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The Governor has vetoed AB 849 (Leno) the Religious Freedom and Civil Marriage Protection Act!
Fuckyouasshole.
•••
Update: If you're in San Francisco, just heard about this:
RALLY AND MARCH TOMORROW(FRIDAY 9/30) San Francisco, at Castro and Market/Harvey Milk Plaza.
5:00 PM
www.markleno.com, eqca.org for updates
Pass it on!
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I've lived through such terrible times and there are people who live through much worse. But you see them living anyway. When they're more spirit than body, more sores than skin, when they're burned and in agony, when flies lay eggs in the corners of the eyes of their children - they live. Death usually has to take life away. I don't know if that's just the animal. I don't know if it's not braver to die, but I recognize the habit; the addiction to being alive. So we live past hope.
That was said by Prior Walter, one of the characters in Tony Kushner's breathtakingly terrifying and hopeful Angels in America.
He's speaking to a bureaucratic committee of Angels who offer him to stay in Heaven (a city, much like San Francisco) instead of return to life, to his life, down on Earth. He's trying to explain to them why things must always change, progress, move forward.
God left Heaven and left the Angels to their own fates a while after He created humans and since that time, when humanity changes, Heaven suffers seismically, they explain to him, demanding he make humanity stop changing.
And I suppose that's enough of a backstory to at least anneal the ends of the quote, to make it self-contained and presentable at least in a limited way.
The story has fucked with me mightily. I was explaining this to Scott this evening, along with my own epiphany that Angels are the most horrible and obscene creatures. Something analogous to the deadly traps and catches that guard the Holy Grail, I suppose. Know I a messenger than is neither utterly forgettable nor annoying beyond all patience?
I told Scott that the moment the Angel of America, of terrible terminations, with frightening flapping wings, causing violence and destruction in entrance and departure, bellows, “I, I, I, I, I...” I knew Angels to be obscenities. Horrific obscenities.
Strength beyond a man and willing to use it however unfairly; stooping to unheavenly intervention yet superiorly levitating, always above.
I read the two plays, Millenium Approaches and Perestroika in 1994. It was May or June. I was with Allen and we were on Saint Thomas, a first-prize won on the Family Channel's call-in quiz thingy (to this day, I relish the fact that Pat Robertson and crew paid for us two faggots to spend an all-expenses-paid week in the Virgins). They knocked me on my ass back then, but now I suspect I was mainly out of my depth in that the worst of the pathology of Allen's AIDS was yet to come and I was still living in that never-changing bubble of denial.
I saw the second play, Perestroika, in previews at ACT in San Francisco as well. Again, with Allen and my friends Dave & Lisa (priorly referred to in these pages as my sherpas to the liberal and lovely world of Northern Californian culture and politics). The production wwas just starting previews and the cast and crew working out logistics and allen was sick and Perestroika took 4 1/2 hours to put on and it took Allen days to recover from the loss of sleep and interruption of schedule and heat of an air-condition-challenged theater.
I missed the Angels in America miniseries when it was on HBO, but I bought the DVDs when they first came out.
They remained in shrinkwrap until last night, when I had the house to myself, my brain to myself, and the need to find motion—any motion at all. I guess I knew what I was doing in choosing to watch this. But I didn't know exactly why.
And I certainly didn't expect to be so fucked by it.
Then again, with almost a full day's worth of time between me and the watching, I should have expected it.
I think about what one of the ghosts of a prior Prior Walter said:
The twentieth century. Oh dear, the world has gotten so terribly, terribly old.
and I can't help but apply it to myself. The I, I, I, I, I have been has gotten so terribly, terribly old. Far too long without the personal renewal I've had the privilege of welcoming on a regular basis here in my City so much like Heaven.
The motion I seek is not specific: when lost in the desert, one direction is as good as any other. And being lost and losing things and losing people and losing out should, like all Absolutes, be also labeled: Temporary.
As Harper Pitt says from her airplane window while on a “Night flight to San Francisco - chase the moon across America”:
I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening. But I saw something that only I could see, because of my astonishing ability to see such things: Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules, of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them, and was repaired. Nothing's lost forever. In this world, there's a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that's so.
I'm sure I'll be considering, with heart and with head, concretely and abstractly, the contents of Angels in America over the next few however-long-it-takes's (and fuck you, too, it's my blog :).
And so I pray your patience on that. Much of my legendary patience may be spent on my own personal restructuring for a while. In the meantime? Renewal.
Nothing's lost forever. [...] There is no zion save where you are.
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I'm heading over in a bit to the East Bay (that's Pig Latin for 'BEAST', by the way), to see Sam's very first solo flight as a DJ. DJ Mix Mutt. The party: Pound. Same place as last Friday's opener: The White Horse Bar at 66th & Telegraph.
As a little gift, I traveled all the way to Eastern Africa to get him a suitable domain name. There's nothing there yet but his logo, but go have a look at http://mixmutt.dj
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Mine is a very visual mind.
Words fall on a page and are captured with near-perfect fidelity. For images, that goes triple.
Listening to spoken word in conversation or film or song, though, and I'm deaf of remembrance. I'm not tone deaf, nor is my ear of tin. In fact, just as I possess some talent for drawing and for narrative and for cognitive eloquence, modest though they may be there are some musical talents in me.
It's just that I can see the music on the sheet better than I can listen to it: the pattern of oblong dots and the neat lines and circles and arcs is more musical to me than the hearing of it—on a cognitive level, anyway, because there's nothing like music in its effects on my mood, my outlook, my own personal timbre (and make it in threes—a waltz or anything in 3/4 or 6/8 time or carry on in triplets even in standard time—and I am utterly captivated. There's no explaining it).
But the unhearing memory, unless consciously exercised, does not so often bring the words of a song out of mood and into cognition.
Which is the sole reason that I'm such a huge fan of the wiki-lyrical sites that post the words to most of the songs out there. I have Dashboard Widgets that look to those sites to display the lyrics of whatever song iTunes happens to be playing at the time. I'll hear a song either on the radio, on my iPod shuffle/mini/20GB or in my head (that happens a lot) and I'll go google “My Heaven Mary Chapin Carpenter lyrics” or “Fantastic Delusion The Tubes Lyrics” and go read the words to the songs.
And in the reading there's so much more than in the hearing, for me. It's like I get to enjoy every song twice: for the listening and its attendant swoon; and for the reading and its attendant understanding.
Sounds like a gift, right? Well, twice given, twice taken, I say. Because one can also google “Take Me Home Tonight Eddie Money Lyrics” or “Toxic Britney Spears Lyrics”. Shudder. Re-shudder.
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California is a wacky place, isn't it?
Not the kind of wacky that lives in Eastern Washington, mind you, but pretty wacky nonetheless.
Take God, for instance (please). It seems that the Unholy State of Things in the Unholier State of California, has “activist” judges daring to proclaim that children should be free of coercion by the government. How dare they?!? Have they no shame? At long last, Sirs, have you no shame?
Activist judges who refuse god. Who refuse to embrace god's statements that marriage shall be only between a penis and a vagina. Activist judges who, decades ago, decided that the tribes of earth should be allowed to intermingle.
And now, they've just gone too far. Now, these California Hippies have said that children have—areyousittingdownforthisbecauseyoushouldbe—the right to be “free from a coercive requirement to affirm God.”
It's like they think Americans have the freedom of their own religion or something.
Hera and Hermes protect us! The Californians have gone mad!
Because, ohwhythefucknot:
I pledged my endtable
Cuz I'm such a fag
And the Unrivaled God of Biscuits
And to the Republicans
Whom we can't stand
Rhythm Nation
Underwear
And flibbertigibbets appalled.
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The Mix Mutt: Sam/LOML
The Place: White Horse Inn
The Thing: The Big Debut of DJ Mix Mutt
The Time: 9pm to 10pm, so get your asses there early
The Location: 6551 Telegraph Ave. Oakland, Ca. 94609 @ 66th st. 510-652-3820
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I'm in the Castro. In the drug store to pick up a prescription refill. The inside of the building has changed, but some things never do.As I wait for them to retrieve my relatively-incidental 'script for Restoril, I see there's someone in far worse shape than me (like I don't remember this anyhow): a paper grocery-bag sized bag with no fewer than thirteen separate script tags stapled to it.
Did I ever pick that many up at one time for Allen? No, not at one time.
Ahh, but only because most HIV drugs didn't exist then. Ahh, that explains it.
Cold Comfort.
I go to the greeting cards section. Tears too swift. Too much anguish in the Now. What kind of anniversary card is appropriate for us right now?
Last night as we talked in bed I looked up at the projection of the time on the ceiling. 12:35. Dread. It's officially September 13 and what would be or might still be our second anniversary. I hate this in-between space.
Even in San Francisco, even in the Castro, there's not an anniversary card for this.
I go to Pasqua Starbucks across the street and sit in my old seat—the one up in the back corner on the riser where I wrote more than half a thousand pages of fiction.
If I have an addiction, it's to Time. But it's not an addiction really, even if and even when the swoon of it overpowers.
The Castro, for me, has so much Past to offer. The Castro, for the world, still has so much Future to offer. But what I need is to be grounded in the Now.
How Soon is Now?
Dear goddess, save me from quoting Morrissey.
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Shakespeare's Sonnet 116
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
•••
Impedimented, altered, removed, unmarked. Tempest-tossed and shaken. Older than my years and wiser than I wish to be.
All of those, yes. But Time's Fool? Eternally never.
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A very Happy Birthday to my scamp of a bear of a pup of a cub of a partner, Sam.
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Just go read him.
Oahu is his home.
Smart, he is.
Handsome, too.
•••
He's brilliant and thoughtful and lovely. And a terrific writer. Though I'm tempted, I won't tell you who it is.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Possum Pie (but you have to give him back to his boyfriend).
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You came to this country to show off ornanamental muscles. Style over substance, form over function. Aesthetics over athletics.
Like the cuckoo among nobler, more honest birds, you deceived your way into place. You hooked yourself into the glam slam no-work no-talent ironic celebrity and milked and bilked millions to make your own millions.
Like the cuckoo, you did no real work yourself—you tricked others into building your future for you. And counting on the baser instincts of the mob mentality, you took your recognizability and co-opted yourself an executive position. Still on no-talent. Still with no-work. Still by subverting someone else's machinery.
You, the man who got so much on so little, you who came to this country as an alien but were welcome and were lavished with abundance, see fit to pass the buck, pass the responsibility of fairness, of balance, of equality, back off to the mob of people out there who stab and swipe at fear with their torches and their pitchforks.
But then again, you haven't vetoed such profoundly, humanly important legislation yet, so you may yet do the right thing. Such an in-kind act on your part may open up a bright world for yourself and the rest of us.
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I'm reading a novel:
“The Perks of Being a Wallflower” (Stephen Chbosky)
It was lent to me by JP, who thought I might like it. I like when people think I might like things. There's that kind of “little intrusion” (this is where I wish I knew french: I always thought petit mort was a grand and fussy and silly and completely accurate way of describing an orgasm) that people surprise you with sometimes. The casual acquaintance who intrudes only enough to let you know they'd never intrude but that they wanted you to know they were there if you needed anything. The friend who stands within yourself who cannot intrude because you've invited him in but who nonetheless takes a chance on getting in further by asking new questions, covering a new topic, offering up a new dimension to themselves.
The book is written by a man from Pittsburgh, my first adopted hometown. I went to college at Carnegie Mellon University, which is geographically, literally across a short bridge from University of Pittsburgh, all in the Oakland section of town.
Pittsburgh often intrudes; so does Shavertown, PA, for that matter (my biological hometown). This happens more and more lately. Perhaps it's a step-function of age, or a natural consequence of adversity, or from the very large number of books I've read in such a short time. Or it's the index cards I carry around with me everywhere: some stuffed in my back pocket, in jacket pockets. In my backpack. On the end-table.
Homecomings, of a sort, which make me think of Homecomings of that sort: the real kind. The kind that you'd go back to CMU for, or to Dallas Area High School for.
The kind I used to imagine returning to myself, when I'd look at the few older “kids” who'd be around for the Homecoming Game. I was the escort of one of my oldest and dearest friends, Toni, for the Homecoming Court my senior year. No one knew I was gay, of course (and thank goddess that relatively fewer kids won't ever have to say “I wasn't out, of course”!), but I was the president of our class, sat on a vast number of cross-functional committees and panels, was well-respected by my teachers and by administrators—and even by the 'snakes' and 'hoods' in the class (in large part thanks to the “indefinite detention” I'd received towards the end of my junior year).
So yeah, the past intrudes as well. But only enough to dot the map between then and here, only intruding enough to say “remember me! I was on your path, too!”
It's a pleasant feeling, like the hum and thrum of body parts after sex, like random breezings of “San Francisco air conditioning” at this time of year, like hearing Sam's voice in the morning separate from everything else because I haven't quite opened my eyes, haven't quite awakened.
There may not have been only the one path from then to here—although given the more extreme places and events along my particular path, I am hard-pressed to imagine another route—but it's the path I took and it's indelible.
I am on Caltrain right now; the novel I mentioned is the reason for the writing, the reason for the gentle tug of memory, the piezo-electric snick of pattern gentled squeezed into place. On the train, I sit facing the City. I always do this. Going to Cupertino or heading back Home, I always sit facing Home, otherwise I get a bit motion-sick. Not the kind you get from moving backwards in the morning or even moving forwards at night, or the kind some get when reading in a moving car. It's more about focus. It's more about measuring distance to understand that which is not subject to the scorn of distance or the chill of Apart. Love of him. Love of City. Love of Family. Love of Self. Love of Life and all its self-made diversity, complexity and wonder.
But I digress.
I am a creature of habit. On the train I read. It's what I do. And yet today I write, for the same reason I always write: because the words are there and permit nothing to continue until they go from here (head) to there (paper/iBook).
Habits can be measured only when you're not performing for them. Otherwise, they're just what you're doing.
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Do you mind sitting across from a small child? No, of course not, I say to the young (well, younger than myself) woman with the red ponytail and the tow-headed two-year-old. I smile and that convinces her.
We're going to see daddy in the City! The boy repeats “City?” San Francisco! I cannot tell if the import of that was lost on the boy or not.
A masterfully-packed bag produces a drinky-cup of apple juice upon demand. Then a Dora book. The boy stands up on the seat, looking out the window. “Train!” Yes, we're on the train. “Daddy!” Yes! We're going to see Daddy! Let's call him.
The magic bag proffers a mobile phone. The boy says, “Conductor!” I am surprised by three syllables and I look up from my own book and smile at him. He reaches for the Dora book and it falls to the floor. I pick it up, and I smile.
Thank you, the mother says, cellphone to ear.
“Thank you!” the child says with no prompting.
Again, I'm surprised. I look to the mother. She smiles, proud. Good for her, I think, she has every right to be. The boy is intelligent and observant, never becoming scattered and distracted.
Daddy isn't answering his phone, she says to the boy in child-placatives. I look at her face and there is no hint of distrust or suspicion or negativity. I am envious but only fleetingly. Let's page Daddy! she says. And does.
The phone rings within 30 seconds and I hear only her side: Hi....no....were you worried?....good....I should have called you when we first got on the train but the conductor—
“Conductor!” the child exclaims. Want to say hello to Daddy? “Hi Daddy!” says the boy into the phone in perfect diction.
I smile again, making eye contact with Mom. They say my blue eyes sparkle, but hers beam. This woman wears Happy as comfortably as she wears her ropey sandals and her casual blouse and her child on her hip (even though he'll almost be too big for it).
The conductor announced 22nd Street!. My stop. The train slows. The passengers stand and begin to gather. “Blue hair!” the boy says about a man walking by with blue spiky hair and too-long blue sideburns.
Mom looks mortified—ish. She's still smiling because there was no harm done and because it was true and because her son is a bright boy and because the man has already passed.
“No hair!” the boy says. This time he's looking at me. I was waiting for it. I hear a sharp intake of breath, a reverse hiss. SSsssssssih!
No hair! I say, smiling huge at Mom. The I look at the boy as I rub my bald head. No hair!
The train stops and I stand up.
I want you guys to have a wonderful evening, I say to her. And I meant it quite earnestly.
“Thank you!” says the boy.
Thank you so much, says the Mom. Thanks for putting up with us.
Are you kidding me? I asked through a still-big smile.
“Bye!” says the boy.
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1% Republican. | “You're a complete liberal, utterly without a trace of Republicanism. Your strength is as the strength of ten because your heart is pure. (You hope.)” |
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I *love love love* when people land here not having any clue in hell what they're about to see. For that matter, I love being surprised when I'm doing a rather pedestrian search and end up at some gay-, ghetto- or just plain-fabulous place as well.
Thanks to the imperious devilish-of-mediocrity UI-unfriendly security-challenged fine people at Microsoft and MSN, someone who went searching for DATE BLACK GIRLS WHO LOVE GOD ended up in my lil ol' humble patch of internet.
You know, Scott Thompson *did* attempt to equate “hot black mamas” and “fags”, once upon a time. And we all know (or should know) that reality is what you make it and all that's required for the birth of a new word is agreement and tradition.
I don't know any black girls who love god of biscuits, but I do know one hot Canadian chick who likes my butt.
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I went out and bought index cards—lots of them—and pens and a notebook. I carry the index cards with me and write down things that pop into my head. Turns of phrase, sequences of events or images, memories, ideas.
Anne Lamott says to do it, and so I do. I've done this before and it led to writing a novel.
Who knows what it will lead to this time? Can't wait to see.
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I hear lines like, “It flies in the the face of natural selection (any hereditary gene for homosexuality would have selected itself out many generations ago). Therefore I ask again, where is the SCIENCE that supports homosexuality?”
Siiiigh.
Maybe I should start a little series of lessons to let these ignorant-yet-bellicose folks in on science's dirty little secrets?
Til then, don't give them too much credit, folks. Don't assume that they've taken basic science plowshares and perverted them into swords of christian kindness. No, they don't even know where to find the plowshares in the first place.
It gets worse, though. They won't actually go look up what 'natural selection' might be, in fact, instead pushing the legwork onto those of us under the onslaught of this kind of stupidity. Ironically, they know there are those who old fact and scientific truth on a bit of a pedestal, so they exploit our care and rigor to keep us busy while they just continue to blather utter nonsense.
Last time I checked, one typically challenged what they knew to be incorrect, not what they didn't bother to understand in the first place.
I guess they figure, if it works for secular conservatives, why not us?
Wait...did I just say “secular conservatives”? Are there any left?
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A real leader faces the music,
even when he doesn't like the tune. - anonymous
So Photoshop is pretty good, right? But I knew this picture was Photoshopped when I first saw it. Oh, not because the artist did a bad job, but mainly because I had seen the Bush-playing-guitar picture before.
So in the interest of fairness, I'm also providing the original picture in context, so you can see the Real Bush In Action.
I suppose I shouldn't complain too, too much. I mean the President did rubberneck fly over New Orleans in Air Force One to gawk at assess the damage.. What a guy.
And I'll leave you with a handful of quotations that do a pretty good job of reflecting what my opinions are about good leadership.
To work in the world lovingly means that we are defining what we will be for, rather than reacting to what we are against. — Christina Baldwin
Blessed is the leader who seeks the best for those he serves. — unknown
An army of a thousand is easy to find, but, ah, how difficult to find a general. — Chinese proverb
Be gentle and you can be bold; be frugal and you can be liberal; avoid putting yourself before others and you can become a leader among men. — Lao Tzu
A good leader inspires others with confidence in him; a great leader inspires them with confidence in themselves. — anonymous
Forethought and prudence are the proper qualities of a leader. — Tacitus
A good leader is not the person who does things right, but the person who finds the right things to do. — Anthony T. Dadovano
The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. — Max DuPree
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Margaret Cho used to tell a joke, one of a rapid-fire set of situations, each funnier than the rest. She talked about a sexual dry-spell, about her incompetence in seducing a man. “Here, let me tell you all my pick-up line. I'll be at a club, see a hot guy at the end of the bar. He smiles, I smile. I walk up to him and I say, 'STICK IT IN!!!'”
The audience cracks up, and she says, “What? Is that bad?”
She thought maybe she's just throw a bunch of leaves and branches over her pussy and maybe man would just be walking along and fall in.
Well, it appears that some parasitic incompetent flimflamming enterprising mountebanks Christians have taken to guiding you to Jesus through typos and subverting a person's intentions. They've thrown leaves and branches over Pussy Jesus in order to trap you.
Go visit http://christians-suck-ass.blogpsot.com or any-profane-heretical-blasphemous-baby-jesus-eats-other-babies.blogpsot.com will do the trick.
It's a toss-up which of the Ten Commandments they're violating. Could it be #3, which states that you shouldn't take the name of the lord in vain? I mean, they're equating a mistake with the Almighty.
Maybe it's a good old-fashioned #9...bearing false witness and all that folderol. I suggest they go with this one...because I've heard tell that the holy bible doesn't actually spell out any specific punishment for lying.
And remember, kids, punishment is for other people, anyone but them.
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I have been trying and stopping, trying and stopping, to express my sadness about what has happened to New Orleans and her people.
Every time I start, I stop. Every time I stop, I get frustrated and start again. I know, at least second-hand, what it's like to live through a flood and all the destruction, displacement and dis-ease...back in 1972, Hurricane Agnes caused massive flooding in the Wyoming Valley of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. Family, friends and so many others ended up fleeing to higher ground. They lost almost everything under 25 feet of water.
I was to New Orleans in October, 1995, in part to escape to a mental “higher ground”: Allen had died three months prior, my Aunt “Toots” (my own Auntie Mame) two months prior, and New Orleans was the only other numinous city in America and I needed to be there.
New Orleans is magnificent—and will be again. You don't keep humanity like that down for very long, but in the mean time, how to mourn the losses?
How to express that kind of sadness, that kind of loss? It wouldn't come to me. Until today.
In writing to Richard (who is struggling mightily, sadly) just a little while ago, I said:
My heart is breaking over what's happened to your magical city.
To all of you Yats—in spirit or in residence—I think we San Franciscans may appreciate more than most what it means not only to live in a Magical City, but to lose it as well. Let us know what you need.
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