In Praise of Andrew Sullivan. (duck and cover!)

I get flack from the Andrew Sullivan haters all the time. Gay people and liberals have a long history of grievance with Sullivan, centering around, as far as I know, three things:

1) In the mid-nineties, he wrote an essay, published in The New York Times Magazine, called "When Plagues End", which was about how the new HIV drugs were radically changing the AIDS epidemic in the United States. Lots of people thought it was irresponsible to be so upbeat.

2) He supported Bush's invasion of Iraq. Big time. When the war turned into a huge disaster, he changed his mind, very publicly.

3) I can't remember exactly when it happened, maybe 5-7 years ago?, but his profile on a gay sex cruising web site, on which he was soliciting unprotected anal sex, was made public. Sullivan is HIV positive.

I read his blog, The Daily Dish, every morning. I don't know of another journalist who blogs daily who is as consistently interesting, wide-ranging, and smart as Sullivan. His blog is a conversation; people who disagree with him get lots of airtime. I disagree with him as often as I agree with him, in fact probably more, but I learn a whole lot more reading him than I ever get by reading Huffington Post (which I stopped reading because, even though the general bias of the blog is maybe closer to my own politics, the writing there is just a lot of knee-jerk shouting by people who usually have a pretty shallow understanding of the issues). Sullivan is a thinker. He can be strident, but he listens and he enjoys the debate. That's why I like him.

I get really exasperated when I read most liberal blogs because they usually assume the correctness of their point of view on issues; they assume that if you call yourself a liberal or progressive, then of course you must believe this, this, and this. (For instance, if you don't support gay marriage, you must be a Nazi.) Sullivan gives me different things to be exasperated about. For instance, I disagree with him about gay marriage, but I agree with him about hate-crimes laws.

Anyway, all that to say that I really enjoyed this little clip this morning. It made me ponder how bizarre the world has become when thoughtful, informed commentary on the issues of our day more often than not is found on comedy shows. Of course, that's not a novel observation.

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Andrew Sullivan
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full EpisodesPolitical HumorU.S. Speedskating


If anyone is curious as to my opinions on 1, 2, and 3 above:

1) I think the essay is great and I think it holds up all these years later. I find Sullivan's writing about the experience of being a homosexual man in these times moving and deeply perceptive.

2) Hard to forgive. But I think his support of the war and his embarrassment and shame about it is part of what motivates his vigilance now about Bush and Cheney, war crimes, torture, etc. Also mitigating was his relentless support of Obama's campaign, which I would guess was a factor in convincing lots of conservatives to vote for him.

3) I have a hard time judging anyone's behavior when they're looking for sex.

Oh Maine, Why Do You Hate Me So??

I got an email this morning from a friend:
I'm looking at my facebook updates this morning and not one of my gay friends has said anything about the inclusion of gays under the discrimination law in Kalamazoo or the fact that in the 23rd district of New York, a democrat upset a Palin-sponsored conservative, indicative of the general positive sentiment toward Obama.

All they have written is "Fuck Maine," "Everyone in Maine can go to hell," "devastating news about Maine," etc. etc. etc. They have totally lost touch with the entire gay rights movement. Infuriating.
I completely agree and had a similar response to all the venting about Maine last night and this morning. No surprise, I guess. Anyone who reads this or knows me knows that marriage is not my thing.

But I did have one thought that was slightly encouraging and worth pondering. I suspect lots of people are very vocal about gay marriage who would previously -- before the movement was hijacked by conservatives -- been apathetic. The virtue of marriage as a rights issue is that it has been galvanizing. People know what marriage is -- they think they do, anyway. Almost everyone, even the crustiest among us, has a happily-ever-after fantasy just waiting to be shocked like Frankenstein's monster to new life. Marriage is a lot more emotionally potent and easier to get the average mind around than anti-discrimination legislation or local electoral politics.

I suspect the people who care about the more practical advances in equality for sexual minorities are still doing the real work, are still vocal, still care, but their voices are drowned out by all the activist wannabes shrieking that they deserve to marry the one they love, blah blah.

My Day at the Dog Park.

I came so close to walking out today. Just grabbing my backpack and going home. It was at the beginning of the last period. About 5 minutes into the period, the kids were still running all over the room and throwing things at each other. One boy, probably about 6'1" and 250 pounds had a girl about half his size in a bear hug and she was screaming, no screeching. Another boy was pounding on the wall with his feet and hands. I told him to stop and he said to me, "Seriously, you better shut up, I'm getting tired of you." Except for one student who had his head down on his desk, sleeping, and two others who were sitting quietly, the whole class was up and running around, laughing, yelling, throwing things across the room. One kid left and didn't come back. I thought about calling security, but wondered what I would say. "Help!"?

A few minutes later, things calmed down enough that I decided I could make it through the rest of the day. When I say "calmed down," I mean that nobody was trying to kill anyone. At no point in the day were more than a couple or three kids doing the work that was assigned. I might just as well have not been there. I'm not sure what difference it would have made.

I guess since the job pays babysitting wages, I shouldn't be surprised that I'm babysitting. I didn't have any illusions that I would be doing much teaching as a substitute, but I'm not interested in being a prison warden. On average there have been about 3 or 4 kids in every class who actually try to do the assigned work, try to engage with the material. The rest just flat out don't do it. They refuse.

The advice I keep getting from other teachers is, "Don't let it faze you. Don't let them get to you. Don't let them make you angry." It's well-meant advice, but somehow unhelpful. I don't feel in danger of getting angry at the kids. The ones who misbehave are too ridiculous to be angry with. The kids I had today were a bunch of brats who've clearly never had any effective discipline in their lives, but they're 12. It's their parents I'm mad at.

Substitute teaching is like spending the day in a pen full of feral cats. Or dogs. Or both -- feral cats and feral dogs. But sadder, because cats and dogs are not the future.

Call Me Party-Pooper.

Sorry, but I can't get too excited about what people are calling the first-ever national pro-LGBT rights legislation being a law that enshrines our status as victims.

The bill is named for Matthew Shepard, whose murderers, as I understand it, got the maximum penalty possible. This hate-crimes (thought-crimes) law would not have made any difference in their sentences. Is this really the right time to be drumming up reasons to put more people in prison? Does anyone really think making prejudice a crime is going to prevent gay-bashing?

I Don't Know, It's Some TV Show.

I just this moment realized that for years I've been confusing Arrested Development with Curb Your Enthusiasm. When people would ask me if I'd seen Arrested Development, I'd say I had watched part of one episode and had to turn it off because a man and a woman were shouting at each other for like 10 minutes straight and I couldn't take any more.

But that was Curb Your Enthusiasm. I had never actually seen Arrested Development, until very recently. A couple friends insisted insistently that J and I watch it because they love it and thought we would love it too. We rented the first season on DVD and watched the first two episodes. I sort of wondered while watching when the yelling was going to start, but I figured it must have been a later episode I'd seen.



So Arrested Development wasn't the unbearable yelling show after all, but it was boring and forced, and we didn't watch more than the first two episodes.

To Have Survived.

I learned yesterday that a dear friend, who is in his mid-thirties, recently became HIV+. A man I am seeing (also in his mid-thirties), on our first date when we were having the "HIV conversation," expressed real surprise when I told him I was negative, as if that is rare and shocking. I don't know the numbers, but I guess it must be uncommon to be a homosexual man over 40 and not have contracted HIV. I'm surprised myself. I was surprised when I had my first HIV test at 30, and I think I have been surprised every time since.

They used to say that we had survived, that we who had managed to avoid HIV infection were survivors. But since the mid-nineties people with HIV survive. Their lives are changed dramatically, but, in some very meaningful way, most of them do survive. So what are we now? Escapees? Fugitives?

Holidays.

Does anybody even know when Columbus Day is, except on Columbus Day (and only because they tried to go the post office or the bank )? I'm glad you "discovered" America, etc., but I was planning to register my car today and now I can't.

This has got to be one of the stupidest holidays ever, when we celebrate that some person from the distant past did something which he didn't, strictly speaking, do. I guess a lot of holidays fall into that category. Christmas, for instance.

Alex P. Keaton Hijacks Gay Rights Movement.



I don't know, maybe it's an old saw by now, but this video clip made me sad and bitter. This is so not what I've been fighting for.

We all keep talking about how, for this new generation, homosexuality is no big deal. It's true, and that's great. But I feel the need to constantly point out that a big part of the reason for that, a big part of the reason the new gay agenda suddenly has so much straight support is because the agenda has become so conservative.

I keep harping on that fact because I have the sense that most people don't get it, don't see that connection. But maybe they do. Maybe it's obvious, and maybe that's exactly what they want. Maybe it just comes down to opposing worldviews. When I was marching in Washington in 1987, I was against the nuclear family, I was against the military. I was marching against the exact institutions that the new gay rights movement is marching for. Maybe the ideal world that has always motivated my political convictions, my activism -- a world of possibility, freedom, openness -- maybe my dream of sexual liberation is hopelessly fringey and outdated. Maybe they're brilliant and I'm just old.

I have to admit that a part of my bitterness is a sort of petulance at being left out. I loved those Washington marches back in my ACT UP/Queer Nation days, how exhilarating they were, how powerful and visible we felt. We were pushing against the mainstream, carving out space for our lives in America; we were brand new. I couldn't have marched yesterday because I don't support any of the things they're fighting for, and that makes me sad.

Y'all, 1992-2002.

I finally started digitizing and putting the old Y'all video on youtube. I would imagine most of the people who read my blog are also facebook friends so they already know this, but just in case, here's the "playlist" with all the Y'all stuff I've posted so far:



Oh, the memories. More to come...

If This Was The Onion, It Would Be Funny.

An article in Scientific American (which I found through Andrew Sullivan's blog) describes a recent study of how the brain is affected by thoughts of "love" as opposed to thoughts of "sex":
Participants in the first study first imagined one of three situations: a long walk with their beloved one (the love condition), casual sex with a person to whom they were attracted but not in love with (the sex condition), or a nice walk on their own (the control condition). Participants then attempted to solve three creative insight problems and four problems that assess analytic thinking, which were logic problems from the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) (e.g., if A <> B then ?) As predicted, participants in the love condition solved more creativity problems and less analytic problems than those in the control condition. Participants in the sex condition, on the other hand, solved less creativity problems and more analytic problems compared to participants in the control condition.
The most glaring problem here is the unexamined assumption that "love" and "sex" are discrete phenomena. What? Another obvious problem is that people lie about their feelings regarding love and sex all the time, even to themselves. Probably especially to themselves. These people ask someone to imagine "a long walk with their beloved" or "casual sex with a person to whom they were attracted but not in love with" and then expect me to believe they have any idea what that person is imagining, let alone that they've induced some measurable state? It's amazing to me that educated people present this hooey with a straight face.

I call bullshit.

Leonard Cohen.

Since I seem not to have much of inspiration to write today, I'll share some Leonard Cohen with you. I can't think of another artist I revere like Leonard Cohen.



A friend posted an old video on facebook today of Cohen and Judy Collins singing "Suzanne," which, until everybody went batshit over "Hallelujah" a few years ago, was probably his most famous song.

One of my favorites is "Chelsea Hotel #2," which Cohen says he wrote about Janis Joplin. The Chelsea is still open, and my friends M and B stayed there when they went to New York for the opening of my show a few weeks ago. My friend P is staying there in a few weeks. Rooms are a little cheaper than average for New York. The Chelsea Hotel's bohemian heyday is decades in the past, but it must hold onto a bit of its color. M said there was a stinky cat litter box in the hallway next to her door.



The Warhol shenanigans are interesting to me, but my real attachment to the Chelsea comes from An American Family, the PBS documentary series from the early seventies. Lance Loud's sojourn at the Chelsea was the first bit of gay culture I was exposed to even though I didn't know that's what it was at the time. I'm sure that glimpse of New York art sex freakiness planted the seed of my desire to move to New York as soon as I could.

Blech.

It's a gloomy gloomy rainy day and I have a cold. The last few years I've been getting these frustrating colds that start with about 3 days of a sore throat and, just when the sore throat is waning and I think I'm over whatever it is I have, I wake up the next day with a full on congested running nose head cold. Since it's happened several times now, I should see it coming and not get so bummed out. So much for my short-term memory.

Being a little sick shouldn't matter much since I have nothing much going on right now. It's only important in the scheme of things because I've been seeing someone. Well, if two dates qualifies as "seeing someone." It has been over a span of time, so it feels more substantial. He travels a lot with his job, I've been going back and forth to New York, several weeks passed between our first and second date which was last weekend. Then I got sick. I thought I may have even gotten the cold from him, or he from me, because we both felt under the weather on Monday, but he didn't get any worse and got better soon.

We have a date tomorrow, which I will probably cancel because I feel like crap. He's leaving again Tuesday for a week, and then I'm leaving the following week for New York again.

This is probably the most boring blog post int he history of the world, but I'm determined to keep blogging daily for a while to get back in the habit.

Privacy.

I've had a hard time sitting down to blog lately. Lots of reasons -- many of them to do with laziness and disorganization because of a transitional phase in my life and career -- but also a lot of the stuff that's occupying my thoughts lately is not stuff I can share. For instance, my collaborators and I on Lizzie Borden have been negotiating a legal agreement to lay out things like billing and percentages of royalties. It's a very interesting conversation, complex, bringing up all kinds of issues related to career, ego, art, business ethics, and friendship. Subjects I love to pontificate on. But the conversation is private. I wouldn't share it -- at least not until I'm very old and writing my memoirs.

And I've been dating. Lots of anecdotes about men and sex, food, nightlife. This is the stuff I'm dying to write about. But it's personal. Private. I don't feel right sharing intimate stories that involve other people.

And why is that? Why is sex private? I guess I'm jaded, but when you've traveled for so long in a milieu where people have sex in bars, in clubs, in parks, in the woods, in public restrooms, alleys, and parking lots between cars, it's hard to regard sex as something that is or should be private. Why private? I can't come up with any reason that I myself might avoid having sex in public other than shame or embarrassment, and that doesn't seem like a very good reason. If I'm in a situation where I don't feel in danger of shame or embarrassment, I'm all for it.

I can buy that some sex is or should be private. Maybe sex is like conversation, sometimes it works better if it's tete-a-tete, and sometimes it's nice to let the whole room in on it.

An article I read last year about bonobos' sex lives had a huge impact on my thinking about sex. Basically bonobos are constantly having sexual contact of various types and degrees, homo- and heterosexual, all day long for myriad reasons: to smooth over or prevent conflicts, in exchange for food or other favors, to express affection, for fun, to make baby bonobos, or because they're drunk and horny and some guy just told them they looked hot ... oh wait, sorry, that was me.

So why do humans create this arbitrary thing we call "having sex" and insist that it's super-serious and has to be kept sacred and private, rather than just let sexual contact be one of many ways we might naturally interact with each other.

Of course, now the whole notion of privacy is sort of antiquated. We think we have privacy, but we don't. Somebody's always got an iPhone and he's taking pictures to put on facebook. I find it exhilarating when my secrets are revealed. Shame is heavy.

Am I missing something? Is there some real reason for us to hold our sex lives so close?