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Thank God SOMEBODY Said It

By Chris Hall
August 5, 2006
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Two things have bugged me about the LGBT movements in this country for the last ten years or so.

Well, actually, lots of things have bugged me about LGBT politics, but that’s because I’m a skeptical, misanthropic bastard.  But for the moment, let’s pare it down to two, just so I don’t have to keep typing until my fingers bleed.  The first is the insistence on a biological origin of homosexuality.  As a matter of scientific inquiry, it’s always interesting to play the “nature or nurture?” game. But as a point of political ideology, it’s a dead end.  It smacks of cowardice; if it’s biological, being queer isn’t a choice, and therefore it isn’t your “fault.” In essence, pushing the “gay gene” idea amounts to institutionalized whining: “We can’t help being homos; it’s in our genes.” But more importantly, it surrenders to the ‘phobes the idea that it matters.  In a country that promises the freedom that America does, it shouldn’t matter one bit whether gayness is locked in by a molecular switch flipped by your mom listening to Color Me Barbara eight million times while she was knocked up, or if it’s something you decide as casually as the choice between Chinese food and steak; who you fuck should be as sacred as what god you worship, and by hammering on homosexuality as biological destiny, the national LGBT groups have completely abandoned that principle.

[Read more…]

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Filed Under: Queer Politics Tagged With: gay-marriage, lgbt, Politics, queer

You Knew It Was Coming….

By Chris Hall
September 1, 2005
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It took mere hours for the American Taliban to crawl out of the woodwork and claim definitively that the grotesque tragedy of New Orleans was caused not by differentials in air pressure, or global warming, or gross bureaucratic, negligence, but fags. Yes, that’s right. If you’re a man, putting a penis in your mouth will cause catastrophic weather disasters; if you’re a woman who’s neglected her womanly duties, time to start putting more penises in your mouth (or whatever orifice may be handy), so that we can all be saved.

Gay Party Causes Hurricane!

An organization of Christian fundamentalists claims the destruction brought on by Hurricane Katrina is God’s judgment against New Orleans for holding festivals like the annual gay Southern Decadence party.

“Although the loss of lives is deeply saddening, this act of God destroyed a wicked city,” said Repent America director Michael Marcavage on the organization’s Web site. “From ‘Girls Gone Wild’ to ‘Southern Decadence,’ New Orleans was a city that had its doors wide open to the public celebration of sin. May it never be the same.”

You’ll probably get your wish on this one, Mr. Mike. Very little will be the same.

Southern Decadence, which was scheduled for the Labor Day weekend, has since been canceled.

Good to see the homos are doing the right thing.

“Let us pray for those ravaged by this disaster,” Marcavage said. “However, we must not forget that the citizens of New Orleans tolerated and welcomed the wickedness in their city for so long.”

And for God’s next trick, he will pull a brain out of Michael Marcavage’s ass.

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Filed Under: Queer Politics, Religious Right

Helping Boys Become Men, and Girls Become Women: How to Prevent Homosexuality

By Chris Hall
August 10, 2005
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The nice folks at Focus on the Family give parents a few pointers on how to keep their little darlings from growing up to be homos. Interestingly, they seem to be a lot more concerned about keeping boys from going down the path of queerness than girls. In the end, I suppose what freaks fundamentalists out is the idea of all their butch, manly men becoming swishy, effeminate faggots with a highly-developed fashion sense; women being fairly irrelevant to your average fundy, dykes aren’t quite so scary. Anyway, here are a few pieces of advice from the Christers on how to raise a “morally straight” child:

3. Recognize that most homosexuals “were not explicitly [so] when they were children. More often, they displayed a ‘nonmasculinity’ that set them painfully apart from other boys: unathletic — somewhat passive, unaggressive and uninterested in rough-and-tumble play. A number of them had traits that could be considered gifts: bright, precocious, social and relational, and artistically talented.” Tip: Discern whether your boy struggles with feelings of “not belonging.” If he does, seek help.

4. The father plays an essential role in a boy’s normal development as a man. “The truth is, Dad is more important than Mom. Mothers make boys. Fathers make men.… Girls can continue to grow in their identification with their mothers. On the other hand, a boy has an additional developmental task — to disidentify from his mother and identify with his father.”

This starts about 18 months of age. The father needs to be there physically and emotionally to affirm his son’s maleness for the remainder of the preschool years (and beyond, especially during puberty).

“A boy needs to see his father as confident, self-assured and decisive. He also needs him to be supportive, sensitive and caring. Mother needs to back off a bit. What I mean is, don’t smother him.” Tip: Single mothers may need to recruit a trustworthy male role model.

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Filed Under: Queer Politics, Religious Right

Homophobes vs. Pride

By Chris Hall
June 13, 2005
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Just in time for the beginning of Pride Week, that lovely time of year when queerness is in the air, the phobes are crawling out of the woodwork as if deliberately trying to remind us all why the parades and banners are still necessary.

In a burst of dewey-eyed nostalgia for those halcyon days of 1939 Germany, Rev. Bill Banuchi, executive director of the Christian Coalition spoke from on high unto his flock, declaring that gays should be made to wear warning labels:

We put warning labels on cigarette packs because we know that smoking takes one to two years off the average life span, yet we ‘celebrate’ a lifestyle that we know spreads every kind of sexually transmitted disease and takes at least 20 years off the average life span according to the 2005 issue of the revered scientific journal Psychological Reports.

The journal Psychological Reports is “revered” by the same people who believe that the dinosaurs became extinct because they didn’t make it to Noah’s Ark in time and that the sperms won’t find the egg if you pray to Jesus really hard.

Fortunately, Mike Silverman, a courteous homo has taken steps to protect straight society from toxic homos like himself by creating

warning labels. Get yours TODAY! [Read more…]

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Filed Under: Queer Politics

Rear-Ending Scalia at NYU

By Chris Hall
April 21, 2005
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Props to Eric Berndt, a law student at NYU. Last week, Berndt caused a little bit of a dust-up when Supreme Court Justicy Antonin Scalia came to speak at the school. Scalia’s the most right-wing Justice on the Court, especially well-known for his stance that “the Constitution is a dead document” which should be read strictly according to the intents and values dominant at its creation. Naturally, when he showed up on the campus of NYU, a fairly liberal place, there was a lot of protesting. As far as I can tell, the protests were pretty boilerplate; a crowd of about fifty or so kids standing on the sidewalk chanting and holding up signs. Man, am I bored with these kinds of demonstrations, which are so ordinary and uninspired as to make little if any point at all. The messages are so entirely repetitive, whether coming from left or right, that they barely register on my consciousness. I long for the beautiful wit and anger of the radical queer organizations of the eighties; groups like Queer Nation and the original ACT-UP fought back at the system with humor and rage without losing the power of either. And their actions never, ever, EVER seemed like a bunch of kids going through the motions; they fought like their lives depended on it. Which, of course, they did. [Read more…]

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Filed Under: Politics, Queer Politics

More Death: Andrea Dworkin (September 9, 1946 – March 9, 2005)

By Chris Hall
April 12, 2005
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This is turning into a regular blog of death.

This weekend, Andrea Dworkin, the famed feminist and anti-porn activist died. She was 59 years old.

Dworkin is one of those people about whom it is rare to hear anything intelligent about, from either her supporters or detractors. She was either a bold, brilliant warrior for feminism or a vicious, man-hating bitch. Few had anything else to say about her, and bringing up her name in a discussion about feminism often worked as a variation on Godwin’s Law, ending all intelligent conversation right then and there. The paradox was that her position in feminism during the 1970’s and 80’s was so important that there was virtually no way to avoid bringing her up at some point.

I count myself among her detractors, and I’ve certain damned her name passionately in the past. I considered her the enemy of many of the things that I hold dearest: freedom of speech, gender equality, and positive sexuality. For Dworkin, there were two kinds of people: men and women. Other than that, she saw few class, social, or psychological distinctions, and she could easily break down all conflicts into a polarized power struggle between the two. But still, my heart always sympathized just a little with her. As offensive as I found her, she did go through many vicious and brutal experiences in the early part of her life. Whenever I listened to interviews with her, it was obvious that she was sharply intelligent and well-read, a great intellect who was one of the great anti-intellectuals of her time. The feminism that she represented to me was one that, instead of smashing open the doors that locked our society into narrowly-defined gender roles, leaned up against those same doors, keeping them locked. Read her works, like Intercourse, and the picture she paints of male and female sexuality is not at all different from what priests and imams have told us for centuries. Despite her tirades against men, her work helped silence and stifle many of her fellow women and lesbians, especially those whose sexualities were outside of the mainstream, such as practitioners of BDSM and erotic writers.

Susie Bright has no real reason to love or even respect Dworkin; certainly Dworkin never expressed any for her while she was alive. And yet, Bright’s writing has always been compassionate and even admiring of Dworkin. True to form as our premier sexual intellectual, Bright’s blog has some fascinating things to say about Andrea Dworkin in her passing that neither villify nor sanctify her, and even embraces her as a kind of mother figure:

Here’s the irony… every single woman who pioneered the sexual revolution, every erotic-feminist-bad-girl-and-proud-of-it-stiletto-shitkicker, was once a fan of Andrea Dworkin. Until 1984, we all were. She was the one who got us looking at porn with a critical eye, she made you feel like you could just stomp into the adult bookstore and seize everything for inspection and a bonfire.

The funny thing that happened on the way to the X-Rated Sex Palace was that some of us came to different conclusions that Miss Dworkin. We saw the sexism of the porn business… but we also saw some intriguing possibilities and amazing maverick spirit. We said, "What if we made something that reflected our politics and values, but was just as sexually bold?"

I’m impressed by the humanity that Bright gives Dworkin, a woman who spent so much of her life trying to dehumanize others, and who condemned her personally. Feminism has moved beyond Dworkin in the past 15 years, and more towards her daughters who, like Susie Bright, adopted her rebellious fire and rejected her authoritarianism. In the end, it’s a move that makes us all stronger.

  • Andrea Dworkin Online Library
  • Susie Bright writes about Dworkin’s breakdown
  • Andrea Dworkin Memorial
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Filed Under: Queer Politics, Sex and Gender

Fag-Bashing: It's Funny!

By Chris Hall
September 28, 2004
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Would somebody please explain to me why Jimmy Swaggart is still considered relevant to anything? Even by the low standards established by the Christian Right, this asshole is an embarrassment. In 1987, he was caught with a prostitute named Debrah Murphee, who claimed in an interview with Penthouse that not only did enjoy fucking her, but tried to talk her into letting him have her 9-year-old daughter. For his sins of using whores, pornography, and attempted pedophilia, he was defrocked for one year by the Assemblies of God. His public response was to break down in tears on his television ministry, begging the forgiveness of god and all the suckers who’d been sending him money for years. Three years later, in 1991, he got nailed in a car with another prostitute.

Apparently, though, neither experience was especially humbling. Swaggart rose to a new level of hatefulness during his September 12 service, when he told his audience that if a gay man ever looked at him that way, “I’m going to kill him and tell God that he died.” (Y’know, Jim, Cain tried that, too.) Even more horribly, this was greeted by laughter and applause from his audience.

Apparently laughter was exactly the response that Swaggart was going for, because after a week of public criticism by gay groups and anyone else with a shred of common decency, Swaggart told us not to take it so seriously, ‘coz it was just a joke. Again, Swaggart is making public apologies, but he’s not breaking into tears this time. Instead, he claims that it was just a “silly cliche,” and that “I will continue to preach against homosexuality, but do it in the right way.”

Sometimes I forget, just for a moment, how sick and rotten to the core the Christian Right is. I’d like to thank Jimmy Swaggart for reminding me.

This post dedicated to the memory of Matthew Shepard.

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Filed Under: Queer Politics, Religious Right

A new kink in the marriage debate…

By Chris Hall
March 20, 2004
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Sandy Clarissa Gast, a 48-year-old transsexual, has been busted by the authorities of Leavenworth County, Kansas, for the horrific crime of filing for a marriage license. The official charges are described as “providing false information on an official document” — i.e., describing her gender as “female,” because despite the fact that she’s legally changed her name and that her driver’s license says “female,” the State of Kansas is firm on the matter of gender: once you’re born, you’re that gender for life, no matter your own feelings about it, no matter what your other legal documents say, and no matter how much surgery you go through.

While there are legitimate philosophical ambiguities about gender, the overreaction of the County officials is just bizarre on a Kafka-esque level. Where they could have just shrugged and handed the application back to her, they decided instead to come down HARD on her ass, releasing her only after she posted a $2,500 bond and now faces a $500 fine.

Strangely, this kind of hysteria only encourages my optimism, rather than diminishing it. When the ‘phobes are this crazed with fear and panic, it can only mean that they know how badly they’re losing.

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Filed Under: Queer Politics

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