A horrible child learns about racism and bigotry toward perceived gender identity because of a traumatic home perm incident and an unfortunate wardrobe. Take that Glee with your overwrought “teachable moment”! This shit is real!

Starlet.

I’ve heard tell that words like chime, melody, and lullaby are the most beautiful words in the English language. Lovely, to be sure, but I find starlet — the word and the act of being — to be a rare state of grace. When a star falls and strikes ground with one last, plaintive twinkle, the sound it makes? Starlet…

There was a time before there were Fame Whores and Celebutantes who have shows on E! and lay claim to fame just for being themselves when the ambitious race of Starlet People populated Hollywood. They were the studio contract players plucked out of beauty pageants and drama schools — hometown beauties made good who went off to Tinseltown and found the gates to the Emerald City thrown open for them. If stars are the established, volatile, and demanding talent, then starlets are the hungry, needy would-bes out to prove their worth and be chosen.

Yes, it’s starlets who are the magnetic, vacant Tabula Rasas on which we can project all our personal obsessions, but the male variety has always been in comparatively short supply. Every so often you’ll get a Christopher George, Joe Dallesandro, or Jon-Erik Hexum, but it’s harder for men to approximate the doe-eyed sex kittenry and goofy naïveté (“Won’t that be the day!”) that women exude as they’re chased around desks or pose in publicity stills. Male starletry has sadly fallen into the hands of celebrity broods and Reality TV douches as of late, and it sickens me.

But one man still embodies everything a starlet should be: the inestimable Marcus Patrick. (read the full article)

When it comes to any sort of group activity — pep rallies, sports, flash mobs, gang bangs — I’ve just never been much of a joiner.

In the context of Nightcharm, I’m something of a mutant. Virtually all of the team here are lapsed Catholics who ultimately turned to some other form spirituality, but I was never raised with religion, and I’ll never turn to it.

My sojourn with The Gay doesn’t really fit the established pattern either. I never bore the paralyzing yoke of difference and guilt that hetero-slanted faith places on people. People may want to chip away at me, but no one has ever touched me. I have no soul-rending rejection by a het love interest that haunts me. Even if I could mystically condition my orientation away — it seems rather like trying to learn to breathe, in the sense that it’s so much effort put into an act that doesn’t require it — it wouldn’t alter my social mobility a bit. Shame and inferiority fostered by the Father have never broken my back. (read the full article)

It’s just one of those things that can be called a “uniquely hetero” experience.

Now, I have positively zero history with or inclination toward professional athletics — specifically, as a viewer — and I always will. However, from what I can gather, there are big events held in stadiums and such — often televised — wherein actual adults lose their collective shit by watching men hit projectiles with sticks or place a ball through a net.

This is not a form of passive spectatorship by any means; fans will don team jerseys, disport garishly elaborate head gear, and paint their bodies in fetishistic tribal colors while boisterously alleging that a hated player on a rival team is performing a sex act on another man. There’s also likely to be no shortage of surly lamenting about how many foreigners have entered into the sport and/or how few white participants there are left, all capped off with grumbling about the cost of the whole event. Charred meat is consumed from grills situated around the trunk areas of cars. Essentially, it’s like a Teabagger rally, only with fewer fire arms, a broader age bracket, and less misspelled signs. (read the full article)

Money can’t buy it. At least not all of it.

Cosmetic surgery is not unlike a bad friend or a fair weather boyfriend: it leads you on, promises a lot but rarely delivers, and slowly comes to preoccupy your mind until it reaches the level of a fixation. It’s also used best in small doses. Yes, a looker can ratchet up his appeal by thinning out his nose or maybe broadening his chin, but the idea that you could build a perfect human beauty in a piecemeal manner like you’re sampling from a platter is ill-advised. The goal may be, say Candis Cayne (as close to being Myra Breckinridge’s “new woman whose astonishing history started with a surgeon’s scalpel” as any man or woman is likely to get), but the reality is more Amanda Lepore. Miss the mark of Brad Pitt, and you end up with Kim Vo. Dare to emulate Angelina Jolie, and the horror that is Octomom ensues.

“Pretty is just a lucky accident,” opined the troubled heroine from Cheerleader Camp, and that’s become my beauty mantra. It comes down to a serendipitous harmony of genes being passed on by two attractive mates, the stronger traits hopefully dominating, the right features maybe coalescing, and symmetry possibly balancing it all out. Even then the end result is still a wild card — you’d think that Hugh Hefner’s union with amazonian Kimberly Conrad would result in some discernible physical presence of her in their two sons, but no, while Nick Simmons, plagiarist son of Gene Simmons, didn’t luck out despite having mom Shannon Tweed in the mix.

A surgeon can only do so much, and when he endeavors to recreate a person from the ground up, the combined folly of doctor and patient crosses the line from Galatean to Frankensteinian. (read the full article)

Childhood.

In the pantheon of American myths, it ranks up there with the the pilgrims (assholes) and Intelligent Design. Glenn Beck can cry for his bygone formative years that never were, and Concerned Mothers can bitch endlessly about teenage wizards and slutty vampire slayers, but anyone in-the-know will tell you that there’s nothing truly safe or protected about being a kid. Children are just miniature adults, which means they can be deceitful, manipulative, greedy, and treacherous — I’d wager there’s likely a Rhoda in-the-wings inside every elementary school classroom — and if you’ve ever grown up with a Baby Jane of a sibling, you had a real reason to hide under the bed and perfect your best 911 call.

Even fairy tales are full of all manner of fuckery — Little Red Riding Hood had more in store for her from the Wolf’s Big Bad than just being eaten — and just as creepy children’s programming will often years later develop cults of scarred adults who get thrills from revisiting their childhood traumas, so too are children’s books far more than just lame pretexts for actresses to brand themselves authors. (read the full article)

From the Barksdale Elementary school newsletter in Plano Texas:

First place in the annual school diorama fair was awarded to Canaan Taylor’s ambitious Intelligent Design-themed Invisible Hand: An Absolutist’s Case For Traditional Marriage and The Purchasing Power of Dinosaurs In The Edenic Free Market. Our goal to balance Leftist Academia with a more conservative perspective is in full effect, and that made this year’s competition a heated one. Katie Perkins’s second place entry King Kong Died For Our Sins was thought to be the front runner, but some unfortunate rumors involving her family — her parents are divorced, and it’s been said she has two Daddies now — cost her in the end. Third place went to Corey Hallohan’s Hijacking The Presidency: The Kenyan Connection, while Trinity Temple’s controversial Jeffrey Dahmer: Nihilism of A Gay Darwinian Atheist made a strong showing in fourth place.

We can all agree that the Texas Board of Education — which wisely opted to not consult any of those biased historians, sociologists or economists when casting its votes — deserves our praise and gratitude. Don McLeroy said it best: “We are adding balance. History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left.”

Equilibrium achieved.