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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.
Popish Mondrianist , Mark Sullivan, linked to an interesting indymedia account of pro-stinian "queers" taking over a Beserkely Starbucks. A street theatrical agit-prop re-enactment/inversion of the history of Israel was the plot. Thwarted Broadway ambitions and exploded superstar daydreams the probable backstory.
Yahweh knows most theater is horrible enough in enclosed spaces. A plea to all street theatrical types: Leave the streets be! Noxious second hand theater endangers the aesthetic intelligence of innocent passers by. Amateur theatricals belong in basements and garages--with the garage door down. And the car engine running.
Heed this plea or I might have to take street theatrical revenge. Maybe storm the giant puppet workshop or the next QUIT planning meeting and do my pastiche of "Best Little Whorehouse in Texas" and the Moscow purge trials. It works best in a paneled recroom but it yearns to break the fourth wall and breathe free on the stage called ...THE WORLD!
Be sure to check out Mr. Sullivan's pic and coverage of the new LA cathedral. Taj Mahony. Now THAT is effing amusing. Not only does the Catholic Church have a gay sex scandals problem, it's got a gay sublimated Cecil B Demille set designer problem. And the second problem might end up being the more costly
In the pic above Our Poor Suffering Lady of Concrete is shot from the gay trade porn angle called "smirking giant". Maybe it will make a nice nightclub some bladerunner day. Looks like it would keep the bass booms and the strobe flashes in at any rate.
"Tony Award-winning lesbian and "Signs" star Cherry Jones is making a triumphant return to Broadway in a much-hyped musical about playwright Lillian Hellman. The play's written by Nora Ephron and the music's by Marvin Hamlisch, and to us that sounds like heaven on a stick."
Sounds like hell in a handbasket to me. But when you read the story this teaser links to it's not so bad. I thought Lillian Mayonnaise was going to have another hero sandwhich named after her. The whole martyred anti-fascist won't cut my coat routine. Turns out the play (it's not really even a musical, saving graces falling everywhere) is about the Mary McCarthy/Lillian H blood feud. "Tony award winning lesbian" (guess she won the Tony for best lesbian), Cherry Jones, is actually playing Mary too. Weird how Planetout pitched the story. I guess the beloved dead stalinist is more admired (or maybe just plain heard of) over on the planet of the out beings than the much smarter, funnier and more truthful Mary M.
Hmmm you know the headline for this post would be a good title for the play. Though it tilts things all Mary's way right from the start. Make that a great title
4:41 AM
Friday, August 30, 2002
young, dumb, and full of, uh, abandon
A reader sent me a link to an article in which Brosnan, Pirce Brosnan, relates that he thought he was gay when he was a teenager but he doesn't think so anymore:
"I was young, frivolous and full of abandon - a hippie with long hair down to my shoulders and a little goatee beard," he says in a new biography. "Why? Because I thought I was gay. But no, I'm not gay."
My correspondent adds that he doesn't know what I'll do with this information. I don't either. I think that it's a real possibility that Pierce was right then and right now. That he was gay when he was 16 but isn't and wasn't from 17-49. The switch makes sense to me. In either direction. I do give Pierce a point for making a confession that there's very little market for. So his final score is 008.
I'm more interested in another mutation. Axl Rose has tranformed himself into....Bo Derek. The shoulder length braids he was swaying during his patented scarecrow dance last night on the MTV video awards (the new NEW Guns N' Roses were the surprise final act) were a tribute to the late Dudley Moore I'm guessing. That huge football jersey he was wearing should have said "10" instead of "80". That big shirt also makes me think that the hustler body is gone too and that Axl has gotten to the second item on the rich and fat agenda. His strangled screech was a little off I'm afraid. Sad when your strangled screech goes. Sadder when you fire the rest of the band and keep the name. One thing didn't change. Guns N'Roses still SUCK.
On a happier note the lead singer of the Vines is cute. And their song beats the entire Gun's Roses oeuvre in 3 minutes 27 seconds. Google was very unhelpful in finding a picture of the dude so this will have to do. Axl WISHES he looked this good.
And finally, the total queenification of B2K proceeds apace.
6:11 PM
Thursday, August 29, 2002
Two Worthy Causes
So I was trying various urls in the Chinese firewall game (below). Thought I'd do the Independent Gay Forum. Except I wasn't really testing them. I misremebered their url. I'd punched in this address.
later I tried the right IndieGayForum url and it too is accessible in China. So the People of China are free to read Deroy Murdock. AND send a contribution to the great great grandmother he never calls.
6:01 PM
The Flaming Firewall
Harvard Law School gets its second Agendabender plug in as many days. Expect to see a spike in admissions requests next year. Either up or down.
Two clever HLS types are trying to probe the great firewall of China and discover which sites are blocked and which aren't.
Pasted below the results for this very page. I don't want to give anything away, BUT VERY POSSIBLY A BILLION OR SO CHINESES ARE READING THESE WORDS RIGHT NOW!
Maybe we can get banned by typing this: FALUN GONG!!!!!!!
And get ourselves unbanned by adding: SUX!!!!!!!!
At any rate our results as of 5pm 9/29/02:
Starting testing...
Stage one testing complete.
Stage two testing complete.
Testing complete for http://agendabender.blogspot.com/.
Result: Reported as accessible in China
I finally saw an episode of the Anna Nicole Smith show. The breakout star, asteroid anyway, is the feather-trimmed-pillow entrepreneur Bobby Trendy who is doing the prefab fabulous thing to Anna Nicole's standard issue MacMansion (the kind favored by 3 out of 4 MTV cribs celebrity babies).
Bobby is like a gay smurf. Instead of using "smurf" every other word he uses "luxurious" as article, adjective, noun, and verb. He is gay to the gay power. He comes across as a tripping mostly and not on the LUXURIOUS carpet. It would be genius if the superfag thing was a total put on, a real innovation in interior decorator scammery. God knows he does seem to be scamming Anna N. but she's an overstuffed bucket of squiggling scam bait so who can blame him.
Trying to figure out the ethnic thing. Maybe Filipino? It's subtle but there's something around the eyes and the remnants of some childhood second (first I mean) language in his accent. The Phillipines HAVE produced some of the glamadramaiest queens on the planet.
He's also got a semi-bad complexion going on under the makeup that reminds of a Phillipino dude I knew (and thus are scientific extrapolations made). The picture on his website catches Bobby on a very good decade. Maybe he's just Calisalvadoran or Chicanorean. Why's it matter? Cause he's won me over, I need to know it all.
OK I cheated and searched. here's BT's version of his origins. Says he's California born and raised. Which doesn't mean English is his first language of course so my speculations aren't dead yet! And then again this is BOBBY's version. It's from Michael Musto's V.Voice column.
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Trendy's background? "I'm a small-town boy from Valencia, California, and I worked at Kmart until I was 16. I found that the '80s was frozen yogurt, the '90s was coffee, and now it's home this, home that. I have a flair for exuberant tastes, so I thought I should have a home store."
Between the Kmart and E!, Trendy spent some time in New York, where "I was one of the first people on The Rolonda Watts Show." Unless I misunderstood, he said he was also on Geraldo with the club kids, which was odd, since I starred on those shows and don't remember him. Later, he clarified that TV producers "never really put me on with the club kids. They put me with the trannies."
Whatever, even more press is pouring in these days. "I can't believe a radio station in Chicago was calling calling me for an interview!" exulted Trendy. Luxurious!
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Stanley Kurtz is a philosopher by profession and a rationalizer by choice. He is a "reasonable creature" by Ben Franklin's definition, "so convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do." Or say.
Stanley joins Rodney over at the National Review in cataloguing all gay misbehavior as essential and all heterosexual hijinks as conditional (when straight depravity gets their attention at all.) Today Stan is all over the forced return of military recruiters to the Harvard Law School. Harvard caved because it risked losing the 16% of its budget that comes from the feds if it continued to ban this federal presence.
Stanley is right that much of the anti-recruiter sentiment derives from anti-militarism especially at elite universities. But the military by its ban on openly gay soldiers is in direct violation of non-discrimination provisions at these same universities so the military is rightly banned for its stated prejudicial policy. The anti-militarists don't need to make their case, the military does it for them.
I have probably equal disdain for the Harvard Law School and the Pentagon. They seem to me more similar than not as insular institutions of privilege and power. So it's a pleasure to see them annoying each other. If the Harvard Law School is really so fundamentally committed to the equal rights of its gay students it would forgo the federal money and defend the principle. It won't.
If the military wants to strong-arm its way onto campuses that are fundamentally opposed to its open discrimination against gay Americans then it has to deal with the reception most party crashing home invaders get.
Harvard Law students have announced their intention to, as Stan puts it, "subvert the decision by flooding recruiters with students who will not inquire about enlistment but will simply argue the military’s policy on gays." Hahaha. Advantage Harvard Law. Stanley ain't laughing however. He considers such amusing, peaceful tactics as the "sort of activity [that] brings shame upon Harvard."
It appears that Stanley's and my shame meter are calibrated differently. Maybe he's gone metric. I think of Harvard Law Students as born in shame, this prank is like the baptism that washes it away. Some of it anyway.
It makes me think again the thought that haunts my days and chills my sleepless nights (Keats lite). Everybody in the world is doing the wrong job. Everybody needs to change places, and probably with the last person they'd dream of. Clearly the Harvard students need to be running the Pentagon, their tactical maneuvers show the kind of imagination that wins wars. And the Pentagonal ones need to be bumped over to GLAAD. Or the HRC.
But where would Mr. Kurtz end up in a world where everybody was doing the job really meant for them? Where place a man who can write this sentence:
"Officials and students at Harvard Law are reportedly furious at being forced by the government to lay aside their ban on military recruiting, which is supposedly based upon the military’s “discriminatory” policy against gays."
Yes, those quote marks around “discriminatory" are his. The "supposedly" wasn't enough of a discount on their motives, Stan? Where place a man who can write a column excoriating the Harvard establishment for sullying the scared birthplace of American liberty with their latter-day anti-American scholasticism. Their crime against Lexington? Banning the ROTC from campus for its refusal
to admit openly gay students to its ranks. Mr. Kurtz thinks this is pretext, sham idealism. But he doesn't urge the military to call the bluff and expose the real motives by removing the pretext and accepting gay recruits as equal Americans. No he prattles on about how the Harvard dons insult traditional American liberty and honor by THEIR actions.
And he closes an article about how shameful it is to exclude from campus an organization that bans patriotic gay students with this sucker-punchline braintwister:
"So it has come to this. Those who would volunteer to defend the United States are banned from the sacred and original ground of American patriotism."
You got that? The organization that bans gay Americans "who would volunteer to defend the United States" is banned in turn and THAT is an outrage against "Those who would volunteer to defend the United States" and against the sacred ground where blood of martyrs fed the tree of LIBERTY.
According to Mr. Kurtz it was really the Tree of Official Banishment that was being nourished and in the delightful shade of which we prosper today.
Where place such a humorless twit and dishonest prig? Is it possible that Stanley Kurtz alone among men has found the job really meant for him, rationalizer for hire at the National Review?
6:42 PM
GERMINAL
Where are the heirs to Zola and the other natuarlist frogs? With their dedication to examining day to day life and describing the singular banalities of every calling, every class, every human condition? Oh, that's right, they're all over the web.
Here a test tube daughter of Sodom and Mammon limns life behind the counter at the porn store. I'm assuming anyone reading this is familiar with life on the paying side of the counter. A sample anecdote:
"Repeat offenders get a note on their file that says "LUBE WARNING". Management policy is that for $6.50 an hour, clerks should not have to deal with the bodily fluids of others. The first time we discreetly but firmly remind the customer that the tapes need to come back clean. The second time we hand him the tape, the Windex, and the paper towels and tell him to clean off the tape in full view of whoever else is at the counter."
I was reminded the other day who the most important living gay writer is. I realized it originally a couple years ago when it occured to me that this was the ONLY gay writer I kept hearing mentioned by, you know, straight people. So yeah I'm defining "most important" in the NAACP way. Which would amuse or annoy him----your first clue, that pronoun. So you can eliminate Liz Smith. Maybe.
Gay people read him too. I wouldn't be surprised if his popularity is almost a 50/50 thing. A half straight, half gay audience. Or maybe it's a nearly 100% bisexual audience. I've seen him read (another clue) at a book signing and the very large crowd was not obviously anything but book fags, meaning they were gay for books but of indeterminate sexual preference with human beings. I fit right in.
In any event it's not the 98.9% gay audience Edmund White attracts to a book-signing or the 99.8% straight crowd that Marvin and Bernard Kalb might draw. (I pick those two glorious siblings and that sublime conditional because I heard a description of them at a mall booksigning, sitting together the books piled high beside them and no one, NO ONE AT ALL, gathered there before them.)
A friend of mine saw Roger Ebert in similar solitude at Tower Books once, except Ebert didn't have his brother there to divide (or is it multiply?) the humiliation.
Speaking of glorious siblings our mystery boy is one and has several. Their glory comes largely from his descriptions of them, his family really stars in his earliest books . Though one of the siblings has carved a glory hole all her own--your last clue.
