Me: I gave up trips to the moon for Lent.
B: Oh yeah?
Me: That’s right. No trips to the moon for the past six weeks. What did you give up?
B: Sex with women.
| Conversations, Heaux-Meaux | Comments (4) |
People are constantly asking me what I must be smoking that I, as a gay man, live in Oklahoma. Similarly, most of the gays I know endlessly bitch about how awful and repressive and stupid Oklahoma is, what with its megachurches and Hummers and lack of decent public transportation and endless suburban sprawl and with neighborhood after neighborhood of identical houses with GOP signs in their yards. Most of these people then move to Dallas, with its megachurches and Hummers and lack of decent public transportation and endless suburban sprawl with neighborhood after neighborhood of identical houses with GOP signs in their yards.
This week one of our state legislators, a lovely, crazy woman named Sally Kern, went on a tirade. You’ve probably heard - she said that homosexuals pose a greater threat to America than terrorists or Islam and that they’re busy in the schools recruiting two year olds. Though to be fair, that’s only so we can eat them. BECAUSE NOTHING GETS YOU READY FOR A NICE BOUT OF SATAN-WORSHIPING, WESTERN-CULTURE DESTROYING GAY SEX THAN THE TASTE OF A TWO YEAR OLD SMOTHERED IN BARBECUE SAUCE.
Anyway, here. Have a look:
As I get older I find myself less and less angered by things like this. If Sally Kern wants to let something that has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with her life get her that much in a frenzy, fine. I hate what she says, but she does, in America, have a right to say it, and if someone hears this and can come up with no better response than to send the woman a death threat, then, well, that’s where we part ways.
I think what makes me the most irritable about this is that it makes Oklahoma look like some backwater place where homos are hunted down and lynched, where creativity is stifled and we don’t want anyone in our midst who is even the slightest bit different than us. Oklahoma’s not like that at all - it’s not gay hell, it’s not bereft of artistic or creative people and it’s certainly nowhere near as boring as, say, Connecticut. But to the degree that it is unable to attract a higher caliber of creative and productive people, businesses and industries, it is because of people like Sally Kern, who are constantly going out of their way to make people feel as unwelcome, unwanted and unloved as she possibly can. You know. Just like Jesus wants.
| Heaux-Meaux, Oklahoma, The Good Fight | Comments (14) |
In general I could give a shit about celebrity gossip. It’s unavoidable, really, so occasionally I find things out, like that apparently that Britney Spears is having some problems. I get most of my dirt from Kathy Griffin, honestly.
So I didn’t really have anything to say about Heath Ledger’s death. He was talented, I suppose, and it’s always sad when someone dies that young, especially when he has a child.
But I immediately got fascinated by the Heath Ledger thing when I heard the Westboro Baptist Church - who have recently redesigned their website, btw* - is going to Australia to picket his funeral.
In general I feel the way about the Westboro people that I do about celebrity gossip: if we’d just ignore it, it would go away. I don’t really feel the need to strap on a set of giant angel wings to go block out their message, because I really don’t fear that anyone is going to take them seriously. Like Britney they do a pretty wonderful job of satirizing themselves; they don’t need my snark to help them to look foolish, and frankly, my snark is better spent on Bush.**
But when I heard that they were protesting his funeral because he’d starred in Brokeback Mountain, I about plotzed. Again - not going to waste snark on it, but I will just say that I’ve listened to this interview with Shirley Phelps-Roper three times, and it just gets funnier every time I hear it. I just hope that when it’s my time to shuffle off the mortal coil and go dance disco and pass out cookies with Jesus in heaven, that WBC sees fit to come tell all the world that I’m rotting away in hell. I may actually want to be buried - or, rather, have my ashes scattered - from a handbasket instead of an urn.
In fact, once I’m gone, could you guys see your way to hooking that up? It would seriously make my day…. er, death.
* Yep, I’m linking to the God Hates Fags site, because I want them to know that I’m gunning for them.
** We’ll get to the State of the Union address later, don’t worry.
| Heaux-Meaux, Blessed Bafflement, The Good Fight | Comments (5) |
Angles is closing. I’m a little stunned at how sad this makes me, considering that it’s been months since I’ve been in a gay bar, and I haven’t been in Angles itself since Pride 2006. Still, for a quarter of a century Angles has been the go-to place for the gay community in Oklahoma City, and really Oklahoma at large. It was the first place I went when I turned 21; Todd dragged me on the eve of my 21st, which was a Sunday, to the Sunday Night Drag Show. I was dressed in old jeans riddled with holes and a brown button-down shirt that I’d cut off because it was too long. It was a memorable night, to say the least.
Later, they started charging a cover to pay for the amazing light system they put in, and the lame-ass cheap gay boys in Oklahoma City stopped going. Even when the cover charge stopped, the crowd never went back. It’s one of the things that makes me hate the gay community in Oklahoma City, and my self by proxy, a little bit.
Angles has been effectively shut down for well over a year now, opening only 7-8 times a year, each time hosting a "flashlight" (read: "We’re too cheap broke to pay the light bill") party. I don’t know what the new owners are going to do with it - will it still be called Angles? Will it still be a gay bar? I was a little worried, I admit, that some lame-ass Gen-X church was going to open up in the space, and we’d have to deal with a bunch of tattooed Jesus freaks coming up to us like, "Hey, man! How’s it goin? Listen, before you go in that bar, let’s sit on the curb and rap for minute…"
Apparently that won’t be happening. Sigh of relief.
Anybody else going to this party? I really want to, but I’m also tempted to let Angles close without me, because I stepped out of the OKC gay scene a long time ago in a lot of ways. I used to be one of those faces you’d see out five or six nights a week, looking cute and occasionally picking fights. I was young and looking for - whatever. Friendship. Love. Fun. Now I’m less young, and I have friendship and love and fun, and to be honest I think the gay community in Oklahoma City could do a lot better for itself than the Habana Inn and the corner of NW 39th and Penn. Also, a lot of the time, the thumpa-thumpa gets on my nerves. But I remember Angles fondly, and I’m going to miss just knowing that it’s there. So yeah, I suppose I will go out one more time and wish it farewell. Who wants to come with?
| Heaux-Meaux, Oklahoma, It's Not Right But It's Okay | Comments (4) |
So yesterday I was flipping through a bunch of people’s MySpace pages - gay people’s MySpace pages, to be more exact, and I realized that - what? Gay people like Shirley Bassey? Huh?
I’ve noticed I have a few regular readers in the UK, and to them my surprise at gay love for Dame Shirley might seem idiotic, like, "Yes, Nathan, and they like Cher, too, and Judy Garland." But here’s the thing: until yesterday, if I ever mentioned Dame Shirley to a gay man, the reaction was always, "Who?" DAME SHIRLEY, MORONS! "Big Spender!" "Goldfinger!" The woman whom most drag queens are imitating, whether they know it or not. It’s like not knowing who Joan Crawford is.
So I’m glad to see that the homos are rediscovering one of the major gay icons. That makes me excited, but in that way when your FIFTH GRADER finally learns how to read, like, "You shoulda been there already." There’s so much more, so much better, so much more wonderful and challenging and thrilling gay culture than just the thumpa-thumpa or Ashlee/Britney/Lindsay/Paris/whoeverthefuck. There are the Scissor Sisters, and Rufus Wainwright, or the Dresden Dolls. Icons? Divas? There’s Dame Shirley. Joan Crawford. Cyndi Lauper.
Let me not even get started on how much I hate Perez Hilton. You want gay wit? David Sedaris. Oscar Wilde. Truman freaking Capote. It makes me want to spit nails to think all this wonderful stuff is out there and gay men are ignoring it because they’d rather read US Weekly, watch Sex and the City and wait for the country to grant them the same rights as straight people.
Yeah, but do you think the civil rights movement would’ve been the same if black people hadn’t invented jazz, blues and rock and roll? Get off your asses, people, and get creative, and stop looking at Lindsay and Paris, because they’re not going away until you do. Look at Dame Shirley instead.
| Heaux-Meaux, iPod | Comments (2) |
I forgot to talk about Pride. Wanna know why? Because I remember so very little of it. See, I woke up this past Sunday morning, missing Brian, who’d had to leave the day before to go to Atlanta for a business thing. I cleaned the house and bought some booze, sent a text message to about ten people to join me at the house for drinks before the parade, and forgot to eat a thing.
So when four people showed up at my house - apparently I’d accidentally clashed with another pre-Pride party - I was operating on an empty stomach and a bit of excitement, and I promptly drank two vodka and club sodas, three glasses of white wine, and two beers. Chambers drove me to the parade, where we met up with some friends, and he also bought me a very large Park Long Island Iced Tea, and by the time the Parade started I was a goner.
Once the whole thing was over I was tired and cranky, and it looked like it was going to rain. I’d been standing on the bleachers with my neighbor, Steve, who was so kind as to drive me home almost immediately after the street was clear. I got like 10 pictures, and stayed for probably 2 hours, and I realize now that things just aren’t as much fun when my man isn’t around.
| Heaux-Meaux | Comments (0) |
This hasn’t been an easy week. The first week back after vacation never really is, but this one has been especially trying. Brian’s been sick since Saturday, so we spent the last day of our vacation mostly just chilling in the hotel room, hoping he’d get better. Instead, he got worse. We had different flights back Sunday, and I didn’t arrive in Dallas until 8 p.m., and we didn’t make it back to Oklahoma City until around midnight. We still haven’t unpacked.
Monday I went to the gym by myself, as Brian was still too sick to go, and I rammed his car into a pole, leaving a serious dent in the front bumper, which will now have to be replaced. Yes, it was stupid, and I felt horrible, but it’s a testament to how wonderful our relationship is that I knew when I told him that he wouldn’t be mad at me, that he’d realize it’s just a car, and no big deal, and that he’d reassure me that, no, I won’t be sleeping under a bridge with the dog tonight, drinking gin out of some stranger’s shoe. So there’s that.
Tuesday night it rained heavily in the city, as it had been doing all last week while we were gone. Brian managed to mow the front lawn before the rain started, but not the back, which is now ankle-high. I can’t really mow because as I get older, my allergies get worse and the last several times I’ve done it I’ve spent the next week feeling horribly ill.
So when I got home from work yesterday the house reeked. I opened the door and my gag reflex went bing! I realized that as we’d been cleaning the house the night before we’d forgotten to take the giant trash bag outside. So I took it out, but the smell lingered. Brian got home and we went searching for the smell. Culprit One was the trashcan full of grass clippings, which was sitting right next to the dryer intake, shooting the smell of rotting grass into the house. So we moved that, but there was still something more.
We went to the den downstairs and immediately realized that the carpet down there was soaked. The rain had come into our downstairs den - possibly via the fireplace in there, or its proximity to the garage - and soaked about half the carpet. This has happened twice before, but this time the smell was worse than ever, and because I’m deeply allergic to mold, I began getting a severe headache, and my mood went south really fast. So we moved everything out of the den, rolled up the carpet, took it out to the front yard, and cut away the wet part. Most of it was still dry, so we unrolled that in the sun room - much to the dog’s chagrin - to get the smell out.
Also, as I mentioned before, getting the vacation photos onto Flickr was a feat of computering akin to hacking into the mainframe at Microsoft, and it ate a lot of my time yesterday.
This is pride week in Oklahoma City, so that should be kind of redeeming everything, except Brian’s company is having a huge event in Atlanta this weekend, and he’s going to miss everything. I’m still wanting to enjoy Pride, but without him it won’t be any fun. I’m probably going to invite a select group of gay boys over for drinks sometime in the weekend, and of course I’ll go to the parade and Angles afterward, but I need people to step up and help me have fun. This means YOU, gay people. This means YOU.
| Heaux-Meaux, On The Road, Casablog, The Power Of Two, Grind | Comments (1) |
Have you been reading Indexed? It’s - like - the best blog ever. This is one of today’s entries:
Isn’t that fantastic? Thanks a million to the site’s author for putting that up. I highly recommend you add a live bookmark to that site, because it’s really, always good.
| Heaux-Meaux, Interweb | Comments (1) |
My friend Jelisa made this:
and this:
I’m totally wearing the second one to gay Pride this year. Click on the links and you can order your very own!
| Sweeeet, Heaux-Meaux, Interweb | Comments (1) |
So Bri and I went into the local Christian bookstore today, for no other reason than we were curious what new forms of inanity the church community had concocted to sell to its unwitting members. At one point I was so fed up with the books about how to cure homosexuals - shelved, interestingly enough, directly across the aisle from a display shelf of Ted Haggard’s books - that I threw up my hands and bought this shirt:
Now, I want every gay boy in Oklahoma to go and buy one. They’re on sale for $10 at the Mardel on Northwest Expressway. The clerk was a little nervous - though I could’ve sworn there was a look of amusement there. Anyway, it looks great and you just might see me out at the bars sometime very soon wearing this. I’m not sure what any of this accomplished, but I sure do like the shirt.
| Heaux-Meaux | Comments (8) |