From a story MSNBC picked up about another marriage equality march that was held this weekend in California, in which the obligatory quote from a gay rights activist who wants the Defense of Marriage Act repealed is followed by the obligatory quote from a total moron:
“The homosexuals and lesbians want equal rights. They don’t deserve equality,” passerby Tony Sottile said.
Good job, Tony. I’m sure you’ll be very proud when, many years from now, your grandchildren or great-grandchildren Google you and see this.
Engaging in homosexual acts in Senegal can get you eight years in the hoosegow. Which brings us to two questions that I’ll now pose in no particular order: Why does the word “hoosegow” only appear on approximately 71,100 web pages (per Google, and if you remove the quotes the number is an only slightly more respectable 77,000)? “Hoosegow” deserves more love than that.
And what constitutes a homosexual act? If you’re a guy in Senegal and you attempt to watch Funny Girl, is that enough to land you in the joint? (Watching Funny Lady would naturally carry a lengthier sentence.) Or what if a gay guy ties his shoes, is that a gay act? I was gay this morning when I made the bed and fed the cat. I was gay a few minutes ago when I signed for a UPS package. How many years in a Senegalese prison is that good for?
And another reminder: Stay away from Nigeria and Gambia while you’re at it. From the New York Times:
Antigay sentiment has been on the rise across Africa in recent years. Nigeria’s Parliament tried to pass a law last year that would restrict the rights of homosexuals to even meet to discuss their rights. Gambia’s president threatened to behead any homosexuals found in his country. And even in Senegal, one of the most liberal and tolerant countries in Islamic Africa, tensions over homosexuality have been on the rise.
Makes our homophobic Republican politicians seem Kathy Griffin league gay-friendly in comparison, doesn’t it? At least they’ll sit down and chat with known homosexuals without decapitating them or having them arrested.
Rachel Griffiths and Toni Collette ABBA it up in Muriel’s Wedding.
Celesbianism was not the buzzword of 2008, and don’t let the Australians, who spend all their time shoplifting and listening to ABBA records*, tell you otherwise. The “celesbianism” movement is as dumb as the “gayelle” revolution. If we have to talk about this subsection of the gay community at all, let’s stick to fauxmosexual, another word the Australians, who spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about how to best label seemingly bisexual female celebrities, recently promoted.
*During the course of my previously mentioned vacation, which is now drawing to a close, I saw Muriel’s Wedding, and I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to say “You’re terrible, Muriel” ever since. So far nothing has presented itself, but I remain optimistic about what the coming week might have in store.
Hurt, all dolled up with no place to go, in Kiss of the Spider Woman.
Who knew William Hurt was so gabby? (Or that he calls Glenn Close “Glennie”?) He’s been one of my favorite actors since the first time I saw Body Heat on TV as a kid, but I had no idea the guy talked this much — or that he has a role on the upcoming second season of the FX show Damages.
When Dave Itzkoff of the Timesasked him about it and what it was like to reunite with his Big Chill costar Close, his long-winded answer kicks off with a “Yeah, you know. You get older and people start passing away.” That’s a bit of a Macon Leary thing to say, isn’t it? As I read it, I imagined Kathleen Turner’s character from The Accidental Tourist getting pissed off and leaving a second time.
The characters in Maurice tried to fight their gay “temptations,” and we all know how that turned out.
I kept waiting for this article to take an Onion-esque turn, but… no. I mean, WTF? Is it really considered newsworthy when a “religious gay man” promotes celibacy in an article that was posted to his personal blog after it was rejected for publication elsewhere? I don’t know what made my head hurt more, Ed Pacht’s blog post or Kilian Melloy’s regurgitation of it.
Here is a sampling of Pacht:
I have been strongly urged to forget my inhibitions and live the ‘gay’ lifestyle, and I have felt the rejection that arises when I admit what temptations it is that I experience, especially when I admit that, though I have never had improper dealing with a minor, my attraction is far stronger toward boys than toward men.
That’s major “oy vey” material right there, is it not?
And then with Melloy it’s all “Pacht describes,” “added Pacht,” “Pacht writes,” “Pacht wrote,” “wrote Pacht,” “declared the writer,” “continued Pacht,” blah, blah, blah. We get it! It’s all Pacht, all the time. (There’s also “Pacht went on to suggest,” “for his own part, Pacht wrote,” “Pacht went on to write,” “Pacht stated” and “summarized the writer.”) Except the guy’s not freakin’ Tolstoy, and he wrote nothing to merit all of that space.
There wasn’t even an attempt by Melloy to analyze any of the things Pacht wrote, described, declared, continued, suggested, stated, etc. No pithy asides or anything. You can’t let a guy tell gay Anglicans to stop sucking cock without at least attempting a pithy aside! I’d give it a go myself (the pithy aside thing, that is; the oral-sex-with-guys shebang is something I’ll leave to my gay male brethren just as God intended), but my own background is more of the Reform Judaism variety, which leaves me ill-equipped to deal with this sort of thing. Our religious leaders, despite their lingering obsession with foreskin, tend not to be so hung up on what we do with our genitals.
And much like Death Cab for Cutie’s navel-gazing, flannel-clad frontman Ben Gibbard, I don’t feel any different. My height, my weight, my sour disposition, they’re all exactly the same now as they were at 11:59 p.m. last night. (And it’s a good thing, too, because I’d hate to have to update my wardrobe or start being pleasant to people just because it’s 2009.)
Or has the new year changed me already? My neighbors added a twist to their boisterous New Year’s Eve revelry last night when a family across the street spent much of the evening encouraging their children to play brass instruments outdoors, for all of us to hear. The results, which it would be generous to say were something less than musical, frequently sounded like the ignoble, pleading moans of an elephant in the throes of death. But rather than take to the porch, megaphone in hand, and bellow something like, “Hey, kid, take that trombone and shove it up your ass,” I chose instead to remain quiet.
This decision was partly influenced by the regrettable fact that I do not own a megaphone, and mostly by my belief that the kids weren’t really at fault; their parents were the ones who, without any regard for the eardrums of the rest of us, allowed this weirdly avant-garde concert to go on (and on, like Celine Dion’s heart or the Energizer Bunny) like that. I suppose I could have changed my message to, “Hey, kid, take that trombone and shove it up your parents’ asses,” but that didn’t have quite the same ring to it.
Sibel Kekilli tries to stop Birol Ünel’s bleeding in Head On
I could take this opportunity to mention that, being a consummate fuddy-duddy, I’ve never understood why people get so excited about ringing in the new year — they do realize that nothing has changed and they’re all still going to die, don’t they? — but instead I’ll just be nice and brief and wish you all a happy New Year and remind you not to drink and drive.
Oh, and none of you plan on wearing ridiculous party hats and holding noisemakers like you’re little kids at a backyard birthday party tonight, do you? You’re adults now; it’s time to worry a little less about being loud and having fun and a little more about nuclear proliferation and global water shortages and Israel’s uncertain future.
My greatest New Year’s Eve to date was spent watching Fatih Akin’s Head On, a Turkish-German movie that makes you want to kill yourself (in the best possible way, of course) for two hours. It leaves you as bruised and battered and emotionally depleted as its lonely, displaced protagonists, and when it’s over you’ll feel more like jamming your hands in your pockets and going for a long walk by yourself than clanging pots and pans and setting off fireworks. I wish my neighbors would watch it tonight; maybe then they wouldn’t be so goddamn annoying at the stroke of midnight.
“Why are those young women water-skiing in tutus?”
What the hell are people supposed to do when they’re on vacation? I’m several days into an almost two-week vacation and I’ve already run out of ideas. I decided against traveling, opting to save money instead, and the only things I told myself I had to do over the next two weeks were sleep late and re-watch the Todd Haynes film Far From Heaven, which I loved six years ago and hadn’t seen since. Now that each of those modest goals has been met (and I still love Far From Heaven, though it doesn’t knock Safe out of position as Haynes’ masterwork), what’s my next vacation-y order of business?
According to the Go-Go’s, who dispense wisdom like PEZ candy (and who were, it should be noted, coked to the gills in the early ’80s when they first made this suggestion), I’m supposed to water-ski while wearing a tutu and tiara. According to Punch-Drunk Love, I’m supposed to buy copious amounts of pudding and then rendezvous with Emily Watson in Hawaii. Or I could go the Far From Heaven route, book a trip to sunny Miami with my doting wife (who doesn’t exist, but let’s not get hung up on details) and get cruised by a younger Truman Capote lookalike who will lure me out of the closet. The second option, I guess, sounds the most appealing, but what would I do with all the pudding?
And so are most Tuesdays and Wednesdays, come to think of it. Thursdays are different. Thursday is the most perfect of all the days of the week because it means Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday are over, but you still have Friday and Saturday and Sunday to look forward to. What’s not to like about that?
Looking forward to the weekend is, at least in my experience, sometimes better than the weekend itself. I blame this in part on The Cure, who carried on about Fridays with such unbridled enthusiasm that it makes my own Fridays seem anticlimactic in comparison, and on Jean-Luc Godard, who made me associate weekends with being captured by cannibalistic guerrillas in hippie garb.
In any case, I am now plunged headlong into three days of existential despair (and high melodrama, judging from my theatrics in this post) as I wait for Thursday, the Barack Obama of weekdays, to arrive, bringing with it the hope of a weekend that will probably suck anyway. If only I were an alcoholic or abused drugs, perhaps I’d be happier right now.
How did Holly Hunter win the Best Actress Oscar over Angela Bassett in 1993? It’s not that I’m surprised the Academy made the wrong decision, because the Academy makes the wrong decisions all the time. It’s more that I’m surprised they’d collectively risk pissing Bassett off. Because, well, look at those arms. One shot of her in a skimpy dress in What’s Love Got to Do With It tells the story, and the story is this: Angela Bassett is unlike Chuck Norris in that she’s a gifted actor, but very much like Chuck Norris in that she could kill you with her bare hands.
(And, frankly, I wouldn’t mind her killing me with her bare hands, but that’s a private matter I’d rather not discuss in front of any strangers who might find this while Googling some horrible combination of either Holly Hunter or Angela Bassett and “fucking” and Chuck Norris. The Internet is full of freaks, and I’ll have enough of those to contend with next week when I get together with my family for Hanukkah.)
