Our Boy in D.C.: Lt. Dan Choi Hijacks HRC and Bravo @11:24 AM
The Human Rights Campaign stands as the the most well-connected and "influential" gay lobbying group in the United States. The repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell is tops among their legislative goal this year. But winter is melting to spring and there is nothing to show other than Congressman Barney Frank's rumblings that repeal may not happen until 2011—when the 2012 elections, in which Democrats have 23 Senate seats up for reelection, are well gearing up. So HRC was forced to break out the big guns down in D.C. Who else to force the arc of history other than a reality show star? READ MORE 8
And That's When I Clicked "Close Tab": Bizarre Anti-Gay Editorial Explanations Department @10:50 AM
"For years, we got the Christmas cards with the official family portrait — Roy Ashburn, his wife, kids and golden retriever, smiling for the camera. Political reporters tacked them up on their cubicle walls with the cards from other local politicians."
—The executive editor of the The Bakersfield Californian starts his explanation of why they couldn't cover the huge hypocritical gayness of CA State Sen Roy Ashburn with this "WHAT HUH? TACKED WHAT ON WHAT NOW?" moment. 14
Gay or Straight, Glasses Mean YOU ARE UNLOVABLE @2:55 PM
"The same-sex version of Taylor Swift's You Belong With Me, made by students at the University of Rocheseter, NY." [sic throughout.] 17
What Makes Your Movie Family-Friendly? (How Many Mommies Does Heather Have?) @12:15 PM
Florida gives a whopping 2%-of-budget tax credit to movies filmed in the state, but only if they're "family friendly." Now the state is trying to define "family friendly" in some tax cut legislation, and some legislators take it to mean movies without any "nontraditional family values." It's a fun semantic shift but mostly it's just to not give a tax credit to any movies with some gay in them. The best part is that this has inspired a rambling bit of hilarity from state Representative Stephen Precourt (R-ORLANDO, OBVS): "Think of it as like Mayberry. That's when I grew up — the '60s. That's what life was like. I want Florida to be known for making those kinds of movies: Disney movies for kids and all that stuff. Like it used to be, you know?" It's an impeccable word salad that he has thrown up here. 10
Gayvatar Dance Fever @9:26 AM
The current, short-lived mini-vogue at gay circuit parties and megaclubs? Gayvatar sexploitation. It even makes sense conceptually, according to a club publicist: "The drama of the movie parallels the drama in the nightlife world. Everyone's calling the police on each other, liquor license inspectors, booking celebrities against each other." Yes, just like on Pandora! 5
At Tax Time, Gays Turn To Accountants, Not Terrorism @12:30 PM
Come tax time, many of the gays find themselves in a tricky and possibly leaky lil' tax boat. Instead of flying planes into IRS buildings, however, which is simply inappropriate, most of them, you know, find ways to mitigate the consequences of a GOVERNMENT-RUN PROGRAM OF INEQUITY. Says one expert: "Heterosexual married couples 'can arrange their affairs any way they want without a tax burden, and generally that doesn’t happen for gay and lesbians.'" Where is the anthraxing and the outrage? Maybe gay people just don't ever have airplane pilots' licenses? 3
Awl pal Rod Townsend has started a website for homosexuals. He's staking out the "postfabulous" space, which I'm pretty sure I'm not in (I'm either pre-fabulous or so post-fabulous I can't remember fabulous?), but surely a rich vein. Anyway, go say hi. @1:55 PM 9
The Awl's Totally Gay Dance Weekend Party Radio: Episode 1 @4:49 PM
You would have no reason to know that all winter I've been attending night school, in pursuit of my Master's in Gay Mixmastery. (This is over at the Finishing School for Homosexualist Gentlemen, which, naturally, closed down for much of the week after the death of Alexander McQueen. It is in Chelsea?) In furtherance of my degree, I had to turn in a final class project, which, because it is now the weekend, we will share with the Internet for no good reason. READ MORE 29
"We’re talking about taking the penis of a man and putting it in the rectum of another man and wriggling it around in excrement. And you have to think, would I want that to be done to me?”
—New Hampshire State Representative Nancy Elliott? You're doing it wrong. @1:35 PM 38
It turns out that no one likes the word "homosexual" but they okay with "gay." (Hey! It's a chant!) @4:12 PM 14
Knifecrime Island Also Gayslur Island @3:20 PM
I really do love this English PSA about not calling people "faggot" and stuff, mostly because homophobic slurs are so much sexier in British! Anyway, now gays are mad about the PSA, of course—but only mostly because the Football Association, which did the PSA, wussed out at the last minute on its debut. Also? In the end I don't really think the PSA's conceit (that men say things at sporting events they wouldn't say elsewhere) works—don't English people call each other "bender" and "poofter" constantly in the office and on the Tube? I mean, that's how we roll in New York even, and we're not even a rapidly-devolving glassing-friendly penal colony of angry shit-faced louts. 9
"If masculinity, in Freudian terms, is a heavily fortified citadel, gay men are inside that fortress, undermining its foundations from within by being male yet violating the official (read: heteronormative) rules of what it means to be a man in America. It’s as if you got into the batsuit, only to find that the Joker was in there with you, naked and way too close for comfort."
—A perspective on American sports, high school gym class, Batman, the Super Bowl and the anxiety of those who can't stand to have those institutions questioned. @10:20 AM 11
Live: The Don't Ask, Don't Tell Hearings, with Ana Marie Cox @12:08 PM
Oh hi, we're having a Don't Ask, Don't Tell party, on the occasion of the Senate Armed Services Committee hearings today, hosted by Gay Friend In Chief Ana Marie Cox! And you're invited.
READ MORE 12
This should probably become an international incident soon, right? (So far, British politicians and Amnesty International have, to be fair, spoken out strenuously.) "Malawi's High Court refused on Thursday to release on bail a gay couple from a maximum security prison where they have been held for a month, saying it had denied their request for their own safety…. Police arrested Steven Monjeza, 26 and Tiwonge Chimbalanga, 20, in late December for getting engaged in a traditional ceremony. They were charged with unnatural practices between males and gross public indecency." This is the second time they have been denied bail. The punchline about the "their own safety" part is about how they are being beaten up in jail. 13
And Barack Obama will ask Congress (ask!) to repeal 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' in his speech tonight. @7:05 PM 8
New York City To Be Renamed Gaycrime Island? @9:29 AM
It really is very 80s out—not just for the weak, early-year movie season—but also outside the gay bars, where surveillance video captured an Air Force bomb defuser straight-up gaybashing some gays, and inside the gay apartments, where a temporary lover picked up at the gym is being sought in a brutal (and fatal) stabbing. Oh and in Queens, where hate crimes charges have been added to assault and robbery charges. (An event also captured on surveillance cameras. Maybe the modern panopticon has some upside?) 15
Sometimes, mostly when things are English, one cannot tell if they are straightforward or sarcastic or totally invented. This first-person essay? No idea. "True, I never liked football or fighting and I do make a beautifully light Victoria sponge when the need arises. But I shamble like a bloke, I burp and fart without shame and I’ve never really got Barbra Streisand. There was a little voice, lost long ago in the drowning din of my homosexuality, that still called quietly; the smothered, smaller voice of a boy who liked girls. And then, two summers ago, I met Olga. She was a knockout-looking Ukrainian, washed ashore as a waitress in a breakfast bar in Ocean City, Maryland." (via) 17
The economy may not be good for gay marriage, but gay marriage would be good for the economy, according to the head of San Francisco's Office of Economic Analysis. @11:10 AM 5
Grindr: When Gays Stop Being Polite And Start Getting Real @12:50 PM
Grindr: the iPhone app that is the future of insane, GPS-locating gay cruising? Or the scariest gay bar on earth that is all over the earth? Only America's best Tumblr, Guys I Blocked On Grindr, can tell you (that the answer is the latter most likely). 19
GLAAD's Media Awards: The Saddest Showing Yet @12:11 PM
GLAAD, an organization that began with the best of intentions and is now, in my opinion, the gay world's biggest fundraising non-profit disaster—with donation income of more than $12 million in 2008, and, for some reason, on-hand assets of more than $11 million at the end of that year, and with staff of at least 46, none of whom, in my experience, are remotely able to return phone calls in a timely fashion to a reporter on deadline—announced its Media Awards this week. Actually the most amazing thing about their announcement about the state of media is that it includes three media contacts: one in-house and also two out-sourced PR people at pricey PR shop BWR, one in LA and one in New York. Why can't a media organization handle the media? Anyway: and their nominees are…. READ MORE 13
Is Michelle Obama… A Gay Male Homosexual? @3:55 PM
Well if she is not, then why does she know so much about fashion, hmm? Simon Doonan (window dresser; homosexual; short) meets the First Lady for White House holiday decorating: "Her long-standing interest in style makes the process easy: She likes the 'softer, more Romeo Gigli colors.' She agrees with my suggestion that we should use 'a Lanvin-ish antique-looking glitter' instead of anything too sparkly. While Mrs. Obama loves the idea of 'the Wish Tree,' an interactive piece created by a Hoboken-based company named Cardboard Design, her most enthusiastic response is reserved for the 800 recycled silver balls that are proposed for the monumental Blue Room Tree. Together we decide that decoupage, rather than painting, is the way to go." Then Doonan lays into that nice man, Andrew Breitbart, who runs that nice website for conservatives. Related: enjoy all this further fodder, teabaggers! 20
"Show me a happy homosexual and I'll show you a gay corpse." @11:30 AM
You know what we needed most of all, in the year 2010? A revival of The Boys in the Band. Thuper! It opens February 21! Let us turn the clock back to 1968, when Clive Barnes wrote in the Times: "As the conventional thing to say about Mart Crowley's 'The Boys in the Band' will be something to the effect that it makes Edward Albee's 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' seem like a vicarage tea party, let me at least take the opportunity of saying it first." Duly noted. And 1969, the headline: "'The Boys in the Band' Is Still a Sad Gay Romp." And 1970: "THE BOYS IN THE BAND" has just entered its third year at Theater Four on West 55th Street, and the damndest thing has happened to it. It has become a period piece." Other interesting Times pieces on the same subject: "More Homosexuals Aided To Become Heterosexual," February 28, 1971. 14
The End of the 00s: A Personal Chronology of the Last Decade Organized Around My Blackouts, by Rod Townsend @1:30 PM
Waikiki 2000
Resurface: The living room of my friend Devin's Waikiki apartment was full of light from a noonday sky. Looking around the room, fully dressed on the couch, I saw my boyfriend on the air-mattress below. I was awash in a feeling of peace right up until I vomited a purple-red gusher.
Remembered: On a rock formation off of Diamond Head that jutted into the Pacific we sat surrounded by water and warm ocean breezes while we waited both for the New Year's fireworks and for our ecstasy to hit. The lightweight in the group, I was feeling it already as two children approached us asking immediately, "Is the world ending?" After the fireworks and the communing with nature, the subsequent trip to the local gay bars seemed tawdrily mediocre, so I drank heavily and popped even more ecstasy. READ MORE 11
A Thanks from Our Poster Boy Zack @1:21 PM
For those that bought our 2010 Benefit Calendar, a few things! It looks like they're shipping, so, 1) Here is an explanatory one-pager that you can print yourself, in case you're giving these as gifts and you want it explained what the heck is going on here: It is a PDF file. 2) When the money comes through, which should be just after New Year's, we are going to send Zack a nice chunk of change. Yay! Good job! And 3) Now a few words from Zack! (And also a picture of him on a fake fur rug in a Santa hat, in honor of the season.) READ MORE 25
Have Your Say! Should We Murder Homosexuals? @10:10 AM
Response and social desirability biases have actually made this BBC discussion poll interesting! It seems that if you start with the proposition that maybe homosexuals should be slaughtered, you'll get a lot of people saying, "Um, NO?" and also some people saying, "Well, not slaughtered, but…." In this way, we can find out what people actually do think of the gays. READ MORE 27
Flicked Off, with Kia Matthews and Natasha Vargas-Cooper: 'Precious,' or, Can a Movie be a Social Act? @10:50 AM
'Precious' has been in theaters for a week now, but since it's Mo'Nique's birthday today, we feel it is now time to finally get to it!
Natasha: Girl, how did you feel about going into this movie?
Kia: Well. I didn't even want to see it. The trailer made me cry, so, I wasn't really looking forward to a full length version of that. It looked like that emotional porn? You know, downtrodden person going through trails, tribulations, strife, set to uplifting music and/or a gospel song, etc.
Natasha: I wanted to see it for two reasons 1. Oscars, natch. 2. I wanted to dislike it. BUT GURL I LOVED IT. READ MORE 44
Two recent items of interest regarding Uganda: this, on what one Ugandan gay men expects. ("Will I be fired if the company is threatened? Of course.") That is a blog we're going to be reading regularly now. And also, Awl pal Andrew Rice's commentary over at Gawker was fascinating. @3:27 PM 6
Real America, with Abe Sauer and Zack P.: The Awl 2010 Benefit Calendar @2:22 PM
We met Zack P. back in August, when he was the sole protester at the Grand Forks, North Dakota Tea Parties. So, what has Zack been up to? I recently received an email answering just that question. "Abe: Am working on a protest of Focus on the Family and their hate-filled B.S. and I can tell by some of the comments on The Awl that people tend to think of North Dakota as a bunch of rednecks… just don't want my hometown to seem like Laramie. Interested?" I was. But when I arrived at the church, Zack was nowhere to be found. Just two police cruisers. READ MORE 139
eBay, always so handy: "I'm an unmarried heterosexual woman, and since I probably won't be using my right to get married, I would like to give it away." @3:37 PM 5
