Click to embiggenIt’s Friday! Friday! Friday! Friday! And it is the first Friday in September, the month in which superior babies are born!
We managed the impossible deadline… and much earlier than the previous two, which made the three-day weekend much more pleasant than I was afraid it would be. The weekend itself was very relaxing.
So, welcome to the Friday Five. This week I bring you: the top five stories of the week, five stories of interest to queers and our allies, five stories about deplorable people, five stories about why we should impeach someone already, and five videos (plus things I wrote and notable obituaries).
Twitter user @SobaFett posted this picture of the crowd at today’s Straight Pride rally https://twitter.com/SobaFett/status/1167845221113180160Was it really just this last Monday that I posted about the only one dozen people who turned out for the so-called Straight Pride parade in Modesto? That group (led by the guy who accidentally admitted that they were a racist group when arguing at a city council meeting) failed to get a permit, but the Patriot Front, American Guard, and Proud Boys (all neo-nazi groups) in Boston did get a permit… and boy, they had dozens show up!
Someone put up these fliers around the parade route in Boston.Since I opined on this whole topic just a few days ago, I’m not sure if I want to say more. Other than to point out that the so-called Straight Pride Parade’s grand marshal, Milo Yiannopoulos, should only be remembered for when he cheerfully explained how beneficial it is to gay boys to be sexually molested by adults.
I realize the purpose of the event is to troll and get attention. But the old adage about not feeding the trolls is just like the useless advice that some adults give bullied kids: if you don’t react, they’ll stop bullying you. That advice is useless because the bully gets just as much enjoyment from the laughter of the bystanders as he does from any reaction of the target. So ignoring them completely isn’t what works. We have to counter lies with truth. But I don’t need to repeat myself, especially when this article explains why straight pride isn’t needed: On Eve of Straight Pride, Equal Rights Group Debunks ‘Heterophobia’.
In other news: Another Ex-Gay Torture Leader Denounces Movement. It’s a story some of us have heard a thousand times: bullied gay kid growing up in a religious family tries to pray his gay away, becomes involved in an ex-gay ministry, leads a double life pretending to be straight while secretly pursuing illicit relationships, and now he wants to apologize and admit he was gay all along.
Except McKrae Game didn’t just become involved in an ex-gay ministry: he helped found one, and did a lot of the (hypocritical) counseling himself.
Listen, I do feel sorry for Game’s younger self. I get it. I, too, was raised in Southern Baptist churches. I was teased and bullied at school and at church as a child because people thought I was gay. I prayed and cried and pleaded with god for years. And also, similarly to this guy, when I confessed to a good friend (who happened to be a young woman) that I thought I might be gay, I let myself be talked into giving a different orientation a try. Yes, I got married to a woman and then eventually divorced and came out.
So I certainly understand the sort of self-destructive toxic self-loathing that drives a queer person to try not to be queer.
But…
I never claimed to be straight. The lie I tried to live for a few years wasn’t much better, because I wasn’t bisexual any more than I was straight. But I didn’t try to tell other gay people that they could be cured. I didn’t found an organization that wouldn’t just spread that lie, but would sell the lie to other struggling queer people.
And maybe I just lucked out in that the first person I confessed my fear aloud to wasn’t anti-gay. Maybe I just lucked out that the attempts by family and church to intervene in my teen life weren’t as forceful and sustained as one of my cousins was subjected to.
But the thing that I keep coming back to with guys like McKrae Game is: it became his job to do this harmful and ineffective “treatment.” I said some pretty shitty things when I was a teen-ager and younger, trying to deflect people’s suspicions. I owe some people that I will likely never see again apologies for that.
But this guy charged the people he was lying to. Like other ex-gay leaders, he made people pay him for the lies he was telling. And some of those people killed themselves because praying didn’t make their feelings go away.
In the article he seems to understand that:
“Most people in the gay community have treated me ridiculously kind,” Game said, “liking me for me now and not who I was. And I hope they just give me the chance to talk to them so I can hear them out and apologize.”
Game said he realizes that for many an apology won’t be enough. And that he’ll likely be apologizing for the rest of his life.
Yes, yes he will.
Enough about that. Let’s close with this bit from June, when Stephen Colbert commented on the Straight Pride when the group first applied for their permit:
Stephen Colbert: What The ‘Straight Pride’ Parade Won’t Have:
This is not a movie. Photographer Jasper Reyes took the picture of part of the demolition of the Alaska Way Viaduct here in Seattle. (Click to embiggen)I really can’t believe that it is Friday! The last Friday in August. So summer is winding down. And this weekend is a holiday. Yay!
But first, I have to get through another impossible deadline at work. One the plus side, while I was compiling this I was also watching the Seahawks win the final game of the pre-season. Which was fun. Even if the gane doesn’t count.
So, welcome to the Friday Five. This week I bring you: the top five stories of the week, five stories of interest to queers and our allies, five science stories, five stories about a hopeful future, five stories about why we should impeach someone already, and five videos (plus things I wrote and notable obituaries).
Instead of finishing my binge watch of The Boys a glance at twitter is forcing me to update a previous post. Remember how Jerry Falwell, Jr. and is wife decided for some completely unfathomable reason to hand over $1.8 million dollars to be a gay-friendly flophouse in Miami as a gift to provide an income to a hunky pool boy they met at a very expensive hotel (and how they kept flying him around on their private jet)? Well, it turns out he isn’t the only one: Another ‘Pool Guy’? Falwell Jr’s Personal Trainer Scored $2M From Liberty U To Buy A Gym.
I’m just going to pull a few paragraphs from that latter story:
The support Falwell provided to the two young men, Granda and Crosswhite, has some parallels. Both were aided in business ventures and both have flown on the nonprofit university’s corporate jet.
One difference: When Falwell helped Crosswhite, he used the assets of Liberty, the tax-exempt university he has led since 2008. Among the largest Christian universities in the world, Liberty depends on hundreds of millions of dollars its students receive in federally backed student loans and Pell grants…
…As Liberty’s leader, Falwell draws an annual salary of nearly $1 million, and is obligated to put the university’s financial interests before his own personal interests when conducting Liberty business.
“The concern is whether the university’s president wanted to do his personal trainer a favor and used Liberty assets to do it,” said Douglas Anderson, a governance specialist and former internal audit chief at Dow Chemical Co, who reviewed both the transaction and Liberty’s explanation of it at Reuters’ request. That would be bad governance, he said. “At a minimum, the terms suggest the buyer got a great deal and Liberty got very little.”
(Click to embiggen)Six years ago there was an ex-gay rally held in Washington, D.C. The organizers insisted that there would be thousands of participants. Several news blogs I followed at the time predicted that the rally would be attended by possibly tens of people. After the event, some of those sites issued a retraction—because the number of attendees was only nine people. And all nine of those attendees were employees of the ex-gay “ministry” that organized the event. When the various groups started applying for permits for straight pride events earlier this summer, I wasn’t quite so sure the crowds would be small—because the people organizing the events are groups associated with various violent white supremacist rallies over the last few years.
One such group failed to secure a permit in Modesto, California earlier this month. The video of their leader arguing at a city council meeting for why they should be allowed to have the event went viral because, after countless times earlier insisting that they weren’t white nationalist, nor white supremacists, nor otherwise racist, he angrily said, “we’re a totally peaceful racist group!”
The council didn’t grant the permit, though I should point out the reason why was not the slip of the tongue. The groups, because of the connection several of them have to those hate rallies I mentioned earlier, had been unable to obtain the necessary insurance coverage required for a parade or similar public event. The slip of the tongue was just icing on the cake.
About a dozen proud bigots showed up for an event at a rented barn—which was cut short when the owners of the venue saw their hateful signs and other things. Then the 12 proud bigots walked to a nearby Planned Parenthood clinic (which was closed) and they chanted various slogans that, oddly enough, didn’t have anything to do with being straight. I mean, I suppose the anti-gay slogan kind of count. And the pro-Trump signs I suppose could be argued to be about the straightness of a philandering twice-divorced man who, by his own admission, loves to grab women by the pussy. But, um, I don’t quite get what the Build the Wall chants had to do with straight pride. Sounds like could old-fashioned racist xenophobia.
About 200 counter-protestors, on the other hand, showed up to express support for queer rights and to denounce hate. And while apparently some angry shouting happened at one point, no actual violence broke out.
We know that this is just a gimmick. The real straight pride happens 7 days a week, 52 weeks of the year. It has never been illegal to be straight anywhere. It has never been legal to fire people because they are straight anywhere. Straight children aren’t shamed and bullied in schools for being straight. It has never been illegal in any country in the world for opposite-sex couples to marry. No one calls for a boycott of a television network when a male character goes out on a date with a female character on any television show. No local television stations refuse to broadcast a specific episode of a show because of the inclusion of a marriage between a man and a woman.
And if straight people think that they don’t have a holiday, go take a look at how many Hallmark Channel movie listings during Thanksgiving and Christmas time have a straight romance as the central plot. Heck, how many times does a kiss between an opposite-sex couple at the stroke of Midnight on New Year’s Eve figure into romance movies?
And let’s not forget Heteroween — a holiday that once did belong to the queers, but y’all took it away with all those sexy mummy and sexy nurse and sexy fireman and sexy pirate costumes that are sold in pairs that result in a clothed-male/nearly-nude-female. Please note, the only problem I have with straight people co-opting our fabulous holiday this way is that they don’t do it equitably. It shouldn’t just be the ladies in those straight couples showing off some skin. I mean, c’mon, isn’t the point of being a straight studly man that woman want your sexy body?
Maybe instead of attacking the rights and freedoms of their neighbors, co-workers, and even their own children, they should put a little more time into asking themselves why queer people make them so uncomfortable. A little self-reflection would do far more good than staging these white supremacist events masquerading as straight pride.
After a few hot and muggy days, we got a drizzly day followed by an cool overcast day. So far we’ve had a mild summer. Let’s hope it stays that way!
So, welcome to the Friday Five. This week I bring you: the top five stories of the week, five stories about sci fi and fantasy, five science stories, five stories the impeachable one and related problems, five stories about domestic terrorist, and five videos (plus things I wrote and notable obituaries).
Aaron Schock was photographed in April 2019 schmoozing with gay men at Coachella… and making out with one of them and putting his hand down the guy’s pants. So much for the claims he isn’t gay…I was out of town Friday and Saturday dealing with family things, and then when I was back Sunday I needed to get the errands I usually do on Saturday finished Sunday morning, then get ready for the second Seahawks pre-season game in the late Sunday afternoon. So though I really wanted to post links to the following stories as a Weekend Update, I just didn’t have time. So this is an update to stories that I’ve linked to and commented upon extensively before that have had some new developments. Some of those developments aren’t that new, but I missed them when they came out.
I have written so many times about the self-loathing closet case former anti-gay Congress-person Aaron Shock. Seriously. Many time. Many, many, MANY times. Among all of these stories about this self-loathing closet case who voted for numerous laws in congress that hurt his fellow queers, we also had to deal with his violation of campaign finance law, which eventually let him to not seek re-election and focus on trying to get out of the criminal prosecution. Which, damn it, he mostly did evade.
Then, as a former anti-gay congressperson with a lot of personal life connections that indicated he was a flaming hypocrite, he started turning up on a bunch of news sites. The stories had a sad semblance: people would post pictures or videos of the easily recognized former congressman hanging out at gay events, or kissing and groping other men at gay events, or shoving money into the g-strings of gay male strippers at gay event, and the other people hanging out with the self-loathing closet case who had inflicted immeasurable damage on other gay people would get called out about hanging out with the evil guy, and they’d try to explain how they didn’t know who he was…
It was just a mess.
Recently, there have been indications that the self-loathing closet case wanted to come out and regenerate his political career. It began a couple months ago with a story I missed: Aaron Schock: ‘We Each Have Our Own Journey’. There are some follow up stories at Kenneth In the 212 that fill in some of the blanks, but the short version is: a guy messaged Schock to commiserate about how Schock’s antics at the festival above were covered in the news (and to hit on him). They wound up having a text conversation.
Then, some weeks later for no apparent reason, the guy shared screen caps.
Turns out, the second guy had been asked to “leak” the conversation by Schock himself. Leaking it in June didn’t have much of an effect. Until earlier this month, when some other news sites found that post and started reporting it. And most gay bloggers and news sites who covered the story it did not comment very favorably on Schock’s poor little rich Republican spin on coming out.
So the purposed of the “leaked” text conversation was to see if the blogosphere would react sympathetically to the idea that, hey, his perfect anti-gay voting record in Congress and all those speeches about homosexuals being abominations and employers should have the right to fire someone even if they only suspect they are gay all happened before he came out of the closet. Therefore, we shouldn’t hold it against him.
He was trying really hard to imply that it wasn’t just that he was in the closet, but he actually didn’t know he was gay back then. Of course, we know that is false because of the time a reporter found him having sex in a shower with his supposed roommate, among other things. Because that stuff is out there, I think he knows he can’t explicitly claim that he just didn’t know he was gay.
None of us are buying the closet as an excuse. So then he backtracked and claimed the guy didn’t have permission to share the screen caps after all…
…and then, this happened: Homocon Columnist: Unhinged, Intolerant Gay Leftists Are Committing A “Digital Lynching” Of Aaron Schock. That’s right, we’re the bad guys. I should note that I have not linked to the angry columnist’s op ed piece directly, but rather to an excerpt with commentary from Joe.My.God. As Joe notes, the writer of the op-ed has previously written about how unfair it is that most gay men won’t date or have sex with trump-supporting gay men. Boo-hoo!
Note that this op-ed just casually refers to Schock as gay and out as if it is old news. And Schock started sharing the op-ed the same day it came out. So it appears that this is Schock’s new tactic for coming out. To get someone else to whine about the pain that somehow we have caused Schock and his family.
We caused?
If Aaron Schock’s family feels humiliated because of photos like the ones at the top of this post and the comments that many of us out queer people have made about them, that is entirely Aaron’s fault. None of us force him to kiss that guy. None of us forced him to shove his hands down that guy’s pants. None of us forced him to go to a gay bar and put money in a stripper’s g-string.
None of us forced him to run for Congress. None of us forced him to vote against every gay rights bill that came up while he was there. None of us forced him to sponsor bills to take rights away from gays while he was there. None of us forced him to make those speeches. That was all on him.
We also didn’t force him to illegally transfer campaign funds to his personal accounts. We didn’t force him to submit false mileage reimbursement forms to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars. We didn’t force him to take his boy toy on trips paid for by the taxpayer and his campaign donors by pretending said boy toy (who kept posing in official photos with Aaron) was the campaign photographer. (Hint: the photographer should be behind the camera, but standing next to the congressman like one of the congress spouses.) All of that is on him.
And to both Schock and Mr Polumbo (who wrote that whiney op-ed): it’s not the fact that we have different politics that makes us unwilling to embrace you within our community. Nor is it merely that you voted for Trump. It’s your willingness to support racist, misogynist, homophobic policies. It’s your votes to take rights away from queer people. It’s your willingness to support an administration that is implementing genocidal policies at the border, taking medical care away from your fellow citizens, taking rights away from queer and trans people, transferring massive amounts of wealth from working class people to billionaire, and encouraging white nationalists to terrorize your fellow citizens.
The fact that you can do all of those things while also being a member of one of the marginalized communities that is a feeling the pain of these things you support is just the cherry on top of this horrible, disgusting dish you are offering up.
We’re not the unhinged ones. The fact that you can’t see how unhinged the policies you support are disgusts us.
Aaron Schock is a public figure and was an elected official who actively caused measurable harm to my community. I have both a Constitutional and moral right to comment upon his actions. And I believe that all journalists bear an ethical imperative to report about hypocritical activities of all elected officials.
All the usual busy-ness at work, but I’ve got a three-day weekend and will be visiting family, so that’s a good thing.
So, welcome to the Friday Five. This week I bring you: the top five stories of the week, five stories of interest to the queer community, five stories about haters and their ilk, five stories the impeachable one, and five videos (plus things I wrote and notable obituaries).
And then this morning the world woke to this news: Jeffrey Epstein Found Dead in Cell in Apparent Suicide. Reminder: Epstein is under arrest on charges of sex trafficing—specifically recruiting underage girls to provide sex for himself and a large group of clients over many years. Several years ago he got out of most of the charges of a similar case with a deal offered by a former prosecutor (who later became Trump’s Labor Secretary, and then resigned when this new information came to light).
And I want to unpack that further than those articles do. A number of possible co-conspirators have already been identified. Charges are likely to be pursued against them. And those charges are not solely dependent on flipping Epstein. Remember, the feds have thousands of photographs seized from just one of Epstein’s properties of people having sex with the underage girls. One of the many tools that the feds had in their back pocket on this case is that possessing those photos constituted a crime in and of themself, even if Epstein wiggled out of the trafficing charges.
However, even though we haven’t seen the photos (and I sure as heck don’t want to personally), the description vague description entered into the court records, coupled with that fact that for some years financial experts have suspected that Epstein’s income may be the result of blackmailing rich people, the logical conclusion is that those photos were the blackmail. The photos constitute proof that certain recognizable people had sex with those girls. That, plus the flight records and other details we already know about at least some of the rich and powerful who hung out with Epstein will add up to enough to charge some of those people.
So killing Epstein isn’t enough. Not by a long shot.
But there are other fishy things besides a conspiracy to silence him. There are plenty of people who think he deserves to die for doing all of that to all of those girls.
The other issue that keeps coming up related to this case, which the political cartoon I linked to above sort of gets at: when the Epstein case came to light, all over social media I kept seeing conservative, Trump-supporting people angrily or snarkily confronting people they perceived as liberal when referencing this case with variants of: “when it turns out the [prominent Democrat X] is one of the clients, you’ll feel differently.”
Let put that to rest: no, no I won’t. If those men took advantage of Epstein’s “parties” and “retreats” to have sex with those girls, then I want them to go to prison. It doesn’t matter if they were a senator, or congressman, or governor who served in the party I usually vote for. It doesn’t matter if they were a president that I voted for twice. I expect them to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
I do think it very telling that the first thing that comes to mind for many Trump supporters is to assume that we will stop caring about criminal activity when we find out the criminal is someone whose politics we support. It’s not a revelation, we have thousands of examples in the last three years alone of how they refuse to believe, make excuses, or otherwise look the other way when the crimes Trump and his cronies comes to light. It’s just one more piece of evidence that they are happy about horrible crimes when they are being committed against certain types of people.
I could keep going, but I’m going to circle back to this: I don’t think Epstein was murdered. His whole life was built around his jet-setting lifestyle that gave him the access, power, and money to indulge his sick desires. Every indicator is that his wealth is the result of a complex illegal scheme of some sort, which the information in the possession of both federal and state prosecutors will put an end to, and once everything is sorted out, he would probably be penniless. The only futures left to him were:
the rest of his life behind bars
many years behind bars, then a life of near poverty
So, he took the coward’s way out.
Edited to add:
This is interesting! Epstein’s Pals Just Lost Any Chance of Having Penthouse Evidence Tossed by the Courts — Here’s Why. Just to be clear, they mean evidence seized during the raid on Epstein’s New York Penthouse. This has nothing to do with the porn magazine. Anyway, because it was seized on his property before he died, he is the only person who had standing to petition the courts to disallow it in trials. So…
This has not been exactly a happy week for world news. Seriously, one of the least awful things to happen this week was the stock market taking a dive as the pointless trade war rattled the economy further.
So this week’s Friday Five wasn’t exactly fun to assemble. This week I bring you: the top five stories of the week, five stories of interest to the queer community, five stories about science fact and fiction, five stories about haters and their guns, five stories about the deplorables, and five videos (plus things I wrote and notable obituaries).
Font Folly 