Hat tip to CTRL+W33D.

“What the public really loathes in homosexuality is not the thing itself but having to think about it.”
–E.M. Forster

Strip away all the ads and angst surrounding recent gay rights referendums, and the most cogent observational kernel came when Dan Savage averred that much of the dread and revulsion orienting around opposition to gay rights comes down quite literally to our sexual practices.

Candidly, it’s ass sex that riles up every Neo-Puritan to start rattler-handling and speaking in tongues, and the threat of it somehow being taught/instructed/endorsed (where was this course when I was school?) to oh-so-vulnerable school kiddies was the implicit push behind the Yes on 1 Referendum in Maine.

Lesbians get more than their fair share of flak, but really the worst skullduggery is probably associated with men, with everything from child molestation, public indecency, pornography, serial murder, disease, and trannies stalking gender-neutral restrooms likely to conjure up the image of a male predator on the lurk.

Is it that gay women aren’t quite as threatening, their relationships not as disruptive to this natural order we keep hearing about? Certainly we’re all vilified for apparently clutching at the wedding band so we can turn it into some kind of grotesque farce (maybe a Fellini Satyricon hitching at sea, or a Flash Gordon theme wedding?), but in terms of measured public acceptance, it seems to be women who are having an easier time of getting over the wall. (read the full article)

There’s a saying about a frog in a cooking pot; throw him into boiling water and he jumps right out, but if you put him in cold water and heat it up slowly, he’ll hardly notice as he’s dissolving into amphibian soup.

That’s about how my fellow journalism majors and I reacted over the last few years as the printed news industry slow-motion collapsed around us, and the functions we were learning to perform evaporated. We hardly paid attention to reports that newspaper revenues were down and hiring was slow, that newspapers were outsourcing more and more of their news gathering operations to the Associated Press and worrying more and more about catchy graphic design. We weren’t even anxious, until we got out into the world as fledgling reporters and suddenly discovered we were irrelevant.

I was still working on my journalism degree when I started writing for Nightcharm, fresh out of my internship with a local paper. I’ve graduated now, and in the 18 months since, several regional papers have gone out of business — some of them that were over a hundred years old – and even nationally renowned papers like the Chicago Tribune and The Los Angeles Times have taken drastic hits in circulation. Many papers lose money or barely break even, staying alive because their investors are more sentimental than concerned with profit. (read the full article)

Nensha, bitches.

It’s a term I tangentially referred to in an earlier post this month, and a theory I’m frankly fascinated with.

Its essence is this: the human mind with all its untapped power has the ability to psychically impress or burn an image into our physical reality, and thus alter it irrevocably. Post-War Japanese researchers devoted much effort into proving its existence — it would later serve as the basis for the nation’s much-praised film Ringu and its equally effective American remake The Ring — but the doctrine was for decades deemed merely a The Men Who Stare At Goats-type of new age hokum. A flight of fantasy. A failure.

All that changed in 1999 when Nensha was revealed to be a wholly factual (and utterly terrifying) phenomenon brought about not to revolutionize telecommunications or create a super soldier, but from sheer corporate music industry greed and folly.

An affront to Nature of the highest order. (read the full article)

Casey’s a long, tall drink of water. Sort of shy, and a little too quiet sometimes. He seems happiest when he’s hanging out with the other guys in the dorm, playing video games or thumbing through old copies of Hustler magazine. Though, as he told us several times during this exclusive shoot: He’s not gay. He supports gay rights and even thinks gay people should get married if they want to — but he just doesn’t feel any sort of erotic charge for other guys.

What a shame.

But, good news! You can still catch a long, long look at Casey’s bold side by popping into the Inner Circle’s Fratmen Theater and watching him rub one off in the bathtub…In fact, in your own private reverie you can imagine Casey doing whatever you what him to do (and we promise we don’t tell him if your fantasy involves another guy.)

My Guidodom obsession is well-chronicled and sprawlingly elaborate. Yet still I go unfulfilled.

Though MTV has yet again mined the depths of human materialistic depravity in its latest semi-verite house of horrors entry Jersey Shore — featuring a roster of roided-out, leather-skinned dry humps who gave me instant roddage — why in Hell didn’t the network opt to have them co-habitate with Manhattan sophisticates in order to achieve maximum culture clash? This is one slice of shameless exploitation I would actually want to be part of. Only then can my fantasy of being adopted into this self-worshiping tribe as a symbolically conspicuous outsider a la Sheena at last come to fruition.

The plot lines are endless. First, I’m curiously pawed at for my far-flung customs called “modesty,” “eloquence,” and “poise”, which are totally unknown to them. While the males slowly come to acclimate themselves to my ability to completely pronounce the continuous present tense of verbs, the females will show me how to best accessorize Forever 21 or Juicy Couture, and when to beat a bitch who gets mouthy.

Finally, after much mutual learning, the group’s alpha male develops a worlds-apart love for me, which triggers a power vacuum and results in he and his challengers throwing down at a club called — I’ll go with — Pandorium. He emerges victorious, and together we fist pump (it’s their form of interpretive dance) in celebration as we become the progenitors of a new people. Toss in some vaguely emotive Top 40 songs, some pre-scripted confessional transitions, and somebody getting bitten, and I just wrote the entire first season.

A dream deferred is a dream denied.