Aren’t babies beau-ti-ful?
Don’t you wish you could have 10 of them! All those little bundles of joy screaming in the adorable way they do? And they grow up to look just like you! What a tribute!
Only Diane Arbus, a photog- rapher with an eye for the gothic in ordinary life (whose pictures you see here), could capture the rude humanity of it all.
Ah, marriage and bay-bees!
Yeah, and the heteros can keep it, say we.
Tom Cruise, for instance. Katie Holmes, for another. What a couple! But Katie — is that a beach ball you’re wearing under your maternity top or have you just been going all Britney on the spare ribs? We loved how Defamer deconstructed a recent photo of Mama Cruise — or as they describes her, the “Scientology war bride”:
Coming out of Barney’s New York, America’s most suspicious expectant mother displayed all the classic indicators of an imminent fake delivery — skinny limbs, a face free of late third-trimester puffiness, and, most tellingly, a mid-sized beach ball inflated to maximum pressure … [photo here]
You mean, we’re in store for another Michael Jackson bait-and-switch, where a blond-haired, blue-eyed baby suddenly, miraculously appears (supplied, Defamer suggests, by some Scientology drone, whose “mission” is to get pregnant for — how should we put this — challenged celebrities.)
Doesn’t this make The Family — that sacred unit dear to the heart of Tom Delay and other Holy Men — look so enticing?
Don’t you wish you could marry a manicurist with a beauty-shop Liz-do and a leopard coat with matching heels? Man, we just want to jump into this Diane Arbus photo, A Young Brooklyn Family Going for a Sunday Outing and start living our dazzling hetero lives!
And then there’s this:
From the Associated Press:
THREE ARRESTED AT BABY SHOWER BRAWL
SPRINGFIELD, Mass. (AP) — An argument at a baby shower escalated into a brawl in which one man was shot and the pregnant guest of honor was beaten with a stick, police said.
Three people were arrested after the fight, described by police as a “baby shower gone bad.”
Authorities said the shooting victim, Aristotle Garcia, got into a fight with a man who is dating his ex-girlfriend. The argument, over whether the woman let their 5-year-old daughter drink beer, escalated and drew in two other [men] …
When the baby shower’s hostess tried to intervene, Rivas [one of the men] began hitting some of the guests, including the 22-year-old mother-to-be, with a large stick, she said.
[The other man] fired a gun in the air, then fired it into the crowd, hitting Garcia in the stomach, according to police. Garcia, 26, was in stable condition at Baystate Medical Center. The mother-to-be, who was seven months pregnant, was treated after the incident Saturday and released…
Right. Lovely.
All photos in this section are copywritten by Diane Arbus.
They appear in the influential Aperture monograph that came out the year after she committed suicide in 1970. It has never gone out of print and is available at Amazon.
Of her work, Walker Evans — himself a historic master of photography — said, “she has an eye cultivated to show you fear in a handful of dust.”
© 2006, John Calendo. All rights reserved. Nightcharm.com
Hey, I’m straight, and I never gave any thought or have had any desire to have kids. (Sex is cool…babies is not!) Maybe it’s crassly capitalistic of me, but after making spare money through high school by baby-sitting (my regular gig was a family with four kids all under the age of 8…god, I’m stunned that I put up with that), I think I realized, “what? have one of those puking, smelly, squealing things FOR FREE??? are you nuts?”.
How can one write about breeders and neglect to include this creepy Christian clan? (link)
Family photo album here: (link)
Sixteen children and counting. That’s 12 solid years of pregnancy. Stupid cow.
Naturally, they make a point of home-schooling. Why join a religious cult when you can just produce your own.
Apparently mom makes dresses for her daughters and herself — I have a hard time believing you could actually buy clothing that ugly.
You know, I don’t come to this site for gratuitous het-bashing. I mean, ridicule specific hets and homos all you like, particularly freaks like Tom and Katie, but the bulk of the above article smacks of bigotry.
Maybe your tongues were in your cheeks when you wrote and/or published this piece. But dudes, some of us homos were at one time breeders and we have some precious, well-behaved and much wanted children to show for it. I wouldn’t trade my daughter and grandsons for all the hot man-cock in the world.
Please tell me there was a point to this that I missed.
The point is…
I belive the point was exclaiming the discontent for how apparently for the most part it seems only the stupid breed. I wont doubt my parents where stupid, I was a accident and the product of an affair. The man married to my mother at the time wanted her to abort me. needless to she refused.
So in other words, I came to this world uninvited, but who cares the resaons somone reproduses. Nature never intended us to understand why we should reproduce. We happen to know because we are smart that we need more people to continue our species. But I dont think we are at the point where we should start blaming hetros for not breeding correct.
Okay, yes, yes it was a cheap swipe and full of stereotyping of the coarsest sort. Here’s the thing: Marriage and children are presented to us at every turn as the only thing worth living for, and we just have had it.
Of course, we are dancing around a hot-button issue here: gay marriage. Let us state the obvious: We believe all Americans should have the same rights, and that the denial of marriage to same-sex couples is unjust. That said, there are still some rights, even if we had them, we would never choose to exercise.
So often “the children” is used as a bludgeon to kill gay rights, fire gay teachers, halt gay adoptions. Because we all are so sentimental about children (yes, even Nightcharm) this kind of argument turns off our minds and makes us vote our fears.
So this piece was just a gasp of “oh fuck off with your ‘sanctity of marriage’ crap and your precious kids.”
We regret that it felt like a slap to our readers who have kids and — yes — marriages, gay or straight.
But, meanwhile, wasn’t that baby shower a hoot!
Thanks Tuffy for the link to the Duggars web. This glimps into the perky heart of total darkness made my head spin…and think how many more of them there’ll be in another 20 years, even after subsisting on those “favorite recipies”. Did you read that? Holy shit!
Thanks for the clarification. I’m not going anywhere, not canceling my subscription, not twisting my piercings in grief. You guys are the best. I just felt a little jolt from the article because I love my babies so much and because they’re so deeply integrated into the fibers of my life.
NO!
Babies are one of the greatest advantages of being gay! You can’t get ‘em. Allright, I agree, they may be cute, but not for long, when you smell their SH*T and try to feed the bastards, you will certainly have second thoughts. Now, it may be because I’m still way too young to have kids, I do know what they stink like, and how hard it is to feed them, and try to keep them from crying.
Really, if there’s one thing I hate, it’s a crying baby.