Sexual harassment: it’s not always as bad as it sounds.

Sometimes it’s better than bad — it’s great! And you can’t spell “harassment” without “ass,” so there’s a Freudian tell for you.

I’m not talking the creepy, stalky, lawsuit-filing kind. I mean the ass-slapping “Uuuuh! Looking good, baby!” sort we all either have to keep ourselves from indulging in or secretly wish would happen to us. The Eric Massa scandal kind of started out rather cheeky and funny in several respects, but as it’s grown increasingly ugly, it’s clear how some things should stay grounded in the windmills of the mind and consequence-free porn plotting. If we lived in a world wherein all employers were hot as hell, sex carried no problematic implications, and there were no Bible-happy buzzkill co-workers, we wouldn’t need GLAAD or the ACLU because we’d all just gleefully fuck our way to the top.

So who suffers the worst? You’d think it would be the ladies infiltrating the workforce and getting paid less while having to fend off skirt-chasing churls with wives at home, a Mad Men boys’ club mentality, and lecherous superiors wanting to coerce them into doling out sexual favors if they want to ascend the career ladder. You’d think old world machismo is the problem.

But no. It’s the Muscle Heads — they of the trademark mandanas, douchey tattoos, Ed Hardy attire, porcupine quill hair styles, and jacked-up roid racks — who are the real victims of our culture of lust politics. Their opponents: the queers with their perpetually roving eyes and inability to keep it in their pants. Their battleground: the locker room. Forget the Lilly Ledbetter Act. This misunderstood minority needs a Donny Dumbbell Act mach schnell. (read the full article)

Out of runway.

It’s a personal saying — not quite a mantra, not quite an idiom — that I regularly resort to when I’m wont to describe a certain feeling of dread finality that comes over me — that sinking realization that your back’s up against the wall, of feeling the house lights dim, of sensing the final curtain about to drop down.

Charlie Crist is officially out of runway.

The once-popular Florida Governor was riding high just a scant year ago, his Republican good ol’ boy cred in a conservative state deemed enough of a momentum to let him cross the finish line of his Senatorial bid in a comfortable jog. In 2008, he was in the top running to be John McCain’s VP prior to McCain opting to play the Penguin to Sarah Palin’s Catwoman in a campaign equivalent of a schlocky supervillain tag-team. Prior to that, he was Florida’s Attorney General under Jeb Bush.

A lot can happen in a year.

Crist’s campaign coffers are now so in the red that they might as well have a DNR. Teabagger rival Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban exiles with a conspicuously ethnic “o” at the end of both of his names — proof positive that the Tea Party can’t even manage coherent consistency in reviling the very type of person it was organized to detest — has been bracingly outdistancing him in polls. (read the full article)

Representation.

It’s that pesky issue in politics, media, and athletics that daunts the minority figure; with visibility comes acceptance, and the lack of it only further ghettoizes difference. The military is in the spotlight currently, but it isn’t the only diffident macho setting that we give the collective side-eye to whenever a claim of being queer-free abounds.

I’ve personally never followed sports (when asked recently whether I would be tuning in for the Superbowl, I proceeded to hesitantly ask, “Now, that’s for baseball…right?”) because I can’t approximate grown men’s wide-eyed obsessions with the incredible ability to throw a ball through a hoop or a hit it with a stick.

Still, when it comes to the Winter Olympics, my only real interest is the speculation of who is, who isn’t, who’s in, who’s out, why it’s an issue, and why it shouldn’t be.

OutSports’ recent close-to-the-bone piece on the thorny path of the in-or-out gay Olympian has a myriad of salient points that casts the Athletic sector as the civilian equivalent of the military or the Boy Scouts: a “No Girls! No Fags!” club house that remains one of the last strongholds of little straight boys’ grown-up fantasy selves, the sort of Boys Own setting that would be somehow compromised if queers slipped in under the radar and showed they could compete in a real man’s world. Undercutting the cliche that with every token gay you get a defiant activist or an unruly upstart, the article — with its tellingly anonymous source — drives home how simply being an athlete without the G-modifier is just one more thing we can never simply take for granted. (read the full article)

President Obama earned the skepticism that the LGBT community now has for him. In his first State of the Union Address he’s officially promised he’ll to move to end Don’t Ask Don’t Tell this year.

It’s not that we don’t appreciate that gesture, Mr. Obama. But we’ll believe it when we see it.

Barack Obama started his presidency amidst reluctant support from many queer people who would rather have had Hillary Clinton for President. It’s one thing to vote for a progressive Democrat who – for all his hesitancy on gay rights – at the very least promises not to refer to you as a sign of a pending apocalypse the way the other party does. It’s another thing to vote for a progressive Democrat who just knocked the perfect pro-Gay Democrat out of the running – the other candidate who, by her very election, would have challenged the gender roles and sexual repression that make America so deeply resist LGBT people.

Since I was an Obama supporter from the beginning – and knew he backed gay marriage personally, despite his formal political position – I was less willing to voice doubts, and turned my frustration toward people who were saying the new presidency was a failure within its first month. They were the same people who had repeatedly reminded me before the election that Obama wasn’t going to solve everything, wasn’t our savior and was politically inexperienced. It was clear that a number of them were more conservative on healthcare or military issues than I am, eager to point out Obama is “too liberal” – a label that is ironically granted him by the Right for his stance on social issues like LGBT rights. (read the full article)

“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)

American schools are ground-zero for the so-called “culture war,” and that’s a good thing.

In the middle of the last century, “multiculturalism” was all but banned from public schools, especially in the South. Segregation meant that people who were visibly diverse were out of view — let alone free to express themselves — in public school settings.

Black Americans went to underfunded black schools and Native American children were often shipped off to special government-run schools that attempted to purge them of their native culture and languages. The fact that schools are now dealing with less dire issues, like a female student’s right to attend prom in a tuxedo — is a sign of incredible progress.

In that cultural battle, young people are once again on the front lines. (read the full article)