Love is the drug…

Roxy Music said it best: the things that fulfill us can often be the very yawning wells that consume us.

Society conditions us to believe that institutions like family and marriage — along with “pure” sentiments like love, hope, and faith — are indisputably positive forces that compel us to act rightly. A lovely sentiment, but still false.

Any curtain-closing kiss can fade to deep, devastating black even after the credits roll, and anyone who’s loved too well knows the treacherous paths our hearts can lead us down — a desert-spanning Lost Highway dotted with signs reading “Danger Ahead” and “Dead End” under the shadowy wingspan of the looming vulture.

For all the lurid curiosity lavished upon sex crimes, too often it’s overlooked that love crimes can be the more monstrous and psychologically weird offenses; this is the dynamic in which selves start to inextricably entwine, superegos begin to topple, and shared fantasies of blood and death find an outlet. Pair killers — Bonnie and Clyde, Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez (aka The Lonely Hearts Killers), and “Schoolgirl Killers” Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka — bound by inhibition-drowning desire and lethal codependency turn up again and again in the annals of True Crime, each seeming to strive to top the vicious, predatory eroticism and all-cylinders-to-oblivion self-destruction of the duo that preceded them. Soul-mirroring love is the goal we all strive for, but we’re never admonished of the peril of fulfillment, the folly of storybook love; sometimes, finding our idealized mate signals the very crack of doom, and as we lose ourselves in symbiotic abandon, the question becomes not so much Happily Ever After? as it is:

Will we kiss or kill?… (read the full article)

This is a horrible old misogynistic coot having a rant about his hatred for well-heeled bitches and fancy men who drive luxury vehicles and flaunt their health club-sculpted tails. Once, on a busy city street, a nasty fat man (with a little dog) who clearly hated “provocative” young men with high-sitting asses like me sidled up to my illicit shape and viciously whispered “Don’t get too gay.” I threw him down to the ground, but did not harm the blameless pup, who was clearly a class act and embarrassed enough. Also, I wasn’t the least bit sorry, which I think in retrospect marked my descent into Fight Club-esque bad boyism.

Anyway, we know now that American prosperity is actually based on cronyism, greed, thievery, and emerging from the right vagina, and that the Free Market is a fantasy perpetrated by bone-throwing psychopaths with business degrees. I too despise our bastard plutocracy and the soul-deadening race to toil for a life of comfort and leisure, so whenever I pull a knife on a broker or banker who cuts ahead of me in line because he thinks I’m insignificant, I have to wonder if this man isn’t inside me. There is truth in every seething, broad-daylight rant.

Continue, toothless, raving demagogue.

So I’m feeling a trifle jealous of Amanda Knox today. I know, she likely got railroaded by a botched investigation into the murder of her roommate, said inquiry fueled by the machinations of a witch-hunting prosecutor of questionable ethics and even more questionable sanity. And yeah, she didn’t do herself any favors in the press thanks to some flippantly weird behavior in the courtroom. Maybe her appeal will snatch her from the jaws of a 26-year murder rap, or maybe she’s up the creek, Italian style.

But still…get him on the left. Not only does she get to look like a captive elven princess, but she’s sporting a kicky pixie ‘do that will only turn on her legions of admirers even more — plus she’s being escorted by a hot-ass Italian cop who appears to have just swaggered on in from the panels of a fumetti. Lucky bitch! (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)

We all have our limits in life.

I can’t add in my head. I can’t sleep in an unfamiliar place. I will never get the appeal of Glee.

Also, I have a problem with frequenting adult retailers.

I don’t know how common a situation it is for others, but it’s not unusual for straight men in my life to ask me to purchase porn on their behalf; apparently, having a gay guy act as their procurer mollifies the guilt many straight men associate with buying smut. Though I’m partial to mail order myself, I personally get a kick out of going to a newsstand and paying for a copy of Barely Legal or Juggs and having the vendor look at me before his gaze wanders to Torso or Honcho. And yes, it’s hard not to laugh as I choose a title like Sex-Starved Fuck Sluts, H.R. Muff ‘N Stuff, or Big Trouble In Little Vagina that fits his/their specifications.

The problem is other men. Please — please — don’t try to pick me up in a sex shop. (read the full article)

When I was a sophomore in college, I got an instant message in response to an informal blog I kept on LiveJournal. The message was from a 17-year-old blue-eyed boy in Tennessee who had longish blond hair and a penchant for eyeliner and taking pictures of himself, as I gathered from his public profile and his own blog.

He was clearly intelligent, but cared little for grammar and peppered his language with gay slang and a sassy Southern drawl. He said he wanted my opinion on some poems he had written, noting that I occasionally posted poetry on my journal.

He told me his name was Chris. Most unsolicited messages I got back then were guys asking for my “stats” or wanting to jerk off on webcam, so I considered Chris unique and kept him as a contact. He was deeply sexual and angered about the fact that the LiveJournal group would not let him post naked pictures of himself anymore because he was underage, but Chris seemed to use sexuality not so much for pleasure but as a way to negotiate his identity and politics. He never tried to bring me in to it. He was online often and sent me poems every day, and I got the sense that he spent many hours behind a computer screen.

I was a recent ex-Catholic, and had replaced its gap in my spiritual life with an interest in astrology, which I saw as a gay-friendly belief system that filled religion’s promise that everything in life had a direction and a purpose. Chris talked me into giving him my phone number so I could discuss his natal chart (his sun was in Sagittarius and his moon in Cancer, if I remember correctly, which was about as in-depth as my astrological knowledge was) and about his life. (read the full article)

Everything was bigger in the ’80s.

The greed. The hair. The shoulder pads. The himbos.

The Me Decade was all about proving you had enough cash to provide you with leisure time, and the fads it introduced are aptly era-specific to a tone set by the excesses of A.L.F., Xanadu, and American Psycho. Dad frequented the sports bar, Mom had her aerobics classes, and the kids played Laser Tag at the video arcade.

Even the strip club became a legitimate business venture in Reagan America. Gone were the days of low-rent joints with seedy-looking women doing the Pony while having the DTs and just-out-of-the-joint ex-con rough trade shimmying to sleazy disco tracks; the men had their upscale gentlemen’s clubs where doctors, brokers, and lawyers could take in the buffet as they scoped out single mothers, dental hygiene students, and touring porn stars on the pole. (read the full article)

Hat tip to CTRL+W33D.