Send your love electronically HERE We will read it. Platonically.
The Public Blogging of Pomosexuality, Homotextuality, Homophobiaphilia, and Drear Theory (aka Career Theory) [aka Gay4Pay]. We also read the Corner and OpJournal so the right buttock will be punished as well.
All comments subject to publication. Or dismissal. Or Both.
Friday, July 26, 2002
Here in Philly the big news is that ActionAIDS, the largest AIDS services organization in city, has decided not to participate this years AIDS walk which takes place in October. The walk is run by a non-profit called The AIDS Fund.
The Fund appears to have been more successful in turning out a small army of disgruntled former employees and volunteers than in raising money for AIDS programs in recent years. The yearly take from the walk has been flat or declining, and critics charge that overhead takes far too large a percentage of overall revenue.
Dissatisfaction with its current leadership is pretty general but public criticism until now has come almost solely from the ex-employees and volunteers. Everybody else who really knows anything is compromised--they benefit from the money the funds disperses, either as employees of other AIDS orgs that get money from the Fund or as clients of the services. So they only bitch to each other and in private.
Even ActionAIDS gives no substantive reason for pulling out of the walk. It's all advanced bureaucratic fumfery, they're looking at "options" and "factors" and for "alternate fund-raisers". The cattiest it gets is this fingers crossed bon voyage: "I wish the AIDS Fund well because a lot of agencies need that money."
No good wishes for the fund or it's management per se, just for the cash it disperses.
Instapundit recently made the excellent suggestion that Big Charity get some of the attention that is currently all going to big business. Non-profiteers have long benefited from the perks of presumed holiness and from oversight that comes closer to overlook. Imagine the innovative bookkeeping and creative accounting possibilities when you're not even EXPECTED to make a profit. Arrogant, secretive, and self-interested management isn't limited to Worldron and Encom.
5:14 PM
Thursday, July 25, 2002
I have yet to hold a copy of Richard Goldstein's new book in my hands and kiss it tenderly. I just haven't noticed it or thought to look for it when I was stalking a bookstore. I've seen the cover at Amazon though.
I love to judge books by their covers (as Oscar W. said, or at least as I remember it, "Only the very shallow can't judge another person on first sight.")
What strikes me about RG's chapbook is the phony dichotomy is telegraphed with the cover graphic. You're either in a tuxedo or hag drag, a guppy or a faerie. Yeah, that covers my life and the people I know. What a world of possibilities--2 cliches to choose from, 2 prefab identikit costumes on display in the shop window. Well socialists were never that big on consumer choice I guess.
And the title. This is what offends me about Goldstein more than anything. HE IS A TERRIBLE WRITER. And again you know this from the cover. Even the title is incompetent, "The Attack Queers". Since the referent is "attack dogs" why not use the epithet for gay that has at least a faint echo of "dogs" in it. That would be FAGS--it carries over some of the phonetic action from "attack" too. It is also funny.
And certainly avoid "Queers" since the whole point is that these homocons really aren't queers in the first place.
Can't imagine how anyone could, or would want to, live without the Popbitch free weekly(ish) email. If you
thrill to semi-blind items about gay, gak addicted popstars on the skids and on their knees in the swampy loos of dodgy bars then make popbitch your one stop shop for full service slop. It's from the UK so some of the pop references are to names whose fame ends at the Irish Sea. Or whose fame ended, even in the UK, in 1993.
A sample revelation from a recent edition:
>> Celebrity Keyhole <<
Inside the homes of the famous
Godzilla writes "My mate has been to Madonna's London house. Apparently, there is a lady dressed in white who follows you around with a little silver hoover in case you make a mess. She also folds bras like origami. And if you ask for a coffee, they dont make it there but a young gay boy runs to Starbucks for you.
Wednesday, July 24, 2002
Just thought of a slogan for my anti-tattoo campaign. Used to like tattoos but when they entered there mandatory for anyone under 30 phase the allure evaporated.
Tattoos: The Bellbottoms You Can Never Take Off
5:42 PM
Planetout.com news reports:
Tuesday, July 23, 2002 / 11:00 AM
Assassinated Dutch politician was buried on Saturday in Provesano, Italy, near his vacation home. Some 35 family and friends from the Netherlands gathered for the small ceremony, the Associated Press reported.
His remains were exhumed on Friday from a temporary burial plot and flown on Saturday to the town in northeastern Italy.
His white coffin was laid to rest inside a marble tomb, with the phrase "Defend freedom of speech" engraved in Latin.
Tuesday, July 23, 2002
Hey, uhm, has anyone here ever read GENRE magazine?
I was kinda vaguely aware of it but I'd never looked through it until oh about an hour ago. My life is now over. I can't accept what I have learned. Maya slipped up, dropped the veil. I know the truth now. Screw the Matrix--the real REAL world is a trash strewn death factory. An orphan crematorium floating on a scummy ocean of stagnant piss.
Genre mag (Aka the blue pill-was it the blue pill? don't know or care) is a brutal mindfuck disguised
as "America's Favorite Gay Men's Magazine." It reads like it was translated from Estonian into Korean then back into Estonian and THEN into English. And all this was repeated 3 times before publication.
I cannot begin to deconstruct this thing. I picked two copies up that were in a discard pile at the library-- I will glom any free crap. Well I read the first ish, the genre special summer reading edition. There's a publisher's note at the start in which he cheerfully relates he doesn't have time to read and "if I read one book a year, it's a miracle!", but he and his boyfriend did listen to a book on tape while they were driving up to San Francisco and really enjoyed it.
This should have tipped me off to the wonders to come. But Genre delivered so much more than even this idiot promised. All I can do is print the editorial on the last page of the other issue I have. That would be "The Travel Issue" (guy in a pink sarong wearing diving mask and snorkel, pulling a luggage cart on the contents page. The design sense here is a match for the prose.)
What we have here is Genre putting on it's black sarong and getting all solemn and thoughtful on us. It is the GENRE RESPONSE TO 9/11. See if you can find all the inane redundancies, solecisms, rusted logic gates, and just unclassifiable dithering stupidity. Oh yeah, count the commas too.
THE WHOLE MAGAZINE READS LIKE THIS.
AND IT ISN'T EVEN PORN.
I wish this gay trainwreck was online so I could link but I'll force myself to copy it here. you all owe me.
"The 911
by Doug Shingleton
It was a sunny, bright morning, with clear blue skies, and great NY weather. I had meetings at the American Express building in downtown Manhattan. It was going to be a beautiful day. It was not meant to be, however, as September 11, 2001, will go down in history as an unforgettable day not only for America,
but for the free world.
From three blocks away, I watched one plane after another fly into the World Trade Center--Our national symbol of free trade and democracy. I realized that America was not impervious to direct assault by terrorism. I saw bodies flying out of windows in an apparent attempt to flee certain death otherwise. I felt
the earth tremble beneath me, similar to the Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles, but not by an act of God, this time by hatred from those who think we and our civilization to be demonic icons of the devil's greed. I stopped and prayed. Later we all watched the buildings crumble and thousands die on television.
Now, as I view commentary news follow-up, read e-mails and grieve the personal loss of friends taken in the tragedy, I wonder how we, as a nation, will grow? How and when will we seek retribution? How will we expand human civil liberties, without disenfranchising personal freedoms of self-expression,including many rights of gays and lesbians still unobtained? How will we seek to find overt activity of those sent to the US to do us harm without encroaching upon innocent people's right to privacy?
I'm fearful of those with right-leaning thoughts, who will and have begun to utilize these actions of terror to attempt to repeal the rights of our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters.
As a gay American, I wonder how I can help? I am stopped from giving blood at blood banks. I am stopped from volunteering for military service. Where is it that I can help?
I can help to support an America that does not trespass upon our basic civil liberties. I can help to support our military personnel who are able to fight. I can mourn the loss of life from the initial attacks and from the impending military action. I can support my brethren within the country by turning a deaf ear to sarcasm and useless naysayers that expound upon America's dysfunction as a family unit. I can make changes in my behavior and those of my friends to be more accepting of each other's differences ourselves.
I can pray for a more socially advanced, prepared society that hopefully accepts me as an American citizen, with the same rights as those of any other citizen.
Most of all I pray for the entire world to be safe."
And the rest of us can pray for a quick, easeful death. A slow messy suicide would do. Let Genre inherit the earth.
8:55 PM
A reader writes with this info on the scary radical Mumia queens whose article I excerpted earlier:
" Sue Docekal and company have been at this stuff since at least 1976 when I first ran into them in Seattle, where the FSP had a front group called "The Union of Sexual Minorities"; they also had a ladies' auxilliary--"Radical Women". What's amazing is that these folks haven't changed their line a bit in
25 years. "
The soul crushing thought of it. 25 years building the rainbow bridge between hell and, uh, outer hell.
Reminds me. I read somewhere that Meshell Ndegeocello was wearing a Che G. T- shirt during an interview. She needs to grow some hair. Think her brains are getting too much direct sun. Yeah, that's just the thing for the conscious dyke rockstar to wear. Woohoo! Cuban Rev sure been good to MY people.
Or maybe she's just showing solidarity with Mike Tyson's tattoos.
3:37 PM
Monday, July 22, 2002
New York Mag had a pretty good gay issue a few months back. That cute kid from the relentlessly horrible "Queer as Folk" was on the cover. There was an excellent crystal meth story. And a very amusing list of the 25 Straightest New Yorkers. Here they are:
Woody Allen, director
Alec Baldwin, actor
Ol' Dirty Bastard, rapper
Steve Brill, Newsweek columnist
Edward Burns, actor
Roger Clemens, Yankee
Bill Clinton, ex-president
Katie Couric, Today show co-host
Ron Galotti, GQ publisher
James Gandolfini, Soprano
David Halberstam, author
Ray Kelly, top cop
Henry Kissinger, statesman
John McEnroe, ex-athlete
Bill O'Reilly, Fox News star
George Pataki, governor
Ron Perelman, billionaire
Andrea Peyser, New York Post columnist
Howell Raines, New York Times executive editor
Jerry Seinfeld, comic
George Steinbrenner, Yankees owner
Donald Trump, real-estate mogul
Harvey Weinstein, movie mogul
Jack Welch, ex-GE CEO
Dr. Ruth Westheimer, sex therapist
(From the April 29, 2002 issue of New York Magazine.)
Except for the GQ guy who I don't know anything about but who has an extremely gay job and ODB whose sexual preference appears to be drugs and who is currently in a very unstraight place (prison), I think this list is quite good. But don't ask me why. I just know that the other names did make me laugh. It's a straidar thing.
Nominations are now open for the 25 Straightest Americans. I think we have to roll Clinton and Seinfeld over (as much as they'll roll anyway) onto the national list. That leaves 23 slots open.
Hmmmm damn, probably Trump and O' Reilly too. Ah hell, we'll see.
The gay angle. Most news stories have one. Or several. If only because most stories concern human beings and often one or more of the humans is a gay one.
Christ, that sounds like the Linda Ellerbee greeting/threat at a Nickelodeon re-education camp.
The gay angle to the Allen Iverson story has gotten coverage in Philly but not beyond it seems. Our
story thus far: tiny b-ball bad boy superstar throws his naked wife outta his mainline mansion then spends the next day tearing all over town--armed, finally barging into an apartment in a less exclusive part of town looking for said wife.
Turns out the apartment A.I. crashed into was occupied by a couple young gay black guys, friends of Iverson's cousin who also lived there. So the mistreated woman seeks safe haven with her younger gay male friends? Well, she wasn't actually there when Allen dropped by, but it's hardly an unlikely scenario. Iverson appears to have made the logical leap in any event.
The Philly Daily News which owns the gay angle on this has gotten some heat for its less than reverential treatment of the gay dudes involved. It printed descriptions of them as favoring "poom poom pants" which it said were hot pants for boys, the kind of boys who hang out on 13th street--a local, smirking reference to male hustlers. I gotta say I don't know what the Daily News is talking about here. Only drag hustlers wear anything like hot pants (and from the picture's I've seen these guys don't look femme.) The boys are in brand name thug gear without exception. Even the one's that would rather be wearing hot pants. They know their market
.
I like that The Daily News has broken this part of the story. It's a tabloid serial so anything goes. I'm sure these young guys are not thrilled with the hooking insinuation (though their lawyers may be) but still I think the Daily News gives them a kind of respect, back-handed and self-serving to be sure, by giving a fuller picture of who they really are.
1:40 AM
Sunday, July 21, 2002
The Blogfather, Instanpundit hisseff, announced his paternity of this site so the court ordered DNA tests won't be necessary. When confronted with the evidence he folded like drunken protein with bad knees. So if IP is the blogdaddy what's that make Andrew S?
8:45 PM
JT Leroy is the real thing. I stayed away for a while. A Madonna endorsement is always a midas-in-reverse incentive for me. If she's hopped on I'd rather keep my distance. So when I heard she was reading Leroy on a plane and passing the book around, he moved down the foodchain. But then I knew that Dennis Cooper was in on the myth too and that seemed good (doubtless Madonna reads Cooper on planes too).
So I read the second book, "The heart is deceitful...", last month. Stunning. Heroic even. Total recall and recreation of a child's mind. More amazing than that--this particular child's world is a roiling discontinuity. One thing to retell a linear story, but to decribe the mess, squalor and upheaval of a life on the road with a mad, drug-addled mom, to remember it all and convey it so truly. It's beyond art.
Like I said, heroic.
I'm going to wait awhile to read the first book, "Sarah", since it seems to cover the same ground in a more
systematic way (it was published first but written second). At least I mean to wait awhile. Leroy's talent is too exciting to put off for long though.
Apparently JT inspired some breakthroughs in journalistic ethics when he first emerged as a prodigy. This from an interview at bizarremag.com:
"You know, there’s a lot of reasons… but I’ve worked so hard trying to figure out who I am. [But] when I was 17 a story of mine [under the pseudonym Terminator] came out in this anthology called Close to the Bone, put out by Laurie Stone. I did interviews and had sex with some of the reporters ’cause I just thought that’s what you do – I didn’t have any boundaries."
