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)

When I was 14 years old, I thought I’d heard the call.

I knew I was gay, and had been begging God to make me straight. I did it through daily 20-minute sessions of devoted prayer, each concluded with a test: I’d get the swimsuit section of the latest department store catalog and stare at the men’s and women’s pages side-by-side to see if this time I was miraculously drawn to the bikini-clad women instead of the men.

It never worked.

As I realized my situation’s hopelessness, I did what many gay Catholics do and wondered if homosexuality was God’s way of calling me to priesthood. Priests don’t need to get married (they can’t), and as one I could still be respected and influential. Randomly, one of my friends said she dreamed of me as a priest, white-robed with a green stole draped around my neck, welcoming parishioners to Mass.

It was a sign. I was chosen. My torturous secrets – my suffering – were, in consistency with Catholic philosophy, to teach me compassion, and would bring good to the world. God works in mysterious ways.

When I was young, I was a proud Catholic. We were the religion of the oppressed: Irish, Polish, Puerto Rican and Italian immigrants whose arrival by boat gave the Statue of Liberty its iconic symbolism. We came from poor railroad workers in the Rocky Mountains and Mexican crop pickers in Texas and California. I was told that Jesuits laid the intellectual foundation for the peace movement during the Vietnam War. My mother said she never met a Catholic Republican; she said the idea was absurd because Catholics care about poor people. My beliefs were as much an ethnic and cultural identity as a religious one.

And then it hit.

When 9/11 shook the country, my church’s youth pastor (a non-ordained, married man who worked for the parish under the authority of the priest and would be the ultimate foil to my faith) responded with a prayer that all the Muslims be converted to Christianity, leaving a sour taste in my mouth. (read the full article)

For me, it’s the question that’s always the most effective in firing like a black arrow into the heart of the Fundamentalist dragon, felling it down to earth in a cloud of ash and fire:

Why are there gay animals?

Confront even the most strident sexual absolutist with this lone, almost child-like question, and a look of confounded frustration will come over them. Clearly stymied, they’ll never be able to give me even a halfheartedly assured reason for homosexuality existing in the animal kingdom. There’ll be some hurried allusion to God creating Adam and Eve in his own image, then something arcane about man being the master of beings that fly or walk on all fours will be trotted out.

The only conclusion that I can reasonably reach from it all is that Man is held to a higher standard of sexual decency than other life forms by his Sky Daddy. Cain and his whoever-the-hell-she-was wife were special. Her improbable existence has been justified by everything from Adam’s and Eve’s genes being so ideal that they permitted him to a marry a sister without fear of inbred mutation, to Cain marryin’ up an ape-woman member of the early hominids and producing those beastly “other races” whose genealogies lie in the mating of a perfect Aryan with a lesser being. They had to keep it classy. So…ewww either way.

Bambi and Thumper, however, are apparently allowed to throw it around the forest any which way they please. (read the full article)

The current boy-rape scandal in the Catholic Church is shaping up to be a Vatican Watergate. Like President Nixon, Pope Joseph Ratzinger’s fingerprints are all over a worldwide cover-up of child abuse at the hands of priests.

Back in 2005, the first wave of scandals broke in the United States. The immediate impulse of Vatican officials was to change the subject, as the Pope is trying (unsuccessfully) to do now. Blame was laid on “social change” and “homosexuals,” as if priestly abuse began in 1960 and gay men were unknown in a church where the clergy are forbidden to marry. At the time, our Senior Editor John Calendo responded to the tarring of all gay priests with the following post. (read the full article)

By now you’ve probably heard of Constance McMillen, the 18-year-old senior at Mississippi’s Itawamba High. Barred by the school board from attending her senior prom with a female date while clad in a tuxedo, her “Nobody puts Baby in a corner!” refusal to be shown the door ultimately lead the board to call the whole dance off.

Yes, it sounds like something along the lines of Footloose, and typically whenever a long-in-the-tooth council of elders decides to put otherwise good kids on a stranglehold of a short leash, there will be push back. A girl going to a dance with another girl? In pants? The next thing you know, these little tarts will want to ride horses with their legs spread, or not be traded away into sexual slavery by their families for six gourds of milk and a goat. Calamity! (read the full article)

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. (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)