Antidote

With thanks to commenter BlakeJButler at Joe.My.God.

Coming Attractions: God's Own Country

A new trailer:

Brand new trailer for God's Own Country. In UK cinemas 1st September. You're welcome pic.twitter.com/VHxmAfylk1

— God's Own Country (@gocfilm) August 11, 2017

It looks like the release date is back to September 1. although IMDb is listing it as in theaters October 27.

Duh -- I just read the footer on the clip and noted it's in UK theaters on September 1. More coffee. Or maybe less coffee.

(And I just realized that September is next month! WTF?)

Antidote: Sweet

This speaks for itself:

Today

Is Pride Day in Chicago -- the day of the Parade. That means that the North Side, from about Armitage to Wilson and east of Damen, is going to be a wee bit crowded. (Well, with a million visitors crammed into that space, what do you expect?)

And of course, as always, it's clear and bright because it never rains on our parade.

A few shots of Prides past:

It's all about color and motion and celebration -- it's a happy thing. And it's a family event -- people bring their kids to watch the dancers and the balloons and the streamers and the excitement.

I started attending the Parade, if not right at the beginning, very soon thereafter. The route was somewhat shorter, the Parade was much smaller, and the crowds were nowhere near what they are today. I've marched -- at first, it was spontaneous: the last float went by, I looked at my friends, they looked at me, and we just joined the Parade -- I've ridden floats, and I've watched from the sidelines.

These days, the idea of watching the Parade with a million of my closest friends is a bit more than I can deal with -- I'm not good with crowds. So I will most likely find a bus that will leave me somewhere in the park and watch the kids wearing rainbows when the Parade is over. That's something that makes me happy: the kids get very involved. That's a good thing.

Antidote

OK -- this is sweet and funny:

A young man plans to relax in the park next to his office, but a zealous street performer has plans of his own.

Together -- We Are Stronger

Something positive for today:

From the official description:

A few months ago we asked our users to take part in the exciting #GaySelfie global video. We were amazed to receive more than 100,000 Selfies entries shared on Moovz feed.

This proves how united we are :)

Here's more background from Joe.My.God.

The Cheerios Effect

It's a thing. It really is. And it generated this ad:

The official YouTube description:

It seemed like André and Jonathan had it all - great careers, a beautiful home, and their love for one another. Then along came Raphaëlle.

Share your connection story at http://cheerioseffect.ca

And for the background on this, see Joe.My.God.

Finally, some good news.

On the Brighter Side

I like this story:

A Navy sailor returning from a six-month deployment emerged from his submarine, dropped to one knee and proposed to his boyfriend during the homecoming celebration in Connecticut for USS New Mexico.

About 200 people were gathered at the dock of the Naval Submarine Base New London where Machinist's Mate Jerrel Revels proposed to Dylan Kirchner. Kirchner said he had thought about getting married but the proposal Monday came as a surprise.

"I didn't really care everybody was around. It felt just like the two of us," Kirchner told The Day of New London.

It occurs to me that this is the kind of story the right wing hates -- it just demonstrates once again how normal we are. And pretty soon, it's not going to be news. For a good sense of that, here's the original story from The Day -- local news, the marriage proposal, who got the traditional first hug, mom bringing the kids to welcome dad back home.

Eat your heart out, Tony Perkins.

It's Pride Month

And in honor of that, read this post by Joe Jervis at Joe.My.God. I think the ending resonates most with me (but all of it's true):

I'm proud because I'm a middle-aged gay man who has more dead friends than living ones and yet I'm not completely insane. I've lived through a personal Holocaust (here we go again) in which my friends and lovers have been mowed down as thoroughly and randomly as the S.S guards moved down the line of Jews. You, dead. You, to the factory. And you, you, you, and you, dead. I am inexplicably alive and I am proud that I keep the memories of my friends alive. I am proud of my people, the ACT UPers, the Quilt makers, the Larry Kramers, the Harvey Fiersteins. I'm proud that I'm not constantly curled up into a ball on my bed, clutching photo albums and sobbing. And that happens sometimes, believe it.

And outside of my personal experiences, I am proud of my tribe as a group. Sometimes I think that gay people are more creative, more empathic, more intuitive, more generous, and more selfless than anybody else on the planet. Sometimes I think that if an alien culture were surveying our planet from light years away, they might classify gay people as an entirely separate species of humans. It's easy to spot us because of our better haircuts.

But sometimes I think we are the worst people in the entire world when it comes to standing up for each other. The gay people who'd like to soothe their personal image problems by selectively culling some of our children from Pride events? They disgust me. They appall me. They embarrass me. To them I say: The very road that YOU now have the privilege of swaggering upon was paved by those queens and leather freaks that you complain about as you practice your "masculine" and give us butch face. If you want to live in the house that THEY BUILT, you better act like you fucking know it. United we stand, you snide bitches. America's kulturkampf ain't gonna be solved by making flamboyant people go away.

I'll end this by making one final Jewish reference. Possibly you've heard the Jewish in-joke that sums up the meaning of all Jewish holidays? "They tried to kill us. We won. Let's eat." My Pride version?

They wish we were invisible.

We're not.

Let's dance.

There are good people in this world

Today's feel-good story:

It's more than feel-good, though: most of the people in this country are decent people who want to do good. (Don't miss the part about ten other companies chipping in to help cover the cost of the repairs.) It's the assholes like Paul Ryan and Todd Akin and Brian Brown and the teabaggers who get the news coverage.

You see why I still have faith in humanity.

(Via)

At Random

Just a few things that caught my eye this morning.

First, from Dave Dayen, the skinny on health-care cost increases vis-a-vis Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurance -- the short form:

The New England Journal of Medicine reports that Medicare and Medicaid spending has decelerated in recent years, and not just because of the Great Recession. The public programs have seen their cost growth slow significantly compared to private health insurance. And this is expected to continue for the coming decade.

This is so important because, as Paul van de Water of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities explains, the public debate has focused on transforming Medicare and Medicaid in the coming years, constraining cost in the very programs that are the most cost-efficient. If anything, the opposite should be true, and more and more of the system should be converted into public programs to increase the risk pool, allow for greater bargaining leverage on prices, and provide stability.

From a couple of days ago, Equality Illinois has gone to the fair:

There is nothing so quintessentially all-American than the State Fair. Moms and Pops with kiddies in tow are treated to award winning sheep and cantaloupes, midway carnival rides, and food booths full of kettle corn, Belgian waffles, and deep fried artery-clogging delight.

And this year, along with listening to the sweet sounds of the Steve Miller Band or Blue Oyster Cult, watching the Twilight Parade, and betting on your favorite pony in the horse races, you can also stop by the Equality Illinois/Lambda Legal booth and pick up an “I Do” sticker to show your support for marriage equality.

You'll inevitably hear cries from the radical left about how gays are allowing themselves to be "mainstreamed," as though there were something wrong with being an integral part of the culture. That's the whole point, and it's been the whole point from Stonewall on. I think it's a brilliant move on the part of Equality Illinois.

The Perseids. Damn! I miss them every year. If you're someplace you can actually see the night sky, check this out. Chicago has too much ambient light, unless I want to hike over to the lake. (I actually did that one year, only to discover that the sky over the lake was completely overcast.)

And more science. If you thought your parrot was smart, you were right. From Smithsonian:

When we think about the smartest animals, chimpanzees are usually the first to come to mind. Experiments show that they can memorize sequences of numbers, learn the meaning of words and associate particular voices with specific faces. Crucially, previous studies have found that chimps and other apes are the only non-human animals capable of making abstract logical inferences based on cues from their environment.

A new experiment, though, might make us recognize that an entirely different species belongs in this exclusive group: the African grey parrot.

I don't do enough entries on science here. Have to fix that.

And finally, manga/amime. Jan Suzukawa has a good heads-up on the release of the new Ai no Kusabi. It's a solid, very informative post on the series. That's one that I've always meant to get to and never quite managed to -- it's not easy to find online, and I do like to check them out before I buy them.

Speaking of which, I really need to get back to my adaptations of the German editions -- Ze 7 arrived, and I'm still in the middle of Der Beste Liebhaber.

Catching Up

It's been kind of sketchy this week, but I haven't been completely idle. Here's a couple of things I think are worth looking at.

First, David Link at IGF has done a very good take-down of Robert Gagnon's latest diatribe.

I am unqualified to criticize the theology in Robert Gagnon’s hefty essay on the biblical errors in Alan Chambers’ leadership of Exodus International.  But what’s at stake here is pretty considerable, and more than just theological.  Chambers is president of Exodus, the group that assists Evangelical Christians with “same-sex attraction.”  Exodus had famously supported the notion that gays could change their sexual orientation, but Chambers – a gay man who is satisfactorily married to a woman, though he does not deny he continues to be sexually attracted to men – says now that he doubts such change in orientation is possible.

His change about change is important, as the sheer length of Gagnon’s critique (35 pages, with appendices) suggests, because it lets us see what Maggie Gallagher and the NOM Choir try so furiously to obscure: all that is left of the debate over homosexuality is the vestigial tail of a religious question about sin.

I seldom agree with Link, so this is sort of important.

And at The Advocate, there's an interview with Barry Sandler, who wrote Making Love, which is a pretty important film in gay history. Remember what it was like in the early '80s?

On the DOMA Wars front, although BLAG (which is the acronym for the House's Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group, and somehow the acronym is just right) is defending DOMA in the courts, since no one else in the government wants to be humiliated, House Democrats are taking their own action -- 132 of them have signed on to an amicus brief in Golinski vs. Office of Personnel Management, which is being appealed to the Ninth Circuit after coming a cropper in the district proceedings:

Unlike most Acts of Congress, DOMA cannot be viewed as the rational result of impartial lawmaking and should be treated with judicial skepticism. The brief makes it clear that the House is not united on DOMA’s validity, that the BLAG lawyers do not speak for the entire institution, and that there is no legitimate federal interest in denying married same-sex couples the legal security, rights and responsibilities that federal law provides to couples who are married under state law. …This law affirmatively harms married gay and lesbian couples and their children.

And, sure as god made little fishes, 60 Democrats refused to sign on. There's a list at the link. If your rep is on it, write your Congressman.

So, let's finish off with a picture. I got a little point-and-shoot digital camera, just to try it out, and I hate it -- there's a time delay between when you point and when the image shows up on the display, and for better than thirty years I've been shooting really fast. But you can get some nice stuff. From a visit to Lincoln Park Conservatory.

"The End of Gay": A Preamble

This is one of those topics that I keep meaning to come back to, and I'm building up a store of links and articles, but I'm not quite ready to dig into it yet. However, this piece by Jennifer Vanasco does look at one of the aspects of assimilation that I've noted before:

Not even gay people can tell that Jenny is gay, and it makes her sad.
"While society has gradually grown more accustomed to the idea that gay people can be flamboyant or perfectly ordinary, we in the gay community don’t always recognize our more subtle brothers and sisters on the street. We assume heterosexuality. Even in our own neighborhoods and our own shops."

“How can you be part of a community if no one can see you?” she asks.

Humans are a tribal animal, and if you’re gay, the LGBTcommunity is your tribe. We want other gay people to recognize us, because it makes us feel less alone. It makes us feel like part of something.

Or, as I've put it, it was a lot easier to know who to ask for a date when gay bars catered to gay people.

There's also the identity question -- what Andrew Sullivan tends to lump with "identity politics," which is not the same thing at all, but Sullivan isn't really very good at fine points.

I am terribly obvious about being gay. I'm not a flamer, by any means, I'm just very open about seeing things from my point of view -- i.e., that of a gay man -- and refusing to adopt any protective coloration. In fact, one reason I'm so obvious is that I got tired of women coming on to me and men passing me by (except, for some reason, the occasional straight guy). (File under "Stereotypes, masculinity")

This is one reason I'm pretty much convinced that, in spite of all the wishful thinking of "mainstream" gays, gay culture is not going to wither and die. We need it. We need to come home every once in a while, we need it as a refuge for our young people who are trying to figure out who they are, and we need it as a reminder to the rest of the world that no, we're not just like they are, and that's part of our value. That's one reason I lose patience fairly rapidly with the nervous nellies who keep screaming about excessive behavior at Gay Pride parades because we'll turn the straight people off. Jeebus! It's our holiday, FTLOP, get over yourselves. Has it occurred to anyone that the major portion of the audience for these things is straight people who come to see the parade --and bring their kids? (At least, that's the way it is in Chicago. I've ridden floats past rows of Latinas with their children, all cheering wildly.)

At any rate, read Vanasco's piece. It's entertaining as well as being spot on.

We're Not Only Everywhere, We're Inevitable

Wonderful story at NYT on coming out in middle school, which when I was that age was unthinkable.

Though most adolescents who come out do so in high school, sex researchers and counselors say that middle-school students are increasingly coming out to friends or family or to an adult in school. Just how they’re faring in a world that wasn’t expecting them — and that isn’t so sure a 12-year-old can know if he’s gay — is a complicated question that defies simple geographical explanations. Though gay kids in the South and in rural areas tend to have a harder time than those on the coasts, I met gay youth who were doing well in socially conservative areas like Tulsa and others in progressive cities who were afraid to come out.

I often refer to myself half-jokingly as a "Kinsey 6" -- I've always liked boys, and I've always known that I like boys, but when I was, say, twelve or thirteen, there was no such thing as "gay." I think kids are coming out earlier in large part because now there is an identity that fits.

After all, I’d known on some level that I was gay when I was their age. If I were growing up today, it’s possible that I would feel emboldened enough to confide in my parents, or at least a close friend, that I was gay. I’d also spent the morning of my visit reading a handful of studies about when gay and lesbian youth first report an awareness of same-sex attraction. Though most didn’t self-identify as gay or lesbian until they were 14, 15 or 16, the mean age at which they first became aware of that attraction was 10. Boys tended to be aware about a year earlier than girls.

It's a very good article, a nice balance between anecdotes and issues. It's even funny in places. Read it.

Core Issues

This post by Chris Bodenner at Daily Dish is instructive, but not for the reasons Bodenner discusses.

Along those lines, the chart's creator, ReligiousTolerance.org, opted for the label "homosexual orientation" over "gay sex," while it referred to "teen sex" and "premarital sex" elsewhere. So it appears their methodology took into account the Catholic parsing of desire and behavior. I personally think such parsing is bullshit (e.g. how exactly is "deliberately engaging in fantasies" an action?). But in the mind of a strict Catholic, a homosexually-oriented person who's never engaged in gay sex is still neutral to sin.

The Church has the same position on masturbation that it does on homosexual behavior: "The Catechism calls masturbation 'an intrinsically and gravely disordered action' (CCC 2352)."

Bodenner is quoting from Catholic.com, and this I found revealing:

[W]e must reject sin, including homosexual behavior—that is, acts intended to arouse or stimulate a sexual response regarding a person of the same sex. The Catholic Church teaches that such acts are always violations of divine and natural law.

Now, divine law is an iffy sort of thing -- there seem to be as many "divine laws" as there are divinities, and anyone who has studied religion in any depth, particularly those faiths outside one's own, knows this. Even more ludicrous is the Church's repeated insistence on "natural law," a construct that is wholly theological and not only has nothing to do with nature, but flies in the face of observed fact. (I mean, come on -- monkeys masturbate, probably for the same reasons people do: they're horny and bored. So what's "intrinsically disordered" about it?)

I am put in mind of nothing more than a dictum that I ran across in my reading at one point, about the role of religion as a political instrument for maintaining those in power in their comfortable positions, which was expressed very succinctly by the author (and regrettably, due to the erosion of my bear trap-like memory by the inevitable advance of years, I don't remember who it was or where I ran across this gem): Control sex and you control the people. The Christian churches, thanks to the pernicious influence of St. Paul, have made controlling sex -- for everyone else, at least -- one of their primary purposes for the past 2,000 years. (Remember, by all reports, Paul didn't like sex -- unless it came with a rich widow.)

Rather than fostering any true understanding on the part of their followers into the moral ramifications of sexuality, the churches have opted for fear -- the first resort of those who have no substance to advance, as we can well see from the condition of our own political discourse. And, I might point out, it is the Roman Catholic Church in particular that has proven itself incapable of understanding morality in any real sense, particularly when a legitimately moral stance might erode its power.

There are those who will claim that by attacking their churches, I am attacking their religion. Nothing could be further from the truth: being a believer myself, and one whose religion recognizes that there are many ways that lead to the one Truth, I'm not prepared to condemn religious belief out of hand. Churches, however, are another story: no matter what their claims, they are purely man-made institutions (and for the overwhelming majority of such institutions, that is the literal truth), and their doctrines are no better than any other manifestation of human thought, and worse than many. We'd best keep in mind that they are flawed, imperfect as we are imperfect, and should be understood in the context of their times and their political aims, because they are as much political as anything else.

So, take Catholic doctrine on homosexual behavior for what it's worth: it is, after all, a human creation, based on nothing so much as a stray Bible verse, which may or may not have been interpreted correctly, used as a gloss to dress up the Church's overriding definition of humanity, which as far as I've been able to figure out, equates fairly closely with the term "breeding stock."

(Afterthought: Regarding "natural law," it strikes me that this is a deeply flawed doctrine developed from unfounded assumptions based on an imperfect understanding of nature and its workings -- or it might be more accurate to say "a complete disregard of nature and its workings." Remember that Nature fell from grace with humanity, but Nature, I'm told, is not redeemable, Teilhard de Chardin notwithstanding. Think about that for awhile.)

On Marriage

Or, to put it in terms the fringe right can understand, this is what they're "protecting" marriage from. From Andrew Sullivan, writing in The Atlantic:

The wedding occurred last August in Massachusetts in front of a small group of family and close friends. And in that group, I suddenly realized, it was the heterosexuals who knew what to do, who guided the gay couple and our friends into the rituals and rites of family. Ours was not, we realized, a different institution, after all, and we were not different kinds of people. In the doing of it, it was the same as my sister’s wedding and we were the same as my sister and brother-in-law. The strange, bewildering emotions of the moment, the cake and reception, the distracted children and weeping mothers, the morning’s butterflies and the night’s drunkenness: this was not a gay marriage; it was a marriage.

And our families instantly and for the first time since our early childhood became not just institutions in which we were included, but institutions that we too owned and perpetuated. My sister spoke of her marriage as if it were interchangeable with my own, and my niece and nephew had no qualms in referring to my husband as their new uncle. The embossed invitations and the floral bouquets and the fear of fluffing our vows: in these tiny, bonding gestures of integration, we all came to see an alienating distinction become a unifying difference.

It was a moment that shifted a sense of our own identity within our psyches and even our souls. Once this happens, the law eventually follows. In California this spring, it did.

Read the whole thing. This is what the Peter LaBarberas and K-Los of the world can't let themselves see.

This is probably an FGB post,

sort of, even though it's Monday.

Participants dance on a float during the Pride Parade in Chicago. (Tribune photo by Kuni Takahashi / June 29, 2008)

The Chicago Pride Parade was yesterday. I didn't go. I was writing pretty much all day, and it was rainy -- the first time in living memory that it has rained on our parade, although I think it held off during the hours the parade was actually happening. It's been known to rain before the parade, but as nearly as I can remember, it has always cleared up before noon, when the parade starts.

At any rate, it's appropriate, I think, to pass on some thoughts about Pride and where we are now. I'm not going to talk about the obvious victories, the apparent progress, the remaining threats: I've done it enough, I think, and you all know what they are. I'm looking at the less obvious stuff, such as the fact that Gay Pride is such a normal thing here that the story in the Chicago Tribune focused on the California marriage decision and the pending civil unions bill in the Illinois legislature. The Sun-Times focused on DADT. The Chicago Reader, our local alt weekly [and, to be honest, one of the oldest and best in the country, in general] acknowledged that the parade was happening, if you cared to look hard enough. Maybe if Boys' Town were in Bucktown, the gay community would get coverage at the Reader.* TimeOut Chicago gave Pride a box on the home page (for Sunday's edition of the website; it's been bumped, but I note that TimeOut has a "Gay and Lesbian" section), similar to the Trib, and UR Chicago gave it a lead story, home page. And this, from the latter, catches my attitude pretty closely:

Oh, Pride. What a wet, boozy, resilient testament to the LGBT crowd's visibility. Sure, some delusional conservative envangicals might ascribe the day's scattered downpours on God's disapproval (which would ignore the gorgeous, sunny weather from the previous couple of years), but actually, the less-than-desirable weather just proved how determined the Gay Pride participants and audience were to celebrate. Besides, if the rain was an act of God, it just goes to show how willing God is to turn an entire strip of Lakeview into one long shower contest. I mean, in case hot guys in Speedos wasn't enough, God wants them to be wet, too? Amen, indeed.

Of course, Windy City Times and Chicago Free Press normally run series during the whole month of June. And we can expect reports in the coming week.

The point of all this is simply that Gay Pride is now, in this city at least, Business As Usual. Pride, like Halsted Market Days in August (which is still, I believe, our biggest neighborhood festival), is simply another celebration in the city. They happen almost every weekend in the summer, although I have to say our two are among the biggest and splashiest. (Whatever else has happened over the years, we still know how to party.)

Chicago Police officers participate in the Pride Parade. (Tribune photo by Kuni Takahashi / June 29, 2008)

Which leads me to believe we are witnessing, in what is arguably the most conservative major city in the country (I mean, "major" for longer than the last ten years -- Midwest, Heartland, white ethnics, all the rest), not only tolerance, but acceptance. In the public perception, we're part of the fabric here.

That's the real gain. That's the reality. And that's the way it should be.

(I love this picture. That's the future, man. Go for it.)

Mike Allegretti (right) and Christoper Littmann, both of Chicago, watch the Pride Parade. (Tribune photo by Kuni Takahashi / June 29, 2008)

*Footnote: I'm not a journalist. Maybe it's just that legal same-sex marriage in a state without residency requirements, a civil unions bill in the Illinois legislature (with some sectors already pushing for full marriage rights), a mayor and county clerk who are on record as supporting marriage equality, a County Board that has just proposed to extend benefits to gay couples married elsewhere, and a Chicago politician running for president who wants to repeal the federal DOMA, aren't something for an in-depth article during Pride Week. I wouldn't know.

FGB III: Thoughts on Parada

A post by Kevin at Citizen Crain on the Sao Paulo Pride festivities, weighted with gloom and doom, and a certain amount of schadenfreude. He seems troubled by the fact that Parada, as it is called, is not only the largest gay celebration in the world, but the most chaotic.

It's almost surreal to stare into the enormity of the annual São Paulo gay pride parade (known here simply as the "Parada") and to see within that image the past, present and possible future of the gay movement in the United States all at the same time. The picture is a mash-up of self-discovery and self-destruction, incredible power and pathetic weakness, great hope and miserable failure. And we should all be drawing lessons from it.

Why? Why should we be drawing lessons from it? That's my first question. It's a celebration. Perhaps it's not the celebration that Kevin thinks it should be, but then, he's not in control of it. From the looks of things, no one is, but that's not unusual in this world. In fact, it's more or less normal.

By comparison, Chicago's Pride weekend, which is a lot more organized than Sao Paulo seems to be, is pretty dull. Well, not the weekend so much, but the parade. But it's remained for the past 30-odd years a smallish (if 250,000+ people can be termed "smallish") neighborhood festival. There are sporadic moves to relocate it downtown, which I oppose -- I like having it in the neighborhood, and I don't see what moving it downtown would do for us. I'm funny that way: it's our celebration.

Kevin seems upset at the lack of "message." I think maybe he's just not seeing it.

But with all these incomparable strengths, what is most remarkable about São Paulo pride is its utter failure to articulate even the most basic message. Beyond a few pronouncements and a banner or a website, a coherent message of any kind fails to reach anyone in the street. Instead, the Parada is a sea of drunken recklessness, criminal violence and disturbing overcrowding which has begun to actually drive the resident gay population of the city away from it. The organizers are very competent in breaking world attendance records, but are hopelessly inept at finding some way to truly organize the attendees around any sense of mission or purpose beyond getting loaded, and getting laid.

What else are parties for? Seriously. I don't see why everything has to be a political event. There's lots of room at a Pride celebration, but remember one thing (which I will probably keep hammering on): it's a celebration, and like an Irish funeral, it's likely to be pretty exciting. (Speaking of Irish, the St. Patrick's Day parade in Chicago is notorious for the drunken brawling that seems an integral part of it. I mean, people bar-hopping from 9 am on. I doubt that Sao Paulo is anywhere close.)

But back to the main thread: why does there have to be a serious mission at a Pride parade? Sorry, but that's an assertion that I can't take as a given -- it's got to have some backing, some clearly articulated reason why the celebration of who we are has to have a message other than "this is who we are." I'm reminded of nothing so much as those in the US who seem to feel that drag queens and leathermen should be excluded from the parades (even though they would never say so -- publicly) because they give a "bad impession" of the gay community. No, they don't. They're as much a part of the community as the PFLAG marchers or the bar floats. Deal with it.

And, when it comes right down to it, what message is Kevin proposing we focus on? He doesn't seem to offer one.

Kevin seems to see the negatives:

My understanding of gay pride events is that they provide a zone of safety for gay people to come out and feel more confident and secure against a tide of intolerance in society. Ironically, at the biggest such event in the world, gay people feel ever more insecure and unsafe. Last year's Parada was marred by a brutal, anti-gay murder in the heart of the Jardins neighborhood just hours after the event ended. A gang of "punks" picked out a man at random outside a gay bar/restaurant and stabbed him to death right on the sidewalk. The police hunted down the perpetrators and began cracking down on gangs as a result.

But this year, the death of a 25 year old gay Brazilian has come to symbolize the growing failure of this event to leave any sense of greater meaning behind than a sense of insecurity, distraction and self-destruction.

Sorry -- does he have any evidence for this? Any surveys? Exit polls from the circuit parties? All I see evidence of here is institutionalized party-pooping. Yes, it is horrific that a gay man was murdered by a gang after the parade. It happens enough that it's not unusual, and usually the thugs don't even need a parade as an excuse. And it's terribly sad that such a vibrant young man died from what looks like an accidental drug overdose. Frankly, to use these two incidents (and I'm sure they're not isolated, but they don't seem to be defining, either, to anyone except Kevin) as an excuse to slam the Parada for not being virtuous enough is pretty damned cheesy.


And my understanding of Gay Pride is somewhat different. I've always seen it as containing a strong element of defiance, and the idea that they provide a sense of safety strikes me as odd. Those who want safety, in my experience, tend to stay away -- they might be seen. (Well, this was true in the beginning. Now, everyone wants to be seen at the Pride Parade.) But the Parade -- and I assume the Parada -- are not about safety. They are about defiance, strength in numbers, joy, and celebration (there's that word again). There's always been a certain "fuckyouness" to the very idea of Gay Pride: it's us standing up and telling the world "We're here, we're queer, deal with it!"

I get emails from American gays fairly often which tell me of a rising level of disgust at gay politics in the United States. To many of them, it is run by a group of hacks who lack vision and courage, who cater to politicians of both parties that have no qualms about throwing us overboard. And these critics are not outraged so much as ready to turn their backs on something that was once an inspiring movement full of hope and joy. One of them, an activist who started in the 1980s, wrote me that she felt like she was watching "my baby, all grown up, just laying there dying and I can't do anything about it."

Today, I read a comment by a Brazilian posted today on the gay news portal, MixBrasil. The frustration I saw in it matches the frustrations in emails from back home. And I wondered, will we end up defeating ourselves more handily than our enemies, simply because we don't have a message anymore?

So here we get to it -- Gay Pride is just an extension of the Human Rights Campaign and its black-tie dinners. (And why didn't I see this coming?) Look, I'm as unhappy with the national gay rights organizations as anyone, especially with HRC, because I think, like Chris Crain, Andrew Sullivan, John Aravosis, any number of other commentators, that they have lost touch with the heart of the movement. They completely missed the boat on the marriage issue, and their rationale -- working on nuts-and-bolts issues first -- while it makes a certain amount of sense, puts them in the position of attempting to control the movement, not of working to further our cause. There's a difference. Yes, people are frustrated with gay politics as it used to be run. Excuse me -- have you heard of the Internet? Gay politics is not a matter of black-tie-dinners any more (which organizations such as HRC, GLAAD and a few others would do well to learn, and learn fast). It's the major gay bloggers, gay news on the Web, and even the little guys like me making their thoughts known to anyone who wants to listen. No filters, no carefully worded press releases, no sucking up to politicians, no pulling punches. That's gay politics today.

And maybe that's why Kevin is so disappointed in Parada: as a reflection of "gay politics" (and I remain unconvinced that it needs to be), it's not old-style, which is to say organized, top-down, focused on message (and just exactly which message is it supposed to be focused on? We have many messages), and controllable.

No, thank you. I like this yeasty, messy thing we've developed here, and I like the way it's reflected in our celebrations. I hate the violence, but we don't start it, usually. (In fact, I don't know of an instance where we have.) I hurt for people like Lucas as much as I hurt for anyone whose life is cut short. How is that a function of Gay Pride?

Kevin closes with an e-mail from a friend (his translation):

When I went to my first gay pride (in São Paulo) seven years ago, it was an incredible experience. It wasn't perfect, of course, but everyone tried however possible to make that parade really be something to be proud of, and set a real goal to gain visibility and tolerance in society. Last year, when I went to it with a friend, after two hours trying to walk along one of the floats, we decided it was impossible because of the number of people and we gave up and went home. Now at home, thinking about the parade, we also feel like we don't have that sense of pride when we left the party, as it's no longer the party it was. Today I live in London and I compare the gay scene of São Paulo with the one here, and I have to say that for all the ways our scene is better, it has a lot of growing up and learning to do. Along with this, after reading the details here and on other sites, and the comments of some friends, I have to say I'm disappointed to see our parade and it's not even Paulista or even gay, it's been turned into a party that sadly promotes just the opposite of what it proposes. Tourists coming to São Paulo to hit the parties in the clubs instead of going to Avenida Paulista, people afraid to get up on the floats or dress up for fear of some kind of retaliation - robbery, crimes, violence and breaking the rules of its own participants is shameful. We have to be more aware and do something that really lives up to being proud.

Look, I'm sorry they feel that way, but that's not the whole picture by any means. That's their reading, their interpretation, of an event that didn't fit their expectations, whatever those were. I've marched, ridden floats, or just watched the parade for over thirty years now, off and on, and no, it's not the same as it was thirty years ago: we have politicians marching now, and support groups, and church groups, and gods know what else, as well as the drag queens and nearly-naked dancers and leathermen (and -women), because they all want to be part of this.

This is who we are: vital, lively, colorful, unruly, unorthodox, sometimes lawless, sometimes fearful, sometimes very brave indeed. And yeah, people still get drunk and puke in the street, have sex in alleys, and get beat up. Sorry we haven't all turned into a bunch of bourgeois bores, but there's room for those, too.

You may have gathered that I think Kevin's post is pretty much wrong-headed. There are many messages at Pride celebrations, just as there are many facets to our community. I'll readily admit I'm resistant to the idea of focusing on "a message" for something like a Pride parade. That smacks too much of organized movement politics, which haven't been all that successful lately.

One thing about this that keeps stirring at the back of my mind, and it's something I run into again and again in reviewing: how much of what you're seeing is what you're looking for, and how much was actually put there for you to see?

Friday Gay Blogging, Sunday Edition

This post by Eric Leven is the kind of thing I'd like to see more of.

Two years ago I made a somewhat jarring, somewhat controversial (although I had no intention of it being so) advertisement that deals with second guessing the choices of your sex life when you find yourself at the STD/HIV clinic awaiting the results of your next test. The ad was both well-received as well as criticized for its level of "fear campaigning."

In the writing, producing and directing of the ad I never once sat down and said to myself, "Ok. How can I scare people?!" Never the case. Not once. I took an experience as a modern, sexually active, sexually positive gay male and translated it to film with the hopes of encouraging others to slow down, think before they act and take their sex lives seriously and responsibly.

On that note, check out this post at Joe.My.God about the sharp increase in new HIV infections. As Joe points out, this is in part due to more complete reporting, but. . . .

Keeping in mind that this spike is fueled in part by better reporting, the news is still sobering, to say the least. I probably should rattle off the "get tested, play safe" mantra, but maybe it's more useful to remind you that by far the most infectious person is the freshly-seroconverted guy who truly believes he is negative.

It doesn't matter how often or how recently you've been tested. Even with "rapid testing" the average time between infection and detectable antibodies is still 25 days. If you are regularly sexually active and somebody asks if you are HIV+, there are only two possible answers: "Yes" and "I don't know." Those guys that trumpet the date of their negative test in their hook-up profiles must believe in time travel. Treat every "negative" partner as if he were just infected yesterday. Because if he passes the virus to you, he probably was.

I haven't written much about HIV, despite the fact that it's still with us and still very much a part of our lives. That's mostly because I don't have anything new to say about it, except to point out that, even though it's a treatable disease and can now be handled like any othre chronic illness, it's still a chronic illness that's going to affect your life in fundamental ways, starting with the fact that you're going to be on meds for the rest of your life. That's something I personally detest. I'm on medication for hypertension and cholesterol right now, and my great goal is to revise my habits so that I'm off those damn things asap. They're not fun (I'm prone to side effects anyway, and these are choice), and I hate the idea that my continued good health is dependent on popping pills.

And then I think what it would be like if I really had to take the pills to avoid lingering illness and an ugly death. I've already lost too many friends. I don't want to be the next one.