Modern Primitives. Raves. Extreme Sports. The Trickle-Down Economic Theory.

Bodybuilding.

They were all big for a time, but ran out of steam in the New Millennium. That’s not to say they’re necessarily extinct. More like extant — trends still practiced by a devoted subculture of acolytes well after their mass appeal has played out.

Musclemen are seeming rather dated now. Almost quaint, really — the stuff of Sword & Sandal epics, Playgirl, and low-rent musclehead gyms where they’re still venerated as earthbound gods. I can’t say I particularly think of bodybuilding as a sport. Like golf, bowling, or non-competitive cheerleading, it’s more of an activity, and its virtues don’t necessarily translate that well across all strata as much more than novelties.

I’ll admit to having a yen for bulky men with a natural curvaceous mass, but the image of grotesquely disproportionate, emaciated hulks with distended silverback gorilla abdomens and the hue of rotisserie chickens does absolutely nothing for me. (read the full article)

It’s easy to forget that same-sex marriage is actually the conservative manifestation of the Gay Rights Movement. It values commitment over freedom; conformity over revolution – it’s a far cry from the underclass of transvestites and bohemians that populated the first gayborhoods.

Perhaps half of all gay people wouldn’t even choose marriage if it were legal everywhere. That’s why the tired refrain of the Right is so ironic: the insistence is that same-sex marriages can somehow affect straight marriages; that social affirmation of monogamy and settlement in the gay community would cause it to spill over and wreak havoc on all values everywhere. Suddenly, gay marriages are pouring out of every city hall and church like floods of ants, and filling the streets with hand-holdy chaos.

“They shove their relationships down our throats!,” they’ll say.

Oh really? In my experience, gay people don’t flaunt their relationship status even to other gay people – not even their close friends – let alone to mainstream society. They don’t have sex in public, nor do they make out constantly, and they are capable of walking down the street two, even three feet apart, and sometimes farther.

Gay couples aren’t as jealous as straight ones; a gay man is far less likely to get offended if you mistakenly hit on his boyfriend. Gay couples still go out to bars both together and separately, they still flirt, and while they may not advertise it, a huge number of them still have sex outside the relationship.

For those couples, as far as friends and acquaintances are concerned, the only thing that changes when the relationship starts is that they’re no longer open to something serious – everything else is still fair game. (read the full article)

I’ve never needed enemies.

The Right truly craves monsters — Black Gestapos, Feminist Valkyries, Mexican Marauders, and Homo Hoydens — that it can rail against and use as foils to define itself. Good must have an Evil flipside, otherwise everything becomes confoundingly relative. If it can’t find antagonists, it just conjures them up and insists it’s being lied to by a world that can’t be twisted and shaped to meet its needs.

Personally, I can live just fine without an antipode to define myself, and I’d argue that the gay community by and large is happy to be without them, too. When our families prove to be draining on us and remain obdurate to the realities of our lives, we walk away. I’d wager most of us who work in mixed work places are careful how much we reveal about ourselves for fear of running afoul of someone who’s going to make it their personal mission to run us out. If every fire and brimstone televangelist, fat shock jock, and blonde values whore went extinct tomorrow, there would be no retroactive falsification that would kick in and cause us to admit that they weren’t so bad to have around.

They were, and it sucked. (read the full article)

He called himself “Professor George.” We shit you not!!

Yes, The Rentboy Temptations of Professor George will be a Death in Venice, but with Budget Inns standing in for Venice, as the pious but randy professor takes the wistful blond Lucien down a primrose path of nude massages, happy endings and total ex-gay fucking!

By now you’ve read the delicious tale of Dr. George Rekers, a leading advocate for ex-gay junk science, being photographed coming back from Europe with a young blond “assistant” he hired from Rentboy.com. He hired the boy, he insists, merely to carry his luggage. At least that was the first draft of the tale.

The story changed within 24 hours, as his cohorts on the religious right dropped him off their sites. Now Dr. Rekers claims he was “ministering” to a confused young lad, for by definition all athletic young men who shyly sell themselves on Rentboy.com with promises of a “smooth, sweet, tight ass” and a “perfectly built 8 inch cock (uncut)” must be confused. And to such sweet and perfect and guileless confusion (see photo at left), our 61-year-old Christian crusader was uniquely qualified to minister.

For one thing, Rekers was actually a Baptist minister, though that is not how he made his mark in the world. As a professor of Neuropsychiatry & Behavioral Science, Dr. Rekers spent his life trying to reclassify homosexuality as a psychosis.

In this effort, he co-founded with James Dobson the vile Family Research Council, a Christian lobbying group focused, in actuality, on criminalizing all aspects of homosexuality. Rekers is also an officer of the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), a faith-based center for the curing of homosexuality that the American Psychiatric Association has condemned as a sham.

NARTH, when it is not damaging the usually young Christian kids sent to it by their parents, is busy inveighing against the longstanding consensus of mental health professions that homosexuality is normal, positive, and not a mental disorder. Leading the charge, Dr. Rekers (at right, December to Rentboy’s May) most recently turned up in Florida, in 2008, to testify as a so-called expert witness against gay adoption.

And yet there he is in the photos arriving at Miami International Airport, fresh from London, Rome and Madrid, all the fleshpots, as the preachers used to say, of Europe, with his rentboy in tow. Rentboy, by the way, is not carrying even so much as a flight bag, let alone luggage. The Miami New Times reported that Dr. Rekers was humping his own baggage cart all the way through customs. (read the full article)

Gay politics do not go easy on those who practice outright denial of truth about sexuality. We are hard on those who say that our relationships are just transient conditions, or that God wants to change us. Even when we know the people preaching those views are secretly gay themselves, we condemn them.

Ted Haggard and his allies are our favorite targets of criticism. We know that he is not without his hidden torments – to pursue an anti-gay religious philosophy and believe, wholeheartedly, that same-sex sexual contact will lead you to Hell, yet be unable to restrain that very human desire, is surely a never-ending nightmare.

We are hard on those who tell us – in spite of all evidence – that we can magically convert to Leave It To Beaver-style heterosexuality, because those people do have the power to torture us through their vice-grip on the Republican party and public policy.

They get their way more often than not; their whim to have everybody else conform to a certain view trumps our interest in pursuing our own happiness, and even our allies in politics back down or appear impotent. So when a person with an obvious same-sex attraction joins the anti-gay cause, we disown them as gay people and hope they will be bountiful in moral failures. (read the full article)

“These are the Armies of The Night. They are 60,000 strong. They outnumber the cops five to one. They could run New York City.”

If you’ve ever been unfortunate enough to have an insane person in your life, then you know the red flags that indicate you’re in the presence of a troubled mind. I’m not talking charming eccentricity or uneasy mercurialness. I mean batshittery.

Conspiracy-related paranoia is key for the unstable. There’s always some form of shadow government or encroaching social malaise that only they and the like-minded can see coming. A wildly inflated sense of self-importance is also integral; something about them makes them so special that powerful forces are uniting to destroy or discredit them. Secret societies — the Illuminati, Satanists, Communists, and aliens (the illegal kind and the invading variety) — are typical oppressor fixations.

Lately I’ve been positing that extreme racist and ethnist reactions may be a form of mental illness themselves. The causal and “enlightened” forms of prejudice — the kind you have to awkwardly dance around as you argue you can spot an undocumented worker by the type of footwear they sport — are character flaws, but the sort of convulsive, visceral kind that revolves around the idea that our arch nemeses Hawaii and Kenya would collude to put a Manchurian Candidate in the White House is a whole different bag. (read the full article)

Ah, Everytown.

Remember the good ol’ days — good for some, at least — before we had Muslim Presidents, civil rights, hippies, working women, vegans, and non-lobotomized gays? Don’t you wish you could retreat into those preserved-in-amber Towns That Dreaded Sundown and escape all this terrifying Communist cha-cha-change?

Me neither, but such towns-that-never-were — the Mayberrys, Hootervilles, and Pleasantvilles — are sacred in some circles, and now Riverdale, home of the Archie Gang, just got a little bigger thanks to the arrival of a new addition. I’m talking about new kid on the block Kevin Keller, Riverdale’s first openly (and readers are emphasizing that modifier) gay transplant who’ll be hitting the pages come September.

Since everything in Post-Dubya U.S.A. is a convoluted Liberal conspiracy designed to corrupt children and take something away from the God Wads, Kevin’s entrée is, natch, polarizing, and the Gays with their fiendish insistence on existing are the culprits. Reaction from the Freepers is typically subtle: “An extremely marginal and diseased viewpoint,” “Giving the Arabs yet another reason to seek nuclear weapons…,” and “Next we will see a misunderstood islamofascist terrorist” are the more clever examples of the ‘Merican perspective. And hey, that’s the go-to reaction for the American Right: take two words that scare you and/or you don’t understand and combine them, thereby creating a red-baits-bull buzzword that makes even less sense when conjoined. Kevin’s “Bitch — you serious?” face says it all. (read the full article)