Dan Choi

There is a bit of glee in online gay lib circles tonight because Dan Choi, the gay military hero, handcuffed himself to the White House fence. He was arrested and he will be charged.

This was a terrible mistake. It is, as we used to call it in the 70s, adventurism. Lt. Choi has placed himself above the movement, requiring that the movement adjust to his personal decisions. Obviously, sometimes that is the right thing to do. When he came out on Rachel Maddow, he took a personal decision that gave a face to a social movement. He knew he stood to suffer, and he bravely faced the consequences of his actions. Recently, in the wake of the Obama administration finally stirring ever so slightly to life on the DADT question, he returned to active duty to the warm embrace of his comrades.

Now he has made himself ineligible for military service. He committed a crime ... albeit one of civil disobedience ... in front of the Commander-in Chief's official residence. This is beyond courage and into the realm of recklessness. When he came out, he gave voice to his closeted and hidden comrades. When he chained himself to the fence, he forced them to seek shelter.

The curiosity of the current phase in gay liberation stems from two contradictions.

Firstly, with gay marriage and DADT, we have finally come to a point where our movement is clearly and unambiguously demanding normalization, admission to the ordinary and the expected. This is why some on the left have belittled gay marriage, and bizarrely why some gave ultraleft cover to Obama's embrace of the bigoted pastor Warren because he tries to save children in Africa ... in other words, why worry about silly old marriage when children are dying. Back in my day in the gay movement, the ultralefts denounced Leonard Matlovich, the Dan Choi of era, because they were against the military.

The ultralefts are wrong ... and they are few, so I have to confess that this is a bit of a straw man argument. The point of it, though, is that now is a moment when we are clearly showing the middle middle of American life that homosexuality is not a threat to anyone, that it is normal, that we just want in. The decorated military man, stiff-spined, clean-cut, clear-voiced, speaks those words into the living rooms of millions. But he throws all that out when he chains himself to that fence.

The second contradiction is the yet-again recrudescence of the bizarre ultra-right just as America finds itself broadly turning a corner. I think the ultrarights are also few, though not as few as the ultralefts. But the media makes them into many. I think that creates a frustration on the left. There were comments today about how slim was the media coverage of the occupation of Nancy Pelosi's office by a crew of ENDA supports; if teabaggers had occupied an office it would be the biggest story of the week. Certainly true, but it again misses the point. The teabaggers are extremists; they call for executions, tax evasion, secession, armed resistance. We have the opportunity of showing ourselves as sane in a moment of mass political insanity. How dare my brothers and sisters occupy the office of one our supporters in the very days when she is desperately trying to gather votes to pass health care reform? Are they nuts; do they not have any sense of timing? If I did not know better, I would say they were in the pay of the teabaggers because these friends of ours are in the bizarre position of playing into the hands of the reactionaries at a moment of the highest political drama.

There is something a little infantile in these two mistimed actions today, as if they could not bear being out of the spotlight while the entire nation is gripped by the fight over health care.

Dan Choi made an error today. He lost his sense of timing, his strategic vision, and his iconic status. It will be for naught; it will not help the fight against DADT. I doubt it will hurt, but it will not help. It will certainly hurt him. He threw a lot of "cred" away for nothing, and he did it independently, without consultation, on his own. There is a fine line between the heroic and foolhardy, and that line is motly about an excess of ego. I think this is a case in point.

Adventurism is always an error. Lt. Choi is a military man. He ought to know that. Sad.

Figure Skating and Masculinity

A little context: I am writing this as I watch the Canada/U.S. hockey game ... nothing lacking in the masculinity department there. I am a huge Winter Olympics fan, and this year has been the best because I a working a DVR for the first time. I love figure skating ... men's, dance, pairs, women's, pretty much in that order. I watched pretty much every minute of the men's short and free programs. I thought Lycacek clearly won, Plushenko deserved the silver, but Takahashi was lucky to get the bronze. Lambiel, whom I have long admired, needed one more clean jump to move up; Takahashi free skate was athletic, fun, and lively, but hardly the classic grace and beauty of either Lambiel or Weir. Patrick Chan of Canada was overscored as a home ice kind of thing. I thought Johnny Weir was robbed of 5 points on the short and 10 on the free; if that's true, he should have the bronze. He certainly skated more cleanly than any of those in the 3, 4, and 5 spots, and he clearly beat Lambiel and Chan. All the results are here.

So that out of the way ... what is it with all the whining about masculinity and the quad. If Plushenko figures a quad equals the gold, then why don't they have a quad contest, sort of like ski jumping. Everybody gets two shots with marks and the best combined score wins.

But that is not what figure skating is. Rather, it is a combination of athleticism and aesthetics that is judged based on that. We all know that skating judging is notoriously corrupt ... and that in my view is why Weir placed as low as he did. efforts have been made to clean up the scoring, and I think those efforts are only half complete. Lots of people think that way, and some have taken this conjuncture as an opportunity to challenge, again, the basic nature of men's figure skating. Most famous is the great Canadian skater Elvis Stojko.

Stojko was a stirring skater, a short fireplug with a muscular athleticism combined with just enough grace to make him a champion. I never particularly favored his form of skating though. I always thought his arms slapped around like swords. But short guys have that problem in skating ... they lack those long lines that we equate with grace.

Stojko and others have argued that figure skating needs to be more masculine. A curious notion that accepts an unexamined notion of what constitutes masculine. Perhaps it would be more masculine if they wore work boots and skidded along the ice before jumping. Is that what they mean? More seriously, at least part of what they mean is that something should be taken away ... the grace, the artistry, those gestures associated with the feminine, certain kinds of costumes.

It's all nonsense. Evan Lycacek is consummately graceful and I see nothing about him that is not masculine. I'm convinced he is gay ... if there were a girlfriend or a wife, NBC would have been all over her like fur on Johnny Weir. He sounds gay to me too, but I confess that my gaydar is notoriously given to false positives and false negatives.

Johnny Weir is a big old queen, but again I do not see why his skating is not masculine just because it favors the graceful and the articulated.


Masculinity is always metaphoric. That is, the concept stands in for something else. That something else is a socially projected notion of what a man should be. For the Greeks and Romans, a man was someone who went to war; killing made the man. That has been true in military societies for millennia. It was true in our society within my lifetime. Increasingly there is a move to include some form of family-style sensitivity in the masculine ... how often do we have to listen to butch film stars ramble on about how fatherhood made them into a better person. The older form of masculinity didn't waste much time on becoming a better person through love and feeling. Nor does the Stojko school of figure skating.

The unspoken, and now oddly unspeakable, side of the masculinity trope is that gay is not seen as masculine. Nobody admits that Johnny Weir is gay, not even Johhny Weir. They call him "controversial". He is certainly, as I said, a big queen. And in his personal demeanor it would be hard to find something that we would ordinarily call masculine. Except he works out like a fiend, he suffers through pain, he marches past ridicule, he calls his own shots, and he doesn't give the time of day to those who revile him. Tough, strong, self-reliant.

Tough, strong, self-reliant. What's not masculine about that. But, of course, there are plenty of female athletes who are tough, strong, and self-reliant, and they'd punch you in the nose if you called them masculine.


Masculine as a concept is also always relative. There is no masculine without feminine; from another angle, there is no masculine without the effeminate. Curious that there is no masculine equivalent of effeminate ... and that goes to another issue in masculinity. In conventional sex roles, the crime of a woman is not to be subservient to a man; the crime of a man is not to dominate either women or men. Much, of course, was made of this during the sexual revolution, but a point was missed. So many men, I would argue the vast majority of men, live masculine lives of ethics and fairness and humanity. The flaw in the feminist view of the masculine was its glib acceptance of the stereotype proffered by the most extreme advocates of chauvinism. That is a flaw which the Stojkos repeat.

I am a gay man who like masculine gay men. I like the queens too, gawd noze. But I am filled with admiration for my brothers who pursue "masculine lives of ethics and fairness and humanity". What has that got to do with figure skating? Does Stephane Lambiel's well turned hand in mid-spin bespeak a lack of masculine ethics and fairness and humanity? On the contrary, I think it speaks to the fluidity of masculinity, to its possibilities, its limitlessness.

So many of the sports we consider masculine are made of grace and beauty. The ski jumping has these scrawny youth striking glorious poses against the wind. The long strides of a speed skater evoke ballet more than football. Why are these masculine, and not figure skating.

It all goes back to the metaphor, the relativity. If your masculine is John Wayne, skip the skating. If your masculine is Dan Choi or Evan Lycacek, enjoy it all.


Photos by Arod of signage around town. This post is not all I want it to be, but I have to get back to blogging. I have become quite a tweeter, and I enjoy the form enormously. But I have to carve out the time again to blog. So choke it out, spit it down ... is that too masculine?

Love in the Era of Obama - and O Canada!

It's July 1, a big day in my life. It marks the 142nd anniversary of Canada's semi-independence. It is the 16th anniversary of the death of my first lover and not-coincidentally the 16th anniversary of when my now sainted ex and I decided to yoke our fates as one.

So love of country, love of my lost beloved, and love of my extant but now only sainted beloved ... this one is for love.

If gay people have anything to teach, it is that the conquering power of love ennobles and enables. Love makes no sense, but there is no sense in not loving. The loathing of the loathers is our lot ... and there is certainly some satisfaction in the present era when at long last the plurality if not yet the majority understand that we are about loving.

In that sense, I think the liberal glee at the fall of Mark Sanford, fundamentalist governor of South Carolina caught in a mad and unlikely love affair with an Argentine, is rather unseemly. What we ought to be saying is not that he is a hypocrite ... hypocrisy in love, dear friends, is as old as prostitution, that oldest of "vices". No, we ought to be pointing out that inconvenient love is as ancient as humanity. So his wife of 20 years is left in the dust ... you know what, this too is an old story. The man fell in love, and it was all so wrong. But love conquers all.

If only he were not a religious bigot who looks to Bathsheba and David to justify his more unseemly grip on power, then perhaps he might just stand up and say, I understand that love is not something that state or religion should seek to control or undermine. What I found on a dance floor in Argentina is just the same as what two awkward dudes found in each other one night in an old Chevy.

But, alas, he is a religious bigot. And, alas, the liberal bloviators love to hold religious bigots to the hypocrisy of their religious bigotry. I say "no" ... tell him that love is its own justice. Tell him to give unto others the respect for love that he asks be given to him. Ask him to learn from his lesson in love.

We might also ask Obama to learn a little. His speech to the quickly assembled gay Appropriati (think Illuminati who have been handed a little badge of appropriateness) was nothing less than nauseating. In his audience, in the White House, was an officer with 18 years of service who is soon to face an administrative proceeding that will inevitably turf him out of the military to which he has dedicated his life. Because he is gay. And to add insult to injury, he was ordered not to wear his uniform, notwithstanding that he is currently an active officer in good standing, lest someone think it political. Obama's message: trust me and wait. Sure ... should the 266 men and women thrown out of the military under Obama's watch wait. What are they waiting for? Someone needs to tell this s.o.b. that he is the Commander-in-Chief. What is he afraid of?

But this is about love. It is obvious that the love affair between Barack and Michelle has been transformative ... more so, obviously, for Barack than Michelle, it seems to me. I always wonder how it can be that someone who encounters a transformative experience fails to translate that into understanding the impact of transformation on others. In other words, when someone is in love, how can they not acknowledge the love of others. I do not think Barack Obama is President without the influence of Michelle. One iota of that realization should be enough for him to realize that he should acknowledge the love that others feel.

It is harder to imagine a man like Sanford projecting his experience in inconvenient love to others. But we should not eschew him for loving.

So back to July 1. In 1993, my first lover, then my first ex, died on Canada Day in Vancouver of the plague. I spent 10 days with him as he lay dying. Bad Subjects published a reminiscence on his death that I wrote in 1993. He was unconscious when I left and died a few days later. Richard moved in to my apartment on July 1. We called ourselves sidekicks, but that night we got drunk in grief and we decided to be lovers, and that lasted for a decade. So July 1 is the death of my first lover and the anniversary of my third.

My love life does not fit into the convenience of gay marriage. It is not the narrative that goes on billboards. But it is mine and it still fills me with emotion and thrill. The truth is that many love lives do not fit the billboard model. Sanford's doesn't. Obama's does.

The job of the state is to stay out of the bedroom. The job of the state is to facilitate the civil nature of human relationships. Canadians of my generation will remember Justice Minister, later Prime Minister, Trudeau announcing that the state had no business in the bedrooms of the nation. That declaration was part of what led to Trudeaumania and his election as Prime Minister. But here, on Canada Day, it is a lesson that Obama, in love with his wife, still does not grok.

So Happy Birthday Canada. I still love you, Gaetano, and think of you every day. And I still love you, Richard, even though I know how much better we are for being friends and not mates.


Photos by Arod from Gay Day in San Francisco, 2009. All my photos from Gay Day are on Flickr.

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Gay Day

I spent the day at the Gay Pride Parade on Market Street and Celebration in Civic Center. As last year, I focused on taking photos, mostly candid people shots, but I spent more time with friends ... bumped into a bunch of people, and spent some time with old and new friends at the Faerie tent. (For those of you who do not know who the Radical Faeries are, google it or wait until I explain some time ... one of the advantages of vowing to post thrice weekly is that I have to keep a bunch of easy topics that I have pre-prepared in my mind at ready hand.)

Gay Day is at bottom a lonely and nostalgic time for me ... I think it's that for a lot of old gay activists, although perhaps I am on the tedious, self-involved end of the maudlin/giddy continuum.

But I don't want this to be about my moping around snapping pix of hot guys and odd beings and the occasional out-there dyke. So ...


It was my impression that this year was bigger and more enthused than last year. It also felt less political. All this is decidedly impressionistic, and the evidence is only my own observations as I wandered up Market Street and then around Civic Center for five hours.

Last year we had a victory that was exhilarating but felt ephemeral. Couples were married on the square, and the celebration seemed to focus on that. We did not yet know that Obama would be President, and we had not yet experienced the crushing defeat in the Prop campaign. But we had also not experienced the palpable juggernaut that the last months have been. The mass acceptance of gay people is moving forward at a staggering rate after four decades of glacially slow increments in polled percentages.

We are at a tipping point, and the celebration reflected that.


I noticed many more young gay men than last year. In fact, Civic Center was crawling with them. It was broiling hot today, and so many were semi clad. I do not know why there were so many more ... perhaps the celebration has become the place to be and be seen. The young dykes were there in force as they were last year. They are tribal and defiant and out there. The young gay guys notice my camera with a little disdain, but the young dykes don't seem to even see me. Maybe some time I will try to discuss the generation gap among gay folks, but I increasingly do not think it is very important. Because young gay people accept their rights as given and undeniable. They did not originate in an era when we were hidden and rightly afraid. I love their native defiance.


But beyond the young gay folks, the most obvious phenomenon is how broadly diverse the audience is. Drag queens, folks in wheelchairs, families of every descriptions, countless young straight folks digging a festival tht is as native to them as it is to us. And there are faeries, leather folks, nude people and lots of folks in nothing but briefs. Diesel dykes by the boatload ... I still get chills hearing the Dykes on Bikes roar up Market Street leading off the parade as they have for many years.

Our movement is at a tipping point. We are on the verge of a cascading set of victories. There are no guarantees, and the condition of our brothers and sisters in other places ... Iran and Iraq and the rest of the muslim world, Russia and Poland, Africa ... is something we cannot forget. But in the rational part of the western world, our humanity is increasingly the property of everyone ... religious bigots and troglodytes excepted.

I did not hear a lot of the speeches today. I do not even know if there were any because the umpteen musical performances scattered at all corners drowned everything out. But, what was lacking today anywhere ... in the parade, the signs, the buttons, the mood ... was acknowledgment that the biggest proximate obstacle we face in these United States in taking advantage of this historical tipping point is Barack Obama. His old-fashioned low-bore anti-gay revanchism provides comfort to our enemies and it impedes the break out. Everybody wants it to be a feel good era, a feel good day. But reality intervenes. DOMA and DADT should be blown up. Post haste. Get it over with. But with the powerful, whenever it is gay people at issue, suddenly everything gets quiet. Gay and quiet never mesh.

So it was a great day, a loud day. But we missed an opportunity. Our great day, no matter how broad and diverse it as become, is a day when we speak to power. We did not do that. So here's my bit

Obama, get in the game!

Gay Rights Now!

Photos by Arod, all taken today. More to come on Flickr, and I will let you know.

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Why the Obama Administration is Anti-Gay

There are two questions here: Why do I think that the Obama administration is anti-gay, and what are the reasons behind the Obama administration's anti-gay politics, policies, and actions?

I like to make a clear distinction between the homophobic and the anti-gay. Homophobia is psychological, social, cultural, personal. Anti-gay refers to the realm of politics, policy, and action. Either can refer to attitudes or notions. In most instances, the homophobic and the anti-gay overlap, but not in every instance. In arguing that the Obama administration is anti-gay, I do not argue that it or any of its members are homophobic ... there is no evidence on that, though lots of us are starting to have some suspicions.

The term anti-gay was common parlance in the gay liberation circles in which I traveled in the 70s. We commonly used it to describe the politics, policies, and actions of the majority of liberal and left groups who were at best openly embarrassed by us and thought that we provided fodder to their enemies. They most assuredly didn't like the loud, swarming, irreverent, open fags that we were.

The Obama administration shares this attitude: they want gay people to sit down, shut up, and wait. "It's not time, yet." "We support you, but there are bigger issues now that we have to attack." Just leave it to us, we will do the right thing when the time is right.” The one difference is that our liberal opponents in the 70s were not quite as nice about it as that. But nice and a DOJ brief will get you a DOJ brief. We don't care about nice.

The success of gay liberation arose wholly because we did not sit down, shut up, or wait. We viewed those who told us to do so then as enemies of our movement, and we should have the same attitude now. (That includes the HRC whose leader complained to Obama in a recent letter of the "pain" the DOJ brief caused ... hey, dude, it's not about some vague feeling of discomfort. It's about the blatant breach of our civil rights.)

That is why the Obama administration is anti-gay.

So, question number 2: what are the reasons behind the Obama administration's anti-gay politics, policies, and actions? I think the answer is obvious, and it is deeply disturbing. Just as Obama's failure to lead on gay rights at this tipping point for our movement is a signal of his now undeniable general reluctance to lead, so the reasons behind the anti-gay politics of his administration signal a larger and depressing fall back to the most retrograde characteristics of American politics.

So let's start with the anti-gay attitudes that we should just wait, that Obama is a "fierce" (yawn) defender of gay civil rights, that he is wisely picking the right time. This sort of argument relies on a zero-sum game political arithmetic. Obama only has so much political capital, and he needs to spend that on the big priorities.

This is reactionary and defeatist.

Political capital is not some storehouse in which gray-complected minions tote up the points scored and spend them parsimoniously; political capital exists only in its exercise. Obama shows in his political arithmetic an almost exclusive orientation to his right. Notwithstanding that the Republicans have given him nothing, nada, zip, he continues to court them. In the meanwhile, as many note, the public political dialogue centers almost exclusively on the madness of the far right against cool hand Luke Obama.

This attitude of engaging his opponents as friends and ignoring his friends as if they were opponents reveals a mechanical calculation rather than a dialectical approach ... arithmetic over calculus ... counting up rather than mobilizing ... electoralism against social change. Obama is looking to the next election, and that is the manner in which he most apparently resembles his predecessor.

In that context, think this through: Obama announces that he has ordered the military to suspend all activities surrounding DADT. The policy will remain in place as the brass figures out how to move forward; but not a single wooden nickel is to be spent on enforcing it. Rush Limbaugh goes into a frenzy ... and Obama makes a joke about it and invites a group of military Arabic translators, two of whom are gay, to the White House and praises the intelligence of the soldiery. The whole thing would be over in a flash.

So why doesn't he do it?

Imagine this, if you will: instead of slobbering like a sycophant about DOMA, the administration issues an opinion that DOMA raises the issue of the breadth of the 14th Amendment. We invite the court to comment. Rush Limbaugh goes into a frenzy .... and Obama makes a joke about it and invites a group of foster parents, two of whom are gay, to the White House and praises the commitment of ordinary Americans to do the right thing and raise children to be good citizens. The whole thing would be over in a flash.

So why doesn't he do it?

I think he doesn't do it because his political calculations are already focused on winning the next election. That is to say, Obama does not actually believe that he can be a paradigm changer like Roosevelt; he does not actually believe that a decade from now we could have a society in which as many accepted commonplaces changed as did from, say, 1930 to 1940, or 1940 to 1950. Obama is an incrementalist, not a radical.

His approach to gay civil rights in this seems to be a very exact calculation. Self-identified gays represent perhaps 3% of the electorate, and Obama gets 90% of those votes come hell or high water. But if evangelicals represent 20% of the electorate, and if he aspires to lock down 40% of them, then we are looking at 8% of the electorate. I figure that Obama figures that the 40% of evangelicals he can lock down are not fixated on the old culture war nonsense, that they are more focused on the activist side of christianity including a rising commitment to social justice especially among young evangelicals. But sin is still sin for them, so there is no upside from this arithmetic in goading them by openly supporting gay civil rights. This is why we are now hearing the highest ranking gay toadies on the Democratic side (including, sadly, Barney Frank) refer us to the second term in office!

So Obama is anti-gay because the arithmetic is bad, and he does arithmetic not calculus in his inner circles of political calculation. If that is the case, then the lie of his presidency is deeper than most of us thought, and the chances that this is a turning point in US history are dashed.

Depressing. The only answer is opposition. This president needs to feel the heat from his left flank. Gay people should lead the way.


Photos by Arod of the San Francisco City Hall demonstrations after Prop 8 passed, November 15, 2008.

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Obama: You Lied To Gay People, and Now We Know For Sure

You know the old saying: Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. The more the change, the more the same thing.

I do not like that saying because it is more than pessimistic, it despairs. That this express some underlying truth ... that there is something grim and gloomy about human existence no matter the age or the conjuncture ... does not excuse its refusal to look at the dynamics of change.

But when one is confronted by the intolerable, the intolerable that has an ancient history, one is tempted to retreat into it ... Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

As I write, this, a commercial for EA Sports on the boob-tubery that uses Beethoven's Ode to Joy ... where are the ultra-expanded copyright laws when you need them. That's change you can believe in, albeit with cynicism ... change where everything, no matter how sublime, turns to crap soon enough.

Obama's turn to crap has been far too fast. His Department of Justice submission to a federal court in favor of DOMA yesterday is the last straw. It is an obscenity. They used all the most reactionary arguments against us ... comparing gay love to incest, squealing that it would cost money, refusing to acknowledge that the Loving decision that ended bans on interracial marriage has anything to do with the civil rights of the last minority that is officially, institutionally, and legally proscribed.

The Bush administration could not have been more vicious. So we are left with this: should we thank the bastards for smiling while they stab us in the back just because they are not the same old scowling bastards who knifed us in the stomach before.

Screw you, Obama. We are pissed right off.

There is rising rage in the gay community, and we are only two weeks from Gay Pride in San Francisco. We should change the slogan right now: Obama, Are You For Us or Against Us.

What a weasel ... more to the point, this is a naked betrayal. When he said that he was a "fierce" supporter of our rights, he lied.

For those of our brothers and sisters who gave him comfort when he appointed a virulent homophobe, the Warren bigot, to give his little prayer at that inauguration that I gushed over ... you were wrong, and we know that now. He appointed Warren because he does not give a flying fuck about gay rights. He used us and he dumped us. We should have protested loud and long on Inauguration Day, and I regret that we did not. He was winking then, but he is lying now.

The more I write, the more boiled I get.

We have to face it: on other fronts, Obama has been as flat as the vision of the earth of the Christians to whom he panders. We are no closer to closing Guantanamo, he seems like a muddle in the face the attacks on health care, there is no timetable in Iraq, new financial regulations are the stuff of fairy tales, and who has heard anything about climate change.

But absolutely nowhere has his failure to lead been more clear than in the case of gay rights.

We are pissed, Obama, and we blame it on you.

To my good friends who never took the koolaid, and who stuck with Hillary right to the end of that colossal primary season - you were right. He is a homophobe.

Or at least he is anti-gay. I promise to write on the distinction between homophobe and anti-gay shortly.

Tonight I am wondering how to express my rage on Gay Day.

What a weasel ... no offense to weasels who at least do not lie about who they are or what they do.


Photos by Arod: the first one is a woodshed which is where Obama and his tawdry advisers belong; the second is my Lesser Siren ... I don't have a picture of a weasel. BTW, AmericaBlog has had excellent coverage on all of this.

Shame Redux

So sundry official gay organizations have their knickers in a knot because the Olson/Boies legal challenge to anti-gay marriage laws appears, in their august considerations, premature and incautious. Allow me to be blunt ... screw 'em. You guys blew it; you are the ones who put on the ridiculously weak campaign that lost us an election that we should have won. So your moral high dudgeon is pitiful. You pissed away the initiative, and everything that is going on is ahead of you.

I like the Olson/Boies challenge because it blasts the issue into a new zone. He who does not compete always loses. These guys stepped up and decided to compete. They represent two gay couples who have the right to sue in federal court for their rights. Did our fattened bureaucrats .... I mean the ones who lost the Prop 8 campaign ... did they take into account that Americans have the right to sue for their rights? Are they telling two couples that they should shut up?

Disgusting.

Whenever I hear people tell gay people that we should be cautious, that we should wait, that the time is not opportune, that gay people should shut up, it turns my stomach. The time was not opportune when I came out of the closet publicly and joined gay liberation as a 19-year-old in 1972. Everybody told me that. The time was not opportune when we won civil rights victories in the 70s, and then had to fight the vicious bigotry of Anita Bryant, who is the moral precursor of the pretend-to-be-nice fulminating, pustulant, hate-filled bigots who bankrolled the campaign against our rights last fall. The time was not opportune when Gavin Newsom supported us and raised the gay marriage issue to another level.

The time is never opportune for gay rights. But we have marched forward by ignoring the wagging fingers and knocking knees. Now the cowards are "our leaders". I say screw 'em. And I don't mean in that "nice, spanky way".

That major gay organizations discourage this bold step only proves how much they belong in the trash can of history.

Bravo to boldness. Bravo to the courageous couples who engaged Olson/Boies. Bravo to anyone who fights for our rights. Bravo to being open and out and forward and uncompromising.

Photo by Arod, recently, of the window of a muscle supplement store on Market a block and a half from Castro.

Shame

So it's disgusting ... the wee 6 on the California Supreme Court could not bring themselves to understand that civil rights are not subject to a vote. There is much talk today that the decision is actually very narrow ... that it states that all rights of marriage are guaranteed to gays except that gay people cannot use the word "marriage." Some will say that that is an essential victory, and that the religious fanatics are left only with a word. One way (sorry, but I can't find the reference again) suggested that we should just take the word "mariage" ... one R, and cooler because it the French spelling.

All this is lovely, and everything, but it misses the point. The California supremes have made a classic "separate but equal" argument. And separate but equal is anathema not just to American law but more so to the concept of civil rights. It is not the place of judges to rule on theological questions, and the question of whether marriage is sacred or whether the Sodom myth actually has anything to say about homosexuality have no place in law or government. The issue is civil rights. No one is saying that religious bigots should be forced not to hate us. We are saying that this is about our civil rights.

The supremes did not see this. They cowered behind the idiotic argument that popular opinion defines civil rights.

I had a little excitement yesterday. I attended the largely student demonstration at MRU (the major research university that laid off my friend Kurt today), and marched with them as far the head of the circle on Palm Drive. They went on to a sit down in downtown Palo Alto, as I headed back to my duties. It was an exuberant, very lefto feeling event. Two professors whom I knew, and a few staffers. Perhaps a 100 or so people in total.

Later I had a silly exchange with some right winger on Twitter. Someone retweeted my tweet "It's a new Dred Scott decision - think how it will look in history - the 'justices' will be so ashamed". And then some evident right winger novelist wrote me to ask if I knew what the Dred Scott decision was. Of course, I do .. it was a decision that stated that a negro was not a person and therefore had not status to sue for his freedom. I think it is very a propos, but more importantly it is a decision that has come to define judicial cynicism. So a little later, this rightwinger tweeted "Yeah, imagine, they made a ruling based on the law and not on "empathy." Never would have expected it." So I replied to him "Dred Scott - 'a ruling based on the law and not on "empathy."'"

That's the way they are crowing ... they are seeing this as lawful, as opposed to empatheticc. They are wrong. This was a failure to see the larger principle of the law that all persons are equal. The decision substituted a specious and discredited theory that approximately similar accommodation is equality. That is bunk. One day the ludicrousness of this decision will earn the same derision we now shower on Dred Scott.

Another fascinating development ... Ted Olson and David Boies, opponents in the Supreme Court case of Bush v Gore, have joined forces to take gay marriage equality to the federal courts. This would have been unimaginable even a year or two ago. We have moved rapidly forward. But it is no time for complacency. Let us applaud and praise Olson and Boies. But let us also organize and prepare for the next battle against the bigots.



Photos by Arod of San Francisco art. Top photo a mural on Harrison (I think) around 20th; bottom photo is a sculpture on the Embarcadero at the foot of Market.

State of the Gay

So, three items ... American Idol, the California Supreme Court Decision, and something called ADAP.

Kris, the sweet christian married boy from down Arkansas way beat the glam rocker Adam who is distinctly if not openly gay. The fundies had picked Danny as their candidate of choice, but he was second runner up.

It was not surprising, and I did call it. I think the thing is vastly more about middle-of-road-appeal than about gay/straight or christian/secular. Adam's followers were not doubt a hard core, and his every performance solidified us; but Kris won people over as he visibly grew and assumed the mantle of stardom. So when it came down to one on one, the normal boy spoke to more people. I figure it this way ... if Kris were a quietly gay Christian from the heartland, and Adam were a loud booze and chicks rock star, Kris would still have won.


On the finale, there was a genuine affection between the two, and the LA Times published an article on the day of the final competition that argued that their relationship was emblematic of the rapprochement that is sweeping not just secular society but young christians as well. Ann Powers, pop music critic, wrote:

In this complicated climate, one painted thumbnail means a lot. Allen began decorating one of his black -- one of Lambert's favorite colors -- late in the season, apparently to dispel rumors that the pair, who were roommates in the show-sponsored mansion where the finalists reside, were feuding. Lambert reportedly later removed the paint from one of his thumbs in his own gesture of support.

The friendship between the two finalists suggests that tolerance can trump ideology, a powerful sentiment that echoes President Obama's suggestion that bridging differences could be more effective than trying to eradicate them.

I didn't know about the painted thumbnails thing ... I find it quite touching. It certainly is the sort of thing that one wants to be emblematic of "tolerance trumping ideology". But it is nothing to hang your hat on. Being nice, being nice and touching, only goes so far. Gay people know all about that.

So the wave of support for gay marriage in recent weeks and months has softened even the hard edges of a skeptic such as myself. There is a cascade of growing understanding that the arguments of the bigots make no sense, that there is no good reason why people should not marry whomever they choose, that the religious right has lied itself into a frenzy. It is not that people are suddenly righteous gay libbers ... it is, rather, a more American phenomenon, to whit that people figure they should stay out of other people's business and let them do what they want.

I still hold out hope that the California Supreme Court, by that original 4-3 majority, will understand that tossing out Prop 8 will spare the state from two more years of religious invective. The way it would work is that the right wingers would have to get 2/3 majorities in both legislative houses ... just like in Massachusetts. And the result would be the same as in Massachusetts, that the whole matter would rapidly become a non-issue.

Did the Supremes watch American Idol? Did they pay any attention to Iowa? Do they think that tolerance should trump ideology? Or are they thinking career? Are they thinking that the wingnut maniacs will never forgive them for voting for us? This, again and once again, points out the degree to which the bloody rump on the 'publicans is still driving the debate in America, still in the intellectual drivers seat, notwithstanding the now openly derided idiocy of their stance.


So here we are in this state of the gay waiting on a bunch of potential vacillators to see if we spend two more years, maybe four more years, proving that we are fundamentally human. I have been gay all my life, but the gnawing feeling of being publicly declared as less than human, it never gets less acute.

I think we are going to win tomorrow ... I was right about Kris, and I'm going to be right about this. If I am not right, then I am gonna be royally pissed. I think hundreds of millions will be royally pissed.

Civil rights is what it has always been about. But that is not all that is at stake in the current decline and fall of California. I could not summarize better the parlous state in which we find ourselves than did Paul Krugman yesterday in the New York Times. It's not state of the gay for him, it's State of Paralysis. And the entire crushing problem in what would be one of the richest countries in the world is the result of the deliberate strategy of the 'publicans to destroy the ability of government to govern. It is nihilism, just as their strategy against gay marriage is nihilism.

Nihilism ... it used to be groovy when we were hippies reading Dostoyevsky ... kills. And that is what the State of Paralysis plans to do as it threatens the Aids Drug Assistance Program (ADAP). Now, they plan to kill funds for children's healthcare as well, so we can't say they favor the cute babies over the fags. But what is a government that lets its people die for want of charity? Is that what Jesus would do?

Here is s case where it is pretty difficult to argue that tolerance is trumping ideology. The wingnuts would have a hard time to argue that if Jesus rather than the terminator had chased Gray Davis out of office, he would be in favor of killing babies and fags. But the scorched earth policy of denying everything leads precisely to that ... hatred, death.

I am aall for the painted thumbnails mode of expressing solidarity. But it is not going to save us. We need a bold Supreme Court, and we need a real government.

If you want to protest the possible end of the ADAP program, sign the petition at the SF AIDS Foundation.


Photos by Arod. Top two are from the tube; third photo is of Castro and market Streets, and the bottom photo is a detail from the mural on the Franklin Street side of the War Memorial Opera House.

Those of my good friends who still soldier through these ramblings may note that I did not meet my self-imposed Sunday deadline for a new post. So here is a codicil to my thrice weekly writing commitment ... on long weekends, I get until Monday to do the Sunday post.

Eurovision

Somehow I missed the whole Eurovision thing ... not a bad move given the paucity of time. But for pure schmaltzy pop with that soupçon of fagginess that marks its as no-doubt European, who can top the cutest guy in the world with a violin, Alexander Rybak.



What a babe!

The event was in Moscow, and the grey and grisly Russian state could not restrain its medieval bloodlust even when the eyes of the world are on it. The thugs in uniform that are the Russian police violently broke up a gay demonstration.



It is noteworthy that Rybak condemned the Moscow police. He stated, "Why did they [the Moscow police] spend all their energy stopping gays in Moscow when the biggest gay parade was here [in Eurovision] tonight?"

Also, check out this documentary on being gay is Russia on Youtube

Most of the information in this post comes from the incomparable JoeMyGod blog. Must reading!

Silence Equals Death

Tomorrow is an embarrassing day for gay liberationists. Somehow some "committee" ... and I use the word with some derision notwithstanding my long history on committees ... decided that they would name May 7 as National Day of Silence for gay people. The idea is so retrograde, so obviously out-of-touch and ignorant of gay history, so ludicrously out-of-touch with what it means to be a gay person in society today. Less significantly, it signals again and once again the degree to which the left has self-absorbed itself out of relevance to the movement.

So some history. The regular reader of my scratch will know that I was a gay activist through the 70s. The photo that follows is pure credentialing ... I may be an old crank now, but I were a yute once, and nobody is taking that away from me ... this is a photo of me addressing the National Gay Rights March in 1976 in Toronto ...

I wrote a little more of my history in the movement here.

I can tell you that the notion of a Day of Silence for gay people would have been viewed as the work of double agents in those days ... if it had not been laughed out the door, it would have been the subject of a stream of those special 70s-style polemics. We were not about silence, and the gay movement was not about silence. For crying out loud, one of our most infamous tactics was the "zap" when a bunch of fags would go to a straight place and kiss and hold hands and queen it up. We had guts, and we knew that silence was the language of cowards. If silence had been our kit bag, my dear friends in the movement today, we would all still be in the closet.

Think about it. The history of gay people is nearly impossible to discern because of the silence which our enemies brutally, murderously, enforced upon us. Remember the phrase "the love that dare not speak its name." That is silence. Remember what they said about us in the 70s when we finally spoke up, they called it "the love that will not shut up." That's me. I am a faggot who will not shut up, even if a bunch of cloistered self-styled radicals came up with the lame idea that sitting around with tape on their mouths represented homosexuality and our struggle for freedom. Our movement is about making noise, and every success we have had is because we have not shut up, not because we wandered around in a daze pretending to have lost our voices.

The modern gay left needs to study the history upon which they are built, and they need to shed the blinders of post-gay-liberation apologies ... I'll explain that shortly ... and look at what really happened.

First though ... how can you have a day of silence when the slogan of our struggle against AIDS was "Silence Equals Death". Let me tell you that all my friends whom I lost in the plague, they are silent. And I can swear to you that if they could speak now, they would tell us to shout and make noise and never to allow anyone to silence us. Every Saturday morning, my dog and I make a pilgrimage to the AIDS memorial grove where I recite thrice the words of my friend, the late poet Thom Gunn, in memory of my silent friends in the stone circle where these words are carved:

walker within this circle pause
although they all died of one cause
remember how their lives were dense
with fine compacted difference

Yeah ... that is what I am saying ... the notion of a Day of Silence dishonors their memory. It is as if all that we did has been pointlessly forgotten in favor of some half-baked idea that nobody with any sense questioned. Imagine what the committee meeting must have been like when this idea first reared its head ... was there no one with any sense of history, of the struggles which have made us what we are today? Did no one think to look at where we came from? I mean this idea has less consciousness than Boys in the Band ... no, the characters in Boys in the Band had the balls to be loud, but whatever committee came up with silence as a strategy could no more have led gay liberation than the Log Cabin Club.

You know, a year ago, I tried to write this post, and it made me so viscerally angry that I stopped. I am writing it this year because only a week ago I promised to blog thrice weekly, so I am stuck with having to spit out what I sat on before. I run my brain like a committee, and I keep commitments even if just to myself ... and my inner committee has enough sense that it tosses lousy ideas into the trash heap without a vote.

So back to gay history. In the 70s, a key debate in the movement, expressed in sundry ways, was between the notion of single issuism and the notion that the gay movement had to "link up" with other movements. The genuine gay liberationists ... I was one of them ... ignored multi-issuism because it obviously spelled the death of our demands. No one liked us. My friends in the movement today, listen to this ... feminism hated us ... the women's movement did everything they could to distance themselves from us. The reason why dykes boycotted the gay movement was the homophobia of the women's movement.

They wanted us to shut up ... they wanted us to be silent. We were inconvenient. They might nod to the fact that we ought to have rights, but it was inconvenient. It played, in their minds, to the bigotry of the opponents of the women's movement. So, better the fags should shut up and go back to their drag shows in shuttered bars.

We did not shut up. We shouted. We screamed. We invaded their precincts and we made them listen. And with reference to above, that is why we do not need to apologize to the myriad ex-post-facto "supporters" who chide us on overblown claims of racism and sexism in the most liberal community in the country. We made our own liberation, not only against the bigots of church and state and common sense, but also against such bigots on the self-absorbed left who still congratulate themselves on finding ways to dump on gay men for being free.

No excuses, no apologies, no silence.

A couple of stories from my past ... at a march for abortion rights led by a group called CARAL (Canadian Abortion Rights Action League) in Vancouver in the 70s ... we jumped into the lead of the march with our banner. The organizers tried to get rid of us, but we wouldn't leave. We wanted to speak at the rally at the end of the march, and they wouldn't let us. So, with the encouragement of my comrades, I simply walked on to the stage as if it was my turn, took the mike and gave a speech. That is one of the proudest moments of my life. There was silence through the speech, but at the end, I remember a rousing cheer. Why? Because we refused to be silent.

Hear this ... Silence is death. Get silence out of your lexicon.

Another moment ... in the 70s in Vancouver, there was a lot of left wing political action to prevent the deportation of the native activist Leonard Peltier. So, as a kind of object lesson to the scolds on the left who kept telling gay liberation that it had to "link up", we "linked up." The homophobia in the native movement was thick. I was at a meeting in somebody's house ... remember I was a 20s slip-of-a-thing hippie-esque gay guy ... and I got to playing with this 5 year-old. Later I found out that there was an angry meeting in the kitchen where the father of the 5 year-old was demanding that all the gay guys be kicked out of the meeting because he didn't want me playing with his kid. That happened. Link up be damned, faggots were last. But we still did not shut up. No silence for us.

So we went to the big march for Peltier. And again, we simply took the microphone when the committee denied us the right to speak. Their silence, our voice. I have this exquisite photo of that moment, and I promise to post it here some time when I find it ... there is this little girl looking right in my eyes when everyone else is looking elsewhere. Why? Because they wanted us to be silent.

We were not silent. And now we are free. Do the math.

Another example ... the Democrats were livid at Newsom because he took a public loud position on gay marriage. But look what happened. Now gay marriage is a prairie fire. If we, and Newsom, had been silent when our "friends" and "fierce allies" told us to be silent, would we be winning in Maine and Iowa and perhaps even in California? No. Because ... my young friends ... Silence Equals Death. BTW, don't forget the episode where Obama long ago refused to be photographed with Newsom ... he has yet to prove to be our friend. Are we going to be silent with him as some have advised?

Has the "silence" crowd seen Word Is Out? Do you have any idea how that film galvanized the movement when it came out? Came out. Because today, yesterday, tomorrow, the gay movement is about coming out and civil rights. Coming out is about being loud and open and speaking. Civil rights is about refusing to be silent in the face of oppression. Any committee who sponsors Day of Silence events should have the self-respect to do a showing of Word Is Out ... because it is the counterpoint that exposes the foolishness of this idea.

Dinner is ready. So let me conclude.

I am not going to be silent tomorrow. I am not going to be silent until they give me six feet of dirt. Silence is the wrong way to go. Kill this stupid idea.

Let's have a National Day of Screaming Queens. Gay pride, not silence.

Silence Equals Death. No excuses.

Postscript: FWIW ... here's a history of the National Day of Silence. Frankly, pretty bloody lame. They actually ask "what are you going to do to end the silence? ... well, how about organizing a National Shout-out to All Oppressed Gay People. That would actually make sense.

Photos ... top by Arod of a bus shelter on Church Street ... middle by unknown of me addressing the 1976 National Gay Rights March in front of Toronto City Hall in 1976 ... bottom by Arod of the AIDS Memorial Grove.

Disco Nite on AI

Listening to superannuated disco divas ... and divos, as it were ... on the kick-off show on American Idol. It makes me nostalgic for the sweet years of my youth when I spent countless hours dancing. I like to point out ... damn it, it's the truth ... I was an exceptional disco dancer in the gay male style. I am riveted with nostalgia.

So let me bring you down ... I compare that to the fate of our brothers right now in Baghdad. Do not click on this link if you have a weak stomach. It is horrible. Our brothers are being horribly slaughtered, and no one cares. Imagine if this were happening to Christians in Baghdad. It is still a fact that killing fags is not nearly as contemptible as killing dogs. Witness the difference between the Michael Vick story and the slaughter of the innocents on our watch in Iraq right now.

Being a gay man means both remembering disco life and remembering how religious bigotry kills. Don't trust the bastards, brothers and sisters. They kill whenever they get the chance. We have two millennia of history to prove that.

Love for All ...

The perfect riposte to religious homophobia ... from Bjorn Borg!



Worth repeating that anyone interested in the actual history of same-sex marriage must read John Boswell's myth-shattering Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe.

Fear and Loathing ... and the Storm a-Coming

So to set the scene ... beautiful Sunday afternoon. I am preparing to add 4 koi to the pond in the back yard. Skipping a meal each of yesterday and today because I have slipped above the limit of what I am prepared to tolerate ... not that I am technically overweight, but I do have a limit and I am not going over it! Wee Timmie Lincecum looking merely mortal pitching against the Padres ... the stuff is there but the killer instinct seems a little soft. I figure he needs a bit of time to get over the off-season celebrity and get back into the desperation for winning that undergirds every great athlete. Went through my closet and tossed a pile of clothing roughly three feet high to Community Thrift. And I am preparing to devote a few of these declining hours of the weekend to The Company, as I sometimes like to call MRU, the major research university where I stuff m&m's into tiny boxes in exchange for enough candy to support my heathen lifestyle.

So life goes on ... even as our christian friends are dressing in strange colors and weird fruity hats in order to celebrate this high holiday of their death cult. Yes, death cult. One does not have to be a historian these days to understand how much this religion is a death cult ... one need only review the ludicrous and bizarrely amateurish new ad that the curiously named NOM has created ... A Storm is Coming.

First off, har-dee-har, we have the bizarre experience of a week in which the extremist fundies start a campaign called 2M4M (2 Million 4 Marriage) AND the extremist wingnuts start a campaign called teabagging. Do these people live in some cellar somewhere immune to everyday life? But ya gotta laugh!

So, there are plenty of critiques of the ad ... for reference, a bunch of actors mouth short lines in front of a montage of the dark clouds of a gathering storm replete with lightning. The actors look fearful, almost weak. You can search for it on YouTube ... I don't want them to count my site as a link.

Or you can watch all the parodies here. I think this is the coolest one:


So much has been written about the dishonesty of the ad ... that the performers are actors, many of whom tried out for multiple parts. That the ad primarily addresses civil rights cases in which church organizations and religious individuals offering public accommodations were required to offer those accommodations to all comers. Yawn ... it is such a problem for bigots living in a free country.

But I think the darker side of the psychology of this ad has received insufficient attention. The storm predicted gets us coming and going. It is a direct reference to the apocalyptic vision of end times, the gathering storm of all these evils terrifying the good souls faithful in Christ. But the storm is also a direct call for action against gay people. This is a longtime subtext in christian homophobia ... the love the sinner, hate the sin is a giant lie, and those of us who suffer from these bigots know it in our bones. This ad gives cover to those who would physically attack us, and it is an unmistakable call for violence.

The bigots make much of their being a rainbow coalition founded in love to protect traditional marriage. What a crock. We do not want their love ... history is replete with how painful their love has been.

History, too, plays a role here. I think this is yet another attempt by the extremist fundies to put the medieval back into christianity. And by that I mean the superstition and the fear and the death.

The regular reader of my musings will know that I am a voracious history reader, and that the Middle Ages is a favorite period. Among the fascinations of history is the idea of trying to imagine the mindset of an era who assumptions and modera operandi are, at bottom, utterly alien to our own. So ... not to put too fine a point on this ... the medieval mind accepted the notion of an active god and an active devil who intervened directly and personally in all affairs. Evil was incarnate, in the flesh. Now, the Middle Ages were not a monolith, and as the church developed its power to command souls, it did so in large part by augmenting its role in direct intervention in personal life. The church always railed against a rising tide of evil, and blamed all reverses upon the sordid nature of human error.

But it was only in the 11th century that the Church changed its mind about the meaning of the Sodom myth. It never liked homosexuality ... it never liked sexuality ... but there are few homosexual purges before the Crusades. That said, the entire era groans under the mindset that human affairs are the active battlefield between the divine and the diabolic incarnate.

We ... rational, secular society ... find that nonsensical. Most of the religious see God as vastly further away, more ethereal, less corporeal than did our medieval predecessors. Heaven may still be for the righteous, but righteousness for most of us is honesty and hard work and goodness. We just do not believe to the same degree in the notion of incarnate evil ... pope Ratzinger's handwringing fulminations notwithstanding.

Now, that may not be as true for the fundies ... but I would argue that even fundies, and especially the young, share in this notion of the distant God. Their nearly erotic love of Jesus as personal intercessor is a way of bridging the distance between an ethereal God and everyday life. (As an aside, this is not what Constantine had in mind when he signed off on the Trinity in 325.) But there is a danger here, because the personal relationship with Jesus is fungible, individual. It threatens to allow individuals to decide for themselves what Jesus means to them. It might even allow homos to decide that Jesus thinks that gay is okay.

So these ads are an attempt to put the Jehovian God ... and the fear and the superstition ... back into the conversation. I think it is a feeble attempt ... but that is the subtext. Jesus may love you, but Jehovah of the flaming sword and gathering storm is an angry God who slays and brings torments and plagues. Love Jesus, but fear God.

Fear God ... fear the homos ... fear the government.

Fear. There is a storm coming, and it is a storm of fear. The righteous will fear god ... and the faggots will fear the righteous.

Yes, the campaign is laughable and it has fallen on its face. But we must remember what it meant to mean, and what it speaks to and about our implacable enemies who still actively fantasize our corporeal destruction.


Happy Easter ... in the strictly pagan sense of that greeting. And long live the multicolored egg-laying Easter Bunnie ... the perfect riposte to the death cult that still threatens our lives and happiness.

Photos by Arod, the first two are street art on or near 16th Street in San Francisco, the last is a pic of Easter Eggs at Le Zinc Café on 24th, one of my favorite eateries.

... p.s., here's another riposte, a kick to the ribs ... with all due deference to Genesis ...

One Legend, then Another, then a New One

Much impressed by American Conservatory Theater's production of Souvenir: A Fantasia on the Life of Florence Foster Jenkins. Foster Jenkins was a 30s and 40s era socialite who fancied herself a soprano diva notwithstanding her near total lack of talent. Her fame grew through recitals to privileged audiences until she rented Carnegie Hall to her eternal fame and shame. She was evidently oblivious, and died without warning, while purchasing sheet music, only a few months later.

Judy Kaye is magnificent in the title role. The whole thing was riotously funny ... and poignant, and they played both to the hilt.

There is not a lot of room for rumination in this one, the more so given that the audience is obviously willing to laugh without reservation at a woman who really should be embarrassed. At the time, the audiences hid their ridicule sufficiently that she could and would carry on. We have no such compunction these days. It took me some time before I could watch the early auditions of American Idol without my finger on the channel changer. The really awful acts are obvious setups, but there is this stratum of people who truly think they can sing but they just plain cannot. They ask for it, they get it, and we get to watch. But it is agonizing to witness their humiliation, and even worse to see them rail against it. No matter how plainly the plain-spoken Simon spits it out, they just do not know that they are "awful."

No excuses for me here ... I am a big American idol fan and I will blog again this year about some of the highlights and lowlifes. But the terrible screeching of American Idol just does not compare to the symphonic monstrosity of Florence Foster Jenkins ... try this on for size:


The other performance in Souvenir was Donald Corren's rendering of the aptly named Cosmé McMoon, the Mexican-born and obviously gay man who was her long-time accompanist. The narration was introspective ... he wondered how it was that he ended up doing this thing. I somehow doubt the original Cosmé had any such reservations ... money is money to the starving artist. And society is society to the fag trying to find a niche. It's never easy, but it was particularly not easy for a gay man to make it in the New York of the 20s, 30s, 40s. I thought Corren was spectacular. And the closet he played was very After Dark which was very apropos, I suppose.

But I am an out-of-the-closet fightin' fag, and so ...

The Oscars and All That

Huzzah to Sean Penn who gets it, and talks the talk and walks the walk. Who will care about the skimpy charms of Slumdog Millionaire in a year or a month or a decade? But Milk cuts, makes history, renders for anyone to see something that must be seen and that the enemies of sight deny to sight. (Shame on Jonathan Rauch for his scandalous pandering to religious bigots. It has never been about assuaging bigotry ... they can keep their bigotry. We have no claim on it. But we deserve to live as any other person lives, and that is what Sean Penn understands, but Jonathan Rauch is willing to give up for a bag of fool's gold.)

I saw Cleve Jones on Rachel Maddow, and he was crystal clear about the nature of the task. He said that 1978 was not as much a memo as 1964 when the black movement understood that we can never get our freedom state by state or county by county. The bigots thrive in the states and the counties. We need a clear federal mandate that gay people are people. Period. That's it. Religious bigots are welcome to hide under whatever bridge they can find or whatever cave they can slither into. But they have no place in the civil rights of fellow human beings.

Did you hear that Obama?

Before I come back to Obama, I have to note that seeing Cleve was a little shocking. We all age. I knew Cleve in passing ... our paths crossed as he was moving on to a kind of entrepreneurial activism and I, a recent immigrant to San Francisco, remained a true believer in the hardy band of lovers who had created the gay movement in the 70s. I mean no slight by the term "entrepreneurial activism", the more so because ultimately Cleve managed to create the Quilt whose power needs to be witnessed to be understood. But I did not have that in me, and my true believerism eventually devolved into retirement and ultimately a career outside the movement. So it goes.

But Cleve back then was such a sweet puppy of a young man ... and now he is not. His voice is as clear as ever, and his understanding unbowed by compromise or cowardice. I admire him. I just wish we did not have to age.

So to Obama, who needs to get with the program ...

That said, what a speech:

Not much to add to all the press, but the non-State-of-the-Union was a masterpiece. How much joy to the rhetorician's heart is a President who rides the language like a surfer on the waves of the ocean of speech.

Stanley Goes to the Fish Market

I read Stanley Fish's blog in the New York Times pretty regularly, and he recently published a piece called The Last Professor. The post questions the survivability of the humanities in the academe, and refers to a recent book by one of Fish's students, Frank Donoghue, who has a new book entitled “The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities.”

Fish argues for "higher education as an enterprise characterized by a determined inutility" ... I refer to a similar concept in the phrase "the tyranny of relevance." Fish writes (and I have conflated two paragraphs for clarity's sake):

This view of higher education as an enterprise characterized by a determined inutility has often been challenged, and the debates between its proponents and those who argue for a more engaged university experience are lively and apparently perennial. The question such debates avoid is whether the [ideal of Michael Oakeshott that "there is an important difference between learning which is concerned with the degree of understanding necessary to practice a skill, and learning which is expressly focused upon an enterprise of understanding and explaining"] (celebrated before him by Aristotle, Kant and Max Weber, among others) can really flourish in today’s educational landscape. It may be fun to argue its merits (as I have done), but that argument may be merely academic – in the pejorative sense of the word – if it has no support in the real world from which it rhetorically distances itself. In today’s climate, does it have a chance?

Both Fish and Donoghue say "no" ... regardless of the merits, scholarship as an end in itself untethered to an explicit and argued social utility cannot and will not survive.

There is plenty of evidence to back up their skepticism, not the least of which is that students increasingly look to post-secondary education with career in primary mind. The last flush of inutilitarian idealism might have been the 70s when people like me took classes in Chinese language whose principle was that the memorization of Tang dynasty poetry could lead to fluency. The result of that is that I can recite imperfectly two lines of a famous poem and I can scratch out around 25 characters.

I believe, and I am in agreement with Fish here, that scholarship is justified about anything that is knowable or anything about which we still do not know everything. That covers pretty much any subject. To require an explicit tie between knowability and utility predisposes the scholar's work with reference not to the object studied but to a present paradigm that may have nothing to do with the object. This was precisely the tyranny-of-relevance error of the whole theory digression that bedeviled literary studies for a couple of decades ... I am happy to aver that the grip of airless theory seems to be loosening.

Having said that ... that study itself is sufficient argument for scholarship ... methinks Professor Fish got lost in the marketplace. Because as with everything, the pure argument, the single source of truth, is always wrong at least because it is incomplete but more so because it closes the door to the fuller explication of the underlying dialectic. You see, scholarship has never been free of the tyranny of relevance in any meaningful overarching sense. Certainly one has professor x who spent three decades deciphering runes while his colleagues snickered at his tawdry clothes and poor hygiene. But even professor x lived in an institution situated within a society, an institution subject to rulership, economics, pressures, and social changes.

Complexity is what interests me, and reductive-to-the-single-point arguments run out of steam. I can stamp my foot all I want about pure scholarship ... I could rage on about the undeniable fact that most professors produce precious little of memorable quality ... and I could feel good about it. But it would not get me closer to understanding the dynamics that are rendering scholarship in the current era.

I think you need to start with the counterposing pure scholarship and social context. They are never separate, though social context pays vastly less attention to pure scholarship than the other way around, certainly. The fascination is in the complexity of that relationship. I wrote a few days ago about a forum on the term "Islamism" and I hope that I prefigured a couple of these points there. Emmerson, the scholar talking about Islamism took the term out of its robust and fractious social context and laid it before us as something to be studied. I think that Emmerson lost a chance to change scholarship by insisting on writing a book about this term instead of creating a living monument on the web. But that demonstrates precisely the struggle between the pure scholarship of wresting the term from its context and looking it as a captured wave (not a fixed or reified object) and the social context that wants some feedback from the pointy-heads who do this kind of stuff.

Emmerson lives in a rarified world, the world of the endowed scholar who just thinks and writes. Great work if you can get it. I think that world has a responsibility to knowability, even when the objects it might choose to study are not relevant, or what is more significant posed-as-relevant, to come current issue or problem. In other words, we can demand of endowed scholars that they do something, and then we can tell them that we are free to make of what of what they do what we want. They can't own it or keep it back. Again, that is a dialectic.

The key to saving the humanities is to inhabit both terms of that dialectic.


At MRU, the major research university where I pile seashells on the beach in exchange for loaves and fishes, I have argued on numerous occasions ... and you must realize that I have no formal standing to make this argument ... that the humanities departments need to seize the idea of the double major. I like this one: French and Civil Engineering. Or, Classics and Urban Studies. Or, Art History and Mechanical Engineering. Or, History and Earth Systems.

Yes, there is a grave danger here that the humanities find themselves tied to a stated and required relevance. But, so long as one keeps this slippery slope in mind, such formally combined majors enable the humanities to inject into the real world the perspective of pure scholarship. More significantly from the social context point of view, they can round up some students and increase their own footprint.

So, the French and Civil Engineering works in Africa for the United Nations, the Classics and Urban Studies student intertwines classical ideas of open space and citizenship with modern transportation systems, the Art History and Mechanical Engineering student retains the notion of beauty as he proposes a bridge on a freeway, and the History and Earth Systems student comes to this most complex of human issues with an understanding that we have ripped our environments to shreds since we first walked the earth.

The humanities can surrender the social context parts of the double major to the science and engineering departments, and thereby liberate itself to its own genius, to whit the inutilitarian search for the knowable.

I propose this example by way of outlining a path for the humanities to engage with the world that threatens it even as it operates to save its most previous perquisite ... the ability of scholars to define for themselves what is worth studying. Moaning that the world has no room for us, well, that is an ancient complaint that has an odor not of striving and research but of coffee and upholstery.


A few further notes on complexity and military history

Last night at a dinner of five pointy-heads, my excellent friend Ian and I sparred about the Dresden bombing and that spun into Hiroshima and the Japanese surrender. Dresden is in the news these days because February 13 was the 64th anniversary, and the day often presages neo-Nazi marches about war crimes committed against Germany. There is a nice piece in the English Der Spiegel here in which Frederick Taylor, a British historian who has written extensively on Dresden, is interviewed. (I suspect he is the son of the noted left-wing British historian, AJP Taylor but I could not find any proof of that).

Taylor rejects the view that Dresden was chosen only because it was an architectural jewel and as part of a singular effort to destroy Germany by destroying civilian morale; he argues that these were certainly factors, but that it was also a significant military target. One can quibble, and we certainly now know that the carpet bombing strategy was not a significant factor in the defeat of Germany. But I find a reduction of the bombing of Dresden to war crime to be a kind of moral cubbyhole that exempts the viewer from the full range of dialectics at play in the moment. In other words, once we assign the single factor and require that all argument start there, we lose the ability to understand how things actually happen, how strategies in the high sense devolve into tactics on the ground, if I can make a macabre pun. But complexity of argument can readily come back to its starting point, and Taylor, the champion of a complex argument about Dresden does precisely that. The aforementioned interviews ends thus:

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Do you think it was justifiable?

Taylor: Personally, though I can trace the logic of it, I have serious doubts. It is a ghastly example of how war depletes the moral reserves even of democratic nations. Goetz Bergander, who survived the bombing of his native city as an 18-year-old and has written widely about its destruction, has described the bombing in his characteristically forgiving way as "outsize." It was certainly all of that.

I think a similar moral cubbyhole has long obscured clarity in argument, especially among liberals, about the events that ended the Pacific War in 1945. It has been argued that the Japanese were ready to surrender, but either we needed to give them time or we needed to figure some way not to force unconditional surrender. There is no evidence that I know that supports this other than assertion. Significantly ... and this is a grave error in anyone seeking to understand military history ... no credit in this view is given to the implications of the fog of war. What the Americans knew was that resistance had not stopped and that large numbers of troops were being amassed in the South in preparation to resist the assumed invasion. That the Russians had entered the war likely had more impact on the Americans than the Japanese military leadership much of which was committed to a fight to the death of the last Japanese; why would they care whether that final plucked life was given up to a Russian or an American?

But once we credit a notion that the Japanese were ready to surrender before Hiroshima, or that they really surrendered after Hiroshima because they were afraid of the Russians and not the bomb, we avoid a grindingly difficult moral argument: did the A-bombs result in a net of fewer deaths; and, if so, were they thereby justifiable?

That is the moral crux of the end of Japanese war, and it should not be avoided.


A last note:

I have meant to write about this for a few days, so I append it here. There was a touching article in the New York Times entitled "My Sister's Keeper". It concerns aging colonies of lesbian separatists who have kept the faith, as it were, with that peculiar 70s ideology. I want to note that the lesbian separatists did damage to the gay movement, and they are not heroes of mine even if they have lived their lives courageously as they saw fit and so desired. The gay movement of the 70s was overwhelmingly male not because we rejected women but because women rejected us. They had lots of excuses ... all men are rapists, the gay boys have too much sex, we expected the women to make the coffee while we did the movement ... but only one argument is real. Feminism of the 70s was homophobic in a dominant sense, that is in its majority and in its actions. Lesbians active in the women's movement felt they had to hide or at least downplay their homosexuality. The separatists, while hardly hiding from feminism, hid from the world and proclaimed that isolation as liberation. They contributed nothing to our present freedom, and their absence weakened us both in the short term and in the long term. I wish them well in their retirement, but the record tells the tale.

Photos by Arod. The owl is from a window on Divisadero Street; the lion is from a Board of Education building on Van Ness; the window reflection shot is just off Market near Gough; the statue is from Golden Gate Park; the finger is from Hayes Street (I think) near Masonic; all are from San Francisco.