The Plight of Gay Conservatives

SourceURL:file://localhost/Users/elliottbreeden/Desktop/Postbox%20Submissions @font-face { font-family: “Times New Roman”; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: “Times New Roman”; }table.MsoNormalTable { font-size: 10pt; font-family: “Times New Roman”; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }

The problem with liberalism is that it’s founded on charity and pity—as opposed to a leftism based on solidarity and justice. Nothing epitomizes the inadequacy of liberalism like the place of the gay establishment, so quick to couch rights claims such as marriage equality in the language of the aggrieved middle-class taxpayer. (“What do you mean I can’t have what I want? I PAY MY TAXES!”)

But then there are the gay conservatives, the mystifying people (mostly white men, of course) who buy into all the wrong arguments about the failed Obama presidency, and make liberal hypocrisy and elitism far more palatable. From the ashes of Log Cabin (are they even still around?) we have GoPAC, with Chris Barron and Jimmy LaSalvia mouthing off at the helm. Arguably, you can spin it as a net boon for humanity that gay conservatives can exist at all, but that’s glib and ridiculous. They’re terrible. They’re the worst. And they’re ours.

It’s a dirty little secret—or perhaps, a suppressed fact—that apart from white people in the Upper South, the only demographic of any significance voted more Republican in 2008 (27%) than in 2004 (23%) was LGBT people. That’s amazing, and it never gets a mention.

There are more gay conservatives than there were, judging by CNN’s exit polls.

(Another dirty secret is that black people are not to blame for Prop. 8, but luckily the flare-up of tensions didn’t seem to last. If anything, L.A. County, which narrowly voted in favor of banning same-sex marriage in California, tilted the results way more than the state’s comparatively miniscule number of black people ever could).

 

Anyway, why the fuck would LGBT people vote Republican? Being conservative is one thing, but voting for a party that specifically, and with vitriol, condemns your very existence is another. You can hold your nose and vote for a corrupt Democrat once in a while, but choosing the bad side at the top of the ticket is quite something.

And they’re kind of ascendant again. Now we have news that Ann Coulter has joined the board of GOProud as its “gay icon.” Leaving aside the question of whether or not to retire that term, what does she bring them? I would guess that more than anything else, it’s legitimacy for their role as gadfly, a tiny organization with low membership that can vault itself into the conversation by virtue of its own status as a paradoxical and mildly interesting curio.

Ann Coulter is an outspoken irritant.  She bothers liberals, even though she’s part of the ceaseless chorus of distractions and wields no power, and raises their blood pressure in ways that wonkier people can’t. Mitt Romney, if president, would appoint guys who would gut the welfare state and turn us into a plutocracy once and for all, but they’re just nerds and nothing they do will ever go viral. What would GOProud want with them? Better to get the flashiest attention whore who opposes everything about gay people and calls them names.

It’s easy to caricature gay conservatives as either victims of mental illness or such rich, selfish bastards that they don’t care about anything but their fucking money (essentially the stereotype of the childless, pampered DINK couple, but curdled and bitchy). A more compelling point is the discomfort, bordering on outright panic, that a lot of gay people share with a lot of straight people.

It’s not socially acceptable to be a gay man living an openly gay life who says things like, “I might be gay, but at least I’m not a faggot. I don’t dress like that or talk like that.” (You do hear same-gender-attracted people say these things, but it’s usually a rationalization for why they aren’t actually gay). Doubtless, this is a widely held, albeit private, opinion.

And once in a while, you do hear a gay conservative express antipathy for flamboyant fags. (Usually, the conservatives have total gay face and frosted highlights and a lisp themselves). So there is no small measure of self-hatred at work, the same kinds of things that armchair psychology clearly dictates are wrapped up in fatherly disapproval over sons who suck at sports and sit with the girls at recess, and all that. Joining the uppermost echelon of the Establishment as away to prove yourself isn’t entirely unsympathetic; it’s a variation on the underdog theme. And power is intoxicating, so why not get closer to it?

I can also see a perverse form of hedonism. Beyond starfucking Ann Coulter, it’s pretty apparent that the empire is heading off a cliff, and unless the Chinese are about to whip out some really amazing technological shit, we’re going to take the planet with us. We’re in the vicinity of Peak Oil, we probably passed the point of no return on atmospheric carbon emissions already, and with seven billion mouths gnawing at the future, Peak Water might be at hand. Eventually, we’re going to hit Peak Pottery Barn and Peak Ibiza and Peak Fun. Why not enjoy life now and push for change that maximizes your medium-term gains?

But I think the real motivation is resentment. This is something you find among black conservatives, too—a bristling at the assumption that “because I am visibly a part of Tribe X, I must therefore think and vote in a way mandated by Tribe X.” (Except black conservatives have a handy discourse of enslavement and plantations and Democrats-as-Uncle Toms that is inflammatory and inane).

I share this. In San Francisco, some absurd organization called t Alice B. Toklas Democratic club endorses people for office based on whether or not they are themselves LGBT. Could that be any more pseudo-intellectual, tribal or crass?

 

(I don’t know how well that works, but I’m sure a lot of gay people automatically vote gay without any further engagement with the candidates vis-à-vis their own interests, or those of more marginalized groups of people than, say, the pitiful, dispossessed homos of 21^st century San Francisco.)

With conservatives, it’s the opposite—they resent the entire apparatus, and envision themselves as lone wolves crusading against a system that includes gay liberals as insiders. Again, it’s all too easy to pathologize this as “conservatives prefer absolutes, liberals love nuance.” But the gay conservative critique is subsumed into an overall investment in the system.

It’s not that liberals don’t do it, too. Gay marriage inevitably and frictionlessly led to giant gay weddings and gay banns published in the SundayStyles section. Commodication of the lifestyle trumps everything else, and LGBT people in urban America are both the very opposite of a persecuted class and conspicuously not joining the fight with, say, other citizens of urban America who are having a rough go with foreclosures and unemployment.

That said, the resentment among gay conservatives, if it has a point at all, it’s a mystery to me. I suspect, deep down, that the real purpose is simply to announce their existence. It’s a case of perpetual coming out, combined with activism’s worst impulses. In the end, it’s pure Kabuki, territorial seizures of a piece of a pie we all know is shrinking.

Civil Unions in Illinois

Tony Perkins on the new law, which isn’t even as progressive as neighboring Iowa: “The so-called Religious Freedom Protection and Civil Union Act has already done more harm to religious freedom than good. The Roman Catholic diocese in Rockford has announced that it will close its doors on the church’s adoption program before subjecting children to placement in homosexual homes. Like it did in Massachusetts and Washington, D.C., the Catholic Church refused to violate its convictions. Unfortunately, it’s only a matter of time before other dioceses follow suit. For the church, this is an act of self-defense. Without a religious exemption, the law makes programs like this one vulnerable to lawsuits or state budget cuts. Much to the frustration of the bill’s own sponsor, the state refused to carve out special protections for the religious organizations like this one. And now the state’s neediest children will be paying for it.”

First, he’s saying that because the Catholic Church is a whiny bitch that’ll fuck over needy kids just to spite fags, it’s not actually the Church’s fault.

Second, I can’t count  how many times I’ve heard that marriage fairness/non-discrimination in employment/not getting the shit beat out of you constitutes “special rights” for gays. It’s been the right’s most effective shorthand for decades, playing up the politics of resentment to thwart homo justice as part of the larger campaign to divide the have-nots against each other. Now Perkins is kvetching that churches don’t get special exemptions. Well, which is it?

Third, I take issue with the phrase “Family Research Council.”  They’re not researching families, or anything at all, as far as I can tell.  It’s not a council if it’s always the same spokesman who never seems to refer to any group of Christian elders. And “family” is really just supposed to be an all-purpose dog whistle meaning “we’re not gay, liberal, pro-uterus, pro-children or pro-childlessness.” It’s awful.

“Family” is supposed to be some kind of affirmation of life by denying everything fun. It’s as creepy a virtue as “decency.”

Boycotting Donald Trump

Donald Trump and I are both from Queens, New York.  In both cases, that statement is both true and not entirely true.  My birth certificate says QUEENS, NY on it and because Queens is a borough I was technically born in the City of New York–in Long Island Jewish Hospital, on the Nassau County border.  But I lived my entire life until my freshman year of college in suburban Williston Park, a middle-class town on Long Island that was probably 97% white and Catholic at the time of my birth.  So it’s both true and not exactly true that I’m from Queens.

Donald Trump was born in Queens and, in spite of a very high-profile bankruptcy in the late 80s, has exemplified throughout his life a sort of parody of the glitzy Manhattan lifestyle available only to the very few–most of them, like him, born into privilege already.  So it is both true and not so very true that he’s from Queens.

And now he’s leading the Republican primary.  Newly converted to birtherism and obviously gifted with the ability to sniff out a marketing opportunity, Donald Trump is the choice of a plurality of GOP voters.  But, nineteen months away from Election 2012, does anyone think that this gaffe-prone asshole with fewer core convictions than even Mitt Romney will somehow secure the nomination?  Pardon my skepticism.

Trump’s a homophobe now, too.  This has nothing to do with pandering to his new audience and everything to do with the rabid hatred found in New York corporate circles and in the upper tiers of the hotel industry generally.

In spite of sophisticated liberals’ general disdain for the sordid horse race aspects to America’s permanent-election culture, we are now supposed to boycott all things Donald Trump. (As if anyone with taste hasn’t already passively boycotted him and his brassy monstrosities for twenty-five years or more.)

That’s not stopping GLAAD.  That circle jerk of media A-gays has issued the call–will You, gay traveler or straight supporter of the gays’ right to lavishly-appointed suites with commanding southern exposure, accept?

I want to cry.  I’ve taken flak for my curmudgeonly stance on gay marriage, which, when softened up by just hanging out with my married gay friends, I know is just a natural manifestation of gay people in love wanting to be happy.  But I’m just not going to get over this one.

The AOL article JoeMyGod links to says it all.  The threats about the “gay dollars” going elsewhere, the mealymouthed concern trolling for the purity of the Trump brand–it’s as ugly as it is irrelevant to the struggle of most LGBT Americans, or most Americans generally, who were never going to stay in a Trump hotel anyway.

I’m starting to think about gay rights as an analogy to Catholicism–each is lovely in the abstract, with superior artistic traditions, but increasingly hideous as practiced.  To wit, the LGBT movement is essentially a vehicle for incredibly entitled white people to bitch and moan about their oppression until the standing army of 15 million Americans without jobs finally gets the message or something.  Just as the “I pay my taxes!” rant lurks behind all too many petitions for the right to marry, here we see the specter of wealth less spectral than ever.

“How is it even possible that I can’t get what I want?” is sort of the new ethos, which just doesn’t sound like what the subaltern might say if she could speak.  And as a corollary, “I’m affluent enough to afford the delusion of grandeur that purchasing luxury item A in lieu of luxury item B will bring positive social change,” is absolutely the worst kind of activism.

And may I remind the Gay Travel Agents Association (a mighty alliance of warm bodies out there on the picket lines, I’m sure) that the president’s coy dithering about his evolving position on gay marriage until, say, 60% of the electorate no longer hates gays, is not courageous.  And it’s approximately as sincere as Donald Trump’s zealous homophobia, which is rooted in self-serving machinations related to business and his need for us all to pay attention to him.

Really, it’s very simple.  If some horrid rich Christian Republicans banded together to “boycott” (which of course means showily parade their own grievance at without much regard for the final result) some airline or hotel or whatnot for being too queer-friendly, sure, I’d roll my eyes at the underlying philosophy but I’d be more grossed out by the form of their protest: We, a subset of the rich, are peeved, and will withhold our vast affluence from certain channels of idle entertainment until we get what we want.

Suck it, Trump!  Suck it, Latina chambermaids!  How can we protest the entire state of Arizona again while we’re at it?

This is just a different We, a liberal We more fun to hang out with than the right-wing We, but I have a hard time experiencing empathy for the oppressed upper class irrespective of voting patterns, and in any case my allegiance to the tribe of faggotry doesn’t run that deep.

Images of the Child Faggot

Why is the specter of the gay child so terrifying?

It’s tied into the beguiling disturbance to the force that sexualized children of any kind represents. But it’s deeper. The conservative myth about gay people, which has more or less receded into the background lately, follows the logic that since gay people by definition cannot or do not reproduce, we must be recruiting among the impressionable and young. Therefore, there can be no gay children. This plots children somewhere on an axis between totally asexual and “naturally” heterosexual but with suppressed or latent sexualities.

So gay kids are scary, and media representations of gay kids scarier still. (Obviously, no one knows about the J Crew kid’s sexuality, but it’s not really important). Dumb people have quite the nose for sniffing out indoctrination, perverted social engineering and anything that can be traced back to the original plot wherein America just started going off the rails at some point. (They don’t know what transgender means exactly, but they can rail against it the way they rail against gay marriage. Contrast these trendy aberrations against the sterling track record of gender-normative parenting and opposite-marriage.)

Fine.  Conservatives are dumb; see world history for illustrations of this. But although Jon Stewart is nobody’s idea of a spokesman for LGBT populations, or even really an official mouthpiece of American liberalism, his otherwise accurate zingers reveal the absence of a better response.  We’ve got ample gay teenagers in the public mind now.  So why can’t we just admit that there are gay kids, too?

The real question is, Why can’t anyone prominent admit that the continuing production of new gay people is what it is: inevitable, normal and neutral–even positive?

Only recently has anyone been daring enough to broach the subject of gay children. Aside from a benevolent hostility to kids in general and reproduction specifically (I cop to this), it’s hard to see why: kids are heartwarming to most people, and blogs like Born This Way are fucking adorable.

At bottom, no one has yet had the courage to say the obvious. Beyond the ridiculousness of thinking the gay rights movement is a decadent late-empire anomaly that some return to a mythologized past will cleanse America or the West of, the future will be as gay as the present and for that to happen there have to be gay kids, gay babies and future fag fetuses–right now.

I’m iffy on the “born” in “born this way,” since it’s more likely a product of “treated-like-and-thus-created-as,” but that’s not really the point. The point is that the odious, self-congratulatory gay establishment which celebrates speech police bullshit like Kobe Bryant’s $100,000 fine for using BOTH f-words (would the penalty be reduced if he’d just said “faggot”?) doesn’t have the balls to stand up and say, yes, it’s a good thing for the world that there are little fags and dykes running around, if only because those kids already exist and should grow up to be happy and not have to be consoled that “it gets better.”

But also because difference is good for it’s own sake, and because they’re likely to become more interesting people than the assholes who hate them.

Butte-Fucking

So apparently gay sex is still illegal in Montana, eight years after Lawrence v. Texas made all those laws unconstitutional, and an attempt at decriminalization failed today.  I’m a little surprised, actually.  Montana is nobody’s idea of progressive paradise, but both their senators are Democrats and its stark emptiness always felt more at home with Mountain Time Zone libertarianism than with intrusive, Jesus-based conservatism.

But how amazing to know that if I were to get fucked in the ass by my boyfriend in the adorable city of Bozeman or the hardscrabble mining outpost that is Butte, I could get hauled off to jail.  (Bozeman is sort of the Castro to Butte’s SoMa, the Chelsea to its Bushwick, the Vauxhall to its Hackney).

JoeMyGod wants someone to “orchestrate an arrest by a gay-friendly cop and then sue the fuck out of Montana, pronto,” but I’d almost rather just go to jail.  I totally admit that I’ve got a perpetual boner for the bad old days, and the whinging about gay oppression you still hear in spite of ever-escalating support for marriage fairness and our near-ubiquity on TV has always left a bad taste in my mouth.  People really suffered for our right to be you and me.

The ultimate fate of this legal relic is already known and no one’s life is going to be destroyed.  So lock me up for a crime of passion.  Nothing complements post-coital bliss than knowing it is indeed possible to strike a blow against injustice by ejaculating.  And it comes with a bonus prison shower scene.

Oscars: The Curious Slum-Milk of REVOLUTIONAR-E/Nixon

There is no reason to get irritated when mediocrity triumphs; that’s what the Oscars are for.  Of all the movies that have won Best Picture there’s really only about 3-4 that actually rank among the best of American film.  The last 15 years, starting with Forrest Gump, have been particularly egregious.  Now let’s dish.

Kate Winslet looked outstanding.

Tilda Swinton now occupies a nice of androgyny that even Annie Lennox would envy. She had no tits!

Freida Pinto was also totes beautiful.  Asymmetrical haute couture sari.  Rad.

Penelope Cruz is really hot but I don’t get the appeal of looking like a bride.

Meryl Streep had a cottage cheese stomach under that bland dress.  Sophia Loren looked like a Superfund site.

Jessica Biel looked like an ugly Evangeline Lilly in something Vanna White would wear on a Tuesday.

Natalie Portman might be the worst actress around but she’s very pretty.

Sarah Jessica Parker grosses me out.  Matthew Broderick is fat.

I actually liked what Miley Cyrus was wearing.  I hope she’s in on her own joke.

Amy Adams‘s necklace was totally hot.  At first I thought it was dumb to wear a dress the same color as the carpet but maybe she’s cool like that.

Beyonce is kind of in her own category.  I just don’t think it’s tenable to dismiss her in any way.

Anjelica Huston is arch-fabulous but she sort of looked like she was in character for a third Addams Family movie.

Marisa Tomei doesn’t age.

The only word for Viola Davis is radiant.

I honestly have no feelings toward Angelina Jolie whatsoever.  I don’t feel the glamour and I don’t care how many kids she adopts or how quickly.  Joan Rivers called her lips “an inflamed anus” and I can’t think of anything to top that.  Brad Pitt is starting to look a little busted.

Josh Brolin is a babe.  He’ll always be a Goonie to me.

I would bottom for Daniel Craig at a moment’s notice.

Ryan Seacrest is going to be a fixture at everything for the rest of our lives.

Mickey Rourke looked like he had some real trouble dressing himself after lavishing all those years in isolation, making Chinese Democracy.  He tacked more crap on himself than a Latin American military dictator reviewing troop formations.

*********************************** Milk

I’m glad for Sean Penn but Dustin Lance Black is gross!  Religious gay people possess an alarming selective blindness.  They can go through their lives with the knowledge that virtually everything monotheistic religions have to say about sex–especially the kind of sex they like to have–is wrong, but somehow they still believe in the bearded cloud who watches over us.

And the way in which DLB, like many gay “persons of faith,” pompously brandished his religiosity in a way that is “moving” and “poignant” was tedious.  There was no mention of how or why a gay person should embrace God in the first place, just a mild celebration of his declawed deity and Black’s own painful adolescence.  Yawn.  It’s like this piece in today’s Times, which goes out of its way to state the obvious and unnecessary point that no church should have to recognize any federal same-sex marriage.  As if that were the issue with marriage, ever.

Just as when middlebrow films “speak to” some important issue and leave their sentimental paws all over it, Dustin Lance Black’s speech will probably be taken by boring homos and by the gay-tolerant public as some kind of landmark oration.  Even though he didn’t advocate anything or advance any intellectually cogent way to reconcile his sexuality with his religion, he probably played a major role in normalizing deviance, at least to people who believe in the transformative power of commercial movies and who assume the road to equality runs through an awards show.  “Touching upon” the issue by mentioning it is sufficient.

I can’t think of a better example of the Death of the Author, or the complete disconnect between a text and its authorial intent, than between Black and Milk.  Milk was way more progressive than people are giving it credit for.  Harvey Milk slept with boys he pulled off the street and put them to work in his campaign.  That’s amazing, and the film didn’t shy away from it.  The specter of the sexual faggot, unlike images of neutered public homos like the guys on Queer Eye, remains transgressive.

Dustin Lance Black’s acceptance speech and Milk‘s general reception remind me of another dynamic.  It gets under my skin when people refer to my boyfriend as my partner after I just used the word boyfriend.  Because while they’re telegraphing their facility with being around gay people and their gay relationships, and they want me to know that they respectfully believe my love for him deserves the same dignity as anyone’s love for anyone else, the word boyfriend still makes people uncomfortable.  It suggests kissing and possibly fucking, and people prefer to desexualize the bestowing of dignity.

Get over it, people.  We fuck.  And get over it, Dustin Lance Black.  There’s no God.  And your movie wants to be our boyfriend but you, your God and the movie-going public who share your belief in Him want Milk to be our husband.

The World Might Be Collapsing, but Here’s A Bunch of Good Things, Including Cookies

For today, I refuse to get worked up about cartoons in the New York Post where the punch line is apparently “Black people are monkeys” or how depressing it is for the Obama Administration to continue some egregiously malevolent Bush anti-terrorism policies or how Goldman Sachs executives are openly stealing bailout money or how Detroit will have a population of 500 by 2020.

Here are links to nice things.

First, the EPA may regulate carbon dioxide.  Really, they just have to or we’re all fucked.  This is technically a minor good thing that relates to a strongly terrible thing, but we’ll take it.

Second, NYU students have occupied a floor of the Kimmel “student center.”  I got my entire secondary education at that school, and Kimmel is a hideous trainwreck whose real purpose as the student union at a university with no campus is to boot students out for donor luncheons and special events, because NYU is actually a vast real estate empire with auxiliary teaching duties it maintains to keep up appearances.

I was on the speech and debate team and my freshman year (’99-’00) we had a practice space and an office — the bad old days.  By the time I was in grad school (’04-’05), I had to coach the kids in an open lounge where everyone was talking and moving around.  The more buildings NYU erects or conquers, the less space there seems to be.  They’re like Robert Moses, building highways to eradicate traffic.

The students’ demands are a greate combination of considerate, radical and achievable.  Opening Bobst Library to the general public is especially progressive.  As of now, it’s a hermetically sealed Borg cube perched at the corner of Bloomberg Square Park.  (When you graduate, you’re permitted to return only once.)

Third, the inebriated fun of the Bay to Breakers race might not go the way of Halloween in the Castro.  (I realize the possible laziness of linking to the NYT from SF about an SF event, but googling it and searching wordpress didn’t come up with anything better).

Finally, delicious things.  I want to make this.

And I’ve been making chocolate chocolate chip cookies compulsively since finishing the lemonade cleanse, and I think I’ve achieved jouissance.  I follow this recipe with some variations.

First: instead of 1/4 tsp of salt I add a heaping 1/2 tsp.  I swear nothing comes out tasting salty and the ability of salt to intensify the taste of everything is particularly effective with the butter.

Second: double the vanilla, from 2 tsp to 4.  This enables you to cut back on the sugar by maybe 1/8 – 1/4 cup.

Third, I also substitute some brown sugar for a bit of the white, so that the total amount of sugar is a little more than 1 1/4 cups, of which at least half a cup is brown.

Fourth, nuke the butter till half of it is liquified.  You really need to watch the microwave; no multi-tasking during this part!  I like to compare sticks of butter melting to the implosion of the Twin Towers.  Once it’s clear that the FDNY are all dead, stop the microwave.

Fifth, mix it by hand.  It’s not hard, you have fewer utensils to clean and I really believe that a heterogeneous mixture–i.e., with little lumps of butter–is the shit.  If you can’t tell, I love butter.

Sixth, refrigerate the batter until it’s as cold as the fridge.  Sure, it’s a pain in the ass waiting and having stiffer batter, but if you’re like me, you actually make cookies as an excuse to eat raw dough anyway.

Just ate the last cookie.

VD: Valentine’s Day

Awwww.  I know they’re in on it because it’s a great store.

There’s something so romantic about defleshing big pieces of meat.  Together, as a couple.

“Don’t Divorce Us” Pro-Same Sex Marriage Video

This is very sweet.  (Can’t embed it for some reason.  Grrr.)

Firemen.  Unsmiling bears with their daughter.  Pictures of old lesbians with big families–that’s the sucker punch, I think.  Who wouldn’t be moved by that?  It’s even better than Men Who Look Like Old Lesbians.

The fact that it’s Ken Starr totally overrides my antipathy to marriage.  What a douche.  Suck the rainbow, you fucking douche.

Gay Marriage Inches Closer Towards Its True Form

Check it.

There are two purposes to same-sex marriage.  One is convincing yourself that you’re normal, even though you should count yourself fortunate that you’re not.   The second is to make sure you get all the $$$$ your rich significant other accumulated until their death but bizarrely chose not to bequeath to you specifically as they are already completely entitled to do.

I’m so grateful to the legal system for pioneering equality in the form of millions of dollars for a no-doubt radical queer!

(Again, for the record, there is no intellectually coherent conservative or religious argument against same-sex marriage.  It still sucks, though.)