But it appears they still want us to keep our distance from the mother ship, and will instead be directing us to our own special gay site from which our homo cooties can’t infect all the normal, healthy heterosexual customers who are seeking opposite-sex partners for Bible-approved, procreation-oriented, missionary-positioned hookups within the miserable bounds of traditional man-woman holy matrimony over at “regular” eHarmony.
I’d type more, but I confused myself with all of that.
One of the only Hitchcock films that bores me to tears.
This kind of stuff freaks me out. Jason Jones, a 26-year-old forklift operator, was arrested in May for the shooting death of a government witness in a drug case. Jones maintained his innocence and offered investigators an easy way to verify his alibi: they could check his MetroCard history to see where he’d been on the night of the murder. He said he had used public transportation to first stop at a cash-checking joint and later to visit his girlfriend, but police didn’t bother looking into it. That didn’t stop federal prosecutors from charging him with murder, which can carry a possible death sentence.
You can guess where this is going, right? A private investigator working for Jones’s attorney went to the jail where Jones had been held and found the MetroCard in question. He took it to the New York City Transit Authority, which was able to confirm that Jones had been on every bus and subway he said he’d been on that night. The investigator also found time-stamped, photographic proof that Jones had been at the cash-checking office with his coworkers just as he had always claimed. It was enough to get him released on bond, but the charges have yet to be dropped.
Aren’t the authorities supposed to check into these things before charges are filed, or is that the kind of silly, old-fashioned concept that’s essentially meaningless now, like the separation of church and state?
When money is tight and Elton John needs to spend another $40,000 on flowers, he simply finds a new pot of gold to raid.
At least that’s what I gleaned from these survey results about straights and gays of both genders and how they’re reacting to the economy going down the drain. And, hey, as long as they can afford it, good for them! Stimulating the economy is a dirty job (someone like Michael Lucas should probably make a movie about just how dirty such stimulation can be), but someone’s gotta do it. Me, I’m more the financially conservative type. My last big purchase was about $30 worth of books from Amazon, and even that I wouldn’t have bothered with if I hadn’t had a gift certificate to use.*
You might recall that back in June, gay and lesbian consumers were surprisingly unconcerned about the state of the economy. Around the same time, business owners and politicians in California were rubbing their hands in glee when a study projected that gay marriage, if it remained legal past November 4, would bring hundreds of millions of dollars into the state in a span of only three years. Ah, June. It was only five months ago, but we were all so innocent then.
* The books, by the way, were David Simon’s Homicide, Nella Larsen’s Passing, and Andrey Platonov’s Soul: And Other Stories. I’m sure this knowledge has enriched your life in unimaginable ways. If you want me to come back tomorrow and tell you what I had for lunch, I’d be happy to do so.
TV critic Andrew Wallenstein’s commentary on Dr. Hahn’s departure from Grey’s Anatomy is one of the best I’ve heard so far, and you can now listen to it in its entirety on the NPR website. He starts off by addressing the issue that has bothered me the most about the firing of actress Brooke Smith — namely, that it doesn’t make sense for a show that is overrun with one-dimensional characters played by so-so actors to get rid of an interesting character played by a talented actress.
In Wallenstein’s words:
“What’s most unfortunate is Hahn may have been the most richly drawn character the show ever yielded. Finely played by a respected character actor like Brooke Smith, Dr. Hahn’s sexual awakening provided what’s otherwise a pretty vacuous soap opera some real moments of dramatic heft.”
He also hits just the right note when he goes after ABC at the end of the piece, giving a nod to all the ways gays currently exist on TV (as cuddly daytime talk show hosts, as comic foils, and as one-time ratings stunts during sweeps) and concluding that “Grey’s may have been doing something more provocative by normalizing a gay relationship.” Until they screwed it all up, of course.
It’s been a while since I last attempted to transcribe any Howard Stern Show shenanigans (I’m still worn out from his Tracy Morgan appearance in March), but this morning Howard devoted a few minutes to Wanda Sykes coming out at a Prop 8 protest rally in Nevada over the weekend and it led to a brief conversation that gave us some insight into what the straightest people on radio think about prominent lesbians.
Wendy and Lisa ought to bitch slap this crazy-ass mofo right off his platform heels. Truly, it cannot be just any old bitch slap. It has to be a zinger. Because now that the artist formerly known as “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince,” that once nameless paragon of, uh, robust heterosexuality, has found religion (I understand it had been hiding at the bottom of a Cracker Jack box, where you’d normally find a small plastic horse), he is turning his back on his gay fans.
That’s right, he has forsaken us to climb into bed with the businessman and hatemonger Philip Anschutz (in a non-sexual kind of way, one would guess, since the only hard-on Anschutz has for homosexuals has to do with oppressing us — but who knows, maybe they’re into a bondage scene together!), and recently told The New Yorker‘s Claire Hoffman that Democrats are making a mistake by supporting gay marriage.*
The first volume of Susan Sontag’s diaries (edited by her son, David Rieff) will be published in the U.S. by Farrar, Straus and Giroux next month. In England they’ll have to wait until January, but today’s Independent quotes a couple of passages dealing with Sontag’s sexuality, including this one that she wrote at the age of 15: “I am very young, and perhaps the most disturbing aspects of my ambitions will be outgrown … so now I feel I have lesbian tendencies (how reluctantly I write this).”
She sounded less reluctant a year later, when she wrote about having sex with another woman, but if the Times excerpts are any indication, Sontag continued to have a complicated relationship with her sexuality for many years to come. In December of 1959, at the age of 26, she wrote:
My desire to write is connected with my homosexuality. I need the identity as a weapon, to match the weapon that society has against me.
It doesn’t justify my homosexuality. But it would give me — I feel — a license.
I am just becoming aware of how guilty I feel being queer. With H., I thought it didn’t bother me, but I was lying to myself. I let other people (e.g. Annette [Michelson, film scholar]) believe that it was H. who was my vice, and that apart from her I wouldn’t be queer or at least not mainly so.
In Las Vegas, the comedian Wanda Sykes surprised a crowd of more than 1,000 rallying outside a gay community center by announcing that she is gay and had wed her wife in California on Oct. 25. Ms. Sykes, who divorced her husband of seven years in 1998, had never publicly discussed her sexual orientation but said the passage of Proposition 8 had propelled her to be open about it.
You can read more of Wanda’s Las Vegas statements here. She’s one of my favorite comedians and I applaud her for finally coming out. It can only help her stand-up routine; now she can let loose in her bit about gay marriage in a way she couldn’t before.
Remember how Senator Bond, Kit Bond, tried to rile up a crowd at a Sarah Palin rally in Cape Girardeau, Missouri last month by telling them that Barack Obama, if elected president, would threaten the very (starchy white, with a pointed hood) fabric of our democracy by possibly appointing judges who don’t hate “the teenage mom, the minority, the gay, the disabled.” That was fun, wasn’t it?
You know what else is fun? Joining outraged citizens across the country in protesting the passage of California’s Proposition 8, which people will be doing tomorrow. In Cape Girardeau.
Ever wondered what happened at Tara when all the men were off at war?
Do you ever find yourself sitting around wondering what it is that Atlanta-based lesbians do in bed? Yeah, me neither. (I assume they do what the rest of us do, except maybe the un-PC sports fans among them throw in a tomahawk chop or something.) But in 2005, sociologist Kathleen A. Dolan approached 162 women with the kind of probing personal questions that are usually only asked by Howard Stern, and for some reason I’m just hearing about it now, via this Southern Voice article by Laura Douglas-Brown.*
The statistic that really startled me would have to be the 21% of women who reported engaging in heterosexual intercourse within the last year. Call me old-fashioned, but I leave the sex with guys stuff up to gay men, just as God intended. Curiously, none of the lesbians interviewed by Dolan reported doing what I do in bed, which is read grisly Ruth Rendell novels and obsessively check my alarm clock to make sure it’s properly set (which isn’t really necessary since I wake up before the alarm goes off anyway, but try telling my OCD that). Maybe those activities are unpopular with the lesbians of Atlanta because they don’t call for any man-penis…
* Those of you who worry about clicking the wrong link at work should know that the article is accompanied by a large photo of a lesbian liplock. Far more troubling than that, in my opinion, and even more distracting than the unusually large earrings both women are wearing, would have to be the ads for a Hilary Duff Greatest Hits CD that are plastered all over the website. I’m hoping it’s 12 tracks of silence, but that seems unlikely.
