Another (yawn) Republican Queer

I'd usually launch into my Claude Raines imitation from "Casablanca" about now ("Gambling?? I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked!")

But even that seems trite at this point.

Some asshole rightwinger, married with children, self-loathing closet case from Washington State (on the left) has gotten caught (in lingerie, barebacking) with some manwhore (on the right) during some Repuglican conclave, somewhere.

If you're surprised, raise your hand! If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands!

If you want to read all the gory details, click here.

In other news...

Still obsessing about that damned coffee-pot, only now I've managed to drag some of my friends into the funfest.

For Halloween this year I'm pretending to be normal. No one will suspect a thing.

I spoke at a 12-Step meeting at 7:30 a.m. this morning. I was told, early on in my sobriety, that I would always have to be willing to go to any lengths to protect my sobriety and that I was never to say "no" to the program. So I said yes. Sometimes I wonder how coherent I am at 7:30 in the morning while still nursing my 1st cup of coffee after a 50 mile bus ride from central NJ into Manhattan.

We have to be quiet for awhile... they're filming scenes for an upcoming Law & Order Criminal Intent episode in our boardroom today.

My stomach is gurgling, it must be lunch time.

Have a great Halloween everybody!

The End of the Gay Ghetto

Joe of JoeMyGod posted a piece yesterday about the slow death of the gay-bar scene throughout America. He raised some good points about a loss of a piece of our gay culture and history.

But it also signals the beginning of the end of the ghettoization of gay people. For better or worse. And you can feel either way about that, and that’s fine.

When I came out, a process that I started as a teenager in the early 60’s, all I wanted to was to “fit in.” I wanted to be like everybody else (except for my family, who were drunks and idiots). I wanted to meet other people “like me” but I didn’t want to have to skulk about in back alleys in search of dark, unmarked, bars in order to find them. I didn’t think I should have to do that.

I knew that God had made me, that God didn’t make garbage and that I was no “mistake.” I also seriously doubted that some Jewish virgin had squeezed God’s baby through her Poo-nanny. So that was the end of me and Catholicism and the beginning of me and my fabulously queer self.

Eventually, though, I did skulk down back alleys into dark bars in order to find others like myself. I even had a lot of fun in those places. But they were always redolent of “shameful hideaways” where out-of-towners from Pissant, Utah, on the prowl in the Big Cities of the East and West Coasts, could get a little same-sex nookie while “on a business trip”, secure in the knowledge that the wife and/or hubby remained safely tucked away back home, where they belonged. Out of sight and definitely out of mind … for the evening.

And for that reason, these joints also often smacked of self-loathing. I never knew how self-loathing I was until I started looking at my past behavior as a gay person and in terms of all my destructive addictions. Booze, drugs, cigarettes, rampant sex… all of them overindulged in to the point of doing serious physical damage to myself.

Then I got sober. And I started peeling away the layers of denial about what I’d done and the reasons why I’d done it. And I saw the self-loathing that lay beneath it all.

So, if we’re moving to a “post-gay” world, where we’re as common as the next door neighbors and it’s just as cool for gay people to cruise each other at the supermarket as it is for Hets to do it, then so be it. I embrace it. In fact, I believe the whole point of the “movement” over the past 38 years has been to get us to this point.

When I sobered up and started feeling better about myself it seemed that my need to constantly reassure myself of my inherent worthiness started to disappear. I began realizing just how cheaply I’d sold myself into the bondage of addictions in the past.

I hope I’m sober enough now to recognize it if I ever start killing myself again.

Commander Guy (Drunken Frat Boy Alert!)

I don't know whom to credit for today's photo, but it sure seems apt given the subject of today's rant!

I refer, of course, to the Chief Magistrate of the United States, and a great little all around drunken Ivy-League Frat Boy, George W. Poopforbrains.

Being in Washington always makes me feel queasy and vaguely nauseous. It's been like that since I started hanging around the place, during my Navy years. I spent some time, in those days, agitating against the war and looking adorable in my Dress Blues.

But something deep down inside told me, even then, "This place is a den of lying horse thieves. Believe nothing they say."

I remember pretty clearly how the Republican party, in 1972, loudly gloated over the fact that the Democratic Party had "sold itself out" to it's Left Wing of Bra-Burning FemiNazis, Homos and Socialists!

Today, of course, the Republican Party of small government and less government intrusion, has happily sold itself out to its Right Wing of Gun-Toting, Bedroom-Snooping, Bible-Thumping, Fag-Bashers.

But I don't see any Democrats on television gloating over that fact.

And back in those days, while I was proudly wearing my naval uniforms, with the chevrons of a Petty Officer Second Class Aviation Electronics Technician proudly sewn (or ironed) to my left sleeve, dancing with multi-ton fighters and bombers around the flight deck of an aircraft carrier in the service of my country, the vast majority of the current crop of Chicken-Hawk War-Mongers were hiding behind their draft deferments, or in their National Guard units or otherwise having daddy, or one of daddy's rich friends, "pull some strings" to keep their sorry, trembling, asses OUT of the active-duty military and out of “harms way.” Like our current El Presidente did.

Remember the Bright Young Republican Things who got elected to Congress in 1994, with their “Contract with America?” One of them came sidling up to me one night in a gay bar in Rehoboth Beach in the summer of ’95, and announced that he had just arrived in DC in the service of one of those self-same Chicken-Hawks and that he, the ass-kissing, closeted toady of one of them had the nerve, the unmitigated gall, the CAJONES to announce to me that he actually BELIEVED in the "Contract with America" and then he stood there smiling at me, as though I would actually be impressed with his self-loathing stupidity and offer to have hot man-sex with him ....

I didn’t know whether to smack him or vomit on him so I just walked away.

Flash forward to yesterday. Our “chief decider” has rechristened himself. As of yesterday, he is now, officially, the “commander guy.”

And I wonder, what pit of hell belches out people like these?