God hates many people

I think the most exacting form of bigotry isn’t to assault people, or lynch them, or vote against them. I think the most effective form of all the phobias and ‘isms I can think of is to just pretend the group of people does not exist. Measured against that standard, Katie Couric and Jan Crawford, her condescending, braying legal correspondent, deserve an award.

According to the Phelps family, the founders of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, insisting that God hates fags is passé: God has moved on to bigger and better things, and he now hates dead soldiers. In keeping with my theory that us fags are the greatest fund raisers on the planet, the fags are central to God’s hatred of dead soldiers; he hates the dead soldiers, according to the Phelps, because they died fighting for a country – the U.S. – that tolerates fags. And that’s why the dead soldiers are indeed dead. After spending nearly two decades criss crossing the country and the world in order to show up at funerals for fags who had died of AIDS with bright placards expressing sentiments including, but not limited to, “God Hates Fags” and “GAY = Got AIDS Yet?” the Phelps and their followers upped the ante and started showing up at services for dead U.S. military personnel. And that was when, of course, the media, which had ignored the protests at fag funerals for the most part, started to pay attention.

This week, in what must be a wet dream come true for the family and its followers, the Phelps went before the costumed almighty at the supreme court. On Wednesday evening, Katie Couric led her newscast with an update on the hearing, bringing Jan Crawford on, of course, to enlighten us on the background of the case and the family.

All of it, of course, except for the fact that the Phelps have been torturing fag families and fag celebrations for years and years. I cannot say for sure why it even entered my mind that CBS might acknowledge the fact that military funerals are but the latest PR tactic employed by Topeka’s most famous family. For starters, I realize – trust me, I realize – that this country is so blissed out by uniformed young men with guns that it’s a wonder the companies that manufacture anti-depressants haven’t gone out of business, and there is no one who can be counted on to wave the flag and beat the drum quite as enthusiastically – and to the exclusion of so many others – as Katie Couric. It’s almost as if she’s angling for a medal. And for finishers, I think it’s important to always keep in mind the fact that it took many thousands of fag deaths in the early 1980s before the networks, including CBS, even mentioned the then-new epidemic. In addition to the fags, there were plenty of other early adopters in the HIV saga, including prostitutes, IV drug users and – remember this one? – Haitians. Members of those groups, like the fags, were unmentionable and so, thanks to people with minds like Katie Couric and Jan Crawford, unmentioned.

Even so, in spite of reality, I was surprised. How can you talk about the Phelps family without referencing the fags? You’ll have to ask Katie Couric and her legal lackey about that. For now, I’m focusing on another, more basic question. Which is the more ominous presence on the horizon of a future – or not – for fags? I’d have to say CBS. At least the Phelps family acknowledges our existence. They even call us by name.

Dancing for a cause

The schedule was pretty tight around here Monday evening. I had dinner earlier than usual, watched a bit of the news, did the dishes and then got into a very nice bath for a very nice soak. Then I got into my night attire and made a pot of mint tea – I love tea on cold evenings – and settled down on the couch. The lights went down, the orchestra warmed up, and Dancing with the Stars began. It was story night, no less. Each pair had to use its dance to tell a story. Story night, I thought: it took only those two words, story night, to make the gayest show on television exponentially more gay, something I hadn't believed possible.

It wasn’t too long, though, before it went straight, as in straight down hill, or straight to hell.

But first, the good parts. The football player and the basketball player get sexier each week, and Monday was no exception. “You’re so charming,” one of the judges said to the quarterback, and I could not have chosen a better word myself. Imagine me, finding a football player charming. It happened. The Situation – his name? his handle? I don’t know – is hot as well, but in a different way. Endearingly earnest, I suppose. And “Bristol the Pistol,” well, I like her actually. She is just really not into it, and she knows she’s really not into it, and she says so, as do the judges. You’re in no danger of becoming the next Meryl Streep, one of them said. Her dance partner, who is luscious, cannot stop kissing her, which makes me think that headlines are in the making.

The first offender was Florence Henderson, who – in what appeared to my cynical eyes to be a ploy for sympathy votes – got all weepy talking about how much The Sound of Music, from which her song was taken, meant to her and how much it reminded her, weep weep, of … her … dead … husband. “I’m sure he’s very proud of me,” she said before her dance, the tears glimmering in her eyes like, well, like stars. “I’m sure he was watching you,” one of the judges syruped after her dance. Being manipulatively maudlin is one of the worst offenses I know of, and on Monday Florence Henderson offended with the best of them.

Margaret Cho was equally tasteless, but in a different way. Her story, in case anyone missed the symbolism of her rainbow-themed costume, including a feathery headdress, was all about pride, and coming out as who you are. After slip-shodding her way through Copacabana she faced the judges indignantly, telling one of them, who told her that her dance sucked, more or less, that the whole point of her performance was standing up to those who criticize you. I could just hear the go-alongs chanting, you go, girl! It got worse. Backstage, Margaret Cho got her two cents in just before the numbers to text in a vote in her support were announced. These are scary times for the gay community, she proclaimed. The kids are committing suicide and we must all stand together against bullying! Bullshit. Here’s my first problem: Margaret Cho, as far as I’m concerned, does not speak for “the gay community” (I don’t think anyone does, in all fairness). Here’s my second problem: regurgitating the talking points about youngsters killing themselves because they cannot stand up to the ages-old issue of bullying just before viewers of the most-watched television show in the U.S. are about to vote – or not – on whether you should stay or go is really, really cheap. It turns being gay into a circus act, I think, and, in the process, turns gay people and our “supporters” into caricatures of circus animals. No, thank you. And here’s my third and final problem: Margaret Cho is a shitty dancer. When even I can identify missteps, you know it’s bad.

Margaret Cho and Florence Henderson, however, paled in comparison on the meter of poor taste to the woman who used her performance to cash in on our hardcore romance with the military. Though I should have seen this coming, I was shocked and horrified by the dancing portrayal of a soldier who emerges out of the smoke machine’s fog (back from battle? from death?) to embrace his gal, who is sitting beside a table with a framed photograph of him in uniform on it. Backstage, right before receiving the judge’s scores and right before the voting on her performance via text and telephone began, the woman (I do not know her name), grabbed the opportunity to say, in a voice as authentic as margarine, that she’d like to dedicate the evening’s dance to all the men and women in the armed services. (Automated salutes are apparently as mandatory in Hollywood as they are on the network news: The woman who won the best director award for The Hurt Locker did the same thing). She just won the damn show, I thought, but I must admit that her dancing is actually pretty good.

I'm your guy

There is some truth to the old bit about being careful what you wish for. For a long time now I’ve believed that politics would be better if more people who are not educated and trained as lawyers ran for office.

NBA retirees are not what I had in mind.

But, here in the territory, we’re getting ready to elect ourselves a governor, and I think there is a very good chance that we are going to elect a guy whose primary job experience, as best I can tell, is a stint with the Portland Trail Blazers. As a player. That’s Chris Dudley, who is – sit down for this one – a Republican. His opponent, whom I intend to vote for, is John Kitzhaber. John Kitzhaber is a doctor by trade. He was Oregon’s governor for two terms, beginning shortly after I moved here and ending in the early 2000’s. When he left office he made a most unfortunate statement: he didn’t believe the state was governable. I think Kitzhaber was a fine governor then, and I think he’d make a fine governor now, but I don’t think he’ll win. He’s “an insider,” and in an age when an endorsement from Sarah Palin actually means something, that’s not a good thing to be.

On Thursday night the two stood on a stage and had a debate. Despite all my criticisms of our local television people, I was impressed. One of the anchors, who asked her questions from behind a desk she shared with an Oregonian reporter, came very close to scolding Dudley at one point, reminding him, in so many words, to skip the messaging and answer the question. He didn’t, of course. He didn’t really answer any of the questions. Conservatives don’t have to answer questions. That’s because, regardless of context, they enter their races as victims of the liberal and elite and terribly biased media. They whine and cry and stomp their feet like the indulged children they are. Afraid of being on the receiving end of their labeling machine, people in the media, for the most part, have allowed themselves to be thrust into the role of AccomoMommy, who does not want to listen to her toddler wail for hours, and who can blame her? Rather than being held to the same rules everyone else must follow, conservative candidates are handled with extreme care. They are bestowed with a brand of the special rights the conservatives themselves claim to loathe. It’s a brilliant strategy, I think: it works.

So instead of answering questions, Chris Dudley simply recited, over and over and over again, Oregon’s rankings on things like unemployment, job creation, number of corporate headquarters located here, etc., which are indeed dismal. Since John Kitzhaber was governor eight years ago, Oregon’s current situation is his fault. On one hand, this is encouraging – Republicans, at least in Oregon, appear to have a memory that extends beyond the past 22 months. But on the other, it’s disturbing to me, the way Dudley concluded his recital, many times, in his dumb jock cadence, with a simple, black-and-white sentiment: if you’re happy with those numbers, then vote for the status quo, but if you’re not, I’m your guy.

It didn’t surprise me that Dudley couldn’t think of a single development in Oregon he finds objectionable. Nor did it surprise me that he thinks the private sector, even when heavily subsidized by public funds (which it usually is) is the answer to all of our ills. But I was a bit surprised that he didn’t seem to know what an open primary is. Personally, I don’t completely understand the concept of open primaries myself, but were I running for governor I think I’d study up on the issue. But what really surprised me was that neither Chris Dudley nor John Kitzhaber properly declared himself to the Oregon electorate: Which of these guys is a Duck, and which is a Beaver? My guess, if I had to put money on it, is that they’re both Ducks at heart. But this is no time for guesswork: the election is barely a month away, college football is on, and I think we all need to know.

Once upon a time

Since the beginning of the year, the main occupier of my time and energy, and my main source of income, has been a gig doing ghost writing for a blog hosted by a corporation whose name we all know. It’s been okay. The people involved have been a bit much, as it must be when working with those on the verge of saving the world, but it’s been regular income and, should I be inspired to look elsewhere, a source of very current writing samples. It’s also been a gold mine of opportunity for me when it comes to practicing how to deal with people. One of the things I’ve been practicing is to counteract my gut instinct to say yes, to accommodate by going along and, in the process, avoid uncomfortable conversations. So I’m learning to say no without thinking about it. With no as a starting point, I can then make concessions one at a time … or not. For me, for some reason, it’s easier to go from no to yes than it is to start at yes and move gradually to no. I knew this project was coming to an end when I was not invited to participate in a meeting to discuss, among other things, “future directions.” When I receive bad news I usually react on a physical level. It’s as if every cell in my body stops, and the stillness becomes not exactly painful, but not exactly comfortable either, so I think it would have been irresponsible of me to not notice that when I was told – directly, voice to voice – that this gig was coming to an end, my body did not ingest the information as bad news.

Instead, my body and my mind drifted back to a night in the summer of 1969 or 1970. It’s a long, long story, but here are the bare bones of it. A tavern across a creek from the town where I grew up was robbed. A few people were killed. The men who robbed the tavern got away on foot. As the entire town exploded with the scream of sirens and the blinding, blinding searchlights from the helicopters overhead, one of my brothers hid in a ditch beside the railroad tracks as two of the killers ran past. My one brother’s perilous whereabouts were revealed to my parents by another one of my brothers, who fled the instant he heard gunshots and ran back to the house. My mother was on the phone with the police in the kitchen, describing my brother. “Please do not shoot my son,” I heard my mother say. I was four years old, maybe five. I was at the foot of the front stairs as our house filled with so much light that I could see fear on my father’s face, an expression I would never see again in this lifetime. My brothers had had one of their backyard campouts that night – their last, as it turned out. Once our parents were asleep they’d jumped the fence and crossed the creek and gone to collect golf balls that were shot out of the driving range, which was right beside the tavern. My entrepreneurial brothers would then sell the golf balls back to the range manager in the morning. But not that time.

That night was but the beginning of a story that is a living and breathing entity to this day. If the town I grew up in were a surface of glass-smooth water, that night was like a stone, dropped in from directly overhead. The ripples, though smaller with time perhaps, are eternal. And since today is my last day of regimented employment for a while, I’m going to force myself, or try to, to put that story on paper.

Dancing on television

My least favorite human trait is hypocrisy. It’s my least favorite trait in others, and it’s my least favorite trait in myself. So, after all my ranting and raving about mindless television, imagine how embarrassing and humiliating it is for me to admit this. On Monday night I parked my ass on the couch and watched Dancing with the Stars. And on Tuesday night I parked it in the exact same spot and altered my bathing schedule in order to find out which couple had its invitation to return revoked.

And what’s worse is that I enjoyed pretty much every minute of it.

What a weirdly intriguing show. For those of you who don’t know, it goes like this. Several ‘stars’ are paired up with professional dancers. The couple is introduced to the audience via clips from the sessions when the pro tries his or her best to transform the star into a presentable dancer. Then, pair by pair, they come out on stage, everyone applauds, and the dancing begins. After the dance, the couple goes face to face with three judges, who offer their words of encouragement or ridicule. Then the couple goes backstage and chats a bit with a slightly snide woman wearing an evening gown and tons of makeup. Then the judges give their scores, which are added up for an overall score. Then the woman in the evening gown announces the number viewers can call or text to vote for that particular couple (that part was confusing, because I’m not sure which scores – the judges’ or the callers’ – are used to determine which couple leaves. Maybe it’s a combination of the two.) Then, after a commercial break, the next couple.

It’s easy for me to blame this all on my friend John, who says he does not watch television but has been talking about this show since July, and so I will. “Margaret Cho is going to be on, and so is Florence Henderson, and Bristol goddamn Palin,” he’s said, many times. And they all were. Florence Henderson was surprisingly trashy, I thought. Equally surprising was Bristol, who was introduced as, I believe, a teen activist, or advocate, and was – I hate to type this – glamorous. Margaret Cho talked about her weight problem and her mommy. She made her angry Asian emperor face during her performance and, in a maneuver that probably required more skill than any of the evening’s dance moves, fell right out of her partner’s arms during their Viennese waltz and crash landed on the stage. Although the judges did not concur with me, I thought the fall was fantastic.

As long as I’m confessing, here’s another: as much as I rail on dumb jocks and pro sports, oh boy, the football player and the basketball player. The football player – Curt, or Kurt, somebody or other – had his dance partner come to his house to meet his family prior to his training. There was something charming about that, I thought. There was something charming about his dancing as well. I’ll bet he’s polite in the bedroom, or the locker room. The basketball player was even better. He’s tall to an extent that looked grotesque in the footage from the training with his partner. But, when these two took to the stage, it worked. I don’t consider myself a critic but when I was watching him I thought, man, that guy stands up straight – he resembled a very erotic crucifix at one point during his performance – so I was pretty pleased with myself when the judges oo-ed and ahhh-ed over, among other things, his posture. I cannot recall his first name, but his last name, aptly enough, is Fox.

Sacred territory

I’ve admitted many times how wrong I was about making marriage the centerpiece of the war between gay people and the heterosexuals. When the issue first surfaced, I thought it was a bad idea. Why, I wondered, must we imitate rather than invent? Why, I wondered, are we so desperate to look like everyone else? And why, I wondered, do we want any part of a tradition so riddled with fault lines? Here is my answer: because it makes a lot of publically heterosexual people with a lot of power and a lot of money really, really uncomfortable. Which I think is great.

But when it comes to the stupidness about being allowed to get a job with the military, I’m sticking, pardon the pun, to my guns. In 1992, Bill Clinton won the hearts, minds and checkbooks of homos across the land with a phrase that became, to me, as annoying as a fly buzzing around the bathroom while I’m trying to shave: gays in the military. Remember that one? That was quickly replaced with “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” the then-new president’s tactic of, by pretending to accommodate two opposing viewpoints, in the end accommodates no one but himself in service of a very short-term and short-sighted (in my opinion) goal. You homos are welcome to benefits of a gig with the military, this non-resolution said, as long as you don’t talk about it, or get caught. That line of thought was articulated and has been enforced, at a cost of $600 million so far, by allegedly heterosexual men. More interestingly, I think, is that it’s the most apt and concise articulation I’ve ever heard of how gay men are expected to behave: be sneaky, and do your business in the dark, and don’t ever, ever talk about it. Gay women, as we all know, are a different story. The puritan enforcers prefer the manifestations of their sexuality very much asked about, and told about, and written about and, if possible, shown.

Anyhow, many homos I know were outraged in 1993 when Bill Clinton took the art of degrading the language to a new level. Though laughable, I thought his post-election reversal made a lot of sense. That’s because the military has the fire power. For those of you who read this blog who are younger than others, Jesse Helms said during an interview shortly after Clinton’s swearing in that he could not guarantee the new president’s safety were he to come to North Carolina, where there are a lot of military bases and a lot of the people who run them. Seriously – the conversation was at that level in 1993, and it’s there today.

On Tuesday it was interesting to read not that a bunch of election-focused legislators “took a stand” against repealing Clinton’s double talk from the last century, but the comments that were made about it. Traitors! Where’s Obama? What about our ‘fierce advocate’? (That’s what Obama calls himself when there’s a sufficient amount of homo money in the room where he’s speaking. Being as susceptible to coercion via flattery as heterosexuals, many of us still fall for it.)

In 1993, I thought that if people insist upon sending their heterosexual (presumed) sons and daughters (though mostly sons) off to get shot up and maimed and disfigured physically and otherwise in order to have a corner on bragging rights of having “served” our country, why the hell are we arguing? And now, even though it’s 2010, I thought the same thing. You want the military? Although – as is the case with marriage – there are certainly benefits to be had in exchange for what you give up with your signature, you can have it. Besides, as far as I can tell, the military is already pretty gay as it is. Come to think of it, if the personal ads are any indication, so is marriage.

God makes a touchdown

My mother thought television was a profoundly bad idea, so for most of my youth we didn’t have one. But every now and then one of my brothers would find a cast off and drag it home, and when that happened we watched the news. In those days, in Saint Louis, the news consisted mainly of two things: murders and baseball. Saint Louis was, for many years, the murder capitol of the world, which was, oddly enough, a source of local, homegrown pride. So too were the Cardinals. I’m not a sports fan by any means, but those guys did have a certain panache. By contrast, when the owner of the football team (also called the Cardinals) started making demands about either reconfiguring Busch Stadium or building his team a brand new one, and when those demands fell on truly flat ears, the team moved to Arizona, and nobody really cared.

Last night I watched the local news in Portland.

A dog survived in a car that tumbled down a steep hill and into Crater Lake. For context, even though the city and the state are facing deplorable economic conditions and everything that goes along with them, the local news in Portland almost always features an animal video. Not long ago a zebra broke out of its quarters and took to the streets of Sacramento, and, in Alabama, there was a monkey who had been trained to ride on the back of a dog and run a race in the state fair. “So irresistible,” said the anchorwoman, whose voice is the auditory equivalent of a rash. The dog story last night, while infuriating, was at least local.

The other story last night that caught my attention – primarily because of the disproportionate amount of time dedicated to it – had all the elements: football, tears and God, lots and lots of God. Recently a high school football star made “the play of his life” (at 18!) and then collapsed on the field. A cardiac nurse emerged from the stands and got to work on him. Yesterday he had surgery, after which the coach did a press conference where he announced that the boy’s recovery, which is expected to be quite rapid, is nothing short of a miracle. I could almost hear the pages in the hymnals turning slowly, and when I looked up from the television, it was as if the windows in my living room had been replaced, mysteriously, with stained glass. It was not enough to simply waste minutes allocated to news with the nonsense about the boy’s surgery going well. First, there was footage from the actual game with a recap of the play and the incident. Then, footage, post-trauma but pre-surgery, of the kid at a subsequent game, where the cardiac nurse was introduced as, you guessed it, a hero. The quarterback came out to the field and he and his heroic nurse embraced before the cheering crowd of football enthusiasts. “That’s when the tears really started flowing,” said the voiceover, in case you missed it.

It got better. First, the quarterback, confessing, with a sparkle in his eye, that he’s always felt that “someone” is watching over him. Then, the coach, who said the boy has a certain aura, a certain glow, as if he’s special and he’s protected. And then, the grand finale, or, in baseball parlance, the home run: the nurse! She too believes that the whole thing was God’s handiwork! “I just had a feeling that I was meant to be there that night,” she said.