Category Archives: Gay

That's not where you thought it was…

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Earlier this evening, after dinner, we went to see if Scotts newest find was still open. They closed at 9pm, so that was a little blah. As we were driving away I noticed that right next door was “Partners Ultra-Lounge” and I stopped the car and just gaped. I, for the past year or so thought erroneously that Partners was in =downtown Kalamazoo= not in PORTAGE! As I was gaping it hit me… This apparent “destination” that I now realize that I’ve never really known is part of a strip mall. A gay bar in a strip mall. I’ll just let that sink in.

I’m still quite a-gog about this. What a shock! Still have zero interest in exploring anything more about it, but surprised it was in Portage. Oh well… 🙂

New York moves toward gay marriage, while Michigan finds new and costly ways to stick it to the gays | MLive.com

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New York moves toward gay marriage, while Michigan finds new and costly ways to stick it to the gays | MLive.com.

It’s almost as if forces are aligning to support my plan! When Western provided “DEI” support, which allows employees to cover one other person that they know with healthcare. When it was first offered I couldn’t help but laugh at it. What a way to go. To provide domestic partner benefits to homosexuals without saying you are doing so. I give this place extra credit on one hand and I laugh about the bullshit from the state on the other hand. That we need guerilla tactics to provide employees with equality, that really takes the cake. I didn’t opt to do it because the DEI package would have bankrupted me. I can’t afford the costs and the lower pay, I’m scrabbling by as it is, but I did appreciate what the University was doing, albeit underhanded and guerilla-fashion.

Now New York State is on the edge of approving Gay Marriage and Michigan is doing whatever it can to punish Universities that offer DEI either by outright persecution or, apparently in the most recent attack, attaching a 5% reduction in state aid to the Universities that dare offer equality protections like DEI. Here in Michigan it’s all being led by Representative David Agema from Grandville. He’s a republican, of course, and I have no idea where Grandville is nor do I care. In many ways I think of Rep. Agema of doing me a huge favor. I know my kind isn’t respected, wanted, or tolerated by the people of Michigan – I’ve made peace with that fact and life goes on.

Once I can afford a move, I will be going back to New York State. It is quite obvious that my time in Michigan is limited, people like me know when we aren’t wanted so all that matters is just getting out of debt, saving up, and making that move from a state that doesn’t care to one that does.

Come Out Come Out

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There’s been some chatter on Twitter about some gay people who believe that we shouldn’t have parades celebrating Gay Pride events. This touches on something that I’ve been saying personally for quite a while. Everyone must come out of the closet. Not just a few of us, but all of us. Only then will we be able to be taken seriously. By staying in the closet we are cowards. Cowards never win anything.

What other good things will come from a mass coming out? Imagine all the young ones, the 17, 18, and 19 year olds who feel utterly lost and alone. Think of the bullying they have to endure and they can’t go to anyone about it because the gay people in their lives are in the closet! If we all came out, and people saw just how really colorful life really is, then these kids would feel less like monsters, more like real people with real feelings, and they would likely know at least someone else who is just like them. Just imagine how quickly and easily a gay young man could come out of the closet if he knew that being gay was as acceptable as being straight and when he already knew at least 3 other people who were also gay. It could, and I hope for this, become so much of a non-issue that the entire idea of “Coming Out” evaporates. People are either straight, gay, or something in between.

The first step however is getting our rights, and to get those, we need to stand up and be seen.

Banishment

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Earlier today I read a news article that stated that someone had successfully knocked the Westboro Baptist Church offline effectively silencing them online. There are few people who get under my skin, but these people, they hit all my buttons. They hate gays and are obnoxious about it.

While I don’t approve of their speech being curtailed, as the First Amendment protects us all, despite the quality of what we say and I must respect that. Deep down their silencing does gratify me, despite it technically being a crime.

What I think should be a new element of popular media is a type of banishing. Banishment has always been a really effective punishment for anyone. Yes you committed a crime, and so you are sent away. In this context however it’s impossible by the law to actually physically banish anyone. What I propose is a kind of attention-banishment. In the case of the WBC they are allowed to spout their vitriol and hatred according to the First Amendment, but every popular media outlet agrees that they are to be ignored. This could only work if all the elements of popular media could be brought together in this way, but it doesn’t really have to be an all-or-none deal, a majority would do just as well. Everyone agrees that stories that touch on the WBC are skipped. It’s not that anyone curtails the WBC’s speech, it’s just that nobody really learns of it or hears about it. In many ways, they are banished, ignored, and over time and enough starvation of attention they will fade into nothingness. The majority of the banishment would be covered if Google removed every reference to the WBC from its index and CNN purged all the stories in its archive that touch on the WBC. In a way, it’s a little like 1984, that if we all agree to forget, and if we all agree that organizations like the WBC exist, then in a very real way, they actually cease to exist. Yes, they can continue to scream and protest and carry on without any curtailment to their actual speech, but we all agree to turn our backs on them and ignore them. Eventually there won’t be any reason to grandstand and show off and protest for them because it’s meaningless. Nobody sees them, everyone ignores them, and no cameras will point their way. No reporters will write stories on the WBC and their existence will be struck from public consciousness. It’s even within this argument that the Wikipedia article for Westboro Baptist Church be eliminated. No historical record of them will be shared.

With this type of banishment, especially in our increasing socially connected world, anyone who is declared banished might as well just give up what they are doing, as it’s just a waste of time, money, and energy.

This reminds me of one of those late-night sci-fi shows that used to be on, like Outer Limits, where criminals weren’t incarcerated at all. They had a mark placed on their forehead that they couldn’t cover up and anyone who saw the mark behaved as if they didn’t exist. They weren’t seen, they weren’t talked to, they weren’t THERE. They could do anything they wanted, but they were cut off from the rest of humanity – and in a way, banished. What a punishment. It just takes my breath away.

Letter to Levin

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Dear Senator Levin,

I just read on the Wall Street Journal that you and Senator McCain have made moves to strip the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” from the defense spending bill. I would be enraged, I would declare that the democrats have effectively turned their campaign promises to us inside-out and displayed the lies that they are. I would claim these things if I were really an American.

I can’t serve in the military, I can’t donate blood despite the need, and I cannot marry. I am not equal under the law and by evidence because I am robbed of my 14th Amendment rights I am easily written off, easily ignored, and issues that matter the most to people like me matter not one jot to those in the Federal Government.

On November 2nd I voted. I went to the polls and I cast my party ticket for the Democrats. The idea that people like me have to find someone to be our champion, to secure our basic rights before the law, and then to have them trample us, to use us via glittering campaign promises which are barefaced lies hurts the most. We have no party to turn to except the Democrats, despite our apparent leprosy.

The problem isn’t just with your decision to strip DADT from the military spending bill, but rather with all the democrats including our President whom I pleaded with when he was just a senator from Illinois to please run for the presidency. I would have never thought it possible that a man and party I idolized would betray us.

In the end I’m just another ignorable voice, one of millions who just fade into the woodwork and don’t really matter. When I go to vote next, I don’t know what I am going to do. Vote for someone who can’t possibly win or for someone who doesn’t really care about people like me. It’s a horrible thing. The only thing that comforts me is that nobody lives forever and with new representation perhaps someday we’ll have someone who thinks that equality is something more than just something to put on a bumper sticker.

You’ve more friends with Senator McCain than with your gay constituents.

Thanks.

The Liminality of the Moulin Rouge

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I have been for the past year observing surreptitiously a particularly seamy segment of the homosexual population. This segment are classified under many names, the most common are ‘barebackers’, who just don’t care about risk and consequence to ‘bug catchers’ who actively seek out risk and consequence.

I’ve watched these people, and I continue to do so. It’s prurience is unwavering, these people are tired of the 1990’s and early 2000’s efforts to get the entire gay male population to stop having sex, or at least engage in safe sex with proper protection and have made bids to behave in a wholly retrograde fashion against best common sense. Driven into a madness by their libidos.

I began to ponder why this phenomena has grown up recently. I suspect people are growing weary of constantly having to be vigilant when it comes to sex, they no longer fear the most common consequences and for many people, this has become a manner of managed risk with a blasé attitude regarding the consequences for themselves. What alarms me the most is that this population exists and it’s members wander about carrying their bio-hazardous passengers  into the lives of people who are hormonally addled to the point where they either don’t care or are not aware enough to take proper precautions. I’ve read many stories where firmly closeted homosexuals, pressurized with a buildup of hormonal chemicals raging in their bloodstream have willfully suppressed their authentic cognition and allowed these people to enter their lives and infect them. The mode for this infection is not as simple as plain exposure, there is a group within the barebacking community that engage in a practice they gloat about, called ‘Stealth’. When faced with the pressure of their sex drives they seek out partners to satisfy their urges, and if those partners are determined to ‘play it safe’ then these individuals will sabotage the protection rendering it merely an affectation and not a true form of consequence protection and then engage in the act of infection to someone who is not fully aware of their situation and the risk they face.

While stealthing is practiced and is an outrage unto itself, these people willfully seek out other infected partners to engage in unprotected sexual relations and many engage in acts of profound exposure, with multiple partners, random partners, and stranger-partners. What concerns me most of all isn’t so much cross-infection, but because these people are engaged in orgiastic sexual pursuits, hyperinfection. HIV is only a single player on the stage, a terminal player but not the most damaging or hazardous – what really concerns me is the hyperinfection of Hepatitis C, which is incurable, leaves you with 10 to 20 year life expectancy and full liver failure at the end. HIV is as hazardous, but it doesn’t cause organ damage like Hepatitis C can.

Through my personal experience and what I have seen in other gay men, there is a duality building in our culture that I call the Moulin Rouge problem. We are on the public surface a ‘polite society’ and this ‘polite society’ doesn’t accept the existence of sexual depravity and amoral conduct, but along side this ‘polite society’ is a darkness in many of our cohort group that sits just beyond and has no problem engaging in such activities and in many ways, revels in it. I see the strictness and moral uprightness deepening the darkness that balances it. You then have a new liminality, on the front of the Moulin Rouge, it’s all quite innocent fun, but behind the Moulin Rouge is failed risk, disease, and the ramifications of uncontrolled consequence. You have men who carry a public image of spotlessness and a private image of orgiastic incorrigibility.

Linked together with my previous post what concerns me the most are the men who exist so far and so deep into the closet that they end up in a perpetual state of sexual frenzy, they have a raw hunger to engage in explosive exercises of homosexual intercourse, they lay there and will agree to anything so that they can achieve satisfaction, and some of them spend not a single moment considering the consequences of their actions. They then take this failure with them, as a new dark passenger, to their wives or girlfriends, where they continue the cycle of ignored risk and unfortunate consequences. I find these men, trapped in the closet, driven mad with sexual frenzy to be almost as bad as the men who willfully spread their infections to others through indolence or malicious design.

The way to avoid this is sexual education and to relax our moral indignation over sex in general. I would argue that we’ve helped create this monster by leaving men too uneducated and too tightly trussed with morality, that if we as a culture relax in regards to morality perhaps we’ll be able to shoehorn some of these men out of the closet, get them educated about their bodies and their feelings and once we get to that point, they should be well armed enough to avoid making life-altering mistakes.

As always, I welcome all comments – I can only hope this gets to a healthy boy in the closet, gets him to come out, gets him to wake up, to think, to not make mistakes – to learn ahead of making these mistakes… to save themselves. Coming out is not only good for you, it’s good for us all.