Category Archives: society

What men do…

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I was on my third date with Glenn when I made some comment about something in the news being particularly disturbing for gay guys like us.

“Hey, man, I’m not gay,” Glenn said, with a grin and a chuckle.

I was dumbstruck for a moment. This was our third date, and me being (at the time) a very recently out guy, and it being the nineties, we had had sex with each other more than once by this point. His night job was bouncer at a gay bar, where he was a well-known flirt. (That wasn’t where we met, btw; he had seen me sitting in a coffee shop reading a book, and had chatted me up in part because he didn’t recognize me as a regular from the bar and he had a thing for “brainy shy guys.”)

Then I realized what he must have meant, and I said something like, “Oh, sorry! I didn’t realize you were bi. Sorry for jumping to conclusions.”

All signs of a sense of humor left his face. “I’m not bi, either,” he growled. “I’m straight.”

I apologized, and then asked him to explain, since we had had sex several times, and there isn’t any part of my hairy body that anyone in their right mind would describe as feminine. I did not add that he had a rather large number of stereotypical gay mannerisms and speech patterns, so no stranger who met him would have described him as straight-acting.

He explained. There was one certain sex act he didn’t do, because only gay guys did that. He did all sorts of things with men, including a few acts whose crude names are common insults thrown at non-gender-conforming men. But this one thing he did not do. So even though he had sex with men, specifically had sex with gay men, he wasn’t gay.

That was another part of his self-definition: he didn’t have sex with men that fit his description of “straight,” he only had sex with men who met his definition of gay. Not obviously effeminate men (in fact, having met a couple of exs, and being friends with a guy who he dated after me, I know he had a particular thing for hairy chested guys with beards), but men who did the thing he wouldn’t do.

I tried to circle back to the bisexual topic, and he dismissed that because he didn’t like having sex with women. He had dated a few girls in high school, and had had sex with two of them on an on-going basis. But he hadn’t enjoyed it. He did it, he said, because it was expected. He tried, when things started getting serious, to convince them he was a good Christian boy who didn’t want to pressure them, because of course being good girls they wanted to wait. But they didn’t want to wait, and he was afraid they might start rumors that he was gay, so he had sex with them.

He knew he wouldn’t enjoy it—just as he hadn’t really enjoyed dating the girls—because he’d been having sex with other guys his age as early as junior high.

“So, you don’t like dating or having sex with women, the only people you’ve had sex with or dated since high school have been men—a lot of men—and the only people you enjoy having sex with are men,” I summed up, “But you’re not gay?”

“No, I’m not, obviously,” he replied, “I’m a man. I do what men do.”

“So what you’re saying is,” I replied slowly, “that I’m not a man?”

The conversation just went downhill from there. Need I mention that it was also our last date?

I was reminded of this conversation by the comments a couple weeks ago by a particularly slimy television preacher in which he told a woman whose husband was cheating that it was her fault. “Men wander,” he said, “that’s what men do.” And then he told her it was her job to make the home and herself so appealing that her husband would rather not wander.

“What men do” is used as an excuse for everything from denying husbands equal child custody in divorce proceedings to excusing infidelities, verbal bullying, and violence. Its inverse, “things men don’t do” is the rationalization for bullying boys and young men who fail to act manly enough, as well as bashing gays or suspected gays of all ages.

It’s crazy, and it’s wrong.

It’s not that men wander—people wander. You can quote studies that say men report more sexual partners than women, and that more men admit to infidelity on confidential surveys than women. But you’re ignoring more recent studies, where respondents were hooked up to what they were told were lie detectors, which show that there is almost no gap at all between the number of men and women who admit to cheating on a spouse or significant other. The numbers of partners reported are more equal, as well.

Monogamy isn’t natural, that’s just a fact. That doesn’t mean that people can’t strive for it and achieve it, it just means that it’s hard work. Perhaps if more people understood that, instead of believing the myth that if you really love someone you will never be tempted to wander, a lot of relationships would be healthier and happier.

Some extremely masculine men date, have sex with, and fall in love with men. Some not terribly masculine men date, have sex with, and fall in love with women.

One of the men with the most masculine personality I ever knew is someone I met when he was a woman, a few years before identifying as transgender and entering into transition.

A straight friend I’ve known for more than twenty years exhibits a lot of stereotypical conservative masculine personality traits—but he’s not afraid to sit with his five-year-old daughter and play with her dolls when she asks. And he’ll tell strangers when he takes said daughter to My Little Pony conferences that it’s for her, but that only explains the third day of last summer’s convention, not the two days before while he was there by himself.

What men do… is whatever a man does. If it would be wrong when someone other than a man does it, then it’s just as wrong when it’s a man doing it. And, if it is all right when a man does it, than there’s nothing wrong when anyone doing it.

Because we’re all people.

The boy who knew too much

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Yesterday, a bunch of people linked to this article about Daniel Dobson, the son of a prominent fundamentalist preacher, talking about being a gay Christian. One of the places that linked to it also linked to this blog post by Ryan Barnhart, which sort of goes off on a tangent. But I understand why, because Dobson’s interview sent me on an even more meandering trip down memory lane.

During high school, I joined an interdenominational evangelical teen touring choir. I’d been raised in evangelical churches in several much smaller towns. Moving halfway across the continent to a bigger town had me feeling more adrift and out of place than before, so an organized religious musical activity was a welcome refuge.

I’d also spent my middle school years discovering beyond a doubt that I wasn’t straight, while experiencing entirely new levels of bullying. I was desperate to get rid of those feelings, so being confronted with a way to do “god’s work” seemed like the solution to all of my problems. Here were a bunch of people more or less my age who had a common background and a holy purpose—plus it combined aspects of music, theatre, sound, and light production…

Continue reading The boy who knew too much →

Just us guys

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How upset some guys get about sharing locker rooms and showers with gay guys would be funny if it didnt lead so often to harassment and assault.

I just want to ask them a simple pair of related questions: are mobs of women you don’t know throwing themselves at you, trying to jump your bones? If not, why do you assume that every gay man is going to be trying to force themselves on you?

There’s an answer, but it isn’t a very pretty one. The truth is that the kinds of straight guys who are weirded out/uncomfortable/angry1 at the thought of having to share a locker room, shower, or even a gym with gay guys know how they treat women they are attracted to. They assume that all straight men think that way about women, so they also assume that all gay men will think that way about them.

And they don’t like it2.

That’s not the only source of their discomfort. There’s also the loss of the “just us guys” environment—a space where guys are safe to be guys. A place where they can scratch where it itches, can make inappropriate jokes, and generally be uncivilized. It would be easy to point out how a little less uncivilized behavior, along with less affirmation of a lot of sexist attitudes, would be a good thing in the long run. And I think it will be a good thing over time.

But there is also some value to that safe place. Just as it is valuable for women to have safe places to talk about their issues without guys like me saying, “Hey! We’re not all like that” or other guys “man-splaining3.” And it’s valuable for gay people to have safe places to talk about our issues without other people insisting they’re “not all like that” or trying to “str8-splain.”

Guys need places where they can be guys.

Now, I’m the first to say that a lot of what currently is presumed to be “guys just being guys” is awful and needs to change. Even when I was participating in several sports back in middle school, there was a certain amount of dread that fell on me whenever it was time to go to the locker room, or go out on the field. Any time you screwed up or failed to be as good at something as another guy, you were called a faggot, or queer, or pussy.

And that was only the nicer coaches5.

The mean coaches and the other kids called you c*cksucker, bitch, and c*nt—in various combinations. One of my middle school tormenters was fond of “c*cksucking, sh*teating fag.”

Guys of all sexual orientations and abilities are harmed by those notions that equate masculinity with athleticism, sexuality, and competitiveness. This notion enforces the hierarchy that equates the amount of respect one is entitled to is determined by the degree to which one possesses those masculine traits (which means that women will automatically never be able to expect as much respect as a man). Even the guys who have found success by embracing this notion have done so by contorting their personality in various ways, cutting themselves out of a lot of what’s great about being a person along the way.

So shaking up that definition is a good thing.

But it doesn’t have to mean that all distinctions between masculine and feminine are going to go away. It doesn’t mean that those of us in the LGBT community think they should6. It just means that there are a lot of different kinds of guys—lots of different ways to be a man. And all those different kinds of guy can hang out and be one of the guys, and all of the guys can be okay with it.

At least I hope so. Because my husband hates it when I start talkin’ about football, and I just need somewhere that I can…

1. Angry in this case is just code for afraid. Guys aren’t allowed to be afraid, so our subconscious transforms the fear into anger.

2. One would hope that this discomfort would help some of them to see that maybe they should start thinking of women a little differently, no?

3. mansplaining: condescending, inaccurate explanations delivered with a rock solid confidence of rightness and that slimy certainty that of course he is right, because he is the man in this conversation4.

4. Some people define mansplaining exclusively as that sort of condescending explanation by a man to a woman, especially about topics related to women’s rights, and so on. But a lot of mansplaining is guy-on-guy. And none of us are immune. Guys are socialized to be confident and assertive, no matter what.

5. The coach who taught Sunday school and who made you put a quarter in the swearing jar on his desk if he heard you say “hell” or “damn” used “fag” so much, you began to wonder if he thought it was a punctuation mark. And don’t get me started on the teacher who was also a pastor.

6. I suspect some trans people have more to say about that than I possibly could.

Not so recent

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Back in the early ’90s, when I was active with the Seattle Lesbian & Gay Chorus, we had some sort of social at a member’s house. Our host and his partner were showing us around, when someone commented on the photos hanging on the wall of an incredibly adorable kid. “Is that your nephew?”

“No,” our host said. “That’s my son. Here he is with his two moms. And here’s one of all of us.”

He proceeded to tell the story of how a friend he had known “since school” had one day asked him if he would donate the sperm so that she and her partner could have a child. “The next thing I knew, I was explaining to my boyfriend at the time about how in a couple months we’d have to go about a week or two without sex to maximum my sperm count.”

They were doing it without the help of a clinic. So, as he said, he had to “produce a sample” at the appointed time, and a friend who had been recruited for the purpose drove the container across town to where the lesbian couple were waiting. It all had to be timed around when she was most likely to be ovulating, of course. Then they had to wait for a number of weeks to see if it worked.

It didn’t.

So they tried again. And again.

“By this point I suspect we were driving all our friends crazy, because we were all paying attention to her menstrual cycle and talking about it in inappropriate places!”

Eventually, they decided that the problem was probably that the drive time was too long for the sperm to remain viable. So, he said, one night he and his boyfriend went over to their house. She and the friend who was assisting with the equipment were in one bedroom, and he and his boyfriend were in another—”He was getting a bit tired of all these bouts of no sex leading up to each try”—and the gal’s partner waited outside the door to take the specimen jar once it was ready.

“It wasn’t romantic for any of us!”

But that time it worked. And ten years later, the lesbian couple were still happily raising their son, with the occasional help of the friend who had donated the sperm.

I was reminded of this story while listening to this story on one of the local NPR stations.

It also made me think about those comments during the Supreme Court hearings a couple weeks back where a couple of the justices kept referring to gay parenting and gay-headed families as a recent development. One justice insisted that the very idea was “newer than cell phones.”

The first analog cellular network went active in 1979, but no one called the large, brick-like phones (some of them were closer to the size of a briefcase) a cellphone. The phones small enough to fit easily in a pocket came out in 1991. About nine years after the birth of the boy whose story I began this post with.

And that wasn’t when gay parenting began. The American Psychological Association published one famous peer-reviewed multi-year study on the outcomes of children raised by gay and lesbian parents in 1970, for goodness sake!

When I was first coming out of the closet, in the late ’80s, a rather large percentage of the lesbians I met had children. Some of my “lesbian aunties*” had children who were older than I was, and those children had children of their own. A slightly smaller percentage of the gay men I met at that time also had children, some of them with children of their own, as well.

Most of those gay and lesbian parents I knew back then had married young while they were still struggling with their sexual identity, and the children were the result of the marriage. Because of various inequities in child custody laws in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, the majority of those children were in the physical custody of their mothers. So I knew of a lot more kids who had been raised by lesbian mothers than those who had been raised by their gay fathers.

On the other hand, one of the adults I knew back then had been raised by an actual lesbian aunt and her aunt’s partner after her own parents had died when she was a baby.

Bottom line: gay, lesbian, and bisexual people have been raising children for many generations. It isn’t a recent idea.

And as to whether gay marriage is a recent idea? Well, the Roman Emperor Constantius II issued what was probably the very first legal ban on gay marriage back in the year 324 A.D. If they decided they needed to explicitly ban it, and then later add the death penalty to the punishment, then gay marriages had to have been happening before that, right?

* Not my actual aunts. These were older lesbian women who sort of adopted me when I was coming out.

Taxes

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We once again put off doing our taxes.

I don’t mind paying taxes. Really. Unlike some people, I recognize that we’re generally safe in our homes and can count on our money being useful to purchase goods and services because of government functions ranging from the local police and fire departments all the way out to federal reserve and the armed forces. That’s not the grumble.

For most of my life (with a couple of exceptions), my taxes have been fairly simple. Unfortunately, for the last three years that hasn’t been the case. Because when voters in my state approved “everything but the name marriage” domestic partnerships a few years ago (and full-fledged marriage last year), they granted community property rights to us, but the federal Defense of Marriage Act forbids the IRS from calling it a marriage, we’re required to file as Single, but we’re also required to report each other’s income.

The first year this was true caught everyone by surprise (a lot of IRS employees didn’t understand why these strange returns were coming in, and sent back letters threatening fines for “frivolously false” filings), so none of the usual free online services (nor the paid software) knew how to handle it. It took Michael and I several hours to sort things out. And if some gay rights organizations hadn’t posted instructions and links to the correct obscure IRS documents, it would have taken a lot longer.

Last year, which was the second year this was required for citizens of a bunch of states, the software services (and some of the walk-in-and-pay-us places) still couldn’t handle it. But since we’d done it once before, and had saved copies of everything, we were able to do it ourselves with much less hassle.

This year, the third year (and with even more states qualifying), I had been pleased to read some reviews that indicated at least one of the common software solutions could handle it.

The reviews lie.

Once I did figure out what the misleading instructions actually meant (both the software interface and the instructions extremely poorly designed), the software would literally not let me back to the dialog box where I needed to change the number unless I deleted the entire form and started over.

Fortunately, they have a simple form on their website to request a refund.

If I had just set out to do it ourselves as before, I would have had a much less cranky afternoon.

The really dumb thing is that most of the reason why I would like to use the software is because both of us have atrocious handwriting. With any luck, the Defense of Marriage Act will finally be gone next year, and we’ll be able to just do the simple “Married Filing Jointly” form.

Wouldn’t that be nice?

Skewed polls and secret money

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A few days after election night, when the leader of one of the local anti-gay groups conceded that voters had approved marriage equality, he groused about how the pro-gay groups had outspent them three-to-one. Just a week earlier he had been insisting that the polls which were all predicting passage of the referendum were skewed. “People are reluctant to say what they really feel to a pollster, because the pro-sodomy side has tricked the media into calling support of traditional marriage as bigotry. But when those voters are in the privacy of the voting booth, they will vote their true feelings.”

They did vote their true feelings. Fortunately for those of us who believe in equality, they had also been telling their true feelings to the pollsters. Surprise, surprise!

Sadly, I believe it was a complete surprise to the opposers. It shouldn’t have been. They had other evidence, and it was right there in that hypocritical comment he made about spending. It was hypocritical because it had only been four years before, during the Proposition 8 campaign in California that the anti-gay side had been doing the outspending. And for years before that, each ballot measure that came up in any state related to marriage equality or civil unions, it was the anti-gay side that always seemed to have the money advantage.

This time around, in Washington, Maine, Maryland, and Minnesota, the forces of hate came up short both in the ballot box and fundraising. And it wasn’t simply a matter that suddenly our side was better at raising money. No, the big story is that they have, in just the last few years, experienced a serious drop in donations.

It isn’t just the amount of money. What’s more significant is the number of donors. The national organizations have been very secretive about their funding. They have refused, again and again, to reveal their donor lists, even when they appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and lost, they have tried to keep that secret. Eventually, some details are beginning to emerge:

Each year, according to [the National Organization for Marriage]’s tax filings, two or three donors give NOM between $1 million and $3.5 million apiece; another two or three give between $100,000 and $750,000; and 10 or so others give between $5,000 and $95,000. In 2009 the top five donors made up three fourths of NOM’s budget; in 2010 the top two donors gave two thirds of the year’s total donations; and in 2011 the top two donors gave three fourths of NOM’s total income. But those funders’ identities are a mystery. Their names are redacted on NOM’s federal tax returns.

My emphasis added. Whoever those mysterious top two donors are, their donations have became a larger and larger proportion of the pot, as the thousands who gave less than $5000 dollars a year have dwindled to hundreds.

Statistics tell us the the most vehement opposition comes from the oldest voters, so a percentage of that drop off represents to reality of demographics. As elderly opposers die off, without a compensating proportion of supporters coming up in younger generations, some of that is just inevitable. But the drop off in support to the anti-gay cause in the last three or four years is far in excess of what could be accounted for by mere demographics.

People are changing their minds.

There will always be a hardcore group opposed to equal rights for gay, lesbian, bi, and trans people. Just a couple weeks ago at the big conservative conference a guy stood up and argued in favor of slavery because he believed it was a self-evident truth that whites were superior to blacks. He wasn’t an invited speaker, and to their credit, panelists and audience members challenged him on it, but during the ensuing back and forth he also made a comment to the effect the women shouldn’t have the right to speak up in public, either. So, just like that unrepentant racist and misogynist, there will always be homophobes among us.

But as more of the moderates and non-hateful conservatives come around, that view will be limited to the lunatic fringe where it belongs.

In the months since the vote in Washington, Maine, Maryland, and Minnesota went our way, the opposers’ spokespeople have gone from saying that they were outspent 3-to-1 (which turned out to be a small exaggeration in our state) to claiming they were outspent 4-to-1, then 5-to-1… the last quote I read was “more than 7-to-1.” I believe their exaggerations get worse due to desperation. They hope that skewing their claim of victimhood will prompt more people to donate more money, which they think can turn the tide.

What they don’t understand is that the only skewed “polls” were their own. They fell into the common trap of thinking that because most of the people they know and like agree with them, that it absolutely must be the case the most people, period, do so. They think that since they still manage to raise a lot of money that there is still a lot of support, ignoring the fact that it’s a smaller and smaller number of people sending in the money. Because they are convinced of the truth of their cause, they believe that the only reasons polls and voting can be going against them is some kind of chicanery. They think that calling us pedophiles, comparing our relationships to bestiality or incest is “civil discourse,” but if we call them bigots we’re being bullies.

Most of all, many of them believe all the lies and distortions that they tell about us. Lies that other people can no longer believe once they get to know us:

Part and parcel

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A pop musician or movie star gets arrested for driving under the influence and being in possession of an illegal controlled substance. When he or she is sentenced to nothing more than some hours of community service, there may be a bit of an outcry from the public, but thousands still attend the concerts, buy the music, see the movies.

If questioned, the fans might claim that you have to separate the art from the artist. They’re more likely to simply say, “Yeah, but I love the music/movie.” But it’s the same argument. Things that an artist does in their real life has nothing to do with the quality of product itself. Just as it would be inappropriate to claim that a painting is less than worthy of appreciation because the artist happens to be a member of a race other than the majority, a particular piece of art should stand upon its own merits, alone.

That doesn’t mean that we can’t argue that the celebrity doesn’t deserve special treatment before the law. We can compare the punishment given to the celebrity to those typically given to non-celebrities charged with the same crime. We can point out that this prominent person was given a punishment at the very lowest end of the first-offenders sentencing range, even though this is their fifth or sixth or twentieth run-in with the law over substance abuse issues.

We can demand that the special treatment stop. Yes, maybe that movie we’ve been waiting for will have to be delayed (or more likely, made with a different actor), but crimes and irresponsible actions should have consequences, and sometimes those consequences impact people other than the perpetrator.

The aforementioned situation is pretty clear, and not likely to draw a lot of argument on the principles.

It gets less black and white if the actor, musician, or artist is arrested for assault, or worse. How much that changes our perception of his or her work depends upon the nature of the crimes and the nature of their work. It may become difficult to listen to a singer crooning love songs when you know he has been convicted multiple times of domestic abuse against multiple partners, for instance.

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.—Salvador Dali

So far our hypotheticals have been about what an artist does during aspects of their lives that would otherwise be private. What happens when it happens on the stage? Say, for instance, that you’re a C- or D-list singer-songwriter who, early in your career, made statements indicating you were lesbian, and for a couple of decades your fanbase has been predominately lesbian, and you’ve continued to cater to that fanbase even though in your private life you’ve married a conservation fundamentalist Christian man and joined an evangelical church.

And then one night, on stage in a city that most of the world equates with gay people, in between songs you start going on a long, screaming rant about how gay marriage is going to destroy the world, how decriminalizing abortion is the signal of the collapse of civilization, and screaming at the audience members who start walking out that “God hates fags!”

I don’t think anybody would argue that other venues you were scheduled to appear at are within their rights to cancel your shows. Politics aside, no one wants to deal with all those angry customers.

Issuing statements afterward that it was meant to be ironic (yet another assault on that poor, abused, misunderstood word), or taken out of context, afterward isn’t going to undo the damage. Particularly with the full video available on the internet and it is quite clear the the context is only hate, hate, more hate, and crazy.

And you can insist you have freedom of speech all you want. Freedom of speech means that you can say what you want without intrference from the government. It doesn’t mean freedom from people being so offended that they choose to stop listening to and buying your music. It doesn’t mean freedom from being criticized. It doesn’t mean freedom from being seen to be a hateful hypocrit whose career is based almost entirely on milking an ambiguous statement that you might be a member of a group of people you despise. Nor does it mean freedom from being labeled a self-loathing closet case in addition to the hypocrit charge.

Assaulting your audience and essentially admitting that you’ve been scamming them for years is another case where things are pretty black and white. There is no reason to separate the art from the artist, because the art is an inherent part of the crime the artist committed.

While I think that Ms Shocked’s tirade was deplorable and revealed that she is a reprehensible, malicious, vulgar louse deserving of our scorn, that wasn’t her biggest crime.

The most awful thing she has done is to produce all that disingenuous music. It is a sin to be a hateful bigot. It is a bigger sin to intentionally produce crap that you don’t believe and call in art.

Things I never believed I would see

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A lot of gay news blogs are sharing the video below this week. And to most people it probably just seems like a kind of silly video with these two guys talking.

But to folks like me? Gay men who no longer can be described as “young” by any definition? It’s amazing. I literally never believed I would see the day when someone would so casually create a show about them self that included the phrase “Your Favorite Gay Marine.”

The fact that Russ and Matt are just two adorable young guys in love, who just happen to both be in the Marines, and happen to be in love with each other, and how matter-of-fact they can be in this very public way is just mind-boggling for an old fart like me:

Public notions

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My old bus route was replaced recently with a so-called Bus Rapid Transit. I say “so-called” because it’s still in with the rest of the traffic, which means it is not true rapid transit. It is merely slightly more rapid bus.

They achieve the faster trips through several clever tricks, one of which is having pay stations at several of the bus stop (it’s supposed to be at every bus stop, but they haven’t gotten them all installed yet), so people who have bus passes can just board through any of the three doors on the bus without waiting in line behind the people paying cash. It really does make loading the bus go much faster.

As I was taking a seat on one bus recently, a lady in a nearby seat was ranting to the guy next to her about how the new buses must be rampant with cheating. “Us honest folks are paying for the other riders! Look! Look! How can they tell which people have actually paid before getting on! It’s such a waste!”

Since I could hear her clearly through my headphones, I knew she was talking very loudly, so I didn’t feel that this counted as a private conversation. I leaned forward and said, “Random fare inspections.”

She looked utterly shocked that a stranger would actually talk to her, though the guy next to her just grinned and said, “See, he’s got your answer.”

She blinked and said, “What?”

“They have guys that come on board with a scanner and ask to see everyone’s card or transfer. I’ve had it happen several times. They can scan your card and verify that you paid. So cheaters get caught.”

She nodded. Then she said, “Wow. Don’t you think Seattle is getting too Big Brother? I mean, scanning your card…”

Just a second before she was angry because she thought people were taking advantage of the public transit she was paying for. But rather than get into an argument with a stranger (I really had just been trying to be informative), I said, “Oh, no! Not at all!” And pulled my headphones back up onto my ears.

She shook her head, said, “You don’t?” Then turned to the guy and went back to talking. But I couldn’t help but notice that she’d switched to an indoor voice. So I guess my attempt to enlighten had at least made her think about how loudly she was talking.

I understand that relying on an honor system means that some people will cheat. On the other hand, I have seen Fare Officers remove someone who hadn’t paid from the bus. I know that when they do that they write you a ticket and it’s handled like a traffic fine. So there is a penalty that cheaters risk facing.

I’m sure some cheating still happens, but similar systems in other transit systems collect an awful lot of fees matching fairly closely to ridership numbers gathered other ways, so the honor system isn’t a failure. And mathematic models have shown that the savings from the shorter trip times more than make up for the theoretical revenues lost through uncaught cheaters.

And in what way is verifying that passengers on the bus have paid through random sweeps “being Big Brother”? She had just been angrily ranting about how “they” have instituted a system that she thought wasted tax dollars because “they” weren’t making absolutely certain that each and every passenger had paid. “They” should do better!

It’s like the people who scream about “guv’ment regulations” hindering business, who then scream “how can they let people sell that?” if there is a salmonella outbreak and their favorite food is being recalled.

Confirming that someone has paid for the bus ride they are currently taking hardly counts as “Big Brother.” And if you think it does, I shudder to think what sort of aneurism you’ll have if I explain to you precisely how cellphone companies figure out which signals are coming from authorized phones. Or how quickly your position can be pinpointed, even on old, cheap phones that know nothing about GPS. Hint: In order to get your 9-1-1 call to a local emergency operator, they have to be able to figure out your position before you hear their first ring.