Obviously not actually me, as there is only one remote in the picture…Several years ago I was reading about the new shows coming out the next season, and one, The Big Bang Theory, sounded like exactly the sort of show that I would hate. So I didn’t make any attempt to watch any episodes. Not very long after the season started, I heard from a few different acquaintances that it was not a good show. The specific comments were that it made fun of nerds by portraying them in completely exaggerated, stereotypical, and unrealistic ways. So I continued to ignore it for all of the first season.
And then another nerdy/geek/fannish friend happened to mention, midway through the second season, that he was strangely addicted to the show. I mentioned the reasons I had assumed I wouldn’t like it, and he said, “Oh, me too!” Then he explained how his wife (a person who has been even more immersed in fannish culture than either her hubby or me) had watched the first season on Netflix. “I tried to ignore, and work on stuff on my computer. But it kept making me laugh… and it usually made me laugh because the characters acted exactly like some of our friends.”
If only…I love superheroes. I read superhero comic books sporadically as a young kid, but didn’t get into seriously following them until I was a teen-ager. Even then, I thought the costume choices artists made were a little weird. I understood why Batman’s costume was mostly black and grey and covered most of his pale skin, because his crimefighting style included lurking in shadows a lot, but if Wonder Woman could fight crime in what was basically a one-piece bathing suit, why did Superman (who had similar super powers and fighting style) need to cover everything up?
On the other hand, since Captain America’s costume included armor (in the the silver age comics the costume included chain mail on his torso!) why didn’t Batgirl take advantage of similar protection?
Marvel’s Valkyrie. Seriously?And then, when the Valkyrie was introduced in the pages of the Defenders, she had armor… Except originally it was only her breasts that were armored, everything else was either covered with spandex or it was bare. And that made absolutely no sense at all! Yeah, she has those shiny metallic wristbands and the upper arm bands, but those look more like jewelry than body armor, right? (Saddest of all, within the story, Valkyrie was created by an evil Asgardian goddess for the express purpose of proving that women were the equal of men! Her superstrength originally only worked when fighting males. Take a guess as to how long after the character joined the superhero group before a story line saw her falsely accused of a crime and sent to a women’s prison, where the artist got to draw a lot of ridiculous women’s prison scenes…)Continue reading Four-color boy’s club…→
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bayard Rustin in a file photo from 1956.Not wanting to co-opt another community’s struggle, I don’t usually write anything about Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. But since certain other people with far less right than I do have, and have done so as a way to shore up their own anti-gay agenda, I feel an obligation to make a couple of observations.
Bayard Rustin is probably most famous as the man who handled all the organizational details of Dr. King’s 1963 March On Washington. Rustin took care of everything from the transportation, to making sure there were enough porta potties for the crowd, to insuring that no one brought weapons and the march stayed nonviolent, to convincing Dr. King that King’s speech should the be at the very end of the program. Rustin was convinced that the “I Have a Dream” message that King had been writing and rehearsing would work best as the dramatic crescendo at the end of the day, rather than as an opening whose sentiment might be overshadowed and diluted by other speakers and performances afterward.
And Bayard Rustin was gay. He was not closeted and secretly gay—Bayard Rustin was openly gay in an era far more homophobic than today. Despite having been arrested, beaten, and several times fired for being homosexual, Rustin remained open and candid about his sexuality. Throughout the years of their association, Dr. King was frequently urged (and begged and ordered) to push Rustin out of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, to distance himself from Rustin and denounce him as a “pervert” and “immoral influence.” Again and again, Dr. King refused to do that, and continued to rely on both Rustin’s organizational and debate skills.
Dr. King was assassinated before the Stonewall Riots, therefore before the modern gay rights movement began to be noticed by the press and the public at large. We don’t know what he might have said or done at that time. We do know that he fought as much against factionalism within his own movement as the enemies without, trying to keep everyone focused on the cause of racial equality and economic equality. As more than one historian or political scientists have pointed out, if he had been anti-gay, there would surely have been a sermon delivered on the topic, or some negative comments about Rustin or other homosexuals he met among the hours and hours of FBI wiretap tapes.
And there isn’t.
Nor is there any indication he ever asked Rustin to try to hide his sexuality.
Rustin had deep religious convictions about the importance of nonviolently fighting against racial and economic equality. While he was open about his sexuality, he didn’t start publicly fighting for gay rights until the 1970s, when he referred to the treatment of gays and lesbians as the new barometer for measuring social justice.
And he wasn’t the only one.
“If you are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender, you do not have the same rights as other Americans, you cannot marry, …you still face discrimination in the workplace, and in our armed forces. For a nation that prides itself on liberty, justice and equality for all, this is totally unacceptable.” — Yolanda Denise King, Dr. King’s eldest daughter.
Today, several white leaders of anti-gay organizations have tried to wrap their hatred in King’s legacy. They do this by quoting King’s niece, Dr. Alveda King, a rabid anti-abortion and anti-gay rights activist. I suppose it is petty of me to point out that the supposedly pro-traditional marriage, pro-life Alveda King has been divorced three times, had two abortions, and the only reason she didn’t have a third abortion is that she could not convince her father or grandfather to pay for it, and that she didn’t appear to become anti-abortion until she started being a paid speaker for various archconservative groups.
But I think Dr. King’s widow might have more accurate insight into Dr. King’s beliefs:
“I still hear people say that I should not be talking about the rights of lesbian and gay people. … But I hasten to remind them that Martin Luther King Jr. said, ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’ I appeal to everyone who believes in Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream, to make room at the table of brotherhood and sisterhood for lesbian and gay people.” — Coretta Scott King, Dr. King’s widow.
Bayard Rustin and his long time partner, Walter Naegle.To me, the real answer comes back to Bayard Rustin. Dr. King was pressured to distance himself from Rustin, to disavow him, to remove him from leadership positions within King’s organizations. When, before the March On Washington, a U.S. Senator read the full police report about Rustin’s arrest in 1953 into the Congressional Record, including Rustin’s guilty plea to the sodomy charge, along with statements from Rustin’s FBI file in admitting several times to being a homosexual, virtually no one would have faulted Dr. King if he had removed Rustin from his position. In fact, the then-president of the NAACP begged Dr. King to, at the very least, not publicly acknowledge Rustin’s role in organizing the march.
Dr. King did none of those things. When Life magazine interviewed King about the March, Dr. King credited Rustin and A. Philip Randolph as the organizers, which led to Ruston and Randolph appearing on the cover photograph of the magazine.
I could include many more quotes from members of Dr. King’s family and other leaders of the movement, but I think Dr. King’s actions toward Rustin tell the story.
Things change. (Click to embiggen)Just a couple of weeks ago, a spokesperson for another one of the anti-gay hate groups out there (I don’t remember whether it was the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, or National Organization for Marriage, or American Family Association, or Coalition of Conscience, or Focus on the Family, or Public Advocate of the United States, or Abiding Truth Ministries… I just can’t keep up with them all!) was on someone’s program repeating the claim that the vast majority of Americans oppose Marriage Equality. Just as only a few months ago a different guy was on another program insisting that “every time this question has been put to the voters, they have rejected it!” Both of them are apparently in deep denial of the fact that polls in the middle of last year showed that now a clear majority of Americans support extended full legal marriage to same sex couples, and more than two-thirds approve of civil unions or marriage. And they seem to be in deep denial of the four states that did not reject marriage equality when put to a vote of the people in 2012.
Now, only three of those four states approved ballot measures enacting marriage equality, while the fourth state rejected a constitutional ban on such marriage by a good margin. But a healthy majority of votes refusing to ban same sex marriage certainly falls into the category of “not rejecting” marriage equality.
Not all natural habitats are equal.My current “pocket book” is a memoir by a gay man who, like me, was raised in a very evangelical fundamentalist family. I’d read reviews of the book when it first came out, and they all emphasized his humorous recollection of often painful situations. Then just before Christmas, the author was a guest on a podcast I listen to, and the host mentioned the book again, repeating the hilarity of his approach to the topic.
And I was just wrapping up another book and thinking I would need to download a new e-book to my phone to be the next “pocket” book. So guess what book I bought?
I didn’t start reading it right way. Once I finished my previous book, I started listening to audiobooks of various holiday favorites during my usual read on the bus time. So I just started reading it this week.
Our tree this year, the theme is Cartoon Characters.Today is the eleventh day of Christmas. Christmas starts, traditionally, at sunset on Christmas Eve, you see. Most of us don’t think of it that way. A lot of people in the U.S., myself included, tend to think of the start of Christmas Season as beginning the day after Thanksgiving. So by the time Christmas Day arrives, we’ve been decorating and celebrating for at least four weeks.
So I understand why some people are tired of it all by Boxing Day.
It feels like people are more impatient to end it than they used to be, and a friend had an interesting theory about that… Continue reading The eleventh day→
Same-sex couples wait in long lines to wed in Salt Lake City.I’ve been expecting the New Mexico ruling. They already had a number of individual counties issuing licenses to same sex couples, and the state didn’t have a specific same-sex ban (unlike other states). There were a number of different laws related to marriage that included gender-specific clauses, but it seemed fairly obvious the state supreme court would rule in favor of equality. So, when the court issued its unanimous ruling on Thursday, it was worth cheering, but it wasn’t a shocker.
Utah on Friday was a big shock. Especially to me, since part of my childhood was spent in one of the most religiously conservative counties in that state…Continue reading I now pronounce you…→
I can quit any time I want.It is very nearly that time of year. It is nearly the time when I can start listening to Christmas music. I have been enforcing my rule for many years: I can’t start listening to Christmas music until after Thanksgiving.
Because of a comment by a friend on Twitter, I wound up in a discussion about my Christmas music, and because the person I was talking with is also a friend of my husband, he had to chime in with some comments about the size of my Christmas music collection. Which got more friends involved as we debated the timeless question: is there such a thing as too much Christmas music?
Everything’s better when Willy Wonka asks it.Are you old enough to remember when the Washington Post was on Richard Nixon’s enemies list? Those days are certainly over.
So, Richard Cohen wrote an editorial at the Washington Post trying to prove that the Republican party isn’t racist. And in the course of that op-ed piece, he said:
People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?) This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts — but not all — of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn’t look like their country at all.
This caused an uproar. The Post‘s editorial board has gotten defensive. Cohen has since claimed that he wasn’t describing his own feelings, but the feelings of some people.
Font Folly 