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.
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.
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.
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.
According to the FBI, hate crimes decreased by 1 percent in 2007. Good news, right? Except for the part where anti-gay hate crimes actually increased by 6 percent. And what about this:
Racially motivated hate crimes accounted for more than half of that total. Religious bias was the second-leading motive for hate crimes, followed by prejudice against sexual orientation.
Within those categories, the FBI report found most hate crimes tended to be anti-black, anti-Jewish and anti-gay.
Egad! Not only am I gay, but as you can see from my photo on the upper right side of this page, I’m also Black. (That photo, by the way, is somewhat out of date. I’ve grown at least two inches since it was taken last year.) Or maybe I’m Jewish. I forget.
Either way, I’m feeling kind of nervous at the moment, and I’m glad I bookmarked this story about female bodyguards a few weeks ago. It might be worth looking into should those anti-gay hate crime numbers increase again in 2008. And who knows, maybe I’d end up with a female version of Kevin Costner (one who doesn’t perform lewd sex acts in front of mortified masseuses while we’re honeymooning in Scotland. That’s so gauche) and find myself singing a passionate rendition of “I Have Nothing” because of her. Or maybe we could scratch that last part, because no one wants to hear me sing. If you had any idea how terrible that sounds, you’d probably pay me not to.
This is the part of the faux-lesbianism debate where we get a glimpse into Don Vito Corleone’s childhood in Sicily, his voyage to America, his adventures in rug-stealing with Clemenza, and the totally awesome way in which he disposed of Don Fanucci. (And that’s not even getting into Michael Corleone’s trip to Havana and his dealings with Hyman Roth, or Fredo’s fatal Johnny Ola slip-up.).
Sorry, I got confused there for a minute. This is the part of the faux-lesbianism debate in which an actual lesbian — Jane Czyzselska, editor of Diva magazine, which is Europe’s answer to Curve — weighs in, managing to do so in a non-sucky way. You know, unlike the Australian article that I complained about so bitterly earlier this week. Czyzselska was responding to Jodie Marsh’s recent declaration that she’s giving lesbianism a whirl.
Today’s Boston Globe has an article about foreigners seeking asylum in the United States to escape homophobia, and it’s impossible to read Brazilian Genesio Oliveira’s story without getting angry. Laws in this country need to be changed so that gays and lesbians can sponsor their spouses for legal U.S. residency the same as heterosexuals. That this wasn’t done years ago (and probably won’t happen anytime soon) is shameful. And for asylum-seekers without American partners, the issue here is the same as in Canada — how do you prove you’re gay, and how do you prove your life is in danger if you’re sent back home? From the article:
Offering a haven for gays and lesbians is an emerging field of law in the United States and around the world, lawyers and advocates say, awakening foreigners to the option to live in the United States that was previously unknown. But the practice is raising concerns, as critics cite the potential for fraud and advocates worry that possible homophobia or lack of international experience might lead some judges and government officials to send foreigners back to dangerous lands.
In a 2003 case, an immigration judge in California denied asylum to a Mexican national, saying it wasn’t obvious the man was gay. The man appealed and won asylum last year.
There is fraud all over the place when it comes to immigration. People are still allowed to immigrate. According to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesman Bill Wright, the government doesn’t keep statistics on how many gays and lesbians are granted asylum. So far, no one has suggested that there’s an epidemic of scheming heterosexuals masquerading as frightened gays and lesbians in search of U.S. residency.
So why do I have a sinking feeling that this is something Fox News numskulls will eventually blow way out of proportion, claiming that it somehow damages America? They need a new “War on Christmas”-esque stunt, and seeing as they love to scream about both homosexuality and immigration, this could prove as tantalizing as a loofah or falafel to Bill O’Reilly.
One thing to be relieved about: No one in the article was quoted as saying anything as stupid as Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary of the United Kingdom, who believes that gays are safe in Iran. (Never mind that by her own admission, gays don’t feel safe enough in Britain to report hate crimes to the police.) On the other hand, I’m sure we’ll hear plenty of the Jacqui Smith response as gay asylum becomes a bigger issue in the United States.
Greta Garbo disguised herself as a lesbian to spy for Germany. Or maybe not.
This is a really dumb article. One of the dumbest I’ve ever read, and I used to read Seventeen and Teen Beat faithfully.
The problems start with the headline, which asserts that “bogus lesbians” are “causing emotional damage.” There are two possible responses to this. The first is a joke about it being old news to actual lesbians that fake lesbians cause emotional damage. The second isn’t a joke, just a confused “Who to the what now?” We’re only headline-deep and the article already feels unintentionally funny, not to mention rather quaint.
Then there’s this:
Several high-profile relationships involving “real lesbians” and women more often linked to men — such as MTV’s Ruby Rose and Jess Origliasso, and Samantha Ronson and Lindsay Lohan — have reportedly encouraged a wave of “fauxmosexuals” on the real life party circuit.
Oh, please. If Lindsay Lohan can’t get leggings to catch on, how is she going to convince a girl who wasn’t already interested in kissing girls to kiss another girl? Let’s give women (yes, even young women), a bit of credit here — they do have minds of their own. And let’s be realistic: “fauxmosexuality” (which is sometimes more complicated than someone simply craving attention, but it’s easier to pretend everyone is completely one-dimensional, isn’t it?) is nothing new. Perhaps the media only recently caught onto it, but “the gays” have been dealing with it, and in many cases rolling their eyes at it, forever.
And then there’s this:
Gay social commentator Tim Duggan has described the “lesbian trend” as a fad which is actually doing “more damage than good”.
“Experimentation is healthy — what it leads to can sometimes be a great thing, but you need to wonder what effect [fake lesbians] are having on women,” said Mr Duggan, co-founder of gay and lesbian site SameSame.
“Women who pretend to be lesbians do it to titillate men.”
Why does lesbianism always, always, always come back to men? I know that not everyone understands this, and that even some gay men have difficulty looking at women’s issues without trying to relate them back to men, but not all experimenters are women who are “pretending to be lesbians,” and not all of them are doing it to titillate men. Certainly there must be a way for concerned social commentators to tackle the subject of “faux lesbianism” without diminishing the complexity of female sexuality and apparently dismissing the notion of bisexuality altogether.
(And why do these lectures always seem oddly prudish, like there’s something inherently distasteful about straight girls wanting to titillate their boyfriends in this manner? Not every girl who kisses a girl to get a reaction from a guy does so under duress. Sometimes — gasp! — women are in control of their own sexuality, know what they’re doing, and like kissing other women and like turning on their boyfriends.)
Finally:
Online gay forums are abuzz with talk of the “bogus lesbian” craze, with some questioning whether the trend is putting real homosexuals at risk.
“Where do these fauxmosexual fads leave queer teens once they’re packed away in the cupboard (with other fads)?,” user timbo84 wrote.
“The statistic of 30 percent of teen suicides in the US being gay or lesbian teens is very distressing.
“Here’s hoping pop culture moves on to focus on people like Ellen and Ian McKellen and not those who are just ‘out’ to make a buck!”
Pop culture hasn’t moved away from Ellen and Ian McKellen. They both have successful careers and legions of adoring fans who respect them for coming out. But let’s back this up a bit: An obscure (outside of Australia) MTV VJ being photographed in a clinch with an almost equally obscure (outside of Australia) pop star might be putting real homosexuals at risk? If ever a remark called for a heavy sigh and a major “Oh, Mary,” that has to be it. (Or “Oh, Martina,” if you prefer, if you’re dealing with a clueless woman.)
I was a teenage lesbian. (That is also the title of my next pulp novel.) That was way back in the ’90s and the early aughts, before Tila Tequila, or whatever the hell her name is, had her own bisexual dating show — a show I’ll admit I’ve never bothered to watch. It was before The L Word existed, before South of Nowhere was on a cable channel aimed at young adults, and, most lamentably, it was before YouTube fulfilled the promise of the world wide web by giving everyone with an Internet connection free and immediate 24-hour access to gay content.
The only lesbians the public knew at that time were Ellen DeGeneres, Melissa Etheridge, Billie Jean King, k.d. lang, and Martina Navratilova. There was also Janis Ian, but the song “At Seventeen” depressed everyone and they tried not to think about her. (As a side note, who have we added to the list since then? A tennis player here, a WNBA player there, a few awful singers with acoustic guitars and the occasional relic from the ’60s. Maybe the world can only handle five powerful lesbians at once. I know I’ve tried to handle six before and after a while it just got confusing.) Back then, even after I started coming out to friends, no one believed I was gay. My sheltered Midwestern classmates seemed to think lesbians were like the Abominable Snowman: “Personally, I don’t believe they exist, but I know this guy who says he saw a picture…”
They thought it was a phase, or that I was simply confused. (A few objected on the grounds that my hair wasn’t short. Yes, my school was obviously crawling with geniuses). They were confident that one day I’d meet the right guy and burst into the home-ec room singing, “Gonna wash that gay right out of my hair!” or something equally catchy. I was fifteen at the time and none of my classmates were openly gay, though we were pretty sure about Tom, a cute Southern Baptist who proudly served in the color guard and loved to quote Designing Women.
A number of my classmates were outspoken homophobes, which was more common than not in the 1990s, in a town that had more churches than bookstores, where PTA moms would stop each other in the grocery store to share their disappointment about Ellen on the cover of Time. Some days I thought I heard the words “gay” and “fag” in the hallway more than I heard the words “and” and “but.”
Nearly ten years later, at the exact same school, my sister came out of the closet. No one thought she was going through a phase. No one thinks she’s going to magically turn straight. (Maybe it’s because she has short hair. We’ll have to gather data.) There are still homophobic students. There are still teachers who do too little to rein them in. Comments are still made and hostile looks are still felt. Sometimes lockers are even defaced. But the school now has a gay-straight alliance, which would have been unthinkable 10 years ago.
And there are so many gay, lesbian and bisexual students that I still get confused when I hear my sister gossip about this girl dating that girl or this guy being interested in that guy’s boyfriend. “Are we talking about the same school?” I want to ask. When I was 13 there was talk the prom would be canceled if the only openly bisexual student in the entire high school brought her girlfriend. Now her gay friends are running student council and planning school dances. It doesn’t compute. (Her response would probably be, “Like we’d let straight kids plan the dances.”)
These teenagers are blazing their own trail. They don’t particularly care who Jess from the Veronicas is spotted kissing, and neither do their heterosexual peers. Jess from the Veronicas doesn’t attend their GSA meetings or write on their Facebook walls. Not only do they not feel their quest for equality is imperiled by Lindsay Lohan’s relationship with Samantha Ronson, they’d roll their eyes at the suggestion that their straight classmates would either assume the Lohan-Ronson union is a publicity stunt or react to news of a Lohan-Ronson breakup by saying, “If the girl from The Parent Trap isn’t really gay, then you’re probably a bunch of impostors as well! We don’t take you seriously now, and once we’re allowed to vote we’re going to make sure you can never get married!”*
Really, how fucking stupid do these people think kids are?
UPDATE (10/14): To answer a few questions, the reason Rosie O’Donnell was left off my “the only lesbians the public knew at that time” list is because … drum roll, please … she wasn’t out of the closet yet. She came out in 2002, five years after Ellen, and I’d graduated from high school by then. As for the “five powerful lesbians” concept, I’m sticking with it for now but would add that Rosie replaced k.d. lang on the list quite some time ago.
Oh, and the point of the post — and I think most people got this, but in case there are any questions — wasn’t that it’s wrong to discuss so-called “fauxmosexuality.” My point, as the first sentence of the post makes clear, is that this particular article on the subject is dumb. It’s a terrible, terrible, shallow, worthless article that reads like it was put together in two seconds. And I’m an expert on sloppy effort, as anyone who has perused this website knows.
* Gay teens do love Lindsay Lohan, though. Call it the Mean Girls factor. The new gays quote that movie as much as the old ones quoted Heathers. The “too gay to function” line is a perennial favorite.
Big Mama Morton keeps an eye on Shell Dockley and Nikki Wade during the Larkhall talent show.
Queen Latifah, recently seen registering a dozen or so perfect confused facial expressions as moderator Gwen Ifill in SNL’s epic vice-presidential debate sketch, is profiled in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine. She succeeds in dazzling writer Alex Witchel, dazzling her bosses at Cover Girl, and pretty much dazzling the normally dazzle-resistant me — until the lesbian issue comes up:
One topic of persistent speculation on the Web is Queen Latifah’s sexuality, particularly a supposed romance with a female trainer. She has never addressed her relationships publicly and was in no mood to start. “I don’t have a problem discussing the topic of somebody being gay, but I do have a problem discussing my personal life,” she said. “You don’t get that part of me. Sorry. We’re not discussing it in our meetings, we’re not discussing it at Cover Girl. They don’t get it, he doesn’t get it” — she gestured upstairs, toward Compere’s office — “nobody gets that. I don’t feel like I need to share my personal life, and I don’t care if people think I’m gay or not. Assume whatever you want. You do it anyway.”
It’s better than what we got out of her eight years ago on VH1’s Behind the Music, when she addressed gay rumors by laughing nervously and launching into an awkward, unconvincing, lady doth protest too much response about not being a “fruit,” but obviously there’s still room for improvement. I do think she’s poised to come out eventually, and if she does it while her career is still monster-sized it’s going to be one of the most socially important celebrity coming-outs we’ve ever seen; the question is, how long is she prepared to wait?
By the way, anyone else catch this bit of hilarity as Witchel followed Latifah around her production company:
We walked upstairs to Compere’s office, which was between a screening room and an editing room (they were cutting a reality show about the rapper Ja Rule).
Shakim Compere is Queen Latifah’s childhood friend and business partner in Flavor Unit Entertainment; Ja Rule, who four years ago starred in a Flavor Unit production, The Cookout, made headlines last year with a homophobic outburst that suggested homosexuality is “tearing up America.” Asked about a Congressional hearing into hip-hop, Ja Rule expressed outrage that rap lyrics were being treated as a national concern when more important things were happening, like the Jena Six protests in Louisiana. He could have left it at that and many people — most of us, I’d guess — would have agreed with him.
But after saying “Let’s get into shit like that, because that’s what’s tearing up America, not me calling a woman a bitch or a hoe [sic] on my rap songs,” he felt compelled to continue:
“And if it is, then we need to go step to Paramount, and fucking MGM, and all of these other motherfuckers that’s making all of these movies and we need to go step to MTV and Viacom, and lets talk about all these fucking shows that they have on MTV that is promoting homosexuality, that my kids can’t watch this shit. Dating shows that’s showing two guys or two girls in mid afternoon. Let’s talk about shit like that! If that’s not fucking up America, I don’t know what is.”
It didn’t take long for Ja Rule to backpedal and try to position himself as a social progressive with comments that were about as disingenuous as Latifah’s ancient declarations of non-fruitiness. He should have kept it brief and honest: “Gays aren’t okay when they’re on my TV, but I don’t judge ’em when they sign my paychecks.” I’m sure he’s seen Queen Latifah’s big number in Chicago and can relate to its message: “The folks atop the ladder/Are the ones the world adores/So boost me up my ladder, kid/And I’ll boost you up yours.”
UPDATE: Forgot to mention that Holland Taylor was also interviewed in the Times. No mention of her personal life, which is par for the course, but it’s a good read.
“You were forced to lie every single day of your life. I lied to my parents, I lied to my teachers, I lied to get into the Army. Now you don’t have to lie anymore.” — Garrison Phillips, 78
“Way back then, being gay or lesbian was viewed as sinful. We hid. There were raids on the bars. Society looked down on us. A lot of people remained under the influence of that prejudice and kept their lives secret. We have to reach these seniors and let them know life is much different now. You have to speak up.” — Ruth Juster, 85
When you have a moment this weekend, I suggest reading this article about the unique challenges facing elderly gays, many of whom lack family members to help care for them and are fearful of being mistreated by homophobic doctors or nursing home staffers. Then head over to the SAGE website and see what you can do to help.
And note to SAGE: Assemble the remaining Golden Girls and have them record a PSA about this to run on Lifetime, LOGO, and Oyxgen. It sounds silly, but I’m not kidding. When Bea and Betty and Rue talk, the gays (and a whole lot of young straight women) listen. Trailblazers like Frank Carter, Garrison Phillips and Ruth Juster made it possible for the rest of us to come out, and we owe them more than we could ever repay. We need to be reminded of that.
