“So many homophobes turn out to be secretly gay that I’m nervous I’m secretly a giant spider.”—Jeremy KaplowitzWe are deep in the shack nasties as we’re trying to get moved, but a couple of things popped up in the news since I posted this week’s Friday Links that I just have to comment. First up, Study confirms some men use anti-gay and sexist & homophobic jokes to shore up their masculinity. Many of us have observed this anecdotally, but it’s nice to have some new science on it. “The study, from researchers at Western Carolina University, assessed how heterosexual men responded to various forms of humor when they felt their masculinity was being questioned. The men who placed more value on how they conform to expectations of masculinity were more likely to embrace humor that denigrated women and gay men if they felt they had to prove that their masculinity was in check.” Note that the study specifically looked at how the men responded to jokes and then what sorts of comments they might make while discussing humor in general. So the context was reading, writing, and discussing humor. The study is therefore revealing a single manifestation of a deeper phenomenon—the more insecure a man is in is own masculinity, the more likely he is to denigrate women and queers. Note also that the study shows the other side of the effect: a guy who feels secure in his masculinity was less likely to bash women and queers.
One last thing, the new study that I cited at the beginning? It also showed that test subjects who showed, on a pre-study survey, a higher degree of Precarious Manhood Beliefs, and then were exposed to information that affirmed that a man being able to see things from a women’s perspective and a woman being able to see things from a man’s perspective were both good things? They were less likely to verbally bash women or queers. Which seems to back up the notion that all this misogyny and homophobia within the culture is causing harm. Gee, who’d a thunk?
We’re still packing and moving and packing and packing and… I finally had a responce to me ad giving away two four-drawer steel filing cabinets… and a few hours later the guy who responded said “never mind.” I really don’t want to have to pay someone to haul these away…
Anyway, here are the links I found interesting this week, sorted into categories.
Obama returns — and avoids Trump. In his first event since leaving the White House, Obama sidesteps talk of his successor as he nudges future political leaders
I haven’t been posting much this week because we’ve been packing. My work week has consisted of going to work, coming home, loading the car up with as many packed boxes as will fit, driving to the new place (a 25-35 minute drive depending on traffic), carrying all the boxes in the car up a flight of stairs to the new apartment, then driving back home to pack some more until bed time. My husband is still in the recovery stage from surgery, and I’m not letting him lift anything until the doctor clears him (he sees the surgeon again next week, so, fingers crossed!). We’ve hired movers who will take care off all the big furniture and anything we’ve packed by then but haven’t moved, and we could let the movers do everything, except that we literally don’t have enough room here to pile everything once it is packed.
Anyway, here are the links I found interesting this week, sorted into categories.
Links of the Week
ADD YOUR GENDER PRONOUNS TO TWITTER. This post is from a couple of years ago, but the issue was only recently come to my attention. And I agree, cisgender people who consider themselves allies of the trans community should add their pronouns to their social media profiles because this normalizes the practice.
Religion Is Just Common Sense With Added Bits of Nonsense. I don’t have a problem with the conclusion, but I quibble with the comedian’s example. He says all religions can be boiled down to five don’ts, four of which make sense and one is nuts, but then he lists five, of which only three make sense and two are nuts. Oh, well…
Steve Ballmer Serves Up a Fascinating Data Trove. “The database is perhaps the first nonpartisan effort to create a fully integrated look at revenue and spending across federal, state and local governments.
“Hands up if you love Fridays.”It’s Friday! Under our original plans for the year, we were meant to be attending NorWesCon with a bunch of friends. But we put down a deposit on a new apartment a few days ago, and we’re scheduled to sign the lease on the day Friday Links posts, and we would like to start moving in to the new place. Earlier in the week, when we were still waiting to hear whether we would get this place, we decided that if we did get it, we didn’t want to have to leave the con and drive back to Seattle and then out the other side of Seattle to the neighboring community where the new apartment is just to sign papers and not start moving. And if this somehow fell through, then we needed to spend these days of paid time off I already had scheduled at work scrambling to sign one of the other places we’d looked at or a new place altogether.
Because we have so, so much stuff packed into our current living space, despite the fact that there are piles of packed boxes taller than me in most of the rooms, there is still a lot of packing to do. Which will be easier to do if we get some of this stuff moved this weekend to make room to pack in.
Anyway, here are the links I found interesting this week, sorted into categories.
Why It Took Barry Manilow So Long to Come Out. “When someone in their 70s comes out as gay, especially a famous someone like singer Barry Manilow, the first question is always, what took so long? But there are very good reasons.”
“If Donald Trump has no obligations to Russia, then why did Trump seek Putin’s permission instead of Congress’s to bomb Syria?”So, Thursday Donald ordered the navy to shoot a bunch of Tomahawk missiles at an airbase in Syria, presumably to punish Assad for using nerve gas on his own people. Donald did this because people here were up in arms because a bunch of children were killed in that gas attack. And the next day all the media talking heads were acting as if Donald had done something brave, effective, and presidential.
Bull.
First, Donald gave Russia a head’s up that we were going to bomb Russia’s ally. Whitehouse spokespeople claim it was just before the attack, using normal de-conflict procedures. But according to the BBC, all the Russian trucks and so forth left the airfield an entire day before the attack. ABC News, meanwhile reports that Russia wasn’t the only ones: Syria evacuating their people and equipment a day ahead of the supposed surprise strikes, too.
(click to embiggen)The problem is, not that long ago Donald literally said, in answer to question about his ban on Syrian refugees, that he would look Syrian children in the face and tell them they can’t come to America. So nobody should think for one moment that Donald was moved to attack Syria because of some dying children. And the attack was entirely for show. We already have drone footage showing that none of the runways were damaged, none of the hangers were damaged, and there are a whole lot of planes parked undamaged on the taxi ways. Russia claims six older planes were destroyed and a few people were killed. But Russia was also pretending just a bit over a day ago that they were shocked and angry and completely surprised by the attack. And we now know that was a lie.
So, thanks for throwing us under the bus, America!
It’s illegal in Russia, now, to share an image of Vladimir Putin as a “gay clown.” There’s a specific image that prompted this, but no one is completely sure which one, because Russian media can’t share it, right?But while we may not have equal rights for long, at least for now, we can share the banned images of Vladimir Putin as a gay clown. Right after this image started going around the internet with various comments about not sharing it because it make Putin mad, some other people were sharing a tweet claiming that those of us sharing it are being homophobic. Oh! Hey! Again with the straightsplaining! No, I am not being homophobic when I share this, because I think there is nothing wrong with a guy wearing makeup. I mean, all clowns do wear makeup, anyway, right? Straight, bi, asexual, whatever the clown’s orientation or gender, makeup is okay. Anyway, let’s end this depressing update on a funny note. Stephen Colbert has a very short take on this story that’s worth a look:
WATCH: Colbert Unleashes Vladimir Putin, Gay Icon:
Gilbert Baker, the artist who created the rainbow flag in 1978 for Gay Freedom Day, died in his sleep earlier this week in New York City. He was 65 years old. (Today.com)It’s Friday! And we’re into April already.
We’re still packing like crazy and looking for a new place to live. I’m trying not to stress and probably failing at it. There has been a weird mix of good news and absolutely horrific news among our extended friends circle and it’s all a bit overwhelming.
Anyway, here are the links I found interesting this week, sorted into categories. You will notice it is a shorter collection than usual.
“This pretty much sums up everyone’s feelings about ignorant hate.” (Click to embiggen)Bryan Fischer hosts a show on the American Family Association’s (a certified hate group) radio network, and is frequently referred to as a former AFA employee (though all that really happened was that his official title of Director of Issues Analysis was revoked after he made some ridiculous comments about the Jewish religion being counterfeit—literally the day before 100 members of the Republican National Committee were being flown to Isreal at the expense of the AFA; Fischer still receives a salary from them, so the firing was a sham). Fischer made some new ridiculous comments this weekend. In a tweet he claimed that gays have stolen the rainbow from god, the original inventor of the rainbow, and that we should give it back.
Fischer is described over on Rational Wiki as someone who “makes even the most cuckoo-bananas conservative talk radio pundits seem sane and reasonable in comparison.” He’s always going on about gay people (and how gays and nazis are the same thing) and gay sex (and how hyper masculine aggressive gay sex is destroying everything). Besides making him sound like a kook, it also proves that he thinks about gay sex a whole lot more than most gay people do. Hmmmm, where have we seen that phenomenon before?
Screenshot of Fischer’s tweet, in case he wises up and deletes it: “Worst example of cultural appropriation ever: LGBTs stole the rainbow from God. It’s his. He invented it. Gen. 9:11-17. Give it back.”There are so many things wrong with this assertion that it’s hard to know where to begin. First of all, he quotes from the end of the story of Noah in the old testament to justify his claim that queers have stolen god’s invention. I’m going to quote a bit of that: “13 I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. 14 Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, 15 I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life.” That’s god talking to Noah, and please note what god himself says: the rainbow is a sign of a covenant between god and the entire planet. A moment later he emphasizes that it is a sign of a covenant between him and all living creatures of every kind. Gay people are part of the planet. Gay people are a kind of living creature.
So, if you believe (as Fischer frequently claims to) that the bible is the inerrant word of god and literally true in every word, well, that means that queers have just as much a claim on the rainbow as any inhabitant of the earth or god himself. I’m just quoting god from Fischer’s holy book, here!
Lots of people had fun with Fischer’s tweet. Part of what cracked me up about it is that this is one of the sections of the Bible that got me in trouble when I was a kid, because I kept having questions that my Sunday School teachers and other church leaders couldn’t answer. Such as, how did all of the land species that live only in Australia get to Noah’s boat? Seriously, did a bunch of kangaroos and koalas and so forth build a mini ark and cross the ocean to get to the Arabian Pennisula? And if they did have a way to survive crosses the Pacific and Indian Oceans, why did they need to get on Noah’s ark to begin with? How did they get to Noah’s ark? And how big was this ark, really, because just assembling every species of, say, feline is going to require a very big boat. And then how are you going to keep all those big cats away from the pairs of the 20+ species of deer?
But let’s get back to the rainbow. The sorts of Christians who insist that every word in the Bible is literally true absolutely despise the notion of evolution. And one of their favorite arguments against evolution back when I was a kid, was to look at the complexity of the eyeball: you have the lens and receptors and tiny muscles to adjust the lens in order to change focus and so on and so on, and just a beautiful perfect organ for focusing and interpreting light could not possible have evolved by chance! Seriously, they think that’s an argument the undoes all of science. Anyway, when making this argument they get very insistent that god design the eyeballs of humans (and every other species on the planet that sees the way we do) and they have all had them since god created the world in a famous six-day run, right? Here’s the problem: the very same laws of physics that allow that lens in the front of those perfectly designed eyeballs to focus images on the retina? They are also what make rainbows appear when there is sunlight shining through an atmosphere littered with tiny water droplets. If god didn’t tweak the laws of physics to allow rainbows to appear in the clouds until after Noah’s flood, then none of the characters in the Bible who lived before Noah could have had the power of sight. They would have all had these perfect organs for seeing in their heads that didn’t work at all.
And they had to be able to see because sight is mentioned in several of the Bible stories before Noah. Also, god is supposed to have created humans in his image and we still are supposed to be in his image (Jesus affirmed that in the same story in which he endorsed paying your taxes), so that means we’ve always had these eyeballs, which were apparently useless appendages until after Noah’s flood.
And I’ve completely skipped over the parts of this story in which god admits he’s very forgetful and prone to rash, unwise decisions. He says he put the rainbow in the sky to remind him from time to time that he’s promised never again to destroy the world with a flood. So god needs to leave himself post-its, “Don’t commit mass genocide.” And the whole flood story begins with god realizing that he should have never created humans to begin with, because all of them are dirty rotten scoundrels. Then god reconsiders and decides that maybe Noah, his sons, and his daughters-in-law might be worth keeping around. But only them! Everyone else has got to go! And how does this supposedly all-powerful, all-knowing, wise and loving god decides to get rid of the scoundrels? Does he unleash a plague that would only infect humans, so that all of them die off and leave the planet to the birds and animals and plants? No, he takes out the dirty rotten people by wiping out every living thing on the surface of the earth. Wipe out billions of innocent mice and puppies and so forth to get rid of a few thousand or maybe millions of humans. That sounds like a plan that a smart omnipotent being would cook up, right?
When I brought up these inconsistencies as a kid, the adults would usually try to handwave about god’s plan, and us poor mortals not understanding. As I entered my teens and got better about pointing out the problems with that, they would talk about symbolism and poetic language. Which of course completely contradicts the notion that ever word is literally true. Then I would usually be admonished for being obstinate and willfully difficult and wasting time on trivial technical questions.
But complaining about who gets to use the rainbow as a symbol of hope isn’t wasting time being obstinate over trivial things?
Queers aren’t the first people to latch onto the rainbow as a symbol of diversity, freedom, resistance to oppression, and so on. There are several reasons for this. Just because the International Cooperative Movement (since 1921), or the Peace Movement (since 1961), or the Rainbow Coalition (since the mid-sixties), or the LGBT community (since 1978) and so on use the rainbow as symbols doesn’t do anything to the rainbows that appear in the sky after a storm. Those rainbows that god talked about in the book of Genesis are still there. We haven’t taken them away. According to Fischer’s religion’s own holy book, the rainbow is given as a symbol to every living creature on the earth. It even literally says “every kind” of creature. If you think you have the right to tell any of us that the rainbow isn’t ours, well, then you just don’t understand the real meaning of rainbows or love or dreams…
“Go ahead! Explain to us how you, a straight person, know more about homophobia than we do.”(Click to embiggen.)In a recent post I commented on the case of Andrew Shirvell, a former Michigan assistant attorney general who lost his job because he mounted a harassment and stalking campaign (using state resources) against an openly gay college student. During the post I commented on how Shirvell pings everyone’s gaydar and talked about the roots of his particularly vicious and obsessive homophobia. And a new commenter decided to explain to me how very homophobic it is for me to characterize Shirvell’s mannerisms and speech patterns as prissy.
Oh, straightsplaining again! Hurrah! Thank you, so much, anonymous straight person, for explaining homophobia to me. How foolish of me to think that my 50+ years of surviving the slings and arrows of homophobia gave me any understanding of it.
Okay, let me clarify a few things:
Fact the First: you are correct, not every gay man is a sissy. Bully for you for being so open-minded!
Fact the Second: there are actual studies that show that, while not all queer men are sissies, at least 75% of boys who exhibit the characteristics causing them to be labeled “sissy” during childhood grow up to come out as queer.
Fact the Third: no matter what their actual sexual orientation, every boy who ever lived in our society who exhibits any of those gender-nonconforming behaviors was bullied because of them.
So, whether you believe that Shirvell is a closet case or not, my assertion that homophobic bullying is part of the root of his insanely over the top obsessively vicious homophobic campaign against that college student is still valid. You’re barely technically correct that we don’t know Shirvell’s orientation for certain (though I’m 99.99999% certain that he is queer of one sort or another). But the sheer level of sissy behavior one sees in any of the video interviews Shirvell gave back when he was defending his campaign tells me that he wasn’t just bullied occasionally as a child, but quite viciously and continuously. And we know from many studies that enduring that kind of bullying is one of the sources of adulthood excessive homophobic attitudes and behavior.
While we’re on the topic of those studies: those studies also show that the more virulent an adult man‘s homophobic attitudes and opinions are, the more likely it is that their body will exhibit involuntary arousal at the sight of scantily clad men. In other others, the more homophobic, the more likely that they are a self-loathing closet case. Add that to the study above, and it’s possible that my 99.99999% assessment is too low.
Fact the Fourth: I was a sissy. My childhood bullies included not just my classmates, but many of the adults in my life: family members, some teachers, and many adults at church. Yes, during my early teen years I was verbally homophobic. In my later teen years the only reason I wasn’t was not because I had become enlightened, but rather because as I had given in to my hormones a number of times, I wasn’t willing to be a hypocrit. But I was still convinced that I was going to go to hell for giving in to those feelings. So I understand Shirvell’s situation.
I do feel sorry for Shirvell the child. I know he had a horrible experience, even though I don’t know all the details. However, he’s an adult, now. He’s been exposed to information about sexual orientation, including the medical studies that it is not a choice (and therefore, since part of the theological definition of sin is being a willful disobedience, that means homosexuality cannot be a sin). He’s had more than enough time to start coming to terms with his childhood trauma and at least make the decision not to be the kind of bully that made his childhood hell. He has very emphatically chosen not to do so. Shirvell the adult deserves not one iota of sympathy. Not one.
Fact the Fifth: Please understand, I’m not stereotyping Andrew Shirvell as a gay man, I’m stereotyping him as a self-hating closet case—and he’s given us so, so much ammunition. It’s not just about the way he prances or speaks, it’s what he says as he’s ranting about the imagined sexual depravities of the targets of his homophobic rants—he simply sounds like he spends an inordinate amount of time imagining queer sex.
And there isn’t a plausible heterosexual explanation for that.
Note: Comments on this entire blog have always been moderated. Specific commenters have been whitelisted, but everyone else’s comments sit in a queue until I approve them. And I don’t see any point in approving comments that are insulting, or obviously coming from sock puppets or—such as the comment alluded to here—indicate the person isn’t interested in listening.
“Sir, I have had enough of your shenanigans, so I bid you good day. I said good day to you sir!”Whenever Aaron Schock is in the news again, hits on one particular old post about him suddenly spike on my site. This happened Wednesday, which sent me looking for the story: Ex-Rep. Aaron Schock Alleges FBI Had His Staffer Wear A Wire, Steal Docs. Schock is on trial for all sorts of financial shenanigans while he was in office (Conning some constituents into paying over $7000 into a fake account allegedly for travel expenses which he actually billed to tax payers, $140,000 in false mileage claims, a $5,000 chandelier for his office also billed to the tax payers, et cetera), which had driven him to resign. I’ve described Schock before as badly-closeted because he’s a Republican with a perfect anti-gay record who not only lived with his boyfriend while he was a congressman, but took the boyfriend on official trips, where even though said boyfriend was listed as a staff photographer, he never took any photos and Schock but rather posed at Schock’s side along with the other congressmen and their wives, at dinner sat beside Schock as the other spouses did, conveniently had an adjoining hotel room et cetera, et cetera. Never mind the times he’s been photographed or videoed in gay bars, or the time he led reporters and a camera crew around a gay neighborhood and kept (on camera) getting destracted with his gaze lingering on hunky shirtless men as they walked by.
It’s kind of pathetic.
I keep half expecting Schock to eventually come out and try to claim that the pressure of the closet unbalanced his mental health and all of his wrongdoing was the result. Or maybe just to claim that the FBI’s investigation into his financial wrongdoings was all some sort of homophobic plot. Which, given that Schock on at least one occasion gave a speech in the House of Representatives chambers in which he insisted that it should be legal for employers to fire people just because they think they might be gay, landlords to evict or refuse to rent to people they suspect are gay, and so on.
Once he’s convicted I hope he gets a long sentence.
He’s not the only homophobe formerly employed by the government in the news this week: Former Michigan Asst AG Andrew Shirvell Loses Law License for Anti-Gay Attack on UM Student Chris Armstrong. Shirvell’s story is weird. Back in 2010 Chris Armstrong, was elected student body president at the University of Michigan. Armstrong was the first openly-gay person elected to that office. Shirvell, meanwhile, worked as an assistant attorney general in Michigan. The minute Shirvell saw a news story about Armstrong’s election, he logged onto Facebook and created a page called Chris Armstrong Watch and posted a bunch of barely coherent anti-gay rants. Facebook suspended the page as a violation of community guidelines, so Shirvell created is one blog (which for a long time had as a banner a picture of Armstrong with an image of a gay pride flag with a swastika superimposed on it and the word RESIGN scrawled across Armstrong’s face).
But it wasn’t just hundreds of anti-gay blog posts. Shirvell spent nearly every night parked in his car across the street from a house where Armstrong and several other students lived, taking pictures of everyone who came in and out of the house. He posted the pictures (and when he could the names) of each one, writing about what sorts of lewd sexual depravities he assumed had to be going on inside the house. On one occasion when Armstrong and his housemates hosted a party, Shirvell drove around the block for hours, taking pictures and trying to get proof that they were serving underaged people alcohol. We know he drove around the block for hours because a) he blogged about it extensively, b) he called the police at 1:30 and tried to get the partiers arrested for disturbing the peace and in his official statement to the police told them he had been driving around the block for hours, and c) several of the neighbors had called in the suspicious car circling the neighborhood. And just to be clear, Shirvell didn’t live nearby!
Armstrong eventually sued Shirvell for harassment, stalking, and related things asking for legal fees and $25,000 in damages. The jury awarded $4.5million in damages. On Shirvell’s appeal, that judgement was reduced to $3.5million, but otherwise all findings of the jury were upheld by the appeals court. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Shirvell’s appeals. It’s unlikely that Armstrong will ever get the money, but the principle at least has been upheld that a government employee can’t harass a queer kid (Armstrong was 21 years old for most of this, but he was a college student, for goodness sake!).
No one has ever been able to get a reasonable explanation from Shirvell for why Armstrong of all people became the target of his fierce and vitriolic obsession. Even under oath on trial (where acting as his own lawyer, he questioned himself for two hours, and then under cross-examination was forced to admit everything he had just testified about Armstrong and the situation was a lie)! Sure, Shirvell was a University of Michigan alumnus (he graduated 8 years before Armstrong became student body president), so you can argue that his initial interest was simply because he followed news about his former school, but the obsessive behavior against someone he otherwise didn’t know was really over-the-top.
The reason he can’t explain himself is that that there isn’t a rational explanation. There is, sadly, a very understandable irrational one. Shirvell is a 36-year-old man who has never been married and never been known to date a woman. In video appearances he doesn’t merely ping a lot of people’s gaydar, it’s like a mega-super-gay four-alarm alert. Shirvell is a self-loathing closet case. And I’m hardly the first person to realize this.
Shirvell had been involved in a few public anti-gay activities before the Armstrong case (my favorite was the campaign to get a local pizza parlor to stop putting a rainbow flag in its window during Pride Month), and his rants then were a bit crazy. He appears to have been raised in a conservative Catholic family (he attended private Catholic schools for his primary grades and high school, and got his jurisdoctorate at a Catholic law school—in fact the University of Michigan is the only public school he ever attended). In interviews Shirvell comes across as not just mildly effeminate, but very prissy. I have no doubt that he was bullied throughout his childhood. So Shirvell has spent his entire life desperately trying to prove to people that he’s straight. He hid himself and denied his feelings and subjected himself to the torture of the closet his entire life. He’s likely never had even a clandestine romantic relationship!
…And then he sees that news story about an openly gay student being elected student president at his alma mater. He sees the smiling pictures of a young man who isn’t hiding those feelings, isn’t suffering alone in the closet, isn’t loathing himself. Shirvell sees that this good-looking, happy-looking young queer man isn’t merely being tolerated by his family and fellow students, but he’s well-liked and even celebrated! No wonder Shirvell over-reacted. Shirvell has been a powder keg of self-hatred and insanity just waiting to explode. So far he’s destroyed his own reputation, gotten himself saddled with an impossible financial obligation, and now even lost his law license because his actions weren’t just creepy and crazy, they constituted legal misconduct.
(click to embiggen)Some would argue we should feel sorry for Andrew Shirvell. But honestly, the number of times during the trial that Armstrong said if Shirvell would just apologize he would drop the case represent only a fraction of the opportunities that Shirvell had to get off this particular crazy train. At this point he has no one to blame but himself.
It’s Friday! We’re at the very end of March. Wow. The year is whizzing by and we’re behind on everything!
We’re still packing like crazy and looking for a new place to live. My husband is recovering from his surgery. The doctor is happy with how things are going. My hubby is getting a bit impatient. I’m not sure I’m doing a good job of convincing him not to push himself too hard. Camp Nanowrimo starts tomorrow and usually I’m the one nagging friends to do it, but I don’t think I’ll have much time for writing this next month.
Anyway, here are the links I found interesting this week, sorted into categories. You will notice it is a shorter collection than usual.
Font Folly 