How I Spent My Gay Pride Day

I was working out at the gym this morning and they were showing Boys In The Band on the monitors. An odd pic for Gay Pride Day in San Francisco, but with a certain aptness for me. Whatever my issues with gay culture these days, watching that film's depiction of the desperate self-loathing and fear in those men makes the freedom that I have feel very precious. Given my advanced age, I remember what life was like when the love that dare not speak its name really did not.

Later in the day, I was on my way to spend some time with a man whom I much like. A fitting way to mark that freedom, I think. I got into the subway and the direction I was travelling in was the opposite of most. His house is west from here, the Pride parade is east. So a hundred gay men were standing on the other side of the station, heading away from me. Or me from them.

I have been hitting the weights with some vigor the last couple of weeks and it shows. Got my hair cut a few days ago. Had on jeans, sunglasses and a nice-fitting grey T shirt. I was, if I do say so myself, worth a second look. After all, I wanted to please the eyes, and more, of the fella I was going to see.

With me on the platform was a Sister of Perpetual Indulgence. Why s/he was heading away form the party I did not know. But s/he had on a particularly annoying getup: the combo of nun and drag queen that they all sport nowadays, plus, s/he wore a Catholic school girl's uniform. We got on the same car and I was aware that s/he was checking me out. Then we got on the elevator to ascend to the street and s/he stood right next to me. Again, I was aware that I was being cruised. And I decided to ignore her.

I try to be a decent guy about being cruised and to treat men who find me attractive in the way that I want to be treated when I show interest....unless a man is a jerk about it, you can decline but show respect...but today, I made a choice to ignore this one. A man dressed up like a nun/dragqueen/schoolgirl holds no allure for me, on any level.

Instead, I met an actual man, a real man who knows who he is, whose company, to put it mildly, I deeply enjoy. That is what this day is about for me.

Having a homosexual orientation is nothing to be proud of in itself; it's not an accomplishment, just a fact. But neither it is anything to be ashamed of, and I am proud both of my own success in overcoming the awful shame I felt as a young man and of those who helped make the world a place where I could do that.

That is the meaning of this day for me, one of the great miracles of my life: men loving men.

Green Apocalypse

I am watching Life After People, a speculative piece on the History Channel about how the planet would change (for the better) if the human race were suddenly to disappear entirely.

Am I being a righty paranoid in sensing a certain Green self-Schadenfreude in this undertaking? The program provides many vistas of a "recovered" Earth, a return to Eden once the evil humans are gone.

It is not until the last two minutes of the piece that one of the interviewed scientists pointed out that if there were no humans, then no matter what happened to the planet after us, there would be no one to notice it.

As one of the Seven Pillars of Liberalism, environmentalism has its necessary internal drama of oppressors and victims. In this pillar, the victim is the earth itself and the oppressors are the human race. Just as Liberalism's other six pillars are a barely disguised wish to erase the white male Christian capitalist patriotic gun-wielders, so in this culminating pillar, the whole species itself dreams its own well-justified disappearance.

Funny how this hatred of some of us ends in hatred of all of us, for our own good.

Gay = Effeminate?

Jack Malebranche makes the case that "gay" as it currently exists means effeminate. Despite the existence of homosexually-oriented men whose gender identity and presentation are similar to heterosexual men, the gay identity, he says, is essentially effeminate. Hence, he considers "gay" a slur on a man.

Despite the extremely common phenomenon of the effeminate homosexual male, both in ordinary life and in the presentations of gay men in media and literature (both straight and gay), I have resisted this notion. For most of my life, to me "gay" has just been another word, a non-clinical colloquialism, for "homosexual". All it meant, essentially, was same-sex attraction.

A thought-experiment came to me today at the gym. (The irony of the place is not lost on me.)

A homosexual male who presents as hypermasculine can be criticized and mocked by gay men for trying to appear to be something that he is not, a straight man, and it can be suggested he is self-loathing and is not authentically gay.

But a homosexual male who presents as effeminate or even hypereffeminate may not be criticized and mocked for trying to be something he is not. Even if his presentation is not appreciated, it is deeply incorrect to imply that he does not thereby belong to the gay community. No one will imply that he is self-loathing.

In effect, your gay identity can be questioned for being too masculine, but not for being too effeminate.

Does this not imply that effeminacy is essential to the gay identity, while masculinity is optional at best?

Is Malebranche right?

Eine Kleine Tanz Musik

Like most curmudgeonly types, I have a hidden ....ok, only I think it's hidden....streak of sentimentality, something I normally abhor. It's what Jung called the shadow, "the you you'd never wish to be, but are".

So here is a video that provokes my sentimental shadow. It made me smile and even brought a bit of moisture to my eyes. Sometimes human beings can be wonderful.

Part of its charm for me is that it reminds me a bit of a man I am getting to know, who, I am told on good authority, is as good a dancer as I am, but whose sheer joy in living only increases mine.

Where The Hell is Matt?

(Scroll down to where it says "view in higher quality" and click there.)

Father's Day

For my dad.

Turning Japanese

The Westernization of Japan continues apace...

Delectatio morosa

Although much of my graduate education involved reading Germans, I am more Catholic than German. So I do not so much experience Schadenfreude as I do delectatio morosa in viewing the above image of Mother Cindy Sheehan, she of the (apparently former) "absolute moral authority", campaigning to an empty street in San Francisco.

Delectatio morosa is a category in Catholic morals and means "sullen delight". It means taking pleasure in dwelling on thoughts that are immoral.

As I have blogged before, I have friends who spend a lot of time trying to be good. I will do it if I can, but don't struggle about it. For example, taking peevish delight in the pathetic end of the Sheehan woman is not something that makes me wonder about whether or not I am "a good person". I have elsewhere noted that I have no sympathy for her and have described her in voice, not print, in language that I rarely use.

She also reveals the fraud of the gender-feminist crowd, who hold that women are men's equals in every way but then, along with the genfen-led press, call on us to give extra special gooey sympathy to her because she is a "mom", and a grieving one at that.

She is, to put it mildly, pathetic. Always has been. She is a mother only a son could love.

(HT to this blog)

Hope you can believe in

Or we are the change we are waiting for? or, change you can hope in....

"Faith is the substance of things hoped for" (Romans) ...hope for things without substance....

On Barry Hussein O:

"And thus the Democratic party is about to nominate a far left candidate in the tradition of George McGovern, albeit without McGovern’s military and political record.

The Democratic party is about to nominate a far-left candidate in the tradition of Michael Dukakis, albeit without Dukakis’s executive experience as governor.

The Democratic party is about to nominate a far left candidate in the tradition of John Kerry, albeit without Kerry’s record of years of service in the Senate.

The Democratic party is about to nominate an unvetted candidate in the tradition of Jimmy Carter, albeit without Jimmy Carter’s religious integrity as he spoke about it in 1976.

Questions about all these attributes (from foreign policy expertise to executive experience to senatorial experience to judgment about foreign leaders to the instructors he has had in his cultural values) surround Barack Obama.

And the Democratic party has chosen him."

Brigitte Bardot, racist

Convicted for the fifth time. Unbelievable.

And in Canuckistan, similar commissar behavior.

I hate "hate speech" laws.

1984 is a bit late, but now it's here.