Robust McManlyPants on Average Display

This weekend I drove from Durham to Asheville and back. Along the way, counting only cars with NC tags and not counting my own, Obama cars were winning 8 (four sedans, two mini-vans and two pickups) to 4 (two sedans and two mini-vans). Counting cars with in-state and out-of-state tags, Obama was winning 8 to 6 (two ginormous RVs towing SUVs behind them, both with Texas plates).

So, apparently the Tardis made an appearance in Durham this morning as there were fundamentalist protesters at the film festival, fresh out of 1996. (KJ recollected that was the last NC Pride at which she recalled seeing an organized protest.) Mostly they were of the quiet and dour disposition but one was really bothersomely loud, shouting a sermon from out on the sidewalk by the street. Early in the afternoon a counter-protest arrived and consisted mainly of a woman in an extremely elaborate outfit consisting of pink feathery things and a headdress. I described her to KJ as “double drag,” as she was a woman dressed like a man dressed like a woman. She was loud(er) and enthusiastic and could sing and was very engaging and drew immediate applause and crowd interaction.

Whoever you are, lady in the pink feathers, you rule.

There were several things that occurred to me during the course of the spectacle of that dim shadow of past protests:

1) I have not grown up. I commented to Pants Wilder that on my way out the protesters had better be gone or I was going to have to tell them to go fuck themselves. Happily, they left pretty shortly after they were thoroughly and wonderfully upstaged by the counter-protest. It did remind me of those feelings that used to bubble up when I would volunteer to work as a “peacekeeper” during NC Pride and some tiny, shadow self deep down in my gut would cross its fingers and hope for the chance to beat up a redneck. Not that I would actually do it, I mean, jeez, I’m not an idiot or a bully, but that desire is still there to see the shoe on the other foot for once. (Also, I’m pretty sure my boyfriend would rightly dump me.)

2) My, how times have changed. There were three cops there when the protesters were there and they made me feel… protected. That was gratifying.

3) There were kids - well, 19- or 20-year-olds, college-aged - at this festival who have probably never been to a gay event that was picketed by religious fundamentalists. That hadn’t really occurred to me until I saw a half-dozen Abercrombied young men standing in an arc doing The Masculine Pose - weight on left hip, one foot forward, hands in pockets, sunglasses down - and gaping at the protesters. They have probably never had a bunch of people holding big signs expressing a strong desire to obsess at them about their afterlives and trying to convince them not to do something. They have never seen an organized protest against their own existence. As weird as it is, I am really, really glad those kids had that experience because it doesn’t happen much anymore but it’s a strong reminder of why things like the film festival need to happen in the first place.

4) Somewhat surprisingly, protesters - even young, prematurely soured ones with constipated expressions - will pose for thin-lipped photos with bald old queens and Subaru lesbians. Gods love ‘em, I watched a couple of suburbanite dykes make bunny ears behind one’s head, arms around shoulders, and it brought a tear to my eye.

It was a funny experience that way. Of the five protesters, only one was loud and he was quickly shut down by a double-drag queen. One was having a conversation with someone attending the festival but it was just that: a conversation, a quiet, apparently respectful exchange of views. Two were young, visibly uncomfortable being there and posing for photos with one arm around a queen and the other holding their apparently unironic condemnatory pickets. That one loud guy was having to do, to be frank, a piece of work to keep the hate going.

In the end, I think I’m really glad they were there. We all had a lot of fun, some of it at their expense and some not, and some of us had valuable experiences of what it used to be like pretty much anytime the queer community tried to make a space for itself for a day. So, uh, yeah, protesters. Thanks for coming out. Zing!

It’s about damn time, isn’t it?

I worked the last day of early voting on Saturday. Over 800 people voted at my location, many of them first-time voters. By the end of the day the line ran out the door, up a couple of ramps, across the parking lot, down a driveway to the street and up the block. The last person in line at 1pm voted at 2:45. These folks had to stand in line for a long, long time all day.

The thing that amazed me and made me love Durham even more: everyone was nice. Every single person who talked to me was nice, all day.

Seriously, is there anyone in the world who honestly believes Castro is still alive? If he is, he’s living on one of L. Ron Hubbard’s boats.

We had Fair day today; the assembled attendees consisted of me, The Boyf, Bascha, Pants Wilder, Anna, Katastrophes, Mr. Pink Eyes, Vonscratch and Jen. We ate Fair food (gods I can’t even list what I ate, but it did include the surprisingly fantastic Cheerwine fudge), we rode rides, we tromped around the Village of Yesteryear where I once again bought things for my altar.

There’s something about buying ritual tools from the person who actually made them and getting to, you know, chat with them for a few minutes and look over their stock and talk about where they’re from and what they do. The woman from whom I bought the kaleidescope (hellooooooo meditative abstracts) commented that I “must be a collector” because the one I bought is somehow unusual but I assured her that no, I am not. I’d bet a nickel she says that to everyone but it was charming nonetheless.

I put up a few random phone pics from the Fair. Yes, these are iPhone pictures. The iPhone: no better a camera than any other phone out there. Still, good enough that I didn’t want to lug a real camera anywhere.

Also, deep fried PB&J was kind of underwhelming, just as an FYI.

One final State Fair note: I saw only two or three stickers for Republican candidates or the Republican Party but I saw lots and lots of folks with stickers from the Democratic Party booth. In fact, as I took the picture of the prize-winning pumpkin a guy waited patiently and then asked where I’d gotten my “I’m the Decider: Dems in ‘08″ sticker because he, as he put it, “just [had] to have one.” Fingers crossed that I see that reflected again next year.

Great news from Iowa - a state judge has struck down the state’s version of DOMA. He issued a stay of his own ruling shortly after, pending review by the state’s Supreme Court, but there it is, another legal victory for marriage equality.

It saddens me to know the wingnuts of Iowa will undoubtedly get up in arms over this. What they don’t seem to realize is that political railroading and bullying as a tactic of religious and political control isn’t something they just invented for themselves; it’s a proud tradition that must be protected at all costs, preserved for future generations. We don’t need to sit back and take it when they try to stop us this time. If we don’t rise up and do something now, future generations may not have the inspiration required to act in their own best interests.

As such, a modest proposal: whereas it makes me sick to know that activist preachers are going to abuse their unelected positions to legislate from the pulpit, making demands and imposing their will on the progressive people of Iowa, I hereby call on all liberty-loving Iowans to act quickly and amend the Bible. Iowa is one short ballot measure from striking back at these power-grabbing, anti-democratic Family Values types. Isn’t it time the Freedom Values Coalition stepped forward to push back?

Today I stepped into the break room to grab a soda and one of my colleagues from another team sighed in frustration at the spouse she was trying to reach on his cell. “Are you married?” she asked.

“Effectively,” I replied.

“What does that mean?” And to be fair, I was being slightly evasive. I am not at all concerned about being out of the closet at work - the first thing I told my boss and his boss at my interview was that I had to know they did same-sex partner benefits in order to bother with the interview at all - but I do tend to place a high premium on personal privacy. That said, the bluntness of her question earned a blunt response.

“It means we’re gay so we can’t get married.”

“Oh!” She looked mildly confused for a moment. “I didn’t know that!” I took this to mean she didn’t know that I am gay, not that we are second-class citizens when it comes to any number of legal rights, but then she went on: “I thought they’d legalized that.”

(When I told that to The Boyf his response was, “Oh, that’s sweet… in a way.”)

“Well,” I said, “Let me be more specific. We don’t live in Massachusetts, so we can’t get married.”

“But I thought you could get married in San Francisco or something.”

“The mayor of San Francisco started issuing marriage licenses for a few weeks, a few years ago, but the state government and state supreme court halted it and revoked the licenses. Regardless, it’s not legal in North Carolina and if we got married somewhere else and came back here state law specifically forbids the recognition of those rights.”

“Well,” she said after a long pause, “You’re living together and that’s the important thing.”

(Again, we agreed: sweet, in a way.)

I said, “It’d be nice to have the legal protections, though.”

“Oh, what do you mean?”

“Well, if I got hit by a bus tomorrow and my family decided to be dicks about it…” and on I went into the usual spiel. She countered with a familiar horror story she knew from a female friend whose unmarried male partner died and the family got everything, etc. It’s a story we all know because it happens more than you’d think. If you don’t know someone whose family swooped in like vultures the moment they died, well, you’re in the minority. It’s not something that happens to gay people or straight people, it’s something that happens to people because some families are simply, as I say, dicks.

I kind of wanted to hug the colleague, after, and I kind of wanted to scream in anguish. Didn’t they legalize that? Girlfriend, I wish. That there are people who just assume that’s all been dealt with is a positive sign of the way society overall has changed but it’s also the reason why it hasn’t been dealt with; people are easily distracted away from problems that affect them directly. We, as a society, are shitty at follow-through.

I don’t even really know what to say about Falwell dying except that one of my first reactions was to think, “Well, finally.”

I felt a nugget of guilt trailing around behind the overwhelming glee. I asked bascha what she thought of that and got this bit of wisdom: “I don’t think our religion believes in ThoughtCrime(tm).”

I mentioned it to The Boyf and he produced this shining truth: “Imagine that we - all the gay men, the lesbians, the bisexuals, the feminists, everyone he hated - had all dropped dead today. What do you think he would be saying about us?”

So yeah. Good riddance to bad rubbish. As I’ve seen noted in more than one place, Virginia just became a slightly nicer, smarter place on average. I fail to see the downside. I had two pieces of cake yesterday to celebrate. It beats drinking in some respects, anyway.

To compound yesterday’s joys, the new Rufus Wainwright album Release the Stars came out which meant iTunes prompted me to go ahead and download it (I’d pre-ordered). I downloaded it and noticed with excitement that it came with the video for one of the songs on it, Going to a Town. I fired that puppy up and… well…

Wow.

It’s so good.

I know not all my friends like Rufus, and I guess I can comprehend that intellectually in the same way I can comprehend someone not liking, I dunno, Reese’s cups. Regardless, it’s pretty amazing. Going to a Town is a break-up song, but not in the way you’d expect. It’s about breaking up with the United States. That’s a long row hoed by the guy who sang California with such enthusiastic abandon. It’s a fantastic example of one of Wainwright’s greatest gifts: expressing the global experienced as the personal.

It left me vaguely breathless at the end, the first time I watched it.

Kasparov? Seriously, could the Russian government be more stupid? He’s a chess champion, he knows how to play games of strategy and he counted on being photographed and videotaped getting arrested and going off to jail healthy. The Russian media is almost entirely state-controlled or effectively so (an enormous percentage of it is owned by oligarchy Putin-loyalists); yes the story there is undoubtedly spun as That Troublemaker Kasparov or perhaps What Happened To Kasparov That He’d Do This but either way they do have to report it. There’s no way they can just be silent about it. With one protest he managed to force the Russian media to talk about the government cracking down on a protest against government crackdowns, force the media to talk about Kasparov being arrested in the street for speaking, personally demonstrated to any on-lookers what he was saying the government was doing and gotten headlines worldwide.

What’s funny to me about this is how some of the Russian media is couching it all in “well, they gave him a permit to protest, he just didn’t get the square he wanted so he took over a different one!” Um, yeah, about that? He applied to hold an Other Russia protest in Pushkin Square. Pushkin Square is, as the linked article notes, the busiest square in Moscow. Everyone would have known about that protest because practically everyone would have seen it. The place where the authorities told him he could have it, Turgenev Square? Well, let’s discuss it this way: if you look at a map of Moscow, the central part of the city is a rough circle about 5 or 6km across. The Kremlin is more or less in the center. The White House - the parliament building - is at 10 if you look at the map as a clock face. Pushkin Square is at 10:30 or 11:00. Turgenevskaya is at 1:00 1:30. It’s not just a different square, it’s roughly 60 degrees around the arc described by the road that encircles downtown.

Oh, and Turgenevskaya is not noted for how busy it is. It’s noted for its metro stop and a statue of a dog.

Interestingly, on the other hand, the dog in question is from a story by Turgenev; the dog is the faithful companion and only friend of a deaf, mute peasant. Eventually the peasant drowns the dog on the orders of a heartless member of the gentry who has been mildly annoyed by its barking. I can’t help but think that whereas in America we quietly acquiesce to orders to hold protests in “Free Speech Zones” miles from the objects of those protests, Kasparov looked at the assigned location for his protest and thought, “No, not this dog, thanks.”

I just watched the UCLA tasering video in its entirety so that I could reply to a friend’s email with my thoughts on it.

This would be less than an hour after I’ve finished watching The Weather Underground.

Now I want to light something on fire just to watch it burn.  Instead, I’m going to go to bed so I can drive to Asheville for the big family Thanksgiving dinner.  These could not possibly be more opposite one another, as actions go.

Speaker Pelosi.  Webb with a lead in VA.  Rumsfeld gone.  Charles Taylor ousted in the district where I grew up.  Coat tails effects in the Taylor/Shuler race handed a couple of completely unexpected, barely contested state legislature seats to the state Democratic caucus.  Widened margins of control in both houses of the General Assembly.

I went home at 11pm last night after a long night at work and proceeded to drink like I rarely drink anymore.  Southern Comfort and “Jazz” Diet Pepsi.  I’m not kidding.  I’d be a wreck today except that my boyfriend is a god and made me drink a lot of water last night.

I was going to be pleasantly surprised by picking up a few seats in the House.  I honestly did not think it was going to go down like this.

The next Speaker is a leftist grandmother from San Francisco.  I can’t describe the warm glow that puts in my heart.

Ever wanted a thorough but largely non-technical discussion of the risks and problems inherent to electronic voting machines?  Read this article from Ars Technica.  He makes some fantastic points.  I will quote only one sentence from it, because that one sentence is, itself, a beautifully brief and very thoughtful point:

Bits and bytes are made to be manipulated; by turning votes into bits and bytes, we’ve made them orders of magnitude easier to manipulate during and after an election.

If you haven’t heard, Bob Corker (the Republican running to replace Bill Frist when he retires this year) - or, depending on whom you ask, the Republican National Committee or, if you ask them then some mysterious entity they aren’t even allowed to see! - put an ad out that, among other things, accused Harold Ford, Jr., of being a promiscuous bachelor. (More accurately, they accused him, a black man, of being a promiscuous bachelor around white women, which in Tennessee is probably more than one statement when made in one sentence.)

There’s also a radio ad (linked to in this follow-up comment by apostropher in the same Unfogged thread) which, if you ask me, makes specious use of the drums.

More relevant, however, is the ad’s line about how Corker has “also built a wonderful family.” Having read this old post from Wonkette (linked today from FARK), I have to agree. I’m gay and all, so the giggling pseudo-lesbian action doesn’t do anything for me, but I am glad his children are apparently more open-minded than he is.

48 to go.