohammed’s story and the stories of other gays in Iraq have made this personal for me. I’ve felt for a long time that America should pull out of Iraq, but that feeling has only intensified as this forces me to look beyond not just the issues of how the American occupation has changed gay life there, but how it’s changed other aspects as well. Their entire society has changed; we’ve destroyed parts of their culture that can never be retrieved, affected political balances, increased religious, social, and political intolerance, and in some cases created the very atmosphere of fear and terror that we claim to be fighting a protracted and useless war against. Life is naturally made up of disastrous changes, and one either adapts and survives, or fails - but the changes we’ve wrought in Iraq aren’t natural. They aren’t beneficial. And the Iraqi people won’t recover from them for a very, very long time.

It’s like engaging in battle over fertile fields. Your battle, won or lost, may be all that matters to you at the time…but in the process the fruits of those fields are destroyed, trampled carelessly underfoot while you’re too busy looking on to your opponent. Eventually the battle will end; the land will clear, and the bodies will be removed, enshrouded, and buried. But the great trenches of war will remain; the land ravaged and stomped by a thousand feet, razed by fire, poisoned by the substances of war. It’s only when the fight has moved on that the land may start to recover, and the people of that land can move in to nurture it slowly back to health - even though its shape and character have changed entirely, and it may never be what it once was, may never grow as it once did.

The Iraqi people are both that field, its fruit, and its tenders.

And we’ve trampled on them long enough.

iraq war, iraqi people, gay iraqis

Sorry I’m a little late in updating today. I stayed up too late last night, indulging in one of my secret guilty pleasures with one of my best friends: curling up on the couch and watching chick flicks until we cried and laughed all at once. Sometimes you just need a night of Smirnoff Ice, cigarettes (hush, Sihaya, I only had one; you know I don’t smoke anymore), and laughing over the fact that you can both still remember the lyrics to Brandy’s “Sittin’ Up in My Room” perfectly and you can’t help getting up to dance when you hear “so I creep, yeah, just keep it on the down low”.

The funny part about that is that while I can get away with that without shame, just by being the type of guy who just does what he does without caring whether it’s considered masculine or feminine…he’s this big, butch bruiser who always has to be the manly-man. He’d be utterly humiliated if I mentioned him by name here, or if anyone knew that he actually watched a chick flick…and enjoyed it. Ha. He was crying thirty minutes into Waiting to Exhale; it took me at least an hour to start the waterworks. (I think the line that got me was “Someone felt that way about me, once…but he stopped.”) Still…as a result of our escapades, I went to bed rather late and overslept today. And here I am now, looking for something to talk about for today’s post before I head off to the post office to finally mail off a certain insufferable a**hole’s package.

Well, for starters, don’t forget that this Sunday, December 16th, at 5p Central Standard Time (if you don’t know when that is in your time zone, check here) marks the first (experimental) Darkside Rainbow Live Webcast, in which I will try my damnedest to keep from tripping over my tongue for an hour of live interactive talk radio…even if I still don’t know what the hell I’m going to say and my stage fright is mounting more and more the closer we get to the date. I’ve worked out how to get the bloody thing to work in IE (sort of), so there shouldn’t be too many people barred from listening. If you miss it or if the live broadcast player doesn’t work from your OS or browser, I’ll be posting the chat transcript and an MP3 of the audio later, using the Flash player currently in use for the streaming radio.

Next, we’re already close to the halfway point on the 1,500 Comments Contest. We’d jumped off again at 1,000, with 500 comments to hit the goal. We’re currently at 1,205, in a surprisingly short period of time. If you’ve no idea what I’m talking about, check out the second half of this post with the rules and the prize (a 1GB MP3 player).

Moving on to more serious news: I’m a few days late on this one, but that doesn’t mean it’s not still a valid point for discussion. Every time I start to think that we as a society have begun to make forward-thinking cultural progress, someone proves me wrong. It’s only a little more disturbing when that “someone” is a prominent political figure and presidential hopeful.

Huckabee refuses to retract ‘92 remarks on AIDS patients - CNN.com

Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee refused to retract a statement he made in 1992 calling for the isolation of AIDS patients.

Surging in the polls, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee campaigns Saturday in Asheville, North Carolina.

Responding to an Associated Press questionnaire, Huckabee said steps should be taken to “isolate the carriers of this plague” during his failed run for a U.S. Senate seat from Arkansas 15 years ago.

He said he probably would not make the same statement today because of what is known about how HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, is transmitted.

“I had simply made the point — and I still believe this today — that in the late ’80s and early ’90s, when we didn’t know as much as we do now about AIDS, we were acting more out of political correctness than we were about the normal public health protocols that we would have acted,” Huckabee told Fox News on Sunday.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded in 1985 that AIDS was not transmitted by casual contact. But Huckabee said at the time, “there were other concerns being voiced by public health officials.”

He disputed the characterization that he was calling for individuals infected with HIV to be quarantined.

“Now, would I say things a little differently in 2007? Probably so,” Huckabee told Fox News. “But I’m not going to recant or retract from the statement that I did make because, again, the point was not saying we ought to lock people up who have HIV/AIDS.”

Huckabee did not explain how individuals with HIV would have been isolated.

During his Senate run, Huckabee also told the AP in the questionnaire that he found homosexuality to be “an aberrant, unnatural and sinful lifestyle.”

As always, I’ve got to play the Devil’s advocate first. It makes me feel better about turning around and calling someone an absolute arse.

To be fair, Huckabee refused to retract his words not because he’s still just as uneducated about HIV/AIDS, but because he’s trying to point out that at the time he made that statement, he was speaking with the more limited knowledge that he had available and making a statement based on what he thought was his best judgment and in the interests of public safety. (Although really, Huckabee was still pretty far behind, considering he made that statement in 1992 when the transmission methods for AIDS were known by 1985, but I’m trying to be a little lenient here.) I’m not saying that I think his judgment was right, but I do think the media are putting a more sensationalist spin on his intentions by making it sound as if he’s still actively advocating sequestering HIV/AIDS sufferers. He admits that with the information available about HIV/AIDS today, his judgment would likely follow a different slant. That should be enough; a retraction really isn’t necessary, though a more clearly stated, honest admission of his ignorance would be nice.

But the media are using his statement about HIV/AIDS to cast an even uglier light on his already-reprehensible stance towards gays, because there’s an instinctive association between the two subjects. If he was talking today about isolating people with some new, viciously fatal disease whose methods of transmission were unknown but that wasn’t in any way related to a divisive political and personal issue, people would say that he was acting in the interests of public health and safety by making sure that the disease couldn’t become an epidemic while we endeavored to understand more about how it’s communicated.

Ech. That almost makes me sound like I support the arse’s foot-in-mouth syndrome; really, I just can’t stand media sensationalism even when it’s turned on those I oppose. But without further ado and fairness aside…

I refuse to listen to rhetoric about sin from a man who had a role in pardoning a convicted rapist. Follow your own damned dogma; aren’t those who scream about the sin of homosexuality also the ones who advocate “let he who hath no sin cast the first stone”? I’m really getting sick of religious ideals being used to sway people’s political choices; how many times have I ranted about separation of church and state? How many times have I snarled about people trying to force their personal ideals on others through manipulation of the law? How many times have I said that one’s sexuality should be one’s own business and not a matter that concerns either church or state?

You know, I’m starting to wonder if there’s some kind of fear underlying people’s religious endorsement of their viciously antipathetic reactions to homosexuality. No, I don’t mean the cliched argument of “you’re afraid of homosexuality because you’re denying your own homosexuality”, although at times that has been the case.

I mean fear of admitting one’s own subjectivity, and owning one’s own biases and flaws without looking for excuses to make them acceptable. I’ve yet to find anyone who could explain a logical reason for their vituperative condemnation beyond that it’s “sinful”, “unnatural”, and “against God”. I just want one person to say “God’s got nothing to do with it; homosexuality just personally grosses me out”. I’d think it was a bit immature, but it would be refreshingly honest, and founded in someone’s personal feelings (kind of like me saying bananas gross me out, frigging fruit of the devil) rather than using a smokescreen of faith to make themselves feel justified in acting on a base dislike with no rhyme or reason.

Hiding behind faith ensures that people aren’t exposed for enacting such gross hatreds towards other human beings based on irrational gut feelings alone, and possibly judged by others for it. I wouldn’t be surprised if people were truly afraid of admitting such, when really it would do everyone a lot of good if homophobes could approach it from the simple perspective of likes vs. dislikes rather than looking for a torch to wave as an excuse to force their opinions and their dislike on others. It would sure as hell make a lot more sense.

After all, I don’t try to make everyone stop eating bananas, do I?

waiting to exhale, chick flicks, boys’ girly night in, darkside rainbow live webcast, comments contest, hiv, aids, mike huckabee, foot in mouth syndrome

Every day, the GBLTQ community faces prejudice; we’re accused of corrupting principles of home and family, destroying traditional marriage, promoting sin, seducing children, even bringing down the wrath of one god or another in the form of natural disasters ranging from Hurricane Katrina to the Indian Ocean tsunami. If there’s a problem with the price of rice in China, it’s our fault. We’re the scapegoats for practically every homophobic cause in existence - and now, according to Pope Benedict XVI, we’re also a threat to world peace.

Pope’s message - gay weddings threaten peace - PinkNews.co.uk

The annual message from the head of the Roman Catholic Church to the world has been unveiled. [...] It is entitled The Human Family, A Community of Peace, and in it he calls for the dismantling of nuclear weapons and environmental co-operation and describes gay marriage as “an obstacle on the road to peace.” The 80-year-old German-born pontiff theorises that peace and the family are inherently linked and any threat to the “traditional family” will be opposed by Catholics.

[...]“Many legislative initiatives work against peace by weakening the family founded on marriage between a man and a woman, by directly or indirectly forcing families not to be open to accepting a morally responsible life, or by not recognising the family as having primary responsibility in the education of children,” he said.

[...]“The natural family, as an intimate communion of life and love, based on marriage between a man and a woman, constitutes “the primary place of ‘humanisation’ for the person and society,” he wrote.

“The family is therefore rightly defined as the first natural society, a divine institution that stands at the foundation of life of the human person as the prototype of every social order.

“Whoever, even unknowingly, circumvents the institution of the family undermines peace in the entire community, national and international, since he weakens what is in effect the primary agency of peace.

“This point merits special reflection: everything that serves to weaken the family based on the marriage of a man and a woman, everything that directly or indirectly stands in the way of its openness to the responsible acceptance of a new life, everything that obstructs its right to be primarily responsible for the education of its children, constitutes an objective obstacle on the road to peace.”

It really disturbs me that millions of people worldwide look upon this man’s words as the word and law of their god. Any remotely agreeable fellows out there want to take a New Year’s road trip to New Hampshire with me to get semi-hitched out of sheer spite alone? No? Thought not. Let’s move on to the discussion, then.

Here’s my main problem with that entire pile of bigotry: the Pope is defining a family by marriage alone, rather than accepting that one doesn’t need marriage papers to mate and bear children, and even provide for both mate and children. A simple word and a few documents don’t automatically confer moral responsibility; the number of broken homes and abused children that come from traditional marriage can attest to that. A strong family would be a strong family with or without that definition, based on the characters of and the relationships between the people involved. So right there we’ve found one instance of flawed logic in this critical institution of marriage as the “new life” that promotes moral responsibility and proper child-rearing. A wedding ring will not change a person’s character for the better; nor will lack of one change said character for the worse.

I can almost get behind the idea that peace is related to the family unit, simply out of sheer animal territoriality. We, as beasts, instinctively want to protect our mates and offspring; it’s hard-coded in those twisty little ropes of deoxyribonucleic acid that form the building blocks of the mess of muscle, blood and bone that we call homo sapiens. That can actually lead at first to further violence when defending one’s claim, but eventually leads to peace as boundaries are defined and the human animal attempts to avoid conflict in order to preserve the lives of those within its territory and maintain one’s own safety in order to act as guardian and provider. These rituals of territoriality existed long before we slapped words like “marriage” onto our pack-animal mating behavior and frittered together a few documents to make it sound important, binding, and somehow fundamentally tied to a universal truth rather than a label that we concocted to apply to existing relationships.

The problem is that we’ve moved beyond simple competition for territory, food, and mates, and into a more complex economic and social structure that we like to call civilization. We’re no longer competing to provide for a single family unit, or even for a single pack. We compete to provide for cities, states, provinces, municipalities (hey, I’m not just assuming the U.S. here), entire nations, and one doesn’t have to be part of a man-woman-children family unit to be a part of any of those common groupings. Even if we aren’t contributing to the gene pool - and that goes for heterosexuals who don’t breed, and not just homosexuals who don’t seek alternate methods of childbearing - we’re contributing to our local economy and our local workforce, thus using our skills and our revenue to strengthen our respective nations and help contribute to the maintenance of a peaceful balance. Family alone is no longer the sole foundation of a peaceful society. Industry and commerce are large factors, and one can contribute quite well to industry and commerce without being part of that kernel family unit that the Pope espouses.

With the human race numbering in the billions, we aren’t needed to ensure the continuation of the species; in fact, we may well be helping to combat overpopulation, a problem that would definitely lead to more violence. The more families - defined by marriage or not - breed, the more mouths there are open and crying for scarcer and scarcer resources, and the more one must consider the possibility of taking what one needs by force when there’s too little to go around.

Even more, if gays were allowed to marry and form families, we would be able to help stabilize the flagging family unit by looking after those who fell through the cracks of the much-touted traditional marriage and heterosexual family unit. There are so many gay couples who would be happy to adopt children whose straight parents either voluntarily left them or lost them due to neglect and abuse. Those children would grow up loved, properly looked after, well-educated, and could eventually grow to contribute even more to the society that they help to form…rather than being forgotten, with only a few given the opportunity to struggle towards something better rather than become a burden upon the economy. I’d say that’s one hell of a “primary responsibility” to take up, if only we were allowed. It’s the proponents of traditional family units that are dropping the ball, not us. We’re even offering to help pick up the slack, clean up the mess…but they don’t seem to want it cleaned.

Yes, the family unit - if not necessarily marriage, people keep forgetting that it’s just a word and fabricated standards - can be defined as the first “natural” society. Every social structure starts off small. First the family, then the neighborhood, then the village/town/city, then the region, then the nation; it all builds in borderline fractal tessellation, and every nation is made up of all of these smaller units broken down again and again. They are the foundation, but they aren’t the be-all and end-all of society, and they aren’t the only role for which any family unit - regardless of the gender pairings of the primary providers in the family - is suited. That’s like saying that a car can run without fuel, transmission, a muffler, wheels…as long as it has an engine. Yes, the engine is the core unit of propulsion, but it couldn’t operate without all of those other supporting factors. Society has grown too complex to try to reduce the encompassing issue of world peace to something so oversimplified and utterly rooted in dogma.

There are too many entrenched faith-based assumptions without logical foundation for the two issues to be anything other than mutually exclusive. You can feasibly approach peace in society and its relation to the family unit from a sociological and anthropological perspective, as long as you retain objectivity and account for multiple influencing factors rather than making hard and fast statements of absolutes with little grounding outside of personal beliefs. You can’t base your argument for traditional marriage on wholly subjective ideas of morality and flawed assignations of roles in child-rearing and then try to apply the argument objectively to the sweeping issues of economics and culture that govern the interactions of many societies. You can’t call something a “divine institution” and then hold it up as a standard for a global community that will quite happily inform you of their differing ideals of what constitutes “divine”.

And you can’t say that gay marriage is a threat to peace, when we’re trying our damnedest to make peace with the ideals of the world we live in - and not break its structure, but join it in the only way we can.

Next thing you know, they’ll be calling us terrorists and swearing that we want to bring democracy to its knees.

gay marriage, gay rights, traditional family, pope benedict xvi, roman catholic church, world peace

“When was the last time you were decently kissed? I mean truly, truly good and kissed?”

That, my friends, is a line from my favorite scene in That Thing You Do, one of my top ten most beloved films of all time. It’s the story of The Wonders, a (no pun intended) one-hit wonder band from the 60s; the film is titled after their hit album.

In this story Guy, the band’s drummer, has been in love with the lead singer’s leading lady for some time; towards the end of the film Faye (played by the full-lipped lady Liv Tyler) and Jimmy call it quits, leaving the way open for Guy to move in and ask that ever-so-crucial question, breathless, his heart in his eyes and on his lips. You’d think her answer would be rather recent, considering her years-long relationship with Jimmy. Instead, after a moment of thought, Faye takes a deep breath and says, “Dave Gammelgard, New Year’s Eve, ‘61.”

“Okay,” Guy says.

And then he kisses her.

It’s the kind of kiss that movie magic is made of; the kind of kiss that everyone hopes to experience at least once in their lifetime - and once they’ve experienced it, there are times when they’d give anything to feel it again.

When was the last time you were truly, truly good and kissed? [laughs] My answer would have to be “too damned long ago.” It wasn’t The Ex, I’ll tell you that…but that’s dirty laundry best not aired here. The last time I felt a kiss like that was years ago with a man who could set my skin on fire with a look, a man who promised devotion and then after a year cheated on me, a man with eyes as black as the Devil’s and a smile to match. His name was Arturo, and he kissed me as if I was the only thing in the world to him. When he kissed me everything narrowed down to that moment: his mouth on mine, and the mingling of our breaths.

I don’t know how to describe that kiss. Some automatically assume that for a kiss to be passionate, it must involve locked lips, twisting tongues, and a few bucketfuls of exchanged saliva. No, thank you. I’ve enough bodily fluids of my own that I don’t need to quaff a quart of anyone else’s. Others assume that a kiss is just foreplay, a mere checkpoint on the way to sex rather than something to be experienced for itself. It’s more than that. That kiss…that kiss is the kind of kiss you swore you stopped believing in when you grew too old and too cynical for the cliches of storybook romance, and yet that you still long for secretly in your inner heart of hearts.

It’s not just physical contact; it’s a moment, trembling fragile and taut between two people drawn towards one another by something ineffable that can hardly be defined. It’s the buildup - the look in his eyes, the scent of him, the heat and closeness that make you weak with longing, fear, pulse-pounding anticipation. It’s that hovering second when he pauses and meets your eyes, as if asking for permission to cross that last boundary and press his mouth to yours. It’s the breaths caught and held in your throat, waiting, feeling as if you’ll come apart at the seams if he doesn’t fulfill that promise held so close and yet too, too painfully far away.

Parted lips, firm flesh, hot skin…all it takes is a little tilt of the head, a light brush of nose to nose, and your mouths fit together so perfectly. Stillness, then - just to savor, just to feel. The barest hint of the taste of him; the faint texture of stubble under brushing fingertips. So many seemingly innocuous things rise to envelop you; the scent of him curls over your skin, and the sounds of his breaths fill your ears like the slow rush of the sea at night. Neither lewd nor chaste, but promising. It’s nothing more than a few seconds, and yet for as long as you can hold on to it…it feels like forever.

A few lingering breaths, and then it’s gone - melting away into the warmth between the breath that he exhales and the next that you inhale, leaving its flavor and its heat upon your lips. One moment, but it tingles through you until it feels like your first kiss all over again, until your knees feel like water and your skin feels too tight and you’re left at once languid and yet breathlessly on edge.

Some people call it chemistry. Some call it romance; some even label it as lust, even though it’s something more than that. I just call it “that kiss”, because that’s all that I need to define it. It’s that kiss - the kiss. The one kiss that reaches down inside you and peels you open to touch places you’d thought you were too jaded to possess, bringing that sweet, tight ache to your chest that’s part pain and yet even more parts bittersweet pleasure.

It’s been years since I’ve experienced that, and it may well be years more before I do again. I’m not ready for another serious relationship and may never be, yet I’m not the type to indiscriminately fool around with others for the sake of pleasure alone. I’m rather stuck in limbo, with a “No entry zone” sign plastered over every accessible part of me, both physical and emotional. I doubt there’ll be any men other than platonic friends in my life for a long time. That’s fine; that’s my choice, and that’s what makes me content.

But nonetheless, I’d give anything to feel that again.

I’d give anything for just that one intoxicating kiss.

gay romance, dating, chemistry, that kiss

I am a geek. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. I love books, I love computers, I love programming, and I spent half this past weekend intensively researching formation of pillow lava and submarine lava tubes along fissures on the mid-Atlantic ridge - ostensibly as background information for a story idea, but after a while I forgot about the story out of fascination with the subject matter. I read Slashdot, I can write my own applications in Flash, and discussions of nanotechnology in crystal solar cells and aberrant prion structures can turn me on faster than a gyrating Chippendale covered in chocolate sauce. Tinkering with the building blocks of our world and ourselves just sends little thrills of pleasure down my spine. Obviously, scientific advancement and discovery don’t make me uncomfortable.

What makes me uncomfortable is the intentions not only of those who make the discoveries, but of those who are given the information and the power to make use of it.

So you can imagine that I was at once fascinated and disturbed to read that scientists have discovered how to use drugs to turn homosexuality on and off within a matter of hours - in fruit flies, mind you, not in humans. I’ve long been a proponent of some kind of biological explanation for homosexuality, whether it’s genetic or a more complex combination of factors resulting from chemical adaptations to the environment, making it as much a physical trait as the color of your eyes or the tendency to grey early around the temples. While fruit flies and humans aren’t exactly the same, the finding that fruit flies’ sexuality is affected by a gene they called “genderblind” and the transportation of a neurotransmitter called glutamate is still a major leap. Chemically altering the levels of glutamate changed the flies’ sexuality by changing how they react to the scents of pheromones. If the same can be said of humans and other animals, then we’ve helped to narrow down the biological source of homosexuality. Great; conclusive proof against homosexuality as a sin or lifestyle choice.

What bothers me is what can be done with this. On one hand, you have to experiment with being able to artificially create and remove biological homosexuality in order to prove that it even is biological, so of course I wouldn’t assume that the scientists involved in the experiments have some kind ulterior motive. They’re trying to understand the nature of homosexuality, nothing more. What I worry about is commercial and private interests pouncing on this. There are enough homophobic people in positions of corporate and political power in this country, people who view homosexuality as a disease, that they could easily take this finding as proof that homosexuality is a defect that can and must be “cured”. It makes me shudder to think of drugs designed to change the synaptic response to glutamate, marketed loudly as the “gay cure” and administered indiscriminately to humans to fix their “defect”. The very discovery is a new weapon for ex-gay ministries to use to seduce people into thinking that they even need to be cured.

Am I doomsaying and predicting the end of the world as we know it? No. This isn’t the Marvel universe, and we’re not going to be rounded up in mutant concentration camps and administered cures for our “genetic aberration” (I told you I was a geek). All I’m doing is raising a note of concern that should be present in all scientific and medical discoveries: concern for the ethical use of findings, and awareness that all discoveries, no matter how innocent, can be misused by those with the wrong intent. It’s a fancy way of saying that I don’t trust people, especially people in power.

What I’m saying is to be aware. You’d be surprised at the things your government does when they think you aren’t looking, such as pushing legislation that could allow government copyright agencies to seize and sell your property on the suspicion of copyright violation, without trial and without recompense - fully overriding due process and protections against unlawful search and seizure, much the same as civil forfeiture in drug possession cases. No, that’s not farfetched speculation of what could happen. That’s an actual bill in the works. The United States government will do anything its people will let it get away with, often with the encouragement of privately owned corporations and religious organizations - even if often, people only “let” things happen by being passive, by not acting, by not even knowing what’s going on until it’s too late.

Don’t be passive. Keep your eyes open. Homosexuality is a hot issue, a divisive issue, and can draw focused attention from legislators. There’s no cause for outright paranoia; this isn’t 1984 and while yes, Big Brother is watching, Big Brother isn’t all-powerful. It’s up to the citizens to protect their rights before they’re taken away - and part of protecting your own rights is being informed. Be aware of what’s happening around you, and how it affects you. Be aware of the ethical accountability of all factions of government, science, medicine, capitalist enterprise - so that when the time comes to speak for yourself, you can.

After all, it’s hard to protest something when you aren’t even aware of it until it’s done.

fruit flies, genderblind gene, genetic homosexuality, glutamate, pheromones, gay gene, ex-gay

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…I am so, so dead.

[laugh] Seriously, though, Hikaru - don’t pay me any mind. You know I adore you just the way you are, political party and all; I just wouldn’t be me if I didn’t take the opportunity to poke you a bit. Besides, I doubt that looks even remotely like you. I think I gave you bad hair. [sheepish look] Sorry.

(For anyone who’s wondering why a reader’s showing up in the comic: he won the 1,000-comments contest. Half of the prize for that was a cameo in the comic.)

I think my hand was drunk while I was drawing this one. Not the rest of me; just my hand. (Though if you could have seen me while I was working on this last night, you might have thought I was drunk - playing Pink at top volume, bopping around in my seat and singing along. Loudly. And very off-key.) See, it’s sitting there sucking up the martini through one finger. I don’t know; maybe I should go back to drawing these on paper, even if it takes longer. Instead of getting better with the tablet, I appear to be getting worse…especially on Red. I don’t know what happened there.

And…gah. Giant wall of text. I have to start trimming these scripts down, although the amount of text isn’t quite such a sin in a single-panel comic. Those tend to rely more on text to expand upon the single illustration.

Anyway. Although it was meant as a joke, the “urban legend” attitude towards gay Republicans is pretty common. In fact, discussion of the seeming rarity of gay Republicans and the disparaging behavior towards them is what prompted a survey regarding sexual orientation and how it affects your choice of political party. Despite the widely-held belief that all that matters to gays and lesbians is a party’s stance towards gay rights, the survey showed that it was actually only a minimal factor in most’s choices. I know that my prior allegiance to the Democratic party had nothing to do with my sexuality.

Yes, that’s right. I, Mr. No Concrete Affiliation, where I’ll only loosely identify myself as an Independent…used to be a proud Democrat. Not because I thought Democrats were better for me and my personal well-being and ideals; I didn’t even think about it that way. I just believed what I was told, and grew up thinking what my parents taught me to think: anyone with dark skin in the deep South had to be a Democrat. It’s like that for many; they follow a political party because their families do. I listened to the party lines and repeated them without really knowing what they meant, or caring. There was a time when I wasn’t particularly politically-minded; I devoted my intellect more to programming and didn’t much care for the outside world. It’s a bit embarrassing to think about, honestly. The self-centered nature of youth, I suppose.

University taught me otherwise. University taught me about the world outside my small, sleepy town nestled in New Orleans’ shadow, taught me how to look at things as objectively as I could (as a naturally subjective being who can only know what his senses and subjective reasoning tell him), how to make decisions based on my own analysis rather than based on what I was told was right and best for me, or based on what everyone else “like me” was doing.

And when I stepped back and looked at both the Republican and Democratic parties, I realized…

…they’re both complete douchebags, and I don’t want much to do with either of them.

It’s amazing the things you learn when you open your eyes and think with your mind, rather than with the expectations of others.

So even if I don’t agree with the Republican party on much, I do have to say that I commend gay Republicans for, in most cases, choosing a political party based on their personal beliefs rather than just on what’s expected of them based on their sexuality alone.

I’m out of here until tomorrow’s rant and ramble. Before I go, though: how much do you want to bet someone’s going to start fabricating blame-laying stories about gangs of violent gays responsible for this, similar to the myths of lesbian gangs packing pink pistols?

no style, gay comics, webcomics, humor, gay comic strip, denver, arvada, colorado springs, new life church, youth with a mission, shooting

Mr. Sanders: [note from Adri: I already know this is a straight guy, and the poor bugger's so uncomfortable approaching me]

My wife has proposed recently that we explore more in the bedroom and bring in a third.She wants it to be a woman. She wants to have sex with a woman while I watch then wants all three of us together. She says she has had fantasies about this. I don’t know what to tell her. Its hot. Really hot But what if she doesn’t like men after sex with a woman? I don’t know what to think. Help [me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope].

Me

I’ve really got to stop MST3King reader letters.

Waaaaaaaaait.

Your wife is basically offering to fulfill every straight man’s wildest dream…and you’re complaining?

I am still on Earth, right?

Teasing aside, though, I understand your concern. You’re worried that if a little kinky play turns into serious interest in the particular shade of grass on the other side, you’ll lose your wife for good. Although this probably sounds like my answer to every question, you really need to talk to her about this instead of asking people outside your relationship to assess the situation. Communication is the key to every relationship, as Hallmark-cutesy as that sounds. The gagworthiness of the sentiment doesn’t dilute the truth of it in the slightest.

Ask her about her desires. Ask her if she feels as if she’s seriously attracted to women, or if she’s just looking to be a little naughty between the sheets and happened to pick same-sex play from a list of possibly appealing kinks. Let her know about your concerns without accusing her; remember, she’s not trying to cheat on you with another woman. She’s proposing activities to make your sex life more exciting, and actively working to include you. Even if you don’t like the possible outcome, her intentions were with your well-being and titillation in mind. These are her fantasies, yes, but her fantasies involve you. You should be a little proud. Most wives’ fantasies (and mine) involve Antonio Banderas.

If it’s just a kink and you’re that uncomfortable with it, she probably won’t mind passing on it and looking for other ways to spice up your bedroom activities without involving other people. As long as you talk things over without fighting and come to a mutual agreement, it shouldn’t be an issue.

If she tells you that she’s always harbored attractions to other women but that she loves you and is still attracted to you, then you’re going to have to trust her. Ask her not to experiment with other women because it makes you worry about losing her, but accept that this is a part of her and it may one day mean that she’s going to swerve down that other road and leave you. If she does, it won’t have anything to do with whether or not she fooled around in a two-on-one girl-on-guy with you. She’d have done it eventually anyway; it just would have taken longer. It does happen now and then; comfortably married women will finally decide that they can’t ignore their sexuality any longer and will move away from their husbands to seek out relationships with other women. If that happens, it won’t be your fault. It won’t be a negative reflection on you. It would just be the way things happened.

Unless she actually tells you that’s what’s going on, though, don’t assume that’s what’s happening. Don’t take “Yes, I’m sometimes attracted to women” to definitively mean “Yes, I will leave you some day.” Until the day it happens, trust her to love you and remain faithful. Don’t be suspicious of her, and don’t try to look for signs in everything she says or does. You’ll only end up undermining your relationship, when she’d likely have been happy with you for the rest of her life.

The point is, I can’t tell you from whence her desires stem. You have to ask her, and trust her to be honest with you - as long as you make it possible for her to speak to you openly without fear of condemnation. Don’t puff up behind that male ego and assault her because your wife’s interest in a little girl-on-girl makes you feel like your mini-me is more “mini” than “me”. Don’t shut down and refuse to discuss the topic. I know, men are bad at listening. No, let me rephrase that: we’re bloody awful at it.

Try anyway.

I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by what she has to say.

Listening like Frasier Crane,
~Adri

Have a question you’d like to see answered on Ask Adri? E-mail your question to adrien-luc.sanders@451press.net with the subject “Ask Adri Question” or use the Contact Form to send your question in.

ask adri, gay advice column, lesbian fantasies

Yesterday was not a pretty day in gay and lesbian news. To take a look at a few of the highlights (since I can’t in good conscience say “lowlights” without feeling as cheesy as Hikaru):

Shepard Hate Crime Bill To Be Dropped: While I’m still