Take These Lies

Fantasy - George Michael (mp3)

Cindy Crawford. Nude. In a bathtub. Sensuously fondling her upper half and literally rubbing in that all we can do is watch.

Hanging out inside Linda Evangelista’s sweater with her.

Christy Turlington, crawling across the floor ala Madonna in “Express Yourself”... but, like, in a more shadowy way.

And a bunch of George Michael’s cheesiest shit blowing up.

To claim that George Michael’s “Freedom 90” is the greatest video in the history of music videos would be slight hyperbole. But to claim it’s one of the best videos ever, directed by the greatest music video director ever, and for a song that has far more depth and nuance than anyone had reason to expect... that’s not exaggeration. It’s nigh-indisputable.

But let’s start with something simple. When this video debuted on MTV, I was a senior in high school. It’s quite possible I watched this video a few thousand times. I recorded it on my Betamax player (no, seriously), on my Great Videos tape. It landed at the end of the Golden Age of models, when everyone who had ever opened a Sports Illustrated knew names like “Cindy” and “Christy” and “Tatjana” and “Tyra.” No last names necessary.

My original obsession with this video was pure lust. I could have listened to nails on a chalkboard for hours so long as my reward for enduring it was watching Ms. Crawford in that tub. I didn’t really like George Michael or anything he stood for at the time, so I intentionally concentrated on not liking or even paying attention to the song.

Nor did I realize at the time that the mastermind of the video was David Fincher, easily one of my favorite two or three directors. Fincher fanatics know, but most normal people have no idea just how influential and omnipresent the man has been in the world of memorable, eye-candy-friendly music videos and movies.

Fincher made Paula Abdul. Think “Madonna video,” and I dare you not to think first and foremost of Fincher (both “Express Yourself” and “Vogue”). Fincher is the one who made “Cradle of Love” rock. He depicted The Rolling Stones as the size they occupy in our culture in “Love is Strong.” He captured Nine Inch Nails in six-inch desktop pin art in “Once.”

Everything lush, tightly-controlled, world-creating. Fincher. There simply isn't another director who would have me this excited about seeing the Americanized version of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" when I so thoroughly enjoyed the Danish version. But Fincher? Yeah, I bet it's gonna be incredible.

But back to his George Michael video without George Michael, who was at the height of his success mostly on the back of his ass and looks. Sure, they more than made up for the lack of George eye candy with the incorporation of eight of the hottest supermodels on the planet, but it was still a gutsy call.



And yes, on the surface, the song is about George Michael’s desire for liberation from his oppressive Sony recording contract, which became a serious lawsuit in 1993. He’s prisoner to the image he helped create, and he’s promising the listener: let me start over; the quality won’t suffer, and I’ll be a lot happier. I won’t let you down.

With the benefit of hindsight, however, we all can see a second story coming into play in this song, as George Michael begins to accept that the only way he can really be happy as a celebrity and as an artist is to stop lying to his fans (and possibly himself) about his sexuality.

When the go-go was supposed to wake him up, he was gay.

When he was the father figure, when he whispered carelessly, he was gay.

When sex was natural and sex was 1-on-1, he was gay, and he was enjoying "random anonymous sex" on frequent occasions.

I don’t know a single gay man who awoke to his homosexuality in his 30s, but George was 34 when he came out. He was gay long before, and he knew it, and he hid it moderately well enough, and if he hadn’t, none of us would likely know who the hell that talented guy was, because the British-Gay-Men-Named-George market was already well-covered in the ‘80s by Boy George.

I now hear the song as a plea. The video is a statement about models, about celebrities, about Platinum musicians, about how much we think we know and how little we want the truth.

George Michael could have churned out four more albums just like Faith and made millions upon millions of dollars. But he didn’t. He asked -- begged, almost desperately -- his listeners to help him create something closer to the truth.

I don’t have to like his music all that much or be a fan of his to continue to admire that moment of his career.

"Fantasy" was the B-side to the CD single of "Freedom '90." As B-sides go, it ain't damn bad.

Stroking Billy Squier

Lonely is the Night - Billy Squier (mp3)

I miss the days when concerts were the cornerstone of great urban legend.

Ozzy bit the heads off live bats. Alice Cooper drank human blood. Prince had real live sex with real live fans right there on stage at his concerts. So did KISS. Zappa ate human turds. These are just the ones I remember vividly. I also recall Styx, 2 Live Crew, Motley Crue, and dozens of other bands and performers being mentioned in rumors of concert insanity. There were even rumors of entire audiences falling asleep during Dan Fogelberg concerts!

To this day I can’t say for certain which of these concert stories are complete bullshit and which ones are based in reality, nor do I know which ones were invented locally in Chattanooga and which ones were viral elsewhere and invaded my hometown circle. More importantly, I don’t want to know. I prefer having to use my own common sense to figure it out while cherishing that golden nugget of uncertainty.

Easily the most disturbing -- and therefore most memorable -- concert rumor of my young life revolved around freakishly girly-looking rock star Billy Squier and his extreme gayness. The specific rumor about him, as I remember it, went something like this: He gave other guys blowjobs on the stage during his concert.

First, I need to clarify something. In 1985, adults did not talk to children about homosexuality. Not in the South, anyways. Dad used the word “sissy” on a number of occasions, and in hindsight that word and its context seem obvious, but at the time I just thought it referred to men who sucked at sports, which is to say, guys like me. So even when adults talked about gay men, I didn't quite connect it to the conversations of kids around me.

I don't remember any teachers talking about it, either in positive or negative ways. It was almost as if the entire queer world existed solely for hidden gay adults and teenage conversations. And Billy Squier, the most openly gay rock star ever.

The singular way I knew anything about being gay, about gay people, about gayness, is from talk with my friends and my peers. If this comes across as defensive, it's intended to be, because attending an all-boys school put us on the defensive about this issue from day one, and adults wanted nothing to do with it. Or else adults just didn't hear it. Either way, Gay Was Bad.

Of course Billy Squier didn't blow men on stage during concerts. He isn't even gay.* But I didn't have the Internet. Catastrophic or unbelievable concert moments couldn't be hunted down on YouTube. So if a half-dozen cool dudes who were three years older than me insisted that Billy Squier was some gay queerbag who blew his drummer on the stage, who the hell was I to argue the point?

It may seem ludicrous that I actually believed this could happen. But we were still emerging from the chaos that was the 1970s, a decade that even in my youthful cluelessness symbolized that anything and everything was possible, particularly regarding sex and sexual positions. Further, when one has attended a single Suzanne Vega concert in his whole life, and when one is as totally clueless about sex as I was -- hell, Kurt Cobain was almost dead before I had sex, and my On Base Percentage in the 80s hovered right about .005 -- who was I to say with any authority or knowledge that some rock star would simply not blow another man on stage at a concert?

Somehow the Village People missed me. I mean, I had two of their albums, but they were never a focal point of any conversation about gay men. Can’t explain it, but it’s true. Same with Freddie Mercury and David Bowie. Don't remember their names coming up much until later. But the Billy Squier stuff, and the stuff about Rod Stewart having to have his stomach pumped? Yup. Those are definitely a part of my pre-teen memories.

I'm glad I went back and listened to Squier's hits. There's nothing earth-shattering in them, but it's comforting to know that "The Stroke" isn't literally about some guy jerking him off, and I get the lyrics to "Lonely is the Night" in ways a virginal naif pre-teen cannot. His music is better than the fate he sealed in my personal history book, and that would be true regardless of his sexual inclinations.

So, from one Billy to another, and speaking for an entire generation of clueless and insensitive bastard teens, I apologize. I can't believe what insensitive and homophobic pricks we were.

But you still shouldn't have filmed the video for "Rock Me Tonite." Talk about stoking the damn fire.



* -- Even as I type these words, having researched it a little to verify what I'd suspected, it's difficult to accept, so deeply has that rumor been ingrained in my memory.

We Don't Need No Thought Control

Another Brick in the Wall - Richard Cheese (mp3)

This week, California passed a law that requires the LGBT community be positively represented in future history textbooks in public schools. It also, according to news reports, “bans materials that reflect negatively on gays.”

Hurm.

I remember adults in the late 1980s talking about Martin Luther King, Jr. I don’t remember which adults, but I know they were white, and I know they were members of my church and friends of my parents and neighbors, and I know they were less than exhilarated about the man getting his own federal holiday.

“He was a serial adulterer,” they’d say.
“He was a Commie,” they’d say. “A real member of the Communist party!”
“He had bastard children and wouldn’t acknowledge or support them,” they’d say.

As a sheltered, naive Southern teenager, I can’t say for sure what I thought of Martin Luther King, Jr., or his significance, or what he did for our country. In hindsight, I must acknowledge a failure to grasp the gravitas of his place in our nation’s history. I knew he was important, but not, like, THAT important.

A lot of white people felt threatened by the holiday. Like acknowledging MLK’s greatness was just another way of telling them they were bad people, their parents were bad people. Their reaction was defensive. Not an excuse, but an explanation. In hindsight, I wish I had somehow realized the truth sooner.

It’s taken decades of experience and wisdom to get beyond the racism I witnessed or overheard as a kid. Most of it was relatively mild, lingering in my experiences like cigarette smoke in a hotel room. One could reasonably argue that I'll spend the rest of my life without ever fully getting past it all. I wonder if any laws could have prevented or further restricted this pollution from my mind, this reminder of who we are and who we aren’t, of black and white and different and better.

Somehow the racist mutterings around me never quite penetrated my circle of closest friends. Having a circle that included representation by several minorities didn't hurt.... but none of my friends were gay. Or, at least, I didn’t know it if they were.

Homosexuality wasn’t obvious to me in the '80s. I didn’t have a “gay-dar” as a kid. The first time I ever remember fully realizing there were actual gay people walking and living around me -- not just singing rock songs or taking homoerotic photographs, but actually going to school with us and stuff -- was 1985.

At the same time I was introduced to Lamar Latrell on the big screen, Rock Hudson died of AIDS, and it totally freaked out my mom and her friends, because suddenly this cat over whom they had drooled in their younger years is discovered to be, as the nomenclature went, “a sissy.” But that year was just the first big brick. Plenty of bricks had to fall, and the fell gradually through high school and into college.

The more comfortable I became with my own sexuality, the less homosexuality frightened me, the less it felt like some problem. The more I saw friends from childhood and high school come out, the more I felt convinced it wasn’t some fashion statement or attempt at rebellion and instead a long-overdue disclosure of their real being.

As a kid, homophobia was the Godzooky to racism’s Godzilla. Gay culture was still very hushed and hidden around me, and I don’t know if people felt threatened by it the way they were in the 90s and this past decade.

I provide my past experience and weaknesses to this because it seems only fair to do so. That I believe gays should have the right to marry, that I believe Gay Is The New Black in American prejudicial fashion, that I believe an overwhelming majority of gay Americans are expressing their natural inclination and not a lifestyle choice, none of these clears me from a lifetime of living in relative cluelessness and surrounded by -- sometimes sharing in -- prejudicial notions.

This California law, requiring positive examples of LGBT people in history and forbidding negative ones, is a frightening attempt at thought control, and there’s no other way of putting it.

I recently wrote about Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken, an absolutely fabulous book for high school kids to read, for both its historical information and its compelling story. If our state had passed a law similar to California’s, and if this law was about the Japanese rather than homosexuals, would we be able to read this book, a book that is frank and fair about Japanese both good and bad, both soldier and citizen, a book that identifies many horrific acts yet also acknowledges their culture and humanity?

I would find such a law horrifying if it protected and promoted Christians, or the Japanese, or penguins. It is no less bad or dangerous for having the LGBT community at heart.

Or, to put it another way, as a friend quoted on Facebook: “Propoganda must not investigate the truth objectively... it must present only that aspect of truth which is favorable to its own side.”

When your actions reflect the words of some dude named Adolf, it’s probably a bad idea.

Daphne the Gay Ninja

One of the Boys - Mott the Hoople (mp3)
Divine Thing - Soup Dragons (mp3)

Massive positive buzz abounds for a blog entry from a mother whose 5-year-old preschool son dressed up as Daphne for a Halloween party at his school. Here’s the intro, but I highly encourage you to read the entire piece:

My son is gay. Or he’s not. I don’t care. He is still my son. And he is 5. And I am his mother. And if you have a problem with anything mentioned above, I don’t want to know you. I have gone back and forth on whether I wanted to post something more in-depth about my sweet boy and his choice of Halloween costume. Or more specifically, the reactions to it. I figure if I’m still irked by it a few days later, I may as well go ahead and post my thoughts...

I find myself uncomfortably conflicted by her post. Perhaps my reaction speaks poorly of me, but the devil's advocate can't stand the absolute onslaught of warm fuzzies she's receiving. A bajillion people have commented how much they adore this woman’s post, and my reaction wasn’t nearly that simple.

Foremost, some of her zingers are absolutely awesome and righteous, particularly this line:

If you think that me allowing my son to be a female character for Halloween is somehow going to ‘make’ him gay then you are an idiot. Firstly, what a ridiculous concept. Secondly, if my son is gay, OK. I will love him no less. Thirdly, I am not worried that your son will grow up to be an actual ninja so back off.

Good stuff, that. She makes some great points, and most of them have Ka-Chow!

Admittedly, however, I have problems with her overall spiel. First, I don’t really believe someone capable of writing this well can be as clueless as she purports. If she didn’t see these reactions coming -- which officially makes her more socially naive than her 5-year-old -- then she doesn’t get out much. Besides, if she didn't see the negativity coming, then why were all her pals high-fiving her down the hallway?

Therefore, I question her motives. Was she really out to make her sweet precious Boo happy, or was she willing to use her son for her own combative lust? (And, if the answer is a little of both, is that OK?)

Third is my reaction to her conclusion:

And all I hope for my kids, and yours, and those of Moms ABC, are that they are happy. If a set of purple sparkly tights and a velvety dress is what makes my baby happy one night, then so be it. If he wants to carry a purse, or marry a man, or paint fingernails with his best girlfriend, then ok. My job as his mother is not to stifle that man that he will be, but to help him along his way. Mine is not to dictate what is ‘normal’ and what is not, but to help him become a good person.

I’ve got bad news for you, honey. Instant happiness and long term happiness are almost entirely unrelated. One of today's biggest cultural problems is that making your child happy has superseded making them good people, and you are clearly and admittedly in that Insta-Happy Camp. (Happy: first sentence. Good person: last sentence.)

Your son might be "happy one night" taking a dump in his pants. He might be "happy one night" biting dogs. He might find "joy one day" eating maggots off the couch and without utensils or his hands. He might be happy doing lots of things that aren’t “right.” I’m not saying purple tights and purses are wrong, but I’m saying that we as parents are charged with raising and educating our children about that very cruel world this mom seems to have magically discovered on Halloween 2010, several decades into her life.

Five-year-olds aren't soldiers. They shouldn't be used to fight our battles. If she'd encouraged her son to dress as Papa Smurf rather than Daphne, she didn't somehow kill his soul. He's FIVE.

Being a parent isn’t always about making our children happy in the now. Happiness is not a goal you can reach by aiming for it. Happiness is the desired by-product of other meaningful pursuits.

Let me be crystal clear here, because this is important: When your first goal as a parent is your child's constant and immediate happiness, you are at best a naive parent, and at worst a horrible one.

Cross-dressing, marrying someone of a different race or religion, moving to Pakistan to become a Christian missionary, opening a medicinal marijuana farm. These are not the same kinds of decisions as whether to brush your teeth at night. I’m not saying any of these life choices are Wrong, because I'm a lib'ral relativist. But in our time and in our culture, to suggest that parents don’t have a responsibility to educate and prepare our children for the world that might not approve of everything they do or want to do... to let your children ride their bikes into traffic without at least informing them of the risks and dangers... well, that’s shitty parenting.

Evangelize to cannibals in the Amazon. Cross-dress. Marry a lovely Hindu man. Whatever. As your parent, I’ll love you regardless, but I do have the responsibility to make sure you are aware what you might be getting yourself into.

Again, I admire at least 80% of what this mom says. And I admire the ferocity with which she defends and loves her son. But to say the moms are bullies? Get over yourself. Snotty? Callous? Condescending? Insensitive? Sure, to all of ‘em. But when we start labeling their behavior as bullying, we have watered down the term so much it’s meaningless. It’s like calling a kitchen knife a WMD.

Her claims of social cluelessness and her prioritization of quick happiness, however, are worth questioning. If she didn’t know it might be controversial, why were all her pre-warned pals giving her high-fives down the hallway like she was about to enter a WWE wrestling ring? Don’t couch it like your toddler has more social awareness than his mother.

And here's the last part for this mom and all her cyber-huggers. Kids are more resilient than any of you seem to realize. Her precious Boo won't remember a thing about his Halloween party in two weeks, because nobody ever said anything to him or did anything to him.

Her blog isn't about her precious Boo. It's about her.

It takes a self-absorbed blogger to know one.

When the Truth Doesn't Matter... Kinda

Lazy Eye - Silversun Pickups (mp3)
Hazy Shade of Winter - Simon + Garfunkel (mp3)

My very first real honest-to-God girlfriend was a senior when I was a junior. She was a stud. She was built like an efficient brick shithouse, played soccer like a champ, and loved Van Halen, Dan Fogelberg, Indiana Jones and Jesus. “Carrie” was also salutatorian at the very large public school where my mother taught. She was socially clueless enough to find me attractive and interesting. One in a million, I tell ya.

We courted for three wonderful months. We dated for six. In the summer before my senior year, I broke up with Carrie. The reasons were lame but valid. And they were punctuated with this minor, insignificant detail that I'd spent two weeks at Governor's School romancing and eventually falling for a semi-psychotic but incredibly adventurous drama queen, someone who was in all ways the complete opposite of Carrie.

Carrie was back in Chattanooga writing me three to four letters each week, drawing little cartoons and cutting out ransom notes and writing bad limericks. I never wrote her once.

I broke up with Carrie the week I got back home, but it took two months of follow-up talks to settle the matter. She never could understand why I was breaking up, and I kept leaving out that little detail about Leigh. But Leigh and I had broken up before Carrie had finally accepted we were over, so I kinda had the chance to make up with her and never did.

I really had no desire to go back. In part because I was scum for lying to her so utterly and repeatedly... and in part because this girl, a very conservative and mature Christian, was simply too good for me.

Yeah so I'm defensive about it. Whatevs.

Cue the fast-moving clock. Move forward in time. Speed past our drifting apart once I get to college and become all but unreachable by family and friends from back home. Soar past our Christmas holiday dinner non-date when I'm a senior and we're awkward and both single but not feeling that thing that would transform a polite dinner into something more intense. Slip past the time we ran into one another on AOL and I tell her I'm engaged and will be married in three months and she immediately disconnects and never answers another email.

It's now the summer of 2010. I'm at a local dive watching the World Cup with my fellow blogger and 100 or so of my closest non-friends. I'm drinking a Bud Light Chelada for shits and giggles, my own form of Mad Men-esque rebellion of imbibing during the workday. (Don’t worry; it was just one freakin’ Chelada.)
Bob introduces me to a lawyer who works in the firm with his wife. Guy went to Red Bank. My mom taught him. He knew my ex-girlfriend. Small world yada yada. And then he says it.

"So weird about Carrie, right?"
"Weird what?" I say. 'Cuz I have no idea what he's talking about.
"I just can't believe she's gay. Never pictured her playing for the other team, you know?"

My reaction to all information I can't quite handle is very similar. If someone says the N-word in my presence, or if someone insults my mother's fidelity, or if someone says my Christian ex-girlfriend is gay, I just shrug and fake-chuckle and turn away and take another drink and try to pretend it didn't happen. It is the reaction of a non-confrontational coward, and I haven't been very good at doing anything about it.

Was it true? Is/was Carrie gay?

That night, when I was hopping around on Facebook, I searched for her name and found it. She was still living and working in Atlanta, but all other information was blocked from snooping eyes. So I sent her a long message. It updated her about my life, my family, my job, my hobbies. Everything someone who was happy not having anything to do with me for 20 years would be fine never knowing. God bless Facebook.

She never responded. Can't say I really expected her to.

So why does this stick in my craw? I don't really care if she's gay. Seriously, if she's married, or if she's celibate and uninterested in relationships, or if she's gay and dating Jane Lynch, none of it changes the way my heart reacts to her or my memories of her. If she's who she is, and if she's happy, then it's a good thing, and I would like knowing it.

Human nature. The Billy version is definitely screwed up. I want Carrie to be happy, but I also want to know I was written into her history book. But is my pathetic ego-trip enough to explain my desire to reconnect and find out?

Maybe I've convinced myself that if she was gay that I could absolve myself of messing around with another girl* while we were dating. I could excuse my unconscionable act with the faulty logic that I must've known something wasn't quite right with Carrie, something I just didn't understand in my clueless youth, and my straying was simply the product of a sixth-sense in my subconsciousness.

* “Messing around” isn’t code for kinky sex. “Messing around” wasn’t even petting. “Messing around” was strictly limited to kissing and groping over clothing. I never actually got my hands under the clothing covering female erogenous zones until one month before my wife got pregnant for the first time. OK, that’s exaggerated, but I was definitely in college.

NOH8'n on Meghan

The Righteous and the Wicked - Red Hot Chili Peppers (mp3)
Left of Center - Suzanne Vega (mp3)

I like Meghan McCain.

Since the "are you saying she's hot" thing feels inevitable, I'll say OK, I think she's slightly hot.

Maybe she has a few extra pounds on her and will never fit down a drain like some supermodels. In that sense, she reminds me of a blonde Sara Rue back when Sara Rue was adorable and plus-sized and before she went all Christina Ricci with the I wanna be skinny like the other Stepford Actresses stuff.

She might lean a little too far right for my tastes, but she's a far more impressive speaker and voice for a younger generation than most anyone else getting their name out there and earning attention for it. If Meghan and Sarah Palin were on The Golden Girls together, Sarah would be the ditzy Betty White character to Meghan's Rue McClanahan, the slut who has flashes of wit and intelligence. (Barbara Bush would be Bea Arthur, and Ann Coulter would be the Estelle Getty old grandma.)

The young Ms. McCain will always have to fight the Ditzy Blonde stereotype, being that her life at times resembles that of Blair from The Facts of Life, but when you're rich and connected like Meghan, then you've got a better chance of fighting your stereotype than some poor black gal in South Dakota has of fighting hers, so I struggle to feel much pity.

I like Meghan McCain's writing. I enjoy that she's young enough to be honest, smart enough not to spout off about every little possible thing, and savvy enough to avoid being a mere mouthpiece or pawn for some portion of the Greater Political War. She can be shallow or quite insightful. In this country that feels increasingly Red v. Blue and decreasingly Purple, I find myself attracted to any and all signs of reasonable middle ground, which is to say I've given up on actual politicians, since they all seem to cater to their narrow "voting base" rather than real honest-to-God people.

This desire for purple ground found reward in the story of Meghan and her mom Cindy participating in NOH8, the campaign to lobby for same-sex marriage.

I'm sincerely excited that the discussion on homosexuality is slowly -- perhaps at glacier speed -- moving beyond a Red v. Blue issue. It's breaking down political barriers and increasingly being discussed as a civil rights issue, about freedom and equality rather than just Jesus and morality.

My cluelessness and insensitivity on matters of minority culture have been pointed out to me many times by friends and enemies, and I profess to be amazingly clueless about The Gay World, but it doesn't seem I need to know that much about the issue to believe, without reservation, that our country is better off giving them the same chances to fuck up marriage that heteros have enjoyed since Adam and Eve. God knows gays can't possibly fuck it up worse.

Part of me thinks we're scared of giving them this right because all of a sudden more gays might pull away from precisely the kinds of wilder lifestyle decisions that allow moralists and conservative Christians to trumpet the evil of their ways. The bathhouse and group sex stereotyping might be less popular if our society showed a willingness to view their relationships in the same light as those of opposite sex couples. If it's true that Paris Hilton only makes the Dumb Blonde stereotype harder to escape, maybe it's equally true that letting gays marry might help pull us back from the stereotype of all gay men being horny sex hounds and all gay women sneaking into smoky dyke dives for nooky.

The McCain women showing up in NOH8 propaganda is one more reminder of why -- before he sank into the game of politics and less "mavericky" -- I found John McCain so compelling and appealing as a political figure. A man whose wife and daughter can come out on the opposite side of a political issue from him is a man I respect, because it means they're allowed to have differing opinions under one roof and still get along.

This, obviously, is quite different from the Palin household, where Bristol accidentally reveals her understandably crappy opinion of abstinence as an effective method of birth control and is effectively hung from the rafters. She reemerges as some kind of national spokesmodel for Abstinence Only. In the Palin home, everyone eats the same amount of food at the same time and with the same utensils, or else Todd takes them out back and skins them alive.

The story of Levi and Bristol is a stark reminder that much of the Palin Family image is no more sincere than that of Lady GaGa. Were they allowed to live their isolationist dream in the far reaches of Alaska, perhaps they would have become more nuanced people. Slightly. But instead we pull them into the vortex and they become cartoon characters.

For now, at least, Meghan McCain has avoided becoming a simple caricature. Who knows whether it can last, since predictability and simple sloganeering seems to be the only real means to popularity in politics or culture, but I'm cheering for her even if I only agree with her 1/4 of the time. If she's the future of the Republican Party, at least I won't have to loathe it and can just respectfully disagree with it.

You go girl.

You're So Gay, You Prolly Think This Blog Is About You

Laura - Scissor Sisters (mp3)
How You Play the Game - Michelle Shocked (mp3)

The following is a reader comment following an interesting NYTimes blog about gender and homophobia:

Homophobia itself, like sexism, needs to be eradicated. And children need to learn (this must be taught by parents + in schools) that “masculine” and “feminine” may be descriptive (what the terms actually mean should always be open to question), but they must never be prescriptive. All children should be free to grow into whatever man or woman they want to be. And both parents and teachers have a moral obligation to facilitate this growth.

I will attempt to explain why the comment above begs me to differ, but first, I must offer some background.

I'm straight. Hetero. Whatevs. I'm also a Southern-Fried Protestant Honky. These are qualities that must be acknowledged right away. I won't gloss over them or the baggage they would naturally require me to carry.

Here's the next thing to make clear: I am fairly open-minded when it comes to sex and love and gender preference and all that jazz. Gay men in general bother me far less than NFL athletes in general or glam rock stars like Bret Michaels in general. I'm not the least bit uncomfortable around most gay men... be they my next-door neighbors or one of our fantasy football team owners or even a student who might or might not have begun to openly admit it to his peers or teachers. Just because I'm open-minded and comfortable, however, doesn't mean I can proclaim that famous ironic statement, "I don't have any problem with them gays."

Seems to me we all have problems with everyone at some point or another. We have problems with our parents, with our kids, with our coworkers, with people in the news, with homeless people, and so on. Some of these are excusable while some less so. But inevitably, our problem with a particular person will inevitably collide with a part of them that ain't like us. Their gender, their race, their sexual preference, their religion. And when that happens, we must ask ourselves how much of that different part plays a role in the conflict.

Put another way: "Am I annoyed by that guy because he's annoying or because he's gay/black/Moonie and annoying?"

The Rev. Al Sharpton comes to mind. He's not evil, but he certainly has too much Publicity Hound in him for me to consider his motives pure and virtuous. I don't like him. So, how does this opinion affect my placement on the Racist Bastard Scale? Is it damning, or do I get taken down a notch, or is my distaste for Reverend Al entirely unrelated to my racism or lack thereof?

Let's use "YouTube Fred" as another example. I don't care whether that kid is gay, het, or hermaphrodite, Fred annoys every last nerve ending in my entire body. (Yes, I know he's TRYING to be annoying, but he's also, like, annoying in ways that are beyond intentional.) Is it because he's effeminate? Probably. I can't deny that possibility. Am I bothered by effeminate males? At times... well, yes dammit, yes. But I'm also bothered by beefy guys who jiggle their man-boobs back and forth to show their amazing muscle control, and by manly men who constantly call everyone "fag" in deep baritone voices. I'm not a fan of ditzy bottle-haired model wannabes with boob jobs and collagen-injected lips who think it's cute that they can't spell simple words and don't know how many states make up the U.S.

In other words, People who behave in real life like two-dimensional cartoon character stereotypes are super-annoying. This distaste crosses all barriers and involves all stereotypes. Women with some masculine qualities or "Oreos" or "Bananas" or "Hootie" or men with some effeminate qualities... none of this bothers me. Hell, I got a whole heap o' Girly Man in me, and I'm really disinclined to be too apologetic about it.

Further, when it comes to essential differences in people such as race or religion or the like, there will always -- ALWAYS -- be some key moments where one side can't quite understand the other. It's a black thing. It's a gay thing. It's a teenage girl thing. It's a horny older married guy with children thing. You wouldn't understand. You're right. I probably wouldn't. Cut me a little slack then.

But then I read a comment like the one this dude wrote: "All children should be free to grow into whatever man or woman they want to be. And both parents and teachers have a moral obligation to facilitate this growth."

How, exactly, is that to be orchestrated?

I'm just not sure we can raise our children in a gender-identity vacuum. Am I supposed to feel somehow uncivilized if my son just so happened to start obsessing over bulldozers and trucks before he was a year old, in spite of living in a house with two older sisters and being surrounded by their dolls and stuffed animals? Am I failing my daughters that they love horses and American Girl crap and iCarly? While I don't believe my wife and I shoved them in these directions, I can't exactly say we've been guilt-stricken or spent time trying to expose them equally to what might be gender interests on the other side.

Sure, they are who they are, and they will be who they will be, and I'm not one to believe we can alter that course drastically without doing some pretty serious damage to them. But I'm just not sure there's some Yellow Brick Road of parental behavior that makes us androgynous shepherds on an androgynous journey while our androgynous children figure it all out for themselves. Nor do we live in an androgynous vaccuum, with pop culture and school and everything else constantly screaming at us about sex sex sex in every way possible.

Could I, like the father in Heathers, proudly and mournfully proclaim the words, "I love my dead gay son!" (Except maybe I could mean it?) I think so. However, I'm not sure that how I raise my children from day to day would get some Good Gay Housekeeping Seal of Approval or anything, since that's not really something I worry about very often. And to follow the "moral obligation" this guy mentions, wouldn't I have to be conscientious of all that stuff all the time?

No thanks. As Lloyd Dobbler said, "I can't figure it all out tonight, so I'm just gonna hang with your daughter."

A Man Needs a Woman... Like a Swallow Needs A Scooter?

Closet - Pete Yorn (mp3)

Tony - Patty Griffin (mp3)

Rough Boys - Pete Townshend (mp3)

Last week was a very gay week for me. Over the weekend, I had a lengthy debate with a friend about homosexuality. Then my wife and I watched the latest episode of "30 Days," which focused on a woman vehemently opposed to gays adopting children living with two gay men and their four adopted children for a month.

The common realization in both is that beliefs about sexuality are tar babies (I use that in the sticky wicket sense, not the racial slur sense). I'm like the blissfully naive gay couple in the TV show, who sincerely believed if someone could just witness them -- their devotion to their adopted children, their love for one another that wasn't at all sleazy or bathhouse-inspired -- it would force a shift in prejudiced attitudes. But these beliefs rarely seem as malleable as we'd like to think they are.

The studies showing that homosexuality is linked to biology and genetics are piling up higher every year. Although there might be cultural or environmental factors, certain people are simply more inclined to be gay than others. To me these studies are simply confirming what I've anecdotally witnessed my whole life.

My friend disagrees. His argument is this, basically: (a) if it's hot and wet and you stick your dick in it, you will get off, so it's really a choice of which hot and wet places you find acceptable and which ones you don't. But it's a choice, regardless. And (b) just because studies show that some people are genetically inclined to find 7-year-olds sexually exciting doesn't make sex with children an acceptable lifestyle choice. We expect those people to either adjust themselves to our laws or suffer serious consequences. So why do we want to make it socially acceptable for one unnatural act and not another?

Considering that I don't get aroused at the thought of mounting a sheep, or at pictures of sheered sheep, or at videos of sheep doing it, and considering I don't get aroused looking at naked men, or the thought of a naked man mounting me or me him, or by watching naked men do it in any way, and considering that I get quite easily aroused when looking at an attractive woman in any number of stages of undress, and most definitely at the thought of sexual exploits with them... it doesn't feel much like a choice to me. (Not that, um, I look at pictures of women and stuff.)

I mostly think that "any hole will do" theory works only in prison or on deserted islands. But hell, even alone on that island Tom Hanks didn't try and rape Wilson. Or maybe they cut that part out of the final version.

An acquaintance of mine is most decidedly heterosexual by choice. Or, to put it another way, he's gay and in the closet. Let's call him Foster.

He in his 40s and has never been in a serious relationship. He will end his years on this earth as a single male, because the only choices in his mind are between Heaven & Hell. Foster could admit his homosexuality to himself, if not the rest of the planet, but to give that possibility any real estate in his thoughts would be sinful. So Foster will never know the love of a relationship based on sex and intimacy.

Maybe some people can joke to themselves, "What a lucky guy," 'cuz you think about all the crap and baggage we deal with in our intimate relationships. Just like Mariah Carey can talk about starving Somalians and say, "I'd love to be that thin, but not with all those flies and everything."

I'm calling him Foster because he is living an adopted life, a lie he hopes will keep his place in Heaven safe. Fortunately, he is so fanatically religious that sacrificing intimacy for his entire life isn't so bad. It's the much lesser of two evils, in his mind. A no-brainer.

But. If all we need, sexually speaking, is some place warm and damp and snug, then it would seem Foster has chosen the worst of all options. He has limited himself to warm locations in which he has no genuine interest. It's like me going to a Hummer dealer to buy parts for my scooter. And, when I realize they have no parts for my scooter, I just resign myself to not buying any scooter parts. Ever.

Except this is sex and intimacy. Which makes it a whole lot more fucking depressing than scooter parts.

Last week just made me kinda sad, because although gay rights are starting to make inroads, and progress is moving along slowly but surely, there are barriers that simply cannot be overcome in the perceptions of others. Most of them are religious, but not all. And although I used to believe that gay rights would be to the early 21st Century what civil rights were to the last 50 years, I'm starting to think gay rights won't get nearly the groundswell of protest or support, and the opposition won't fade into the shadows in quite the same fashion.

Some beliefs are so powerfully instilled in people that no amount of heartstring-tugging or anecdotal convincing or scientific research can sway them. We are a stubborn civilization in that regard, and it makes me sad.

"Closet" is from Pete Yorn's debut album Musicforthemorningafter. "Tony" is from Patty Griffin's rawkin' second album Flaming Red. "Rough Boys" is from Pete Townshend's 1980 album Empty Glass. The first two are available on iTunes or Amazon.com's mp3 site. "Rough Boys" is available only on iTunes.

Other songs I thought about but didn't include:

• Michael - Franz Ferdinand
  
  


• Mama I'm Strange - Melissa Etheridge


• Androgynous - Crash Test Dummies



• Androgyny - Garbage

Others that actually were hits:

• I Kissed a Girl - Jill Sobule
  
  


• We Are the Champions - Queen
  
  


• Lola - The Kinks
  
  


• Freedom - George Michael
  
  


• Stand By Your Man - Lyle Lovett
  
  


• Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover - Sophie B. Hawkins
  
  


• Relax - Frankie Goes to Hollywood