The Ex-Gay Movement.

In terms of actual effectiveness it ranks down there with Faith Healing, The Secret, and The Zen Diet, but that hasn’t stopped self-styled experts in human sexuality from preying (heh) on the hopes and money of far too many vulnerable and confused individuals out there. Sure, you might think that rewiring the complex and fluid human libido à la A Clockwork Orange is a pretty tall order, but you’re just underestimating the power of the will. It worked for Peter Pan and The Little Engine that could!

While touring America’s Heartland in an effort to expose the deleterious effects of sundry ex-gay pseudo-therapies — whose big collective Ta-Da! amounts to producing not functioning heterosexuals but celibate gays going through the motions of sham marriages — is not the most enviable prospect, Truth Wins Out’s Wayne Besen is leading the charge with an eleven-state speaking tour.

“The message of this tour is that you can’t ‘pray away the gay’ and LGBT people are fine just the way they are,” said Besen, founder of Truth Wins Out. “Organizations that claim they can change one’s sexual orientation are committing consumer fraud and harming a great number of people.”

The tour schedule is available here, and if you’re unable to attend, please donate to ensure that the Truth Wins Out.

The latest ad full of contrived gay controversy likely to be pitched for airing during the Super Bowl, certain to garner jeers from both sides of the debate before getting banned, thus achieving its actual desired intent. Maybe — maybe? — we could just have products directly marketed to us as consumers without being treated like risqué sight gags for drunk-ass sports fans? Seriously, ad execs: a magical Mommy/Girlfriend/Blue Fairy doesn’t just waft into my apartment every week with an assemblage of cleaning products in tow, partnered and single gay dads sometimes have to give their kids cough syrup, and not every athletic man who uses high endurance deodorant is alternately thinking about basketball and the ladies every other minute of the day.

Hat tip to Joe My God.

Earlier this month, the Proposition 8 appeal in California was almost bumped from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to the California Supreme Court after the federal courts questioned the legal standing of the defendants of the proposition. These defendants include the former Governor (Schwarzenegger), Attorney General (Jerry Brown), county clerks, and state health department officials, who forthrightly do not support the proposition. What does this mean?

The appeal is getting closer to federal courts, increasing the threat against Prop 8.

Political expectations aside, to commemorate the victories and losses in this civil rights battle over the past three years, I decided to watch the critically-acclaimed documentary 8: The Mormon Proposition. The film looks at the underbelly of this unprecedentedly-funded Proposition 8 to reveal its primary supporter and funder — the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (The Mormon Church, for all you faithfully agnostic and atheist folks). In addition to delving into the church’s involvement in the political fundraising, the film also explores the lobbying and religious support the church required from its congregation, and the results of church’s staunchly anti-gay agenda.

(read the full article)

Numbers.

Yes, they should be empirical, but like those pesky facts that make us feel so bad, can’t they just be spun to suit our needs? And really, shouldn’t they? For the children?

Stop8.org’s Matt Baume (friend of the show) deconstructs NOM’s latest numerically-challenged ad — complete with infantilizing moose mascot — targeting the Rhode Island Governor’s race.

Recent events may have you prioritizing issues like mental health care, holding political leaders responsible for their reckless demagoguery, and the frightful availability of weapons whose sole purpose lies in their ability to mow down an entire city block on your To Do List, but the brain trusts of NOM know that nothing — nothing — is a greater threat to the Union than the very idea of Jake and Trent getting hitched.

And sure, you could find an obscure Biblical passage that would help you convince a majority of Americans that, say, women shouldn’t be able to wear pants or Muslims should have a curfew, but referendums aren’t about attacking. They’re about defending.

Because tradition, like numbers, never seem to work in a minority’s favor.

Making films and television shows from the premise of a graphic novel or comic series seems to be all of the rage. Such graphic novels as Alan Moore’s The Watchmen, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim, and recently Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead have all been made into films or television series. The transition of these works into live action has popularized the graphic novel to a new demographic, outside of the perceived hipster or comic book store shut-in.

This new appreciation for the graphic novel has raised a few questions, such as, “Where are the mainstream gay characters in these works and when will they make it onto the big screen?” Some well-known graphics have made socially progressive leaps such as in Scott Pilgrim, who in the series (and movie)  has an openly gay roommate. While these steps are progressive, where are the unabashedly gay front men in the graphic-to-film series?

When you peel back the layers of the comic underworld there are plenty of classic gay comics and graphic novels to choose from. Stuck Rubber Baby, the 1995 Howard Cruse graphic novel that follows its main character, Toland Polk, through the civil rights movement and the acceptance of his homosexuality, is an award-winning graphic novel, certainly movie-worthy. Even Jeff Krell’s Jayson series — which is kind of like the gay version of Archie — would work! Regrettably, the world doesn’t seem quite ready for a gay on-screen super hero, even if he is just fighting racism.

I understand that A&E will probably never adapt Dykes To Watch Out For into a series, so for now I’m just praying for a gay zombie.

So superficially, I’m thinking that the casting of a trans man — which I’ll confess I’ve never had the opportunity to encounter — in the current cast of Argentina’s Big Brother (apparently, many nations have a variation on this human zoo experiment) was intended to act as a shocking rupture in the social fabric of the series’s hermetically-sealed narrative. The horror of self-contamination! The dread of difference! The paralyzing anxiety of having to share a living space with…one of them! I’m sure the producers were looking for arc somewhere along the lines of Boys Don’t Cry by way Just One of The Guys with a dash of Dressed To Kill to cap it all off.

And yet…

Something kind of magical seems to be going on here. In this footage, who’s the one person who seems unpretentious and real amid all the ego-preening and forced interaction? Here, Alejandro Iglesias completely undercuts the expectation of what hetero culture envisions a transsexual to be — male-to-female, overheated and overglossed, bitchy, campy, theatrical, unable to pass as one of them — and I hope genuinely takes the audience as off-guard as he does the other cast members.

Gender dysphoria is all the proof I need to see that capital N Nature is not an omnipotent puppet master beyond reproach, and all the tension and burden that comes with being born in the wrong body is on display here: the can-you-believe-it?! whispers that make him seem like a changeling, the careful apprehension about finding a trustworthy confidant(e), and all the tiny little things that the flock take for granted while the lone wolf looks on with quiet aspiration.

The One alone dreams of stepping outside the body and transcending its limitations, and the Many are too fixed in their own shells to wish that big.

Palling around with a scientist, a foreigner, and a Darwinian caveman? What’s next — a terrorist?

Being voiced by a woman connotes gender inclusivity and the slippery slope of cross-dressing.

Obvious encoded references to “bongs” as drug culture lingo. “Not a bong to spare!” We bet!

Instructing impressionable little Baby New Year to accept physical difference and cast off his God-given shame smacks of Liberal “If it feels good — do it!” propaganda.

“Same way with everybody else” = “Let’s have non-procreative gay sex and redistribute wealth!”

First it was supposed to be “groundbreaking.” Then it was supposed to be glossy, voyeuristic sexploitation. Then it was supposed to be a guilty pleasure none of us would admit to watching.

For most of us, it was just a gay take on Heathers we skipped.

For a show so relentlessly promoted and purportedly much-watched, Logo doesn’t exactly seem to be racing to renew its new signature show, The A-List: New York. Series like The Walking Dead and Boardwalk Empire have already been greenlit for sophomore runs, but despite finishing its fledgling year and capping it all off with a requisite reunion show, The A-List cast has yet to even hear anything definite from producers regarding renewal.

Cast member Reichen Lehmkuhl — weathering some bad press as of late — has been getting the chill from the network as well, citing a nebulous mid-January date as the cut-off for the yea or nea on a second season order.

Yoink! What does it all mean? Is there a critical mass even in the Reality TV landscape for venal, preening luxury (a show devoted to reigniting the freakin’ Gold Rush some two hundred years after that died out is by comparison a hit)? Were the series’s theatrics so transparently contrived that we just opted to watch trashy telenovelas instead? Or — or — have the machinations of Conservative gay quislings who voted with the GOP’s “I got mine — so fuck y’all!” platform created an antipathy toward the Gilded Gays who value personal fortune and social mobility above all else?

One of the readers at Joe My God beat me to the punch, but there’s one paraphrased classic movie line that perfectly sums up my personal schadenfreude toward everything A-List:

Who are they? Who were they? Who do they hope to be?

Wit so sharp it requires a scabbard and a tetanus shot.

Hat tip to Joe My God.