STFU

The (so-called) Concerned (so-called) Women (cough, hack) for America say:

Here’s some encouragement: Return your body to its (cough, hack) god-given state, shut the fuck up, get married, submit to the guy and start cranking out future christofascists.

Oh…

Those rules don’t apply to the pretty christofascist girls who want to have bigger breasts than god wanted them to have?

Silly me.

Maybe if HRC Hadn’t Lied So Much, it Might Have a Few More Dollars for Salaries Right Now

I’m just sayin’.

Actually, it was Pee Wee who was sayin’ what we all know he actually said back in 2007.   Now, however, according to Queer Channel Media:

The Human Rights Campaign will announce a workforce reduction in the coming weeks, a spokesperson said.

Trevor Thomas, HRC’s deputy communications director, cited economic conditions as the reason for the reduction.

“Like so many other non-profits in this economy, we still have to adjust our budget to comport with economic conditions,” he said.

Yes, but how many non-profits (well, apart from christofascist ones) have as much of a history of telling lies and committing fraud as the Scampaign does?  Lies and fraud which, if HRC’s inner circle of jerks could possibly ever be honest with themselves, have to have resulted in enough of the “economic conditions” to make a difference in the number of employees its going to have to lay off.

In December, HRC President Joe Solmonese told the Blade that the gay civil rights group “has been monitoring the economic climate closely for the past few months and has managed expenses accordingly.”

He said at the time that while contributions had slowed in the last quarter for 2008, HRC had no plans to lay off employees.

Solmonese has since taken a voluntary pay cut of 10 percent, lowering his total compensation from $338,400 to $302,200, according to HRC.

$302,200?

That’s about $302,199 more than he’s worth.

Any wagers as to whether, by some twist of fate (or noose), the layoffs will only manage to affect those few employees of the Rhode Island Avenue Cesspool who actually give a damn about trans people? 

Even if not, for those of you who do get a pink slip from the Scampaign?  Just remember – you have not the Bush-Gramm-McConnell economy to thank for it, but the never-ending stream of transphobic lies and deception by Pee Wee Solmonese and his Purple-n-Yellow Conservaqueens.

We Don’t Exist, Part 683,349,163

From Bay Windows – and the headline turns out to say it all:

New Hampshire one step closer to equality

It says it all, because it says nothing…

about the people who were fucked in New Hampshire yesterday the way they were over a decade ago – now aided and abetted by the organized gay rights establishment’s decade-and-a-half-long acquiescence to the ‘demonization of trans women’ narrative.

You see, “equality” no longer needs a modifier – because when they say “equality” they only mean one thing.

They mean  “marriage equality,” which, of course, actually means: “We get gay marriage.  Who gives a fuck whether trans people can find jobs or not?  They’re just trannies.  Oh – you mean we implicitly promised that we’d go back and add them to non-discriminaion law once we got a law that protected us?  Sorry, I don’t have the time, energy or inclination to deal with tranny stuff; I have a wedding to plan and a pre-nup to draft.”

A Sentiment from The John that I Can Agree With

Seriously.

Then again, its pretty easy to come to a consensus about how much of an intellectually-diseased nutbag that Virginia Foxx is.

America already has a hate crimes law. We’ve had it for decades. But it only covers race, religion and national origin – in other words, it covers the religious right. It doesn’t cover everyone else. The amendment, which passed in the House yesterday, would add gender, disability, sexual orientation and gender identity to the already-existing law. Regardless of your feelings towards hate crimes laws, if America is going to have one on the books – and it does already – the law should cover everyone, and not just give special rights to the Christian fundamentalists at the Family Research Council, the American Family Association, and the men at the Concerned Women for America.

Preceding that analysis was some other analysis of the gender-transitioned-reincarnation of Jesse Helms:

Oh – and perhaps the most painful thing about the Countdown clip actually isn’t the Foxx Flop but the anti-historical insanity of Michelle ‘My IQ Equals My District Number’ Bachmann.

OK – I might be wrong with that nickname.

6 might be stretching it for her IQ.

Hoot-Smalley?

Hoot-Smalley?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

Augmented Breasts Are Okay, But Augmented Genitals Aren’t?

Presumably – at least it wouldn’t have been in the Miss Universe pageant in 2001.  (Ask Elodie Gossuin why.)

As for post-job boobs?  Well, apparently the only concern – if you can even call it that – is over who pays for them.

Shanna Moakler, Co-Executive Director of the Miss California Organization, has confirmed the group behind the pageant paid for Miss California Carrie Prejean’s breast implants, weeks before she competed in Miss USA.

In a new interview with Access Hollywood’s Billy Bush, Shanna confirmed the news.

“Did you guys pay for it?” Billy asked Shanna directly.

“Yes,” Shanna said. “We did.”

The organization paid for Carrie’s breast enhancement prior to her competing in the Miss USA pageant, which was held in Las Vegas, almost two weeks ago.

“It was something that we all spoke about together,” Shanna said referring to herself, Carrie and Keith Lewis, Shanna’s co-executive director. “It was an option and she wanted it. And we supported that decision.”

Shanna, a former Miss USA herself, defended the Miss California Organization’s decision to pay for the elective surgery.

“Breast implants in pageants is not a rarity. It’s definitely not taboo. It’s very common. Breast implants today among young women today is very common. I don’t personally have them, but you know — they are,” she added.

Well why is it not taboo?

And, perhaps and even bigger question: Where exactly is the focus on what seems to be a bigger matter than her stance on “opposite marriage.”

If I’m reading this right, she is a right-wing nutjob (and, yes, I actually think she has a bit of a legit gripe over being singled out for a really controversial question from someone who, in reality, is probably even more of a waste of DNA than she is; even bigoted morons who view themselves to be superior to the less-perfectly-pretty merely by virtue of even thinking about entering a beauty contest deserve to be treated fairly) who seems to think that marriage being defined as between a man and a woman is unchangeable because its a concept that came from her deity, but that the breasts on her body – which, one has to assume, she believes were created by her preferred deity – are okay to be changed.

If it gets her a tiara.

Her stance on marriage, by itself, would not appear to make her a hypocrite.  A bigot? Yes, but not a hypocrite per se.

But why does she think she has the right to alter the work of the deity that one must presume she believes to be her creator?

Oh…

That’s right…

Pretty girls with bibles and the right chromosome patterns don’t have to be consistent when they preach to the less-pretty and the less-chromosomally-correct.

And, speaking of the trans issue: Presumably, a woman with a non-surgically-created vagina but with a surgically manufactured bust would be an acceptable contestant, yet a woman with a surgically manufactured bust and a surgically created vagina (or, perhaps, even a vestigal penis) would not be?

WTF?

The Lie That Keeps on Lying

Incremental Progress = Lie:

The New Hampshire Senate today unanimously rejected a bill that would have extended anti-discrimination laws to transgendered people.

House Bill 415 would have protected those with sexual identity issues in areas of housing and employment, much the way the state’s laws protects others from discrimination on the basis of color, race, religion or sexual orientation.

Those who fought the bill said it would open women’s bathrooms, changing rooms and locker rooms to sexual predators who could raise a defense in court that they were sexually confused.

The 24-0 vote to kill it came after Democrats blasted opponents of the bill for dubbing the measure the “bathroom bill,” a move they said created misunderstanding and fear among the general population.

They also criticized the press and media for picking up on the nickname, saying they became an unwitting partner in the effort to continue denying a part of the population its civil rights.

Yeh?

Why didn’t you blast who was really responsible: the gays and lesbians who ensured that their greed – the same senate decided that gays and lesbians only needed to wait a couple of years to move up from civil unions to marriage – superceded our basic need by being complicit in the move of the media’s bathroom gaze away from gay men and onto transsexual women?

Any same-sex couple who takes advantage of the impending same-sex marriage law in New Hampshire is a passive co-conspirator in the ongoing anti-trans economic hate crime that is the state’s gay-only civil rights law.

Looks Like Censorship Hypocrisy is the Least of Virginia Foxx’s Insanities

Yes, this was bad.

But, there was more where that came from:

The bill was named after a very unfortunate incident that happened, where a young man was killed, but we know that that young man was killed in the commitment of robbery. It wasn’t because he was gay. The bill was named for him, the hate crimes bill was named for him, but it’s, it’s really a hoax, that that continues to be used as an excuse for passing these bills.

You’re telling me that the real-life Mayberry couldn’t have opted for Otis the Drunk instead of this nutjob?

Positive Words

A lot of what I write here is negative – and necessarily so.

However, I want to send out props to Rep. Jared Polis of Colorado.  He just (well, earlier today) gave a great speech in favor of H.R. 1913, appropriately mentioning Angie Zapata.

So I Can Presume That Virginia Foxx Will Support Legislation to Negate Yesterday’s SCOTUS Decision Giving the FCC the Right to Penalize ANY Use of Dirty Words?

I just flipped on CSPAN for the debate on the Hate Crime bill – just in time to see that piece of work, North Carolina’s Virginia Foxx, whining and moaning that the bill would threaten free speech.

Specifically, she yammered about how cherished the notion of free speech is in a land as unique as America…

and the ‘marketplace of ideas’…

yadda, yadda, yadda…

The Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday federal regulators have the authority to clamp down on the broadcast TV networks that air isolated cases of profanity, known as “fleeting expletives.”

So, if Foxx (who represents the area including the town upon which Andy Griffith’s Mayberry is based) is so worried about limits on freedom of speech, I can presume she’d back legislation to undo that decision?

I’m not holding my breath.

Taking Issue With Larry Kramer

The Daily Beast has the text of a speech recently given at Yale by Larry Kramer.

Generally, I like Kramer – and his style.  And this speech, detailing some heavily entrenched, institutional homophobia at Yale falls in nicely…

Until…

Kramer begins to play the dichotomy game – regarding what is and is not ‘gay history,’ and what should and should not be taught under the heading of ‘gay history.’

There were and are 22 courses offered in the Pink Book of LGBT studies for this year. Only one of them, the course George Chauncey teaches entitled U.S. Lesbian and Gay History, is a gay history course. Here are the others:

•Gender and Sexuality in Popular Music
•Critical Ethnography: Methods, Ethics, Poetics
•Cross-Cultural Narratives of Desire
•Gender Transgression
•Sex and Romance in Adolescence
•Biology of Gender and Sexuality
•Anthropology of Sex and Sexualities
•Beauty, Fashion, and Self-styling
•Gendering Musical Performance
•Gender Images: A Psychological Perspective
•Gender, Nation, and Sexuality in Modern Latin America
•Queer Ethnographies
•Music and Queer Identies

The word “queer” also embellishes most of the activities and lectures and fellowships and appointments announced in those various emails. It seems as if everything is queer this and queer that.

Just as a point of information, I would like to proclaim with great pride: I am not queer! And neither are you. When will we stop using this adolescent and demeaning word to identify ourselves? Like our history that is not taught, using this word will continue to guarantee that we are not taken seriously in the world.

Here are some of the things that I have uncovered about our history in writing my new book, The American People:

That Jamestown was America’s first community of homosexuals, men who came to not only live with each other as partners but to adopt and raise children bought from the Indians. Some even arranged wedding ceremonies for themselves.

That George Washington was gay, and that his relationships with Alexander Hamilton and the Marquis de Lafayette were homosexual. And that his feelings for Hamilton led to a government and a country that became Hamiltonian rather than Jeffersonian.

That Meriwether Lewis was in love with William Clark and committed suicide when their historic journey was over and he wouldn’t see Clark anymore.

That Abraham Lincoln was gay and had many, many gay interactions, that his nervous breakdown occurred when he and his lover, Joshua Speed, were forced to part, and that his sensitivity to the slaves came from his firsthand knowledge of what it meant to be so very different. And that the possibility exists that Lincoln was murdered because he was gay and John Wilkes Booth, who was gay, knew this.

That Franklin Pierce, who became one of America’s worst presidents, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who became one of our greatest writers, as roommates at Bowdoin College had interactions that changed them both forever and, indeed, served as the wellspring for what Hawthorne came to write about. Pierce was gay. And Hawthorne? Herman Melville certainly wanted him to be.

That most of the great actresses who endlessly toured America during the 19th century bringing theater to the masses were lesbians and occasionally dressed as men. Just like Katherine Hepburn.

That the plague of AIDS was allowed to happen because much of the world hates us and most of the world knows nothing about us. They don’t know we are related to Washington and Lincoln.

I needed no queer theories, no gender studies, to figure all this out.

Why can’t we accept that homosexuality has been pretty much the same since the beginning of human history, whether it was called homosexuality, sodomy, buggery, hushmarkedry, or hundreds of other things, or had no name at all?

Ah yes…George Chauncey – the same George Chauncey who managed to write a 300+ page book on Gay New York, which:

• dealt quite a bit with Harlem drag balls;
• contained the occasional mention of the concept of men becoming women; and
• even mentioned Rae Bourbon, who produced and marketed many 1950s ‘party records’ of his drag act in which he portrayed himself as having undergone sex reassignment surgery (“Let me Tell You About my Operation” and “One Night in Copenhagen”)

 yet, somehow, is devoid of ‘transsexual’ and even of trans-anything as any substantive element.

You know…

Kinda like Kramer listing:

That most of the great actresses who endlessly toured America during the 19th century bringing theater to the masses were lesbians and occasionally dressed as men. Just like Katherine Hepburn

yet in the same breath bitching about gender-everything?

Kramer is complaining about erasure of homosexuality – but he’s playing the erasure game as to, well, everything that would not explicitly fit into Connecticut’s statutory definition of “sexual orientation”

“sexual orientation” means having a preference for heterosexuality, homosexuality or bisexuality, having a history of such preference or being identified with such preference….

If Katherine Hepburn had to seek redress for discrimination based on dressing like a man, I suspect that she (1) could find a lawyer willing to take he case; (2) afford to pay said lawyer; and (3) feel confident that said lawyer might know about the administrative law decision in Connecticut that allegedly prohibits discrimination based on some aspects of trans-whatever.

Katherine Smith f/k/a Kenneth Smith (whoever that might be), however?

Not likely.

I’ve never attended Yale, nor taught there – and if Kramer’s attitute was to take hold there, I can imagine that neither of those facts will change.

To be fair, I share a disdain for much of what is pumped out as ‘theory’ – and not just GLB and/or T.   Mush of what is foisted on us in my history Ph.D. program as ‘theory’ is pure bullshit – and that’s not a left-right or gay-straight or gay-trans sentiment.  It doesn’t matter what the inclination is; bullshit is bullshit whether it comes from a diarrhea-mouthed apologist for Newt Gingrich or a speed-addled spewer of the most nonsensical of theoretical genderqueer legal nonsense (NOTE: I don’t consider genderqueer stuff to be nonsensical per se, but some people who are being passed off as the 21st Century god-neuter legal saviors of trans-everybody are as full of shit as Dr. Manhattan is of tachyons.)

Theory tends to allow those privileged with their PhUDs (or other terminal degrees) – and accompanying academic positions – to suck all of the air out of discussions with anti-substance.  Something that is 95% theory and 5% history (or law or whatever) is 100% shit.

And, in that sense, gay history and trans history are equally afflicted.

I teach a course on trans history.  Sometimes it is in the History Department.  Sometimes it is in the Sexuality Studies Department.  I think it will soon be in the Women’s Studies Department.

Those are labels.

The substance is what I teach – and it is substance.  If someone begins my course with a propensity for masturbating to Foucault’s History of Sexuality, my course, by itself, probably won’t stop the person from doing it – but, I doubt that anyone will ever begin to start getting orgasmic at the mention of ‘theory’ as a result of my class.

Then again, I don’t tell them that they have to think according to the precepts of any particular PhUD-esque theory-monger.  I do, however, tell them about certain aspects of history – things that they’re probably not going to run across in what would appear to be The Acceptable Gay History According to Larry Kramer.

I tell them about how laws manufactured by well-heeled, well-monied gay men and women would leave people who fit Kramer’s vision of Kate Hepburn out in the cold.

I tell them that Iowa’s Varnum v. Brien was not only not the first instance of Iowa being at the forefront of civil rights, but not even the first instance of Iowa being at the forefront of LGBT civil rights – and, of course, I mention that, more specifically, it was th T that marched forward first.  You know (or, more likely, you don’t know), things like:

• Gay marriage came to Iowa in 2009, but while there was another judicial attempt at gay marriage in Iowa 33 years earlier – one which failed miserably – transsexuals were obtaining the approval of the Iowa legislature (you know – or probably don’t – that parenthetical in the Varnum opinion about suanging sex on birth certificates?  that became law while Iowa’s sodomy law was still active);
• That the above occured one year before an attempt at gay marriage failed miserably in California – which ocurred while transsexuals were obtaining the approval of the Iowa legislature; and
• That though, in 2005, California couldn’t muster a first-degree murder conviction of a gang of thugs who murdered a trans woman, Iowa managed to obtain a first-degree murder conviction for the killer of a transsexual woman in 1977.

That’s history.

That’s a fact.

So is the default legal definition of “sexual orientation,”such as Connecticut’s.

Do you know that men loving men does not require the sexual act to qualify them as homosexuals? My American Heritage unabridged dictionary lists two definitions for homosexuality: the first: “sexual orientation to persons of the same sex; and the second: “sexual activity with another of the same sex.” In other words, it is not necessary, nor should it be, to have had sex with another of the same sex, to maintain that a person is homosexual. Why, then, do academics, indeed everyone, insist on this second definition over the first? This theory makes it all but impossible in many cases to claim a person as one of us.

Again – go back to that accepted, default legal definition of “sexual orientation.”

Go back to that, and try to fit in Katherine Hepburn.

In addition to trans victories, I teach the stories of how certain gays and lesbians rigged the law to benefit themselves – and to leave out people such as myself.

That’s history.

That’s a fact.

What’s Larry Kramer?

I thought I knew.