"Pressure on the vacationing president" and "Among the lucky was celebrity interior designer Nate Berkus," or: which is worse, Bush or the gay media?

As the estimated death toll from Sunday's tsunamis in the Indian Ocean rises as high as 100,000, and in the wake of Bill Clinton's public statement that it's "really important that somebody take the lead" in organizing relief efforts, the Bush administration's indifference to human suffering has reached a level that can only be called obscene:

A White House spokesman said Mr. Bush could monitor developments at his Texas ranch without the need of a return to Washington or a public statement.

"The president wanted to be fully briefed on our efforts. He didn't want to make a symbolic statement about 'We feel your pain,'" a White House official told the newspaper.

The New York Times referred to "pressure on the vacationing president to appear more engaged in what aid groups are calling one of the worst natural disasters in history."

However, equally obscene, I must say, was the first and only story on the tsunami to appear on 365gay.com (motto: "More people get their LGBT news from 365Gay.com than from any other source" - I am not making this up). The original article seems to have been deleted at some point after it was posted (!), so I've linked to Google's cache as the only remaining evidence of this incredibly offensive article. Here are the first few paragraphs:

Gays Stranded Others Among Dead & Missing Following Tidal Wave
by Peter Hacker 365Gay.com Asia Bureau Chief
Posted: December 27, 2004 2:14 pm ET

(Bangkok) Phuket, the most well known and popular gay beach destination in Southeast Asia lies in ruins in the wake of the most powerful tsunami to strike the region in decades.

As 365Gay.com first reported on Sunday (story) tidal waves, some measuring up to 20 feet in height and moving at more than 500 mph, swept over much of coastal Southeast Asia following a powerful earthquake centered off the coast of Indonesia's Sumatra island. The quake was measured at 9.0. The tsunamis which followed struck Sri Lanka, India and Thailand.

The death toll stands at more than 20-thousand but thousands more are reported missing and the death toll is expected to rise.

Among the lucky was celebrity interior designer Nate Berkus from Chicago.

Berkus, a regular on The Oprah Winfrey Show, was on Sri Lanka's eastern coast handing out backpacks to needy children.

"There was absolutely no warning," he told CNN.

Can you fucking believe this?! This celebrity interior designer is handing out backpacks to needy children? And this is fucking gay news because rich white gay Americans vacation in Phuket?

After following up Mr. Berkus's profound insights and humanitarian efforts with several more descriptions, plucked from other news sources, of bodies washing up on the beach, 365gay.com concluded its coverage of the tsunami with the following:

Tourism to Phuket has been cancelled. Anyone holding reservations is advised to contact their travel agency.

I actually had to read this several times because I found it so utterly improbable that somebody could actually print this article. The critical point is that you should call your travel agency before hopping on the plane for your planned Thai beach vacation? And gay political leaders wonder why Americans believe in the myth of gay affluence - that is, why Americans think of gays as well-heeled, educated, and in possession of much disposable income, even though (as the only full-scale analysis done on the subject by an economist shows) gays and lesbians, as one might expect of a stigmatized group, in fact make less money than straights?

I mean, seriously, folks. C'mon. This kind of coverage is like a wet dream for Jerry Falwell. You're doing the Family Research Council's work for them. South Asian countries face one of the worst natural disasters in recorded history, with a death toll nearing that caused by each of the two atomic bombs that the U.S. dropped on Asian people 59 years ago, the "gay community" is represented as worrying about their vacation plans? If this is what gay people are about, who could possibly give a shit whether, say, we're protected from job discrimination?

Indeed, one of the most underplayed arguments in the abovementioned economic analysis (published as Money, Myths, and Change, by M. V. Lee Badgett) is that the gay media happily propagates the myth of gay affluence. These periodicals survey their own readerships - skewed, naturally, toward those queers who patronize the bars, boutiques, and laser hair removal establishments that advertise in their pages - and then proclaim loudly to potential advertisers that they reach a thoroughly upscale community with lots of money to spend. Virtually every major-city gay newspaper, I might add, uses this tactic.

(Granted, the straight media ain't so great, either. As the Washington Post drily put it this morning, "Sunday afternoon, anyone turning on cable news would have seen two breaking stories: Thousands dead in Asian tsunami, and thousands of Americans delayed at airports.")

P.S.: Give to Doctors Without Borders or the organization of your choice

First two AIDS diagnoses in SF were in black children

Doug Ireland, who has pissed me off a number of times by sending blatantly self-promotional emails to the Queer to the Left list, recently posted a serious of interseting analyses of the crisis in the AIDS activist world. The event that crystallizes the crisis is that the executive director of AIDS Action, which represents itself as the umbrella group for AIDS organizations in the U.S., agreed to join Republicans in hosting an event as part of Bush's inauguration. I am not making this up! She has gotten a huge amount of flak for it now, including from funders. I'm just glad that somebody noticed. Read more at his blog. The related problem of organizations expanding their services in order to seek more funding is described in a Washington Post story.

But what I'm really going to write about is a sentence written by a veteran AIDS activist that Doug Ireland quotes: "AIDS was once a singular problem for urban gay white men; they basically had no other comparable burden or challenge in their life. But the disease today is inextricable from a raft of other problems of the poor, particularly the urban poor." This view is completely contradicted by a very interesting book I just read for my orals. I wrote a summary of the book, which I'll post here:

Michelle Cochrane, When AIDS Began: San Francisco and the Making of an Epidemic (Routledge, 2004)

This book argues that the medical and public health response to the AIDS epidemic has been shaped from the very beginning by assumptions that led researchers to overlook important factors, foreclose possible explanations, and in ways both concrete and abstract harm the public health. In general, “Throughout the course of the epidemic, the general tendency inherent in surveillance activities and epidemiological research was to magnify the role of gay male or (hetero)sexual intercourse in driving the HIV/AIDS epidemic and minimize the contribution of chronic urban poverty, poor public health and services, and injection-drug use and substance abuse in producing and sustaining this epidemic” (191). She wants to ask how people were diagnosed with “AIDS” and whether this blanket diagnosis tended to obscure the complexity of the epidemic’s course, and also ask what epidemiological possibilities were foreclosed rather than opened up by this fact.

She argues that the disease was socially constructed very early on as a sexually transmitted disease, in ways that obscured the presence of other factors, such as IV drug use, poverty or homelessness, or multiple other major chronic health issues in virtually all of the earliest cases of AIDS in San Francisco. She shows this by looking at the medical charts and CDC epidemiological interviews of everyone diagnosed with AIDS in 1981, showing that the likelihood of homosexual transmission was magnified, murky realities were reduced, and social factors were obscured. The sexual transmission model meant that cases with multiple factors were automatically, until the late 1980s, assumed to be cases of sexual transmission, when in fact IV drug use or other risk factors might have been relevant. She shows, strikingly, that some public health researchers actually attributed the hepatitis B, AIDS, and other sexually transmitted diseases in gay men to the 1974 decriminalization of sodomy in California. She argues that male homosexuality had been demedicalized in the early 1970s but was already far along a process of re-medicalization, through hepatitis B vaccine trials and other efforts, in the late 1970s. The hepatitis surveillance context does, I think, help explain why so many gay men thought it plausible that the government might have been responsible for introducing the virus into the population, which she does not discuss.

She shows persuasively that the construction that AIDS “first” arose among those in a “fast-track” lifestyle of “affluent and previously healthy white gay men” (190), and was later spread in a “second” epidemic to poor IV drug users, is totally wrong. She also shows that there is practically no other explanation for why this explanation came into circulation other than a core belief that gay male sexual culture was inherently hedonistic and unhealthy. The first two AIDS cases diagnosed in San Francisco were African American pediatric cases, both children of the same mother who used injection drugs. Almost all of those who presented clinically in the next two years were homeless or poor, chronically unemployed, already sick, or used lots and lots of recreational drugs – but even if there was any chance that they were gay, they were counted as cases of sexual transmission. One of her most interesting arguments is that while many of these people had moved multiple times within the city or between cities and gave multiple addresses, the city DPH distorted these cases so as to exaggerate the concentration of cases in the city’s white gay male district, especially the Castro, and to underestimate concentration in neighborhoods with lots of poverty, homelessness, and people of color; these geographical data were then used to shape future research and consequently had permanent ramifications that distort the public’s perception of what the disease actually was. “I am suggesting . . . that the epidemic began, and to a large extent remains to this day, overwhelmingly (although not exclusively) concentrated among impoverished, politically disenfranchised, marginalized inner-city populations, a population that does not ipso facto exclude homosexual/bisexual men” (57).

The book would have done better to include a more detailed discussion of the history of the process of isolating the HIV virus itself. She shows that the American and French researchers who were involved in the international dispute settled out-of-court in 1987 over who had first isolated the AIDS virus also signed an agreement literally to agree on an orthodox history of the virus’s discovery and never to cast any doubt publicly on this narrative (11-12). This material may not have been available to her.

In the first half of the book, Cochrane reconsiders all the AIDS cases diagnosed in San Francisco in 1981, looking at their medical charts and CDC and attempting to show that their cases were far more complex and murky, and that they survived much longer without treatment, than previously thought. She argues, disputing Shilts and others, that the SF Department of Public Health and the CDC were convinced from the outset that the disease was sexually transmitted and that gay male lifestyle was to blame.

And yet, at the same time, she argues that the government’s decision in 1987 to promote the idea that AIDS was likely to strike heterosexuals through sexual contact was never plausible. She says it never was an “equal opportunity disease,” that funds spent to prevent its spread among heterosexual women and white college students have been almost totally a huge waste, and that the prevention message that a condom breaking one time can give you the disease, while technically true, also was promoted for ideological reasons having to do with sexual morality and as a way to get (desperately needed) funding.

She doesn’t deny that there really is an HIV virus, but she thinks the possibility that there were multiple viruses that interacted in some way in vulnerable individuals was discounted by the construction of a tautological set of diagnostic criteria that meant that confusing cases were and still are determined to “be” “AIDS” even in the absence of important criteria. She has a problem, because she wants to argue that researchers did not hold out for long enough the possibility that social factors rather than a single “killer virus” contributed to AIDS epidemiology before the discovery of the HIV virus – and yet once there actually WAS found to be a “killer virus” this point becomes, at least for most of us, irrelevant. In general, this book would probably be better received if she were less willing to hear the claims of “AIDS dissidents” who think HIV doesn’t cause AIDS – although she would doubtless say that silencing alternative possibilities would go against her whole point.

She says that “official public health data and discourse, epidemiological research, and HIV/AIDS surveillance practices and policies collectively elided the multiplicity of social and behavioral risk factors that characterized those populations most likely to acquire the disease, instead favoring an explanation based on the random chance of being exposed just one time to a single highly infectious and fatal virus” (191).

Mormon leader talks about gays

On Larry King Live:

We love these people and try to work with them and help them. We know they have a problem. We want to help them solve that problem.

Asked about civil unions:

Well, we want to be very careful about that, because that - whatever may lead to gay marriage, we're not in favor of.

And, boy, do these folks know from marriage. As Brigham Young himself said: "Now if any of you will deny the plurality of wives, and continue to do so, I promise that you will be damned."

Planning for the revolution

The following is from a Salon.com article that is the first piece, that I know of, to really take a step back and consider some of the reasons why this year's remarkable grassroots progressive political mobilization failed. The writer, Farhad Manjoo, suggests a deceptively obvious answer. Remember all those news stories that mentioned in passing that the liberal 527s and the Kerry campaign were not going to be able to communicate with one another at all? Remember how America Coming Together couldn't actually promote any particular candidate? Well, it turns out that these things, these quirky aspects of the 2004 political landscape, may turn out to have mattered in the end. Consider (and read the whole article):

....DeNike had stumbled across one of the main operational flaws of the liberal get-out-the-vote effort -- a lack of coordination between the Kerry campaign and its third-party surrogates. What DeNike discovered was that neither the ACT people nor the Kerry people were mounting a final new-registration push in South Florida because each believed that the other group would be handling it. That would seem to be a silly mistake -- didn't people know their roles? -- but this sort of thing seems to have occurred often in the campaign, volunteers say. Because campaign finance laws prohibited the Kerry staffers from discussing their efforts with ostensibly independent groups such as ACT, the campaign and the outside groups were often duplicating each other's work, or sometimes weren't working on what needed to be done because they assumed the other side was doing it.

The coordination problem was especially pronounced during the last few weeks and days of the campaign, when the full force of get-out-the-vote canvassers, tens of thousands of people, were going door-to-door in battleground states. "We were knocking on doors and people would say, 'You're the third person who's come by today,'" says Eric Rorer, a freelance photographer from Northern California who worked for the Kerry campaign in Columbus, Ohio. Volunteers from the various groups were running into each other on the street, Rorer says, but they couldn't pass the slightest information between themselves, even plans as to which houses they would tackle first. One ACT volunteer who canvassed in Miami says, "By the Friday before Election Day people were like, 'Stop coming around!' These people were being extremely over-canvassed -- we were hitting them, MoveOn was hitting them, the Kerry people were hitting them, the Senate candidates were hitting them, there was a mayoral candidate that was hitting them..."

Nobody knows whether this "over-canvassing" problem -- which was reported by just about every canvasser Salon spoke to -- caused many (or any) voters to become so annoyed with the process that they decided to stay away from the polls. But Donald Green, of Yale, says the situation affected the progressive groups' overall efficiency. "It was not easy for them to spread their resources intelligently," he says. Successful door-to-door operations call for a well-planned series of visits to each household over a period of weeks. But instead of each household getting a first contact from a group, then a second contact, then a third, what happened in this campaign in many neighborhoods was that "lots of people were getting many first contacts," each from a different group. "Some people got five first contacts." That must have caused no small amount of confusion, if not anger, among voters.

If some neighborhoods in the swing states were being over-canvassed by progressives, other neighborhoods may have consequently been under-canvassed by those groups. Could the efforts of the third-party groups have been more fruitful if some of their door-to-door canvassing had been shifted from reliably Democratic urban neighborhoods to other areas -- specifically, should ACT and MoveOn have concentrated on some of the suburban and "exurban" neighborhoods that the New York Times Magazine's Bai calls the GOP's secret weapon in Ohio?

"It's a fair point," says Thomas Gensemer, ACT's director of Internet strategies. But conducting a get-out-the-vote operation in non-base suburban neighborhoods would have been difficult for ACT, he notes. Under federal campaign finance law (ACT is a 527 organization, an entity to which donors can contribute unlimited sums of "soft money,") ACT could not call on voters to go out and cast a ballot for a specific candidate. In Democratic strongholds, this limitation worked out OK: The group didn't need to sell voters there on the merits of John Kerry; all it had to do was make sure people got to the polls. But how could ACT have campaigned in areas where the voters' preferences weren't so certain? It wouldn't have worked. As a third-party group, ACT had one key limitation -- it was a "campaign without a candidate," Gensemer says. "That's why our mandate from the start was much more to go after base votes. I don't know if you can do anything else in a 527 world when you're not the actual candidate's campaign. Getting out the swing voters was not the role of us and MoveOn and others."

But if ACT and MoveOn could canvass only in the cities, why couldn't the Kerry campaign have canvassed in the suburbs, spreading the door-to-door resources? The answer, again, is coordination: In key states like Ohio and Florida, the Kerry team couldn't have shifted its resources to the suburbs because it couldn't be sure what the third-party groups would be doing in the cities. It had no way of coordinating with them. So it too had no choice but to concentrate its mobilization efforts in the cities, where all the reliable Democrats were located.

The Democratic focus on urban Democratic strongholds, then, seems to have been a necessary consequence of its reliance on third-party advocacy groups. Republicans, it should be noted, didn't face this problem. Because the Bush-Cheney get-out-the-vote operation was run in-house, not farmed out to soft-money third-party groups, canvassers could do as they pleased, without worrying about coordination failures, or prohibitions on how they could sell their candidate. If the Democrats faced any strategic mobilization disadvantage, Green says, it was this difference in their operations. Republican canvassers were selling a candidate, while canvassers at ACT were really selling an idea -- broad progressivism -- that they hoped would translate into action for their candidate. The match was not quite fair.

The over-canvassing thing may be a bit overplayed here. But, on the other hand, it was a fact. I noticed it myself. We all talked about it the weekend before the election. It happened. I talked to plenty of voters in "core" Democratic neighborhoods who were sick of hearing from people like me, and I knocked on doors that had signs on them that said "No campaigning please."

However, the silver lining is this. Maybe this really will turn out to be our Goldwater '64 defeat, where we organized and organized and were mightily disappointed, but began to build a grassroots movement that eventually put our people into office and dominated national politics. And maybe this time, after the collapse of the dollar and the stock market and the painful years of sleeping on gymnasium floors, we will create something more exciting and more worthwhile than the New Deal.

Maybe?

CanadianAlternative.com

Check it out.

The religious right's covert anti-Semitism

(Thanks to Brad for sending me this)


I am amazed by how much airtime the right wing has managed to get this year from the notion that they are "oppressed" by the separation of church and state. The Family Research Council website has a list of Christians' "rights" during the holiday season, and points out that 96 percent of Americans celebrate Christmas, as if that fact somehow should act as a counterweight to the notion of separation of church and state.

I really have trouble seeing how this can be, at the end of the day, anything but anti-Semitism. It was, after all, primarily concern for the rights of Jews in the aftermath of World War II that animated the U.S. Supreme Court's now decades-old rulings about school prayer that still vex the Christian right (and, to some extent, was the moment when they began organizing as such!). The reason we don't any longer require children in public schools to participate in Christmas pageants is because American courts decided, in the wake of the Nazi Holocaust, that really it was important to respect the rights of the Jewish minority in this country.

The religious right has a curiously Janus-faced way of dealing with the existence of American Jews, in fact. On the one hand, they actually like right-wing Jews, and they endorse the notion of a "Judeo-Christian tradition," and use it to sustain their fanatical belief that Israel can do no wrong in its struggle to keep Palestinians as second-class citizens. But at the same time, their anti-Semitism hasn't disappeared so much as gone underground. Christian right leaders don't talk about Christian anti-Semitism, don't even acknowledge it might exist, or else they locate it in a mythical, irrelevant past, even as they quite literally insist on rooting out and destroying "influences" on American culture - "Hollywood," "the media" - that have undeniable and profound historical relationships to the migration of European Jews to America in the twentieth century.

This time I was in the shower with Barack Obama.

"Speakin' of butts - had another sex dream last night. This time I was in the shower with Barack Obama. Oh-bama, he was 'ba-racking' my world."

---Grace, on "Will & Grace," 11/25/2004. 'Cause let's face it: whatever else is wrong, around these parts at least we're going to be represented in the U.S. Senate by a hot, hot man.

A year ago Barack Obama was running fourth in the Democratic Senate primary in some polls. I've been reading about the Obamas and thinking about how significant it is that they come across as normal people. In fact they are normal people. I read in the current Newsweek cover story about how even with the stresses following the election, they still had to deal with stuff like their kid getting sick. I looked them up on Switchboard.com, figuring he hasn't been famous long enough to have gotten himself removed from such things, and found that they live less than a block from the beautiful, spatious, sunny apartment where I spent the summer of 2003, just north of 55th Street on Everett Avenue. They live in a modestly upscale real estate development there - nice, but not the fanciest housing in Hyde Park by any stretch of the imagination. A couple of my professors, actually, live in the same development.

Michelle Obama works at the U of C Hospitals as Executive Director of the Office of Community Affairs, which must be a big fucking job, even a daunting or excruciating one, at that place.

The current issue of Newsweek mentions that he will be among the least wealthy Senators; hell, even with his new $1.9 million three-book deal, that still might be true. John Kerry, by contrast, is the Senate's #1 wealthiest member. Let's hope the passing of the torch does some good.

The magazine story also has a very strangely worded paragraph in which Obama manages - just barely - to say he won't "back off" on the abortion and gay issues:

Obama doesn't believe that John Kerry lost because of "moral values." It's much more complicated than that. But he knows that the cultural divide and issues like gay marriage and abortion played a role, and that Kerry actually lost among his fellow Roman Catholics. The task now, Obama says, is not to back off on any particular issue but to at least open these cultural subjects for discussion again—and for Democrats to "reclaim and reassert in very explicit language that our best ideas rise out of communal values."

I've written him a letter.

1473 W. Farragut Ave., Apt. G
Chicago, IL 60640

December 22, 2004



Senator-elect Barack Obama
c/o Obama for Illinois
310 South Michigan Avenue, Suite 1720
Chicago, IL 60604

Dear Mr. Obama,

I write as a former Illinois General Assembly constituent in Hyde Park, a soon-to-be Senate constituent, and a gay Illinoisian. You spoke at my graduate school orientation at the University of Chicago in the fall of 2002. Like millions of Americans, I have taken great solace in your victory at an otherwise very trying political moment.

I have one simple and humble request: please stop saying that you are opposed to same-sex marriage for religious reasons. As far as I can tell, you avoided this wording for most of the campaign, emphasizing strategic considerations instead. For this, you were my hero. I imagine that Alan Keyes’ efforts to paint you as a social radical led you to adopt the new line late in the campaign. Even if it’s true, you know as well as I do that your religious beliefs have no bearing on civil marriage, and that our nation’s diverse religious authorities are divided on the question.

Your gay constituents are counting on you. As the only African American in the Senate, your voice has a special significance, because the religious right today wants to exploit the resilience of Black families in the service of their cruel and divisive agenda. There is little evidence to support their belief that black Americans are more opposed to GLBT equality than whites are. In fact, in ten out of the eleven states where same-sex marriage was on the ballot this November, African Americans were less likely than whites to vote to amend their state constitutions.

Gay Americans are one of many groups of vulnerable Americans who face tremendous difficulties during President Bush’s second term. Please stand up for us.


Sincerely yours,



Timothy ***

Shopping for a better world

HRC's Holiday Shopping Guide, based on its Corporate Equality Index, embodies everything that's wrong with HRC. And yet some of its comparisons are useful. For instance, I routinely buy gasoline, and lots of people go to Target for things like paper towels and toilet paper.

It's funny - I remember my parents boycotting Mobil in the '80s to protest apartheid in South Africa; then people not wanting to buy Exxon in the '90s because of their response to the Valdez spill. Then, according to a site linked from HRC's shopping guide, the 1999 merger between the two resulted in gay and lesbian Mobil employees who had previously enjoyed antidiscrimination protections and partner benefits losing those benefits.

I need to read Dana Frank's book on gender and consumerism for my orals. Sigh.

Safire's words bring to mind his Nixon White House years

To the editor:

There is an eerie familiarity in William Safire's attempt to compare a hypothetical Charles Lindbergh presidency, imagined in Philip Roth's latest novel, to a present-day nightmare scenario in which President Bush had decided against invading Iraq preemptively. Safire has brilliantly parroted the childhish unwillingness to concede defeat of an administration that has made the phrase "mission accomplished" into a national joke, that brazenly floated the phrase "Weapons of Mass Destruction-related program activities" as an after-the-fact justification for an invasion that had turned out to be unnecessary and rash.

Mr. Safire's defense of an unpopular and increasingly bloody war inevitably reminds me of Hillary Clinton's comments, almost nine years ago, after Mr. Safire called her a "congenital liar" in his column: "As best I can tell, he is still working for the Nixon administration."

Sincerely yours,
Timothy ***

Was Abe Lincoln a fag?

I have to say this New York Times piece kind of made me want to puke. These people (ALL of them, it seems, except maybe Carl Sandburg) do not seem to understand the historicity of sexual categories. I'm especially disappointed in Jean Baker, who is a good historian and should know better than to make that absurd claim about Lincoln's being "on the margins of tradition," with his sexuality somehow pertaining to the Emancipation Proclamation. That is complete crap.

The Harvard emeritus professor just doesn't know what he's talking about. At all. It's kind of breathtaking. The fact that Lincoln "alluded openly" to his relationship with Speed says little one way or the other about whether they were boinking (and, as Carroll Smith-Rosenberg pointed out 30 years ago, the were-they-boinking question tells us more about the present day than it does about the 19th century). Rather, Lincoln's openness testifies to the fact that romantic friendships between men were not, in his day, subjected to the kind of scrutiny that today we expect as routine. That's why there are so many photographs of men holding hands without embarrassment, up until the 1930s; homo entrepreneurs have lately turned some of these photos into greeting cards, which is fine with me, but that doesn't particularly mean that the persons in question "were gay." And while an erotic preference for men could help explain his marital difficulties (along with other factors), I think it's unwise to regard those difficulties in and of themselves as evidence of his "homosexuality."

The history of the censorship of Sandburg's biography is interesting to learn about, but beyond that, there's really nothing new in this article. I'll be very interested to see the Tripp book and how it's received by the public. Gay historians have written about Lincoln's intimacies a number of times in the past, but never with this high a profile.

I'm skeptical, though, of Larry Kramer's notion that we can win over the hearts and minds of the public by proving that a homo signed the Emancipation Proclamation. As my friend Moon just reminded me yesterday, Harvey Milk, also wanting to show that gays "do good things," publicized the fact that the guy who saved President Ford from an assassin's bullet in San Francisco in 1975 was gay, which led to his being outed on the front page of papers all over America. And while being outed caused tremendous personal difficulties for the poor guy, it's not clear that the public, in the end, thought any better of gay people for it.

In other news, check out Mark Morford's latest column, Canada Goes To Hell. "Legal pot? Legal gay marriage? Universal health care? What's next, free porn and candy?"

In retrospect.

Recently I did some impromptu couples counseling for two guys I know who are a serodiscordant couple. That means that one of them is HIV-positive, and the other one isn't. The one who's positive (I'll call him Alex) is a close friend, one of my first friends in Chicago. Last summer, he suddenly found this fantastic new boyfriend (I'll call him Ben) who was perfect for him in every way, and they were on the fast track to getting serious. And then suddenly something terrible happened. Alex met me one afternoon to tell me about it in person.

It turned out that Alex had already known about his HIV status, and he'd waited longer than he should have before telling his new beau. He thought he'd be rejected, one way or another, perhaps abruptly, perhaps delicately. And he didn't tell his other friends either, such as me, until after the whole thing blew up and Ben had been scared out of his wits and run away. In addition, Alex didn't tell Ben about his status in a particularly optimal way: he put it in an email.

Neither one of them, it turns out, has many people they can talk to about the difficulty of their relationship. Alex doesn't really have any friends who are HIV-positive (or, at least, openly so), which I have told him many times is a problem. It means that he doesn't have people who've gone through what he's gone through, with whom he can talk about his experiences and worries, and about how hard it genuinely is to disclose his status to others and to make decisions about when and how to do so. And he also hasn't had the experience of meeting guys in settings where there's no fear of disclosure (like the positive singles nights that take place at various gay bars in town).

I ended up trying to convey to Alex the importance of the fact that as they were doing their initial sexual decision-making, Ben had not had the maximum possible information, whereas Alex had. Yes, one has to assume that any new sexual partner might have HIV, knowingly or unknowingly. But, as I've said to Alex over and over, if he has sex with someone without disclosing his status - any kind of sex really, regardless of what the definition of "is" is - then he automatically makes it much more difficult for himself, and increases the likelihood of rejection, especially if he ends up wanting to get serious about that person.

Ben doesn't have many people to talk to, either. He's totally in love with Alex, but he's also still pretty deeply hurt by the way that Alex told him about his status. He's also scared about his own status, even though objectively he doesn't really have very much reason to worry. He finds himself dwelling on Alex's sexual past, wondering about his partners, even feeling like there is a whole unfamiliar side of him. Of course, this sort of feeling must be a natural consequence of [being negative and] hearing from someone you've fallen in love with that they're positive.

I told Ben that he needs to try to separate in his mind Alex's sexual past and the fact that he has HIV. The fact is, you can get HIV in ways other than having sex, and you can also have lots of sex and not get HIV. Sure, there is a relationship between the two. But what you do with your partners matters most.

(This problem is made even more difficult by the fact that for a significant proportion of gay men, it's not all that unusual for decisions like whether to go on a date to be made after two people have already had sex. Because he's never really had anyone to talk through these issues with, and perhaps for other reasons, which are still not clear to me, this wasn't very obvious to Alex.)

Today, the two of them are back together, visibly and desperately head over heels in love---and here's where it gets interesting. Because, after all was said and done, Ben did come back. Yes, it involved three weeks of rage and avoidance and extremely intense arguments, three weeks in which Alex was pretty tough to console. Yes, he might not have come back. But he did. And I find myself having to reevaluate a critical piece of my objection to Alex's handling of the situation.

Recall what I told Alex early on:

- that by disclosing his status early on, he "automatically makes it much more difficult for himself, and increases the likelihood of rejection, especially if he ends up wanting to get serious about that person." But from a longer-range perspective, it's hard to say what would have happened if Alex had done what I suggested. Because the fact is, when a gay guy who has HIV discloses their status to a gay guy who doesn't, it automatically creates distance. There is no way around it. Yes, the negative person is likely to try to take in the information without seeming surprised, but it's actually only a very tiny minority of HIV-negative people who would not have serious reservations even about a first or second date with someone who's positive. I can only think of a couple of HIV-negative people in my life who I'm pretty sure would be really comfortable with it. Rejection is subtle.

- Honesty is the best policy. Yes, morally. And yes, by waiting until they were in love, Alex made the imposition-of-distance that comes with disclosure far more catastrophic than it would've been on a first meeting. And yet it meant that the shock and the resentment came between intimates rather than acquaintances; it meant, in short, that Ben had someone and something to come back to, once he'd come to grips with his shock and anger. So that from a perfectly rational perspective (which of course one never actually adopts in real life), if Ben really was worth getting serious about, waiting to tell him just might have increased Alex's chances of ending up with him for good.

- But he put Ben in danger. But if safer sex practices were followed, did he put him in any more serious danger than Ben might very well put himself in, say, going home with someone from a bar after a night of bar-hopping in Boystown? Even, given the circumstances of several unsolved murders of gay men in Chicago, perhaps considerably less danger? As The Onion put it in Dance-Club Bathroom Left Out of Gay Couple's Meeting Story: "'Oh, we met at The Gay '90s,' Robertson said, making no mention of the fellatio Ledger performed on him in the second-floor restroom."

(And note this, too, when you ask yourself who's responsible for stopping the spread of HIV: the Bush administration has been widely criticized by AIDS activists for capitulating to the religious right in cutting educational campaigns targeting the general population and expanding campaigns that target positive people with ad campaigns such as HIV stops with me. These ads, with their upbeat, anti-stigma veneer, conceal - much like the Swift Boat ads - the real reason why they have been promoted. And that reason is because the Family Research Council doesn't want the government telling the general public to use condoms.)

It's complicated. At this point, my initial judgment about the morality of Alex's actions is clouded by my enthusiasm - and theirs - for their having gotten back together. But after spending time counseling both of them about this difficulty, I can't help but feel that these two people have a pretty intense grasp of the precariousness of building a relationship, of what's at stake - the kind of grasp that you get after spending years together. Ben's going to spend Christmas with Alex's family this year. I've hardly ever seen two people more profoundly happy to have found each other.

There remain serious complexities for any serodiscordant couple, and they will have to face those together for as long as they remain together. Epidemiologists study serodiscordant couples closely, because they're one of the few cases, in the universe of sex between men, in which they have a fighting chance of getting reliable empirical evidence to try to figure out what increases or decreases the chances of transmission. There remains a profound difference between them, and even, now, a fairly burdensome history. I told them at the end of our counseling session that they both need to understand that Ben will always contend with the possibility of a chance in his HIV status, whereas Alex is not facing that possibility. When I said that, they looked at each other. Alex said, "It's true. My status isn't going to change - I mean, unless there's a medical breakthrough." Ben said, "I know. And I'm hoping for that one day. I really am."

Media segmentation in action

Tomorrow is the planned beginning of a fare strike to protest massive cuts to Chicago's public transit system, the nation's second largest, which are set to go into effect January 2. In covering the fare strike, though, the Tribune elected to cover not the strike itself, but an email hoax that the CTA decided to refer to the FBI for investigation. Even the Tribune, though, can't quite pull off the job of turning someone's fake press release into - well - a federal case. The FBI spokesman said, "we are not sure if there was a violation of federal law. We will be consulting with the U.S. attorney's office to determine if a possible Internet crime occurred." What's fascinating, though, is that Red Eye , the Tribune's daily tabloid-style paper aimed at and popular among the 20something set, featured an lengthy column about whether or not a fare strike is a justifiable tactic, a question that has also been the subject of much debate on my 20something leftist/hipster/queer listservs (so, commenters, check out the specifics if you want to weigh in).

Homeland Security nominee has been getting rich off 9/11 just like Rudy Giuliani

The Times headline says it all: Security Post Would Put Kerik Atop Field That Enriched Him. Kerik's been busy working for Tazer Corporation to sell to police departments their stun-guns that the US military has found may not be safe for people, an issue that the Justice Department will be investigating.

And if you wanna get disgusted, check out Giuliani Partners, which goes so far as to post news stories such as this one saying:

The firm, which opened in January 2002 in affiliation with Ernst & Young, the global accounting firm, is clearly and without apology driven by the stature Mr. Giuliani gained in commanding the New York City Police Department and in guiding the city after the World Trade Center attack. It is sustained by the advice Mr. Giuliani and his partners offer in appearances they make around the nation and the world, warning audiences that more attacks are almost certainly on the way. Such predictions, of course, benefit both the former mayor's firm and the clients he has retained, many of them involved in selling terrorism preparedness products.

I'm so glad the Republicans stand for moral values....

Gay Activists Refuse to Bargain Away Rights

From WaPo:

Dozens of prominent advocates for gay rights sent a letter to every member of Congress yesterday stating that they would reject any plan to bargain for equal rights, and specifically decried a report that the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest gay political organization, was planning to "moderate" its positions and would possibly support President Bush's plan to create private Social Security accounts.

Read the full letter on the Task Force website. It's great:

The powerful and revealing fact is that that over 60% of voters in November 2 exit polls said they supported either marriage or civil unions for gay and lesbian couples. What remarkable progress we have made over these last years.

The New York Times today reported that some in the LGBT community are ready to pull back on our struggle for freedom to make everyone more comfortable politically, or willing to bargain away the rights of others to make a deal for themselves. Specifically, the notion was advanced that we could make gains at the expense of senior citizens by privatizing Social Security.

For our part, we want to be absolutely clear and on the record: We specifically reject any attempts to trade equal rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, a group that includes many elders, for the rights of senior citizens under Social Security or, for that matter, the rights of any other group of Americans.

I was glad to see my advisor and John D'Emilio signed it.

In other news:

TORONTO, Dec. 9 -- Canada's Supreme Court on Thursday declared same-sex marriages constitutional, underscoring the sharp contrast on the issue between Canada and the United States.

Those thinking about moving should read the Canadian Skilled Worker Self-Assessment and consider advertising on MarryAnAmerican.ca (double attractive for the homo set). Also, this from the Chronicle of Higher Ed (which I'm pasting in because their articles are not accessible without a subscription):

The Chronicle of Higher Education
Friday, December 10, 2004

2 Colleges in Massachusetts Halt Benefits for Same-Sex Partners, Now That They May Marry
By PIPER FOGG

At least two colleges in Massachusetts have stopped offering benefits to their employees' same-sex domestic partners since a law went into effect this year that permits gay and lesbian couples in the state to marry.

Emerson College and Northeastern University say such couples, if they marry, are now eligible for spousal benefits, just like married heterosexual couples.

Northeastern has given couples until June 2005 to decide whether they want to get married or lose their same-sex-partner benefits. Emerson, which announced its new policy in June, gave couples about three months to decide. It stopped offering the benefits to unmarried partners on October 1.

The University of Massachusetts, a five-campus system that previously did not offer benefits to same-sex domestic partners, will now offer spousal benefits to married gay and lesbian couples.

"It's a step toward equality," said Daryl Herrschaft, a project director at the Human Rights Campaign, a lobbying group for gay men and lesbians. But he cautioned employers to give their people a sufficient amount of time to decide whether to marry and to make marriage plans.

"It takes more than 12 months for an average marriage to be planned," he noted.

Mr. Herrschaft also said there is an argument to be made for keeping benefits for same-sex domestic partners because such a policy would recognize all types of partnerships. Some colleges in Massachusetts, including Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have no plans to discontinue domestic-partnership benefits.

In an e-mail message, Mary Ann O'Brien, a Harvard spokeswoman said, "We would approach any change in this area cautiously, with an eye toward where the law and the work force is going."

A final thought: perhaps "gay gene" research will begin to die a long-overdue death now that Dean Hamer is researching whether there's a faith gene.

Here is a cute if overpriced bumper sticker for straights and gays on your holiday shopping list.

HRC, Part 2: "We are not going to get into details." Don't worry, we still care about trans people.

I've got to admit to my dear friend Jesse that he was right in saying, when I joined HRC in October, that I'd surely be quitting again, or at least cursing, the next time they did something totally fucked-up.

*

Date: Wed, 8 Dec 2004 23:17:10 -0600 (CST)
From: Timothy *** {tim***@***}
To: steven.fisher@hrc.org
Subject: What is the "difference in management philosophy"

Dear Mr. Fisher [Communications Director],

I'm a 25-year-old gay man in Chicago, and I wrote you in October with the
message that after years of discomfort with HRC's approach to the
movement, I had joined the organization because of your decision to
endorse only a gender identity-inclusive version of ENDA. After I asked
you to forward my letter to Ms. Jacques, I received personal letters from
several members of the HRC board.

I am very concerned, though, to hear about the departure of Cheryl
Jacques, and your press release does not make clear what "difference in
management philosophy" prompted the board to ask her to leave. I am
especially concerned that HRC could be backing down from the forceful
demand for equality and recognition of the needs of ALL queers that Cheryl
Jacques's leadership seemed to me to represent.

Without a clearer understanding of what the change is, I certainly won't
feel comfortable, for instance, giving gift memberships to my relatives
this holiday season, or encouraging my friends to do the same. Can you
please clarify what precisely this is about?


Sincerely yours,
Timothy ***
Chicago, Ill.

*

Date: Thu, 9 Dec 2004 00:31:03 -0500
From: steven.fisher@hrc.org
To: timsw@midway.uchicago.edu
Subject: RE: What is the "difference in management philosophy"

First, thanks for your thoughtful e-mail. We understand a lot of people
want greater clarity about Cheryl's resignation.

I'm sure you've worked in a lot of large organizations and you know that
sometimes management and employees don't see eye to eye. That often
leads to differences that can't be reconciled. We respect Cheryl and
admire the work she did over the past year and, out of respect for her
and for HRC, we are not going to get into details around her
resignation. Be assured that those differences were around management
philosophy only. We remain as commited as ever to our mission and goals,
including a transgender-inclusive ENDA.

We are focused on the future and new strategies to have a direct
conversation with the American people about our lives and our families.
This means engaging straight allies, people of faith and finding new
approaches to talking to the American people about issues that affect.
You'll be hearing more about this new strategy in the weeks and months
ahead.

Thank you again for taking the time to write,
Steve

HRC, Part 1: "A new, more moderate strategy"

The 600,000-member (!) Human Rights Campaign has fired its executive director and announced "a new, more moderate strategy, with less emphasis on legalizing same-sex marriages and more on strengthening personal relationships," as the New York Times put it.

I'm all for an approach that doesn't focus solely on marriage, and I'm glad that HRC has woken up to the fact that other things matter (though I don't know why they're so damn obsessed with churches). But can you imagine any of the major pro-choice organizations publicy adopting a "more moderate strategy" in the aftermath of this election? Hell no! They're fighting harder than ever! They seem to get it that our lives are at stake in the struggles ahead.

Even the Times reporter (of all people!) noted the irony that HRC is only now waking up to the state ballot measures, which in contrast to NGLTF it barely lifted a finger to fight until the final weeks of the campaign:

The Human Rights Campaign, which is based in Washington, was instrumental in the defeat this year of the federal marriage amendment, which would have defined marriage as a union only between a man and a woman. The group was not as active in the ballot initiative battles in the states this fall.

The Times also did a good job of representing opposition to HRC's decision (although they did not represent at all queers who are lukewarm about marriage or against it for progressive rather than conservative reasons):

But others involved in the drive for gay and lesbian equality say the Human Rights Campaign's approach smacks of pre-emptive surrender and wrong-headed political calculation.

I liked what NGLTF executive director Matt Foreman had to say:

"A lot of gay people understand the concept of bullies," Mr. Foreman said. "The worst thing you can do with a bully is not fight back because you'll only get hit harder the next day."

I love local TV news!

On Channel 5 a few minutes ago, a breathless anchor declared, "With 300 firefighters on the scene, this is the largest fire response in Chicago history. In fact, this is the largest fire in Chicago history."

About 30 seconds later she corrected herself - she'd forgotten about that fire back in 1871.

One does wonder what on earth prompted her to make the assertion in the first place.

*

Now for some real history. The LaSalle Bank Building, an art deco gem, was built on the site of the Home Insurance Building, which has been called the "world's first skyscraper." The building, which was built by Marshall Field himself. After its completion (around 1930?) there were no more skyscrapers built in Chicago until 1955.

Quotation of the week: "For the life of me, I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply because it is so easy to do.
---outgoing HHS secretary Tommy Thompson

No New Money for abstinence-only sex ed

Take Action..... In less than a minute, you can make your influence
known......

NO NEW MONEY FOR ABSTINENCE ONLY!

As many of us are aware, a report prepared for Representative Henry A. Waxman (D-CA) entitled The Content of Federally Funded Abstinence-Only Education Programs (also referred to as the Waxman Report), was released last Wednesday, December 1 (World AIDS Day.) The report can be found at:
http://www.democrats.reform.house.gov/Documents/20041201102153-50247.pdf

Now is another FABULOUS time to advocate for No New Money for abstinence-only-until-marriage programs.

GO TO: www.NoNewMoney.org and write to the White House and your elected officials demanding that NO NEW MONEY be WASTED on abstinence-only-until-marriage programs. There is a "Take Action" button on the website that will enable you to send an e-mail in LESS THAN A MINUTE.

The more our policy makers hear from us, their constituents, on this issue, the more likely they are take notice. We must strike while the iron is hot!

By way of some additional talking points and information, the report finds that 11 of 13 abstinence-only-until-marriage curricula contain errors and distortions of health information including misleading or false information about the risks of sexual activity, the effectiveness of contraceptives, and the risks of abortion. The report also examines how these curricula confuse religion and science, as well as present stereotypical gender roles as scientific fact.

Remember, go to www.NoNewMoney.org

After you have taken action....
PLEASE FORWARD THIS E-MAIL TO YOUR FRIENDS AND LISTSERVS!

The fate of those "gay friends in the red states"

In today's Tribune:

WASHINGTON -- In one of his first big postelection appearances in the nation's capital, Sen.-elect Barack Obama lampooned his celebrity status and the speculation that he has a future run for the White House on his mind....

Referring to the Democratic National Convention speech that rocketed him to national celebrity, he recalled that he had said that "we coach Little League in the blue states and we have some gay friends in the red states.

"Well, here's an update. Since the election, that gay couple I knew in the red states? They've moved back to the blue states."

You should read the rest of his jokes. A lot of them are funny!

"often in direct contradiction to the findings of government scientists...contradicts the 2001 edition of a standard obstetrics textbook..."

Required reading. What a disgrace! Read all the way to the end, too. These people think women should be barefoot and pregnant and gays should be jailed.

Some Abstinence Programs Mislead Teens, Report Says
By Ceci Connolly
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 2, 2004; Page A01

Many American youngsters participating in federally funded abstinence-only programs have been taught over the past three years that abortion can lead to sterility and suicide, that half the gay male teenagers in the United States have tested positive for the AIDS virus, and that touching a person's genitals "can result in pregnancy," a congressional staff analysis has found.

Those and other assertions are examples of the "false, misleading, or distorted information" in the programs' teaching materials, said the analysis, released yesterday, which reviewed the curricula of more than a dozen projects aimed at preventing teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease.

In providing nearly $170 million next year to fund groups that teach abstinence only, the Bush administration, with backing from the Republican Congress, is investing heavily in a just-say-no strategy for teenagers and sex. But youngsters taking the courses frequently receive medically inaccurate or misleading information, often in direct contradiction to the findings of government scientists, said the report, by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), a critic of the administration who has long argued for comprehensive sex education.

Several million children ages 9 to 18 have participated in the more than 100 federal abstinence programs since the efforts began in 1999. Waxman's staff reviewed the 13 most commonly used curricula -- those used by at least five programs apiece.

The report concluded that two of the curricula were accurate but the 11 others, used by 69 organizations in 25 states, contain unproved claims, subjective conclusions or outright falsehoods regarding reproductive health, gender traits and when life begins. In some cases, Waxman said in an interview, the factual issues were limited to occasional misinterpretations of publicly available data; in others, the materials pervasively presented subjective opinions as scientific fact.

Among the misconceptions cited by Waxman's investigators:

* A 43-day-old fetus is a "thinking person."

* HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, can be spread via sweat and tears.

* Condoms fail to prevent HIV transmission as often as 31 percent of the time in heterosexual intercourse.

One curriculum, called "Me, My World, My Future," teaches that women who have an abortion "are more prone to suicide" and that as many as 10 percent of them become sterile. This contradicts the 2001 edition of a standard obstetrics textbook that says fertility is not affected by elective abortion, the Waxman report said.

"I have no objection talking about abstinence as a surefire way to prevent unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases," Waxman said. "I don't think we ought to lie to our children about science. Something is seriously wrong when federal tax dollars are being used to mislead kids about basic health facts."

When used properly and consistently, condoms fail to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) less than 3 percent of the time, federal researchers say, and it is not known how many gay teenagers are HIV-positive. The assertion regarding gay teenagers may be a misinterpretation of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that found that 59 percent of HIV-infected males ages 13 to 19 contracted the virus through homosexual relations. Joe. S. McIlhaney Jr., who runs the Medical Institute for Sexual Health, which developed much of the material that was surveyed, said he is "saddened" that Waxman chose to "blast" well-intentioned abstinence educators when there is much the two sides could agree on.

McIlhaney acknowledged that his group, which publishes "Sexual Health Today" instruction manuals, made a mistake in describing the relationship between a rare type of infection caused by chlamydia bacteria and heart failure. Chlamydia also causes a common type of sexually transmitted infection, but that is not linked to heart disease. But McIlhaney said Waxman misinterpreted a slide that warns young people about the possibility of pregnancy without intercourse. McIlhaney said the slide accurately describes a real, though small, risk of pregnancy in mutual masturbation.

Congress first allocated money for abstinence-only programs in 1999, setting aside $80 million in grants, which go to a variety of religious, civic and medical organizations. To be eligible, groups must limit discussion of contraception to failure rates.

President Bush has enthusiastically backed the movement, proposing to spend $270 million on abstinence projects in 2005. Congress reduced that to about $168 million, bringing total abstinence funding to nearly $900 million over five years. It does not appear that the abstinence-only curricula are being taught in the Washington area.

Waxman and other liberal sex-education proponents argue that adolescents who take abstinence-only programs are ill-equipped to protect themselves if they become sexually active. According to the latest CDC data, 61 percent of graduating high school seniors have had sex.

Supporters of the abstinence approach, also called abstinence until marriage, counter that teaching young people about "safer sex" is an invitation to have sex.

Alma Golden, deputy assistant secretary for population affairs in the Department of Health and Human Services, said in a statement that Waxman's report is a political document that does a "disservice to our children." Speaking as a pediatrician, Golden said, she knows "abstaining from sex is the most effective means of preventing the sexual transmission of HIV, STDs and preventing pregnancy."

Nonpartisan researchers have been unable to document measurable benefits of the abstinence-only model. Columbia University researchers found that although teenagers who take "virginity pledges" may wait longer to initiate sexual activity, 88 percent eventually have premarital sex.

Bill Smith, vice president of public policy at the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, a comprehensive sex education group that also receives federal funding, said the Waxman report underscored the need for closer monitoring of what he called the "shame-based, fear-based, medically inaccurate messages" being disseminated with tax money. He said the danger of abstinence education lies in the omission of useful medical information.

Some course materials cited in Waxman's report present as scientific fact notions about a man's need for "admiration" and "sexual fulfillment" compared with a woman's need for "financial support." One book in the "Choosing Best" series tells the story of a knight who married a village maiden instead of the princess because the princess offered so many tips on slaying the local dragon. "Moral of the story," notes the popular text: "Occasional suggestions and assistance may be alright, but too much of it will lessen a man's confidence or even turn him away from his princess."

Social Security "reform" and gymnasium floors

Dear Christopher,

I was sitting next to you when we both first heard that Kerry had conceded defeat in the presidential race. We both became rather upset. I remember the first coherent thought that you managed to speak: you said that American homeowners who voted to reelect Bush, with their thirty-year mortgages and their 401K's in the stock market, are going to be pretty bewildered in a few years when things get so bad in this country that they're having to sleep on gymnasium floors.

I think of this often. The Social Security debate recalls it to me. I also thought of it when the religious right managed to convince the entire media that the election was about ordinary people and their moral values when in fact nationwide Bush won lost in every annual income group below $50k a year and won in every income group above $50k. I think it's so interesting that that was the first thing you said.

cheers,
tim

"Where they burn books, ....."

One hates to be melodramatic, but.....

Alabama Lawmaker Wants Gay Book Ban

Build a "big hole and dump them in and bury them."

That's what should happen to books in public, school and college libraries that have gay themes, says Rep. Gerald Allen, a state lawmaker in Alabama who has proposed a bill banning books with gay themes and protagonists.

Under his legislation, public funds could no longer be used to buy "textbooks or library materials that recognize or promote homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle."

Allen, who has sought to ban gay marriages in the state, says he offered the bill to protect Alabama children from the "homosexual agenda."

"Our culture, how we know it today, is under attack from every angle," he told reporters Tuesday.

If the bill becomes law, "public school textbooks could not present homosexuality as a genetic trait and public libraries couldn't offer books with gay or bisexual characters," said the paper.

Things to Do Before the Inauguration

Forwarded by my friend Brad.


1. Get that abortion you've always wanted.

2. Drink a nice clean glass of water.

3. Cash your social security check.

4. See a doctor of your own choosing.

5. Spend quality time with your draft age child/grandchild.

6. Visit Syria, or any foreign country for that matter.

7. Get that gas mask you've been putting off buying.

8. Hoard gasoline.

10. Borrow books from library before they're banned - Constitutional law books, Catcher in the Rye, Harry Potter, Tropic of Cancer, etc.

11. If you have an idea for an art piece involving a crucifix - do it

12. Come out - then go back in - HURRY!

13. Jam in all the Alzheimer's stem cell research you can.

14. Stay out late before the curfews start.

16. Go see Bruce Springsteen before he has his

17. Go see Mount Rushmore before the Reagan addition.

18. Use the phrase - "you can't do that - this is America"

19. If you're white - marry a black person, if you're black - marry a white person.

21. Take a walk in Yosemite, without being hit by a snowmobile or a base-jumper.

22. Enroll your kid in an accelerated art or music class.

23. Start your school day without a prayer.

24. Pass on the secrets of evolution to future generations.

26. Learn French.

28. Attend a commitment ceremony with your gay friends.

29. Take a factory tour anywhere in the US.

30. Try to take photographs of animals on the endangered species list.

31. Visit Florida before the polar ice caps melt.

32. Visit Nevada before it becomes radioactive.

33. Visit Alaska before "The Big Spill."

34. Visit Massachusetts while it is still a State.

Abstinence-only lies

From Slate today, via Debbie Gould:

> The Washington Post fronts a Democratic congressional study
> concluding that students in federally-funded abstinence courses are
> learning such, ah, facts as: HIV can be spread by sweat, touching of
> genitals can cause pregnancy, and abortion can lead to suicide. Of 13
> curricula examined, 11 had boo-boos or falsehoods, though "some" were
> only minor mistakes. (How many?)

Dance-Club Bathroom Meeting Left Out of Gay Couple's Meeting Story

1. The Onion has been unusually on-target this past year in using satire to represent the periodic weirdness of the cultural encounter increasingly taking place - or so one hopes - between straight and gay Americans. Massachusetts Supreme Court Orders All Citizens to Gay Marry was priceless. Here's a gem from the latest issue:

MINNEAPOLIS—During an anniversary get-together at their apartment Monday, Matthew Ledger and Dale Robertson told the story of their first meeting to a curious friend, omitting key details that took place in the men's room of a Hennepin Avenue dance club. "Oh, we met at The Gay '90s," Robertson said, making no mention of the fellatio Ledger performed on him in the second-floor restroom. "Matt bought me a drink, and we and ended up dancing together all night long. When his date was pulling him out of the club at the end of the night, he slipped me his number." Helen Meske, the friend who asked about the couple's meeting, said the story was "so sweet."

This story is telling in a number of ways, but I don't think it's right to assume that choosing not to disclose something need in itself always raises the specter of "the closet" that looms over gay life. I remember reading an article by Samuel Delany in which he said that the concept of "coming out of the closet" needed to be expansive enough to encompass choosing not to come out to someone. Yes, it's sanitizing one's experience. But gays have no monopoly on sanitizing our experiences - and weddings perhaps illustrate this best of all. Is queer politics a contest, with prizes reserved only for those who are maximally transgressive?

2. In this vein, George Chauncey provides a useful reminder in Why Marriage? that except in the context of gay people, the concept of assimilation is for all practical purposes dead:

If the original gay advocates of marriage had seen it as an instrument of gay liberation and social transformation, many of marriage's most famous advocates in the early 1990s, such as the New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan, saw marriage as a means of mainstreaming gay culture. [Even today, BTW, Sullivan was still the only gay political voice on 20/20 last week.]...Such arguments produced a strong reaction from Michael Warner and other gay men and lesbians who felt making marriage a central movement goal (or even supporting it) would dishonor the innovative forms of intimacy that had taken shape in queer culture. Stigmatizing such alternatives was the last thing they wanted.

If one side embraced marriage's symbolic power to assimilate gay couples into the mainstream of American life, another side resisted it as an assimilationist retreat from the radical aspirations of gay liberation. That debate revealed genuine and growing disagreements among gay activists, but it also often seemed to me to misconstrue the likely significance of securing marriage in part because of the way it used the term 'assimilation.' Historians once used the term to describe the process by which Mexicans, Asians, European Catholics, and other immigrants were absorbed into American culture and became indistinct from it, as they shed all signs of their difference from the national norm. Although that framework still underpins the debate over gay assimilation, it has been refashioned by theorists of ethnicity, who recognize that even as immigrants were reshaped by their incorporation into American culture, so too was American culture. Securing marriage will have significant symbolic implications, but they will be more complex than the debate over assimilation usually allows. Just as problematic, neither side in the assimilation debate paid much attention in the 1990s to the tangible rights, benefits, and protections conferred by marriage. That would soon change....In the 1980s and early 1990s, few people who were debating the desirability of marriage so fervently thought there was much prospect of it becoming available to gay couples anytime soon. (pp. 121-22)

3. As I thought this over, I thought of an article by Pat Califia that I first encountered in 1998, while I was volunteering at an HIV/AIDS program in Philadelphia, which I found very influential:

The sad fact is that if all gay men settled down into pairs like animals clambering into Noah's ark, a world of possibilities would disappear. A culture that embraces nonmonogamy, casual public sex, erotic art, sex toys, costuming and a theatrical attitude toward pleasure is a national treasure, not a shameful anachronism.

Twenty years ago, who could have predicted that any gay activist worthy of the name would be preaching the same values as Anita Bryant?....And so now there are gay activists who say we need to shut the bathhouses, stop partying and devote our efforts to winning a legal right to gay marriage. They tout marriage as a means to maturity, monogamy, membership in the mainstream and, ultimately, as an escape from the epidemic, and they have little faith in condoms, safe sex or a vaccine....Same-sex couples absolutely ought to be allowed to marry. And for those who choose it, monogamy is a valid boundary to set. But the gay men advocating marriage and monogamy as our only hope of salvation from the scourge of AIDS haven't done their homework. They act as if AIDS were the only sexually transmitted, fatal disease that ever existed. But what about syphilis?

Last spring I said several times that I thought queers should come together in support of the right to marry for those who desire it, but that it must remain together when the battle concerns our right to have kinky sex. I still think so - and as time goes by, I find this viewpoint less contradictory than I once did. In part, Califia wrote at a time when Andrew Sullivan's interpretation of the meaning of marriage was virtually the only one getting any widespread play in the queer press. Today there are many more voices speaking today about the significance of marriage, and few of them have much to say about monogamy (though my friend Liz's recent piece in a new book on marriage does; more on that after I've read it). It has never quite seemed plausible to me to assume that marriage would transform gays but not the other way around.

4. And now, for a dose of reality - disturbing in some respects, but heartening in others - here's Scott McClellan on states' rights (Nov. 29):

[...] Go ahead Terry. Let me go to Terry, and then I'll come to you, David.

Q The United States Supreme Court declined to take the appeal from the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruling that allowed for same-sex couples to get married in Massachusetts . What's the President's reaction to that?

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, I think that the President continues to emphasize the importance of moving forward on a constitutional amendment that would allow the people's voice to be heard and not allow this issue to be decided by activist judges or local officials who seek to redefine what is a sacred institution. The American people strongly support protecting the sanctity of marriage. I think you can look to the recent elections in 11 states to see the kind of broad support there is for protecting the sacred institution.

And the President remains firmly committed to moving forward on a constitutional amendment that would allow the voice of the people to be heard and involve states in this process. And that's different from allowing the activist judges to redefine this without the people's voice being heard.

Q But the activist -- the judges of the United States Supreme Court, the Justices just said this is something for the states, that we aren't going to get involved in this. And 11 states are doing it. Why does the President want --

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, I think -- I don't think that they were looking at it from the federal law perspective, but looking at it from the state law perspective of the Massachusetts court. So we need to separate those out. You do have the Defense of Marriage Act in place, which the President strongly supported. There is some question of whether or not that will be upheld over time. And the President believes that this is an enduring institution in our society. That's why he has fought to move forward on a constitutional process that would allow the states and the people in those states to be involved in this decision.

Q But I'm just wondering why the President thinks that federal judges are going to overturn, or "federalize" the Massachusetts decision to allow same-sex couples to get married. One of the arguments the President made was that a federal court might get involved. Isn't this a strong signal from the highest federal court that this is a matter reserved to states?

MR. McCLELLAN: I don't think I would necessarily look at it that way. Again, I think they were looking at it from the state law perspective, not the federal law perspective. It was not something brought under the Defense of Marriage Act.

Q And so the President's position -- just to get this right -- is that if a state wants to decide through a majority vote that it will allow for same-sex marriages, the President wants to have the federal government smash that down and make sure that no state can decide that, right?

MR. McCLELLAN: No, I think that you're talking about what activist judges are doing right now. The activist judges are seeking to redefine marriage for the rest of society, and the people's voice is not being heard in this process. That's why the President is committed to moving forward with Congress on a constitutional amendment that would protect the sanctity of marriage and allow the people's voice to be heard in this important debate facing our society.

Q But it would only allow -- it would give victory to the people who support that definition of marriage, wouldn't it? Because if the state --

MR. McCLELLAN: There are 11 states that recently voted on this very issue, and they voted to ban same-sex marriages overwhelmingly in those states. And I think if you look at any number of indications, there is overwhelming support across the United States for protecting the sanctity of marriage.

Q Just to get this straight. The President does not want to allow the people of a state to decide to allow for gay marriage. In other words, he wants a federal constitutional amendment that would stop a majority in the state --

MR. McCLELLAN: He supports the constitutional amendment --

Q -- from voting.

MR. McCLELLAN: -- and the constitutional process would allow the state's voice to be heard.

David, sorry, go ahead. [...]

"the law schools are entitled to at least as much deference as the Boy Scouts"

Excerpts from the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruling , in Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights v. Rumsfeld (opinion filed November 29, 2004):

Just as the Boy Scouts believed that ‘homosexual conduct is inconsistent with the Scout Oath’ …, the law schools believe that employment discrimination is inconsistent with their commitment to justice and fairness. Just as the Boy Scouts maintained that ‘homosexuals do not provide a role model consistent with the expectations of Scouting families’ …, the law schools maintain that military recruiters engaging in exclusionary hiring ‘do not provide a role model consistent with the expectations of’ … their students and the legal community. Just as the Boy Scouts endeavored to ‘inculcate [youth] with the Boy Scouts’ values—both expressively and by example’ …, the law schools endeavor to ‘inculcate’ their students with their chosen values by expression and example in the promulgation and enforcement of their nondiscrimination policies….And just as ‘Dale’s presence in the Boy Scouts would, at the very least, force the organization to send a message, both to youth members and the world, that the Boy Scouts accepts homosexual conduct as a legitimate form of behavior’ …, the presence of military recruiters ‘would, at the very least, force the law schools to send a message,’ both to students and the legal community, that the law schools ‘accept’ employment discrimination ‘as a legitimate form of behavior.’….

Moreover, the District Court’s scrutiny of the law schools’ belief that the presence of military recruiters will undermine their expressive message about fairness and social justice violates the Dale Court’s instruction to ‘give deference to an association’s view of what would impair its expression.’….the reason why there was ‘no question’…that a gay scoutmaster would undermine the Boy Scouts’ message was because the Boy Scouts said it would….. In our case, FAIR has supplied written evidence of its belief that the Solomon Amendment’s forcible inclusion of and assistance to military recruiters undermines their efforts to disseminate their chosen message of nondiscrimination. Accordingly, we must give Dale deference to this belief, and conclude that likely satisfies the second element of an expressive association claim…..[Footnote: Furthermore, the law schools are entitled to at least as much deference as the Boy Scouts, as the Supreme Court has recognized in other contexts that universities and law schools ‘occupy a special niche in our constitutional tradition,’ Grutter v. Bollinger (2003)].

We presume that the Government has a compelling interest in attracting talented military lawyers. But ‘[i]t is not enough to show that the Government’s ends are compelling; the means must be carefully tailored to achieve those ends.’…[T]he Solomon Amendment could barely be tailored more broadly. Unlike a typical employer, the military has ample resources to recruit through alternative means….The availability of alternative, less speech-restrictive means of effective recruitment is sufficient to render the Solomon Amendment unconstitutional under strict scrutiny analysis…But our path in this case is even clearer. The Government has failed to proffer a shred of evidence that the Solomon Amendment materially enhances its stated goal. And not only might other methods of recruitment yield acceptable results, they might actually fare better than the current system. In fact, it may plausibly be the case that the Solomon Amendment, which has generated much ill will toward the military on law school campuses, actually impedes recruitment…..

[T]he military’s recruiting is expressive of a message with which the law schools disagree. To comply with the Solomon Amendment, the law schools must affirmatively assist military recruiters in the same manner they assist other recruiters, which means they must propagate, accommodate, and subsidize the military’s message. In so doing, the Solomon Amendment conditions funding on a basis that violates the law schools’ First Amendment rights under the compelled speech doctrine….

Unsurprisingly…the record demonstrates that openly gay persons who meet with military recruiters are told by the recruiters that they may not pursue military careers….by directly providing ‘access’ to campuses for speech by military recruiters where law students are told that openly gay applicants may not serve, the Solomon Amendment requires the law schools to allow an objectionable message counter to their beliefs….The statute insists not only on access to campus for military recruiters, but the active and equal assistance of law schools’ career services offices….Like the forced display of an unwanted motto on one’s license plate, or the compulsory recitation of a pledge, this is compelled speech….Like the forced inclusions of a parade contingent, a statement in the extra space of a utility’s billing statement, or a response in a newspaper’s editorial page, this is compelled speech….Like mandatory assessments to support advertisements or political funds, this is compelled speech….

The Government has not shown that the assistance from law schools that the Solomon Amendment requires is narrowly tailored to advance its interest in recruiting….as we noted above, the Government has chosen to submit no evidence that would support the necessity of requiring law schools to provide the military with a forum for, and assistance in, recruiting….The Government fails to offer even an affidavit indicating that enforcement of the Solomon Amendment has enhanced military recruiting efforts. It suggests simply that the scope of the remedy sought by the plaintiffs relieves the Government of its obligation, pursuant to the First Amendment, to justify its curtailment of expression. How this is so we cannot conjure. We are unaware of any case so holding. [Footnote: [T]his is not a case where the Government has presented less evidence than might otherwise be required; here the Government has presented no evidence.] And while the Government emphasizes that the Nation’s military is at stake, invoking the importance of a well-trained military is not a substitute for demonstrating that there is an important governmental interest in opening the law schools to military recruiting. See Rostker v. Goldberg, 453 U.S. 57, 89 (1981) (‘“[T]he phrase ‘war power’ cannot be invoked as a talismanic incantation to . . . remove constitutional limitations safeguarding essential liberties.’”…)

…[I]t is hardly ‘common sense,’ as the military alleges, that its presence on campus amidst . . . commotion and opposition has aided its recruitment efforts….[T]he government has chosen not to produce any evidence that it is no more than necessary to further the Government’s interest. Perhaps this explains why the DOD initially objected to the Amendment as ‘unnecessary’ and ‘duplicative.’ 140 Cong. Rec. H3864 (daily ed. May 23, 1994).

[T]he Solomon Amendment cannot condition federal funding on law schools’ compliance with it. FAIR has a reasonable likelihood of success on the merits and satisfies the other injunctive elements as well. We reverse and remand for the District Court to enter a preliminary injunction against enforcement of the Solomon Amendment.

"Matthew, the model gay"

I have some further thoughts on the 20/20 Matthew Shepard program.

1. It's a program whose language and assumptions reflect the continuing media assault on GLBT people in the wake of the November 2 election. The religious right wants this assault to continue, and so does the current administration. We could face an assault on the inclusion of sexual orientation in hate-crimes laws.

2. The program is an outrage. The executive director of NGLTF even wrote, "Direct action would also be an entirely appropriate response." ABC News, in the middle of sweeps month, wants ratings (and surely got them). In essence a battle to win over the Fox News segment, ABC's strategy represents, as my dad put it, a "race to the bottom" in network news reporting.

3. This story hits us where we're strongest. Americans support protections against violence, and the Matthew Shepard story was the major force that galvanized a perhaps rather sizable minority of Americans to come to recognize the reality of antigay violence. I wrote about it in my college newspaper at the time [unfortunately, the web archiving back then did not properly preserve formatting and punctuation of articles]. As my friend Moon said frequently in the period when gay marriage was suddenly hitting the national radar early this year, hate-crimes laws (as flawed as they may be) are a fight that we could win in 2004, if we were able to devote our resources to fighting it instead of trying pitifully to stop even one of the state marriage amendments.

4. The program's major claim is that the murderers were high on crystal meth and the victim was a frequent user of it. These facts somehow diminish the murderer's culpability and confer it on the victim (as when women are blamed for "asking" to be raped). But the shift in the viewer's perception that the program is most likely to create is that concerning Shepard himself. As Michael Bronski put it in this week's Boston Phoenix,

Let’s face it: the general population is going to have less sympathy for a wealthy, HIV-positive, meth-snorting college kid who had lived abroad for much of his life than it does for the angelic, fragile icon of Matthew Shepard that has been presented to us over the past six years.

Bronski hits the nail on the head here. This story isn't even really about the killers - it's about the fact that Matthew Shepard was an HIV-positive meth user. This was reported in a Harper's cover story in 1999, as Judy Shepard mentions in her press release today.

5. As much as I hate to say it (and I do), the gay community is partially responsible for the conditions that made this symbolic attack possible - that is, for making Matthew Shepard into the one and only symbol of antigay violence. In addition, there's some truth to a claim that a friend of mine made way back in October, 1998, in the next issue of my college newspaper following my own article's appearance. At the time, I was pretty pissed off by this passage of Corey's article:

Of course - and this is the part nobody wants to think too much about - Matthew is not just any ordinary queer. He is in fact the model American, Aryan, ideal - Matthew was white, middle class, Christian, well mannered, (heretofore white, etc) and yeah he happened to be gay. One newspaper article described him as someone who you would feel comfortable taking care of your grandmother - whoa, theres a lot of political and social history tied up in that statement, hunh? The fact is that we were all duked by the media into feeling remorse for their prototype.

The question is, what does this say about the motivations for our current acute awareness of gay rights issues? Tim *** last week wrote, in part, that one of the lessons of Matthew is that we arent as safe here as we think we are. After all - and forgive me Tim for a slight manipulation of your words, but the point must be made - he was a white college student like many of us (did any body notice the racial makeup of the Matthew Shepard vigil? - it wasnt all white, but it was close), and look what happened. Are we really all so dense as to need to be reminded that people are killed for their sexual practices and their gender bents by being hit over the head with the story of Matthew, the model gay? The answer, apparently, is yes.

At the time, this pissed me off, for at least three reasons. Reason #1: I knew Corey was partly right, even though I thought using the Shepard case to appeal to middle America could be a good "strategy." Reason #2: I felt the personal criticism here added insult to the injury of Corey's not wanting to date me several months previously. Was I right or was I right? Reason #3: It made me feel petty for even thinking about Reason #2 ("forgive me Tim...but the point must be made"). Reason #4: It seemed even more obnoxious given that I in fact organized "the" Matthew Shepard vigil that he was calling "close" to all-white, together with my best friend Talia, who incidentally was and is not white; over 100 people had come, according to the campus paper; and Talia called it "the most intense public mourning experience that [she] ever had." But in very important senses, Corey was right about the potential problems with the significance that Matthew Shepard was coming to take on. And I've forgiven him for the other things. Really.

The Matthew Shepard drama, and my friends' collective response to it at Swarthmore, represented a pretty key episode in my gay identity development, I think. The vigil was followed several months later by a vandalism incident at the Intercultural Center, which led to a huge rally on the campus's main lawn at which my boyfriend Ben was the major speaker. (Ben was later quoted sarcastically and disparagingly in US News and World Report , in one of those boilerplate stories about the excesses of multiculturalism on campus, for having said in that speech that he was "overcome by tears and mucus" when he first heard about the incident.) And then, the following summer, Talia and I stopped in Laramie - even spent the night at her family friend's house there - less than one year after the murder.

To a certain extent, we're stuck with the Shepard case. Its role is not going to disappear, and ABC News needs to be called out. But should we seek above all else to preserve its crucial status in the development of gay politics in the last ten years? Or would we be better served, as Tavia suggested in his reply to my post last night, by trying to paint a richer picture of the diversity and complexity of queer people and what we suffer.

The more I think about it, the 20/20 program is a trap that we simply can't get out of by continuing to rehash the Shepard case. Because, as brutal as it was and as crucial as it was in changing Americans' minds about gay-bashing, there is simply no reason why the larger question of antigay violence or hate-crimes laws should rise or fall on this case. The FBI has even just published data showing a sharp increase in hate crimes involving sexual orientation in 2003 (though I don't see why this might not be partly or, less likely, fully due to an increase in reporting). There are so very, very many other stories to be told.