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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.
Julian Sanchez wondered why these young cons couldn't more truthfully be called libertarians since they seemed to be more live and let live than conservatives generally. Julian also thought Glodberg's reply to the Time's article was good. He wrote this:
I never in my life believed I'd type these words, but Jonah Goldberg is on point about the piece.
Goldberg rightly scorns Hipublicans as a ludicrous and just plain awful neologism. And he makes tried and true points about the ignorance of most journalists to ideologies rarely encountered on Manhattan's upper West Side, but Goldberg's reply was fraudulent at its core. I wrote the following in Julian's reply forum:
Julian,
Go back to not typing those words. Trust the wisdom of your fingers. Jonah G's piece is utterly dishonest:
Let's see, can someone tell me when gay bashing and blue blazers were required? I know that anti-Communism really was required for most of the last 50 years — because anti-Communism defined conservatism — but just because the Times and the Left generally have decided that sexual orientation and gay rights are the more important and interesting themes of the 20th century, please don't rewrite the past to fit it. Then there's the assertion that conservatives "learned" that "by acting like everybody else" they can achieve their goals. I see. In other words, if conservatives had their druthers they'd still be fag-bashers who shop at Brooks Brothers, but instead they have to wear the uniform of the lumpen liberals.
Well, the gay bashing was required up until about 5, maybe 10 (to be generous), years ago. Now it is just a popular option. And the option is often chosen at those training camps for the campus cons new model army, the Corner and NRO. Does Jonah read Dreher, Derbyshire, K-lo and Kurtz? Does Jonah read Goldgerg? He's no open hater like Derb. More a clueless disdainer. A legacy jackass who can write but still hasn't mastered the thinking for yourself thing. This piece wasn't even well done, though. That frigging Fossey hook was DOA.
The blue blazer campus conservative cult was still going strong in the 80's, when I stopped paying attention, but I'd bet that tribal costume still has its fans among the junior cons. Goldberg knows this too. And it was very much the Buckley bots who wore the colors.
Would they be gay bashing, B.B. blazer wearing stiffs today if they could get away with it? Uh yeah, pretty much. Some still are and a lot more would be except that they ran up against the zeitgeist and surrendered. Now Goldberg claims that as a victory. And sees himself as the unacknowledged Che in the Revolution.
But weren't they supposed to be standing athwart history jamming on the brakes? So history jammed them instead and some of them wised up enough to start remaking conservatism. Gay tolerant, Gap instead of B.Brothers. Nice as far as it goes. Which is farther than Goldberg and NRO have gotten.
Update: Right on cue Jonah G shows us that if some of today's young conservatives are more gay friendly, and comfortable in their own skins if they are gay themselves, it has NOTHING to do with any guidance from NRO and the Corner. Goldberg posted this yesterday:
THE VIKING KITTENS ARE BACK [Jonah Goldberg]
And quite disturbingly, they are at The Gay Bar! (Gay Bar! Gay Bar! Gay Bar!.... great that's stuck in my head now). Turn volume down -- but not off -- if you're at the office.
Click on the gay bar link and you'll see net supergroup the Viking Kittens doing their flash rendition of Gay Bar. Which is approximately as disturbing as internet flash puppies doing their version of Milk Bar. OK, I could give Goldberg a break and assume he really wasn't "quite" disturbed by it. That he was winking a little bit and at the same time throwing a rhetorical bone (or a rhetorical ball of yarn) to the Cornerians who would be offended by the silly thing (and their numbers are legion). Except that all the evidence is that if he was throwing that particular bone he'd end up catching it himself. This is the same Jonah G who was bothered by the notion of a proposed gay version of the old TV series Hart to Hart, remade with a gay couple as the crime fighting hobbyists. Jonah's threshold for bother when gay content looms is quite disturbingly low. So if any of the college conservatives can watch the kittens rocking out at the gay bar with no tremors of disturbance at all, it's no thanks to Goldberg, Dreher, Derb et al.
Second update: The roommate said something funny, libelous and certainly untrue re the original version of Hart to Hart. He said the show was so good because Robert Wagner and Stephanie Powers brought so much experience to their roles as homicide investigators. Afterall, he'd killed Natalie Wood and she'd killed William Holden. See Jonah, now THAT'S a quite disturbing premise.
Third update: I was writing to a friend, and when I checked the email for typos I found one that deserves to be preserved as a new word: unfluence. Unfluence is what Jonah G., NRO, and NRDT exerted in the reshaping of conservativism along more gay friendly lines.
Fourth update: Stephanie Powers' name is correctly spelled Stefanie Powers. I'm so ashamed.
Fifth update: I had to read the joke at the beginning of Atrios's take on all this three times before I got it. I am so VERY ashamed.
11:46 AM
Thursday, May 29, 2003
Blonde on the Tracks
From my brunette niece. Doubt she sent this to my blonde niece:
A brunette is standing on some train tracks, jumping from rail to rail, saying "21" "21" "21" A Blonde walks up, sees her and decides to join her. She also starts jumping from rail to rail, saying "21" "21" "21" Suddenly, the brunette hears a train whistle and jumps off the tracks just as the Blonde is splattered all over the place.
The Brunette goes back to jumping from rail to rail ,counting "22" "22" "22". 5:28 PM
The Black Dadhlias
I didn't know till I read yesterday at Hit and Run that the new book which finally reveals the killer of the Black Dahlia names the same person as the last book which finally revealed the identity of Elizabeth Short's torturer, dismemberer and roadside abandoner. That same person being the author's father. There's a small problem, however. The books have different authors and the authors have different fathers. I looked through the first book when it came out a few years back and just leafed through the new one last month. Any Black Dahlia book will always get a once over by me.
I failed to realize from my quick look that the new one ratted out dear old dad though, the older book gives the game away on the cover. The first book looked pretty cheapjack too, while the latest one looks like the publisher spent some bucks on it. Buy 'em both and you've got the perfect Father's Day gift. Too late to give mom the Medea and Mommie Dearest giftpack, but there's always next year.
The multiple maniacs angle is too funny (sorry, Elizabeth). A third book now needs to be written about the battle over which daddy really did it: Two Dads and a Torso (really, really sorry, Elizabeth).
Come to think of it, my dad was pretty young at the time, but he's never given me a good alibi for the week Liz went missing. He was older and living in Chicago when Richard Speck killed the nurses. I've read speculation that Speck didn't act alone.
I was going to link some breakthrough porn images except you'd have to have a Global Male Pass ID number to see them (or you'd have to have a true and saintly pal like my friend Matt who always gives me his various porn site passwords.) The pics are of a young, latin dude named Aquino. He is dark skinned with a beautiful smile. His haircut is about 10 years out of date (maybe 15) which means it should be on its way back soon. It's a modified Philly fade. What makes it modified is that it's also dyed green. A bright emerald green. The pictures were taken in a rain forest next to a running stream. One of the Caribbean islands I guess, or maybe Panama since I think Panama has become a tropical Czechoslovakia, a source of low cost porn models for international export.
We see Aquino both against a jungle backdrop that matches and multiplies the color on his head and in the running waters of the stream. Which is to say we see Aquino in exactly the same places and poses that any gay porn auteur would have chosen given the jungle locale. Its the green hair that makes these images extraordinary. And the green hair was Aquino's choice. Bravo Aquino.
Ah, here is a thumbnail of our hero which resides outside the firewall. This image should be on a stamp. This image should be on every stamp.
Does everyone know this song? It kinda comes from the same place, the island of the black-skinned green-haired boys. And it kinda makes the same point I'm trying to make--new things under the sun, new color contrasts, there is a Clairol/Acuvue utopia coming. And it is the promise of that punky-colored dawn that sustains me.
I'm a pop culture syncretism salvationist. Blessed be the wiggers too.
There was a beautiful young face on the front page of New York's Gay City News last week, which is news in itself. So as I picked it up I was grateful for the feeling on aesthetic delight that its front pages so rarely provide. When I saw the words Newark Weeps in bold under the picture and below the fold, I realized it was that same High School picture of Sakia Gunn that I'd seen in several stories about her murder in the previous week. Just bigger and in color this time. I'm no great fan of the Gay City News, its editorial voice is monotone and leftoid, but it redeems itself somewhat with its coverage of Sakia's
murder. There are still touches of that artlessness endemic to movement prose, but the story is greater than the pro forma sex pref namechecks and the banal acronyms.
Sakia Gunn was born on May 26, 1987. She would have been 16 today.
By late afternoon on Tuesday, it is already dark under the scaffolded roofing on the corner of sidewalk where Sakia Gunn and four friends waited in the early morning hours Sunday for the bus that the 15-year-old expected would bring her home to her grandmother.
Sakia never made it.
Now, two days later, a large, makeshift shrine, constructed between two upright girders, stretches from the sidewalk clear up to the planks of wood above. The shrine is festooned with balloons, and emblazoned with ribbons of the rainbow colors, the insignia of gay and lesbian freedom, and scores of Sakia’s friends, classmates, and even passing strangers, most of them adolescent African American lesbians, have etched their names and their good-byes in the cramped spaces on the green oak tag paper taped to the wall
A basketball, autographed by her friends, lies next to bunches of flowers and a ceramic crucifix. The phalanx of candles has been lit and tended to since shortly after hundreds of Newark’s lesbian and gay youth learned of the death of their schoolmate and lesbian sister, Sakia Gunn.
...He told Sakia, ‘Come here.’ She said, ‘No, you’re not my father.’ Me and Valencia was fighting him. He grabbed Sakia by the neck and put a knife there. She started fighting him and got away. She swung once at him. When she tried to swing again, he stabbed her.”
Sakia’s killer jumped into the white vehicle and it sped away.
Valencia raced to a car that had stopped for a red light.
“ ‘Please, mister, please,’ I said as I was banging on his window. ‘Can you please take us to the hospital?’ ”
...The anonymous Good Samaritan took all five young women in his car to University Hospital, a short distance away. However, Sakia’s massive blood loss spelled the impossible for doctors who tried to keep her alive.
“She died in my arms in the emergency,” said Valencia. “They rolled her into the back and tried to save her. But they couldn’t.”
...“I lost my best friend,” said Spanky Ross, 18.
She wears a backwards baseball cap and a bracelet of colored beads that demonstrates her lesbian pride. Sakia’s school portrait, fast become the young lesbian’s death image, graces Spanky’s T-shirt.
...Stacy Nickerson was among one of the first adults summoned to University Hospital early Sunday morning. Sakia and Stacy’s daughter, Toni, 15, dated briefly and had maintained a friendship. Stacy often cooked dinner for the girls and spent time discussing with them their travails and triumphs as teens and young women coming into full awareness of their sexual orientation.
“Toni first told me in the seventh grade, ‘I don’t like boys,’ she said. At first I didn’t believe her,” said Stacy. “Three and a half months ago, Toni brought Sakia home to introduce to me. They were going out with each other. Sakia became like a daughter to me. It’s very painful, because she was so young. This is very hard.”
...Sakia’s grandmother, Thelma Gunn, her legal guardian, now lies in the cardiac intensive care unit three floors above the emergency room. Upon receiving word of the stabbing of Sakia, Ms. Gunn collapsed and suffered a mild heart attack. She spoke from her hospital bed with a natural poise and politeness, neatly coiffed and alert. She was circumspect about the fact that Sakia was lesbian.
“I knew about her and I accepted her. I knew where she went with her friends. She always came home to me, though. It was never a problem.”
Ms. Gunn raised Sakia from her infancy. She is the matriarch of a large extended family that includes Sakia’s mother, her siblings, as well as many cousins, aunts, and uncles.
“She was my oldest granddaughter,” Ms. Gunn recalled. “That was my baby. I loved her. And she loved me.”
Victoria Dingle, 16, a lesbian, was with Sakia on the Pier along West Street at the end of Christopher Street Saturday night. She also attends West Side High School.
“The pier is somewhere we go to feel open about ourselves and have fun,” she said. “Me and Sakia and some friends were just chilling and having fun and feeling good about being together.”
...Ashley Jackson, 17, last spoke to her friend on Saturday evening just moments before Sakia left for Greenwich Village.
“Just now they got police officers in that booth because Sakia died. They killed Sakia because she was gay. If Sakia had been dressed like a regular female, if she had on tight jeans and she didn’t have on her Globetrotter’s outfit, this never would have happened,” said Jackson in reference to Sakia’s preferred style of dress.
...A large number of adult women, many of whom are the lesbian mothers of high school youth who were among those assembled, stood above the group on the higher steps of City Hall as well as on the fringes of the mass, silent protectors of their offspring. Their stoic presence represented the vigilance and respect many of Newark’s older adult residents still harbor for the cause and struggle for equality and justice.
Valencia’s mother, Gail Bailey, a Gunn family friend, said, “I know my daughter is a lesbian and I love her for it. I am glad I had her before I came out. Now we have the sorrow of the death of one of our sisters to deal with. But we will help each other through it.”
...Sakia was described as a loyal girlfriend and a loving daughter.
Atisha Davis, 16, Jamiekai Johnson, 17, as well as Victoria Dingle, all of them from West Side High School, arrived to mourn the loss of their schoolmate and fellow lesbian.
...Meanwhile, Laquetta Nelson, a lesbian, and the founder and former president of New Jersey’s Stonewall Democrats, was asking by way of a bullhorn, “Where’s Sharpe James? Come out of the closet, Mr. Mayor.”
Later, she expressed her awe at the sheer magnitude of lesbian youth assembled.
“I have been a part of many demonstrations. Never have I seen anything like this.”
The mayor of Newark never did appear to address the mourners.
...There were young men at Thursday’s protest march as well
Marcees Dixon, 16, Sakia’s half-brother, said, “ I heard about her death when I got to school on Monday. I just left school. I couldn’t concentrate.”
Marcus Dinkins, 16, a gay youth, said, “She was one of my closest friends.”
Arthur Thornton, 16, another gay youth who attended health class with Sakia at West Side, spent his time during the march running through the written remarks he intended to deliver on the steps of City Hall.
Friedrich Hayek dedicated his book The Constitution of Liberty to "the unknown society that is growing in America". Friedrich didn't have Sakia and Marcus and Arthur and Spanky Ross in mind when he wrote those words, the society he knew was growing was unknown to him in its names, shape and particulars. He just had faith in the alchemy of freedom, even imperfect and limited freedom. He trusted above all in the inventiveness and creativity of people who lived mostly in freedom, their power to produce the unexpected and the unpredictably beautiful. The unknown society grows in untold ways in countless places. Put Newark on the list.
And much love to another unknown--"The anonymous Good Samaritan" who drove Sakia and her friends to hospital.
I used to spend a lot of time with pythons, worked for a guy who loved the things. I'd often pick up dinner for the long, fat, lazy boys at the live poultry store in Italian Market. And sometimes I'd crawl in the cage just to say hi. But I never got this comfortable. Or this wrapped up.
I agree with the Cambos, this kid's an harbinger of something or other. The Doors reunion tour perhaps.
Here's one for Rick Santorum, Stanley Kurtz and Gary Bauer. If we let corporations marry (and divorce) underage girls, soon the Pillsbury Doughboy will be shopping for a wedding ring with the Michelin Man. And check out the dateline on the story, Rickster. Unsurprising, n'est-ce pas?
Disney and 'Lizzie' Star Hilary Duff Break Up
Sat May 24, 4:20 PM ET
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Walt Disney Co. and Hilary Duff (news), star of the Disney Channel's hit "Lizzie McGuire" comedy TV show and a recently released Disney movie of the same name, have split up, a spokeswoman for the entertainment giant said on Saturday.
Disney and the 15-year-old actress were "going their separate ways" following failed talks over the direction of Duff's career, the spokeswoman told Reuters. 3:05 AM
