I know I’m a bit late on this — I was away from my computer most of the day yesterday — but having finally read what Scott Eckern, who resigned as artistic director of the California Musical Theater on Wednesday amid protests over his $1,000 donation to the anti-gay Yes on Proposition 8 campaign, had to say for himself, I gotta admit: I’m a bit baffled.
In what universe does a statement like “I understand that my choice of supporting Proposition 8 has been the cause of many hurt feelings, maybe even betrayal. It was not my intent. I honestly had no idea that this would be the reaction” make sense? He’s been working with the gays for more than 25 years; he knows we’re a bit on the sensitive side even when we’re not being stripped of newly granted marriage rights by our “loving and supportive” friends and relatives and coworkers.
Are we sure The Terminator wasn’t influenced by Cruising?
Would it kill Arnold Schwarzenegger (pictured above at his favorite leather bar) to stick with a position on gay marriage? As this Los Angeles Times article so neatly lays out:
In past statements, he has said he personally believes marriage should be between a man and a woman and has rejected legislation authorizing same-sex marriage. Yet he has also said he would not care if same-sex marriage were legal, saying he believed that such an important societal issue should be determined by the voters or the courts.
Following that position, he publicly opposed Proposition 8, which amends the state Constitution to declare that “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”
Today, Schwarzenegger urged backers of gay marriage to follow the lesson he learned as a bodybuilder trying to lift weights that were too heavy for him at first. “I learned that you should never ever give up. . . . They should never give up. They should be on it and on it until they get it done.”
It’s nice that Governor Schwarzenegger, the star of such cinematic masterpieces as Red Sonja and Junior (oh, the side-splitting hilarity of a pregnant man! It was almost as funny as casting Schwarzenegger as a scientist), has decided that gays and lesbians are deserving of civil rights after all.
It’s also nice that he’s encouraging us to keep fighting for equal treatment under the law.
What isn’t nice is that he didn’t keep his promise to fight Proposition 8. Instead, he chose over and over again to remain mostly quiet on the issue in the crucial weeks leading up to the vote.
Maybe a guy who has blemishes like Raw Deal and Jingle All the Way on his résumé isn’t overly concerned with his legacy, but Schwarzenegger’s failure to stand up to the Yes on 8 crowd will not be forgotten. And he owes us all — not just Californians, but everyone around the country who supported No on Proposition 8 — an apology.
With a Huffington Post blog entry on Saturday, writer and actor Evan Handler has joined the growing list of celebrities registering their disgust with Californians who voted yes on Proposition 8 on Tuesday. I’m not going to quote anything from it, because you should click the link and read it in its entirety, but I especially liked his response to his Sex and the City boss Michael Patrick King’s ludicrous suggestion that a performance art protest is in order.
It shows that Handler understands what we’re up against, and it’s a nice companion piece to this angry Harvey Fierstein essay, also posted at HuffPost, that reads in part: “While we dance in the streets and pat ourselves on the back for being a nation great enough to reach beyond racial divides to elect our first African-American president let us not forget that we remain a nation still proudly practicing prejudice.”
The Associated Press has also put together an article about celebrity reaction to the passage of Prop 8 that includes comments from Sean Penn, Melissa Etheridge, Ellen DeGeneres, Rosie O’Donnell, Christina Aguilera, and Samantha Ronson. At the time of this posting, more than 500 people who read the piece on MSNBC’s website had inexplicably given it an average rating of 2.5 out of 5 stars. One of the highest-rated stories on the website, earning 4 stars out of 5, was called “Bullies may get kick out of seeing others in pain.”
CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric recently took a few minutes off from practicing gotcha journalism (sample questions: “What’s your name?” and “How do you spell cat?”) to point out that while Barack Obama’s Tuesday victory is being celebrated as a “triumph for civil rights in America,” we’re still a pretty hateful country, as evidenced by the fact that gays and lesbians were viciously bitch-slapped by millions of bigoted voters in no less than three states on the day Obama was swept into office.
After noting the Chicago race riots of the 1960s and the progress the civil rights movement has made since then, Couric concluded: “In 1969, there was another riot called Stonewall. Thirty years later, gays and lesbians hope for their moment to return to the streets and cheer.” Thirty years?! Did she get that number from a sad old queen dressed entirely in Abercrombie garb?
… And the asshole of the day award goes to Dwight Scharnhorst, the creepy Republican State Representative from Missouri’s 93rd district. Scharnie is up for re-election this year, running against Democrat Phil Bognar, and like his fellow Missourian and brother-in-hate Kit Bond, he’s trying to rile up bigoted voters by reminding them of the gay menace. You know, the same menace that already scared them into banning gay marriage in Missouri back in 2004…
This delightful gay-baiting mailer was sent to my parents on Mr. Scharnhorst’s behalf by “HRCC – Marc Ellinger, Treasurer” (I assume this is the Marc Ellinger in question), apparently to warn them that their almost 30-year marriage is being threatened by hot gay guys in chains. Oh, the humanity!
Mr. Scharnhorst, Mr. Ellinger, I have two questions:
1) If heterosexual marriage is somehow under attack in Missouri (again, despite the state’s gay marriage ban), as your mailer indicates, could you give me an idea of how quickly these traditional man-woman unions might be destroyed by these guys in their white tank tops, with their come-hither stares and their sexy chains, should Mr. Bognar win on Tuesday? Because my parents have an anniversary coming up and I haven’t bought their gift yet. The last eight years of failed Republican economic policies (™ Barack Obama) has taken its toll on my checkbook, and I don’t want to spend money on anything that might be rendered useless by Mr. Bognar’s support of — cue the sinister music — same-sex unions.
2) Where did you find the “guy in chains” photo? Was it already on one of your hard drives, or were you forced to arrange for your own special photo shoot?
Finally, Dwight Scharnhorst, thanks for reminding my parents who to vote for on Tuesday. One of them has a gay sister, the other has more gay cousins than any of us can keep track of, and together they have two gay children. When they drive through their subdivision they pass an awful lot of Scharnhorst signs, but I know that after seeing your mailer today they won’t forget to vote for Phil Bognar.
“Joseph Smith could have dozens of wives and Sulu can’t have one fucking husband? What kind of bullshit is that?”
The only thing missing from this great No on Proposition 8 ad narrated by Samuel L. Jackson is a few well-placed f-bombs. Imagine how majestic it would sound with just the slightest of script revisions:
“It wasn’t that long ago that discrimination was legal in California. Japanese Americans were confined in internment camps. Armenians couldn’t buy a house in the Central Valley. Latinos and African Americans were told who they could and could not marry. It was a sorry time in our history. Today, the sponsors of Prop 8 want to eliminate fundamental rights. We have an obligation to pass along to our children a more tolerant, more decent society. Vote fucking No on Prop fucking 8. It’s unfair and it’s wrong, motherfuckers.”
There is still time to volunteer for and donate to No on Proposition 8. I’ve already forked over my money and harassed other people to do the same with theirs. The Mormon hate machine must be stopped. And if I could single out all of you California homos who are reading this — I’ve examined my Google Analytics and see your San Francisco and West Hollywood asses out there — I hope you’re doing your part. You don’t want the friggin’ Osmonds telling you who you can marry, do you?
While grown-up Mormons living in Utah prove that state boundaries are no match for their all-consuming hatred of non-heterosexuals by eagerly awaiting the opportunity to help quash gay marriage in California, first-graders from the Creative Arts Charter School in San Francisco spent Friday afternoon celebrating the wedding of their lesbian teacher. The children, whose parents supported the field trip to City Hall, threw rose petals at the brides and said things like, “She’s a really nice teacher. She’s the best. I want her to have a good wedding.”
Maybe one of the church elders from Salt Lake City who plans on making phone calls to Californians asking them to vote yes on Proposition 8 could get in touch with these bigotry-free six-year-olds and explain to them why the teacher they’re so nuts about shouldn’t be allowed to get married. An education is obviously in order here, and these kids seem more than qualified to teach men like L. Whitney Clayton a thing or two.
Madonna, ever the trendsetter, tried her hand at lesbian bigamy in 2003.
Laureen Wells-Weiss is one angry lesbian. In 2001, the New Yorker married her long-time partner, Shari Weiss, in Toronto. Five years later, Weiss broke up with Wells-Weiss and promptly took up with another woman, later entering into a civil union with her in Vermont. The problem? She never got around to divorcing Wells-Weiss first.
Now Wells-Weiss is seriously mad, and if there’s anyone you don’t want to piss off, it’s a lesbian. When you piss off a lesbian, especially one you vowed to spend the rest of your life with, you know there’s gonna be hell to pay. And now — pretend the guy who narrates trailers for suspense films is saying this next part — Laureen Wells-Weiss is ready to collect.
Not only is she still engaged in a legal battle with Weiss in New York over their assets, she has also, as Molly Walsh notes in the Vermont Free Press, “been on a letter-writing campaign to Vermont officials urging them to pursue a case against her estranged spouse on bigamy or perjury charges and to void her civil union.” This, as Wells-Weiss openly admits, is largely designed to bolster her case in New York. So far, her letter-writing campaign has been about as successful as, well, something that is … completely unsuccessful. (Crystal Pepsi comes to mind.)
Her lack of results, she is certain, has to do with her sexuality. As she told Walsh, “I am offended as a gay person and I am appalled as an American that somebody can commit a crime and not be held accountable and the people who are supposed to uphold that law are dismissing it.”
However, a state’s attorney for the Vermont county in which Weiss was civil unionized, or whatever you want to call it (with terminology like that, can’t you just picture Norma Rae serving as the couple’s witness?), isn’t sure any crime has been committed. He also thinks it’s a bunch of hogwash to suggest that Weiss has escaped prosecution because the justice system doesn’t take gay marriage seriously. In his words, “I think the rather unique facts and the multistate and international aspects combined with the fact that it appears to be civil, not criminal, makes it not likely to attract the attention of those whose job it is to prosecute criminal matters.”
Honestly, I’m not sure what to make of any of this. Clearly it’s wrong to enter into a civil union when you haven’t legally dissolved your previous marriage, but these are untested legal waters and it’s disingenuous for Wells-Weiss to cry homophobia when she knowingly entered into a marriage that wasn’t legally recognized in the United States. What I keep going back to are the words “multistate and international,” which put the magnitude of this kind of dyke drama into perspective.
These women have managed to drag New York, Vermont and Canada into their fucked up relationship. That has to be some kind of record. (It certainly makes me feel better about myself. My screwed up relationships have all stayed local. The courts were never involved, reporters were never contacted. Most importantly, no one has ever written about my failed relationships on their shitty blog.) Whatever the outcome of all this legal wrangling turns out to be, this case ought to serve as a cautionary tale for gay couples everywhere.
The first thing it taught us: Don’t be scuzzy. If you got married in one place, even if that union isn’t recognized elsewhere, you’re married. You’re a disgrace to the gay community when you marry one person in Toronto, then take advantage of the fact that American courts don’t know how to deal with gay marriage in order to practically marry another person in the United States.
The second lesson: If your desire to get married is so incredibly strong that even horror stories like this don’t make you reconsider legally binding yourself to your partner in a country that can’t figure out how to handle gay unions, at least do the rest of us a favor and keep your own name. Seriously, lesbians, do we have to do everything like our mothers? All that typing Weiss and Wells-Weiss drove me fucking crazy. Especially Wells-Weiss, which sounds like someone with a speech impediment trying to say Rolls-Royce.
According to the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, women in the Army and Air Force are being kicked out in record numbers under “don’t ask, don’t tell.” From the Times:
While women make up 14 percent of Army personnel, 46 percent of those discharged under the policy last year were women. And while 20 percent of Air Force personnel are women, 49 percent of its discharges under the policy last year were women.
As Aubrey Sarvis, the executive director of the SLDN, notes, “Women make up 15 percent of the armed forces, so to find they represent nearly 50 percent of Army and Air Force discharges under ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ is shocking.”
The Pentagon hasn’t offered an explanation for the increase in discharges of lesbian military personnel, but I have to wonder: could this be the start of the Tasha effect?
As the state of California prepares to start issuing marriage licenses to gay couples next week, a piece in today’s New York Times examines “the egalitarian nature” of same-sex relationships.
When asked to comment on whether they think it’s true that same-sex couples “fight more fairly” and are better at dividing household chores than their heterosexual counterparts, my parents got into a vicious argument that started with my father saying “There’s no such thing as a fair fight with your mother,” and continued with my mom snapping, “Your father would have to know what chores are before he tried doing any.”
Realizing that thirty years’ worth of grievances were about to be rehashed in clinical detail for the 3,758th time, I hightailed it out of there without asking any follow-up questions. Good times!
