…and to All a Good Night

Well.  First and foremost, happy Christmas, I suppose… I know not many people read this often, but just in case, I like to extend well wishes to everyone.  So there.

This has been a fairly uninspired holiday… maybe that’s the first sign of getting old, when you don’t even think about Christmas until you get out of work on Christmas Eve, and say to yourself, “Shit, it’s tomorrow.”  And then you have to run and buy a last-minute gift or two, wrap them all really fast, catch the last-minute train back home, help set up stuff for the next morning, and then finally zonk out until younger siblings come wake you up at an ungodly hour.  Or maybe that’s just my experience.  In any case, now I’m home in the suburbs, where I’m terribly bored, but obligated to hang out with family members, because, after all, it is the family holiday.  I don’t mind saying that generally, I end up with such a bad case of stir-craziness that I usually masturbate nonstop while I’m home; we’re talking four or five times a day, just because there’s nothing to do.  Another sign of growing up: when you can’t feel comfortable in your parents’ house anymore, no matter how hard you try.

Oh well.  In any case, we had a fabulous dinner, I got some cool swag from my mom and dad and sibs, and I’m probably heading back into the city tomorrow.  I desperately need some kind of human contact to whom I can be out and happy, rather than subdued and boring.  I’ll put in my48 hours of family time, and then that’s it.  This time of year always sets me in a tizzy thinking about my life and the future, especially once New Year’s hits, and I don’t want to be stuck in the mire of my childhood and adolescence while thinking about all that.  Already I’m thinking about 2009, and how I should get out more, meet more people, make new friends, et cetera.  I suppose I’ve already tried to accomplish that, and succeeded pretty well, this past year.  But it never hurts to ramp it up a bit, does it?

Should go watch Charlie Brown Christmas…

I don’t really have much else to say, except that it’s Christmas, I just talked with one of the many boys I’ve been describing lately on the phone, I wish I had him (or anyone) to curl up with in a warm bed tonight, and for all that I might complain about being restless at home, I really do appreciate this time of year for its multiple chances to get away from everything and just celebrate.  So, just a short entry.  I’ll get back to this when there’s more to say.

~~ PQ

Borne to be Wilde

So after my little biographical celebration of Francis Bacon, I’ve been doing some reading up on another one of those famous early gay icons: Oscar Wilde!  A personal favorite of mine, I must add.  Again, he’s representative of many stereotypical “homosexual” things. probably most notably his famed wit.  Every gay man would like to believe that he is just the sassiest, smarmiest thing on two legs, and that he always has the perfect retort, the right comment to make or break anyone around him.  In short, every gay man wishes he were Oscar Wilde, but I think very few can actually accomplish that highest echelon of sarcastic brilliance.

Wilde was from Ireland originally, at a time when it was still part of the British Empire; he left the country for good when his sweetie, Florence Balcombe, decided to marry Bram Stoker instead of him.  (I love how all these authors just hung out together.)  He ended up in London, Paris, and the US at various points, before settling down in London, where he met his eventual wife Constance, with whom he had two children.  But of course, most people don’t think much about the fact that he had a wife and kids, because it’s Oscar friggin’ Wilde.  There’s some debate about whether or not he was bisexual or just married and gay, but certainly he took no great pains to conceal his relationships with men, or his behavior that was then, and would be now, considered “effeminate”.  As part of the Aesthetic and Decadent movements in late Victorian society, he dressed as a foppish dandy ought, and effected mannerisms that were “unmanly”, while expressing his love for boys in the “pederastic tradition” of Ancient Greece.  There are some disagreements about when Wilde first discovered his “love that dares not speak his name”, but it may have been when he met one of his great loves, Robert Ross, the year after his wedding.

Sucks to be Mrs. Wilde.

Just to point out: Robert Ross was 17 when he met Wilde, in 1885.  Wilde was 31.  It’s not the most incredible age difference I’ve ever heard of or experienced, but still, it’s really odd to my contemporary mindset how a relationship like this could be tolerated for its perceived “mentor-student” aspect, while an out-and-out physical relationship between two men equal in age and temperament was seen as criminal.  Certainly Ross and Wilde weren’t as chaste as some might have thought: Ross introduced him to the Victorian “molly houses”, prostitutes, rentboys, the whole nine yards.  Aside from being the prototypical witty gay man, Wilde was also the prototypical closet case going through a mid-life crisis and discovering all these things about his sexuality in a mega-sleazy fashion.  He began to incorporate more homosexual themes into his works, hung out with the Uranian poets, and began living openly with his lovers.  (Eventually, his wife left him, took the kids, and changed their name.  But that’s an entirely different story.)

It was his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas that led to his downfall.  Douglas’ father, in true cultured Victorian fashion, accused Wilde of being a “sodomite” on a calling card, sparking a libel case, which led to investigation of Wilde’s private life, which led to his imprisonment for “gross indecency” with other men.  He was imprisoned for two years, doing hard labor because of his sexual liaisons.  It’s kind of weird that all this happened only about a century ago, and only 70 years before Stonewall and such.  Going from years of hard labour and worse penalties to having Gayborhoods in most large cities in that short a timespan is really remarkable, and no doubt cases like Wilde’s helped publicize the fact that homosexuality was in fact widespread.  So what’s the use of criminalizing it?  One commentator on Wilde’s trial suggested they might as well arrest every student at every boys’ private school in England, given the traditions of buggery at such places.

In any case, Wilde only lived a few years after the trial, before dying of meningitis in France.  But those last years, he was back up to his old tricks at the behest of Robert Ross, and I suppose he at least died happy.  Even his grave in Paris is exuberantly gay: a stylized naked angel complete with male genitalia, covered with thousands of lipstick prints from admirers over the years.  (One of those is me.)  And his celebrated last words, true or not, show that Attitude: “Either those drapes go, or I do.”  Oh, Oscar.  Sassy to the very end.

~~ PQ

What a Wonderful World

Picked up a PGN and having a look through it now…

First thing that caught my eye was a review of Were the World Mine, the Shakespeare-gay-glam-teen movie I raved about a couple weeks ago.  The reviewer was…less inspired.  I went to see the film at the theatre last night, and it was as good as I remembered (mostly), so to see this review trashing the acting, the music, the dancing, the design, the direction, and just about every other aspect of the work was mildly offensive to me.  I have this nagging feeling I know the reviewer, though; his name is familiar, and fits with an acquaintance of mine involved in the Philly gay theatre/film scene who I could anticipate absolutely hating the film.  What is it about older single gay men and their unrepentant bitterness towards youth, love, and beauty?  There are so many older guys who have tried to get in my pants so many times, but who scoff at my youthful “naivete” when it comes to actively seeking out romance or hell, just having fun.  An artistic celebration of those themes would, I suppose, stick in the craw of such a reviewer…

But then, perhaps I would have gushed too much if I had written.  I just feel that this guy didn’t get it. 

In political news, Obama has appointed Nancy Sutley, a lesbian from L.A., as the head of the Council on Environmental Quality.  I’m pretty green as far as my politics, and I feel like raising both eyebrows at this one.  Obvs, I’m happy to see an LGBT person with a senior position in the administration, but I have to wonder how a water board chairwoman from Los Angeles, perhaps the most polluted city in this country, will fare in the national energy and environment position.  She has spent her time in Cali doing work against water and air pollution – and I can’t see that the city has improved so much in these areas – which don’t really fit into alternative fuels, energy management, and resource development, areas that Obama said he was focusing on.  So, I have to wonder: is he trying to score brownie points by appointing a lesbian, and hoping that no one will notice her areas of expertise vis-a-vis his policymaking goals?  I think he could definitely pick someone better, and it sucks that two areas I feel strongly about might come into conflict with this.  Grr.

The William Way Center was involved in some kind of charitable thing involving a ceremonial giant Cheque.  I don’t see anything about the Foyer, though… I really want to investigate and see if I can volunteer there or something.  I’d like to help build it up from the ground-up.

And here’s an article about discrimination at Aramark that forced an employee to resign for being gay.  I’ve worked with Aramark before on a couple projects through my own job, and I’m surprised that they were so nasty to this guy; they always seemed to be decent people.  Most Philadelphia companies seem that way to me, in fact.  I suppose it’s too much to hope that the generally liberal politics of the city would carry through into the business world: the heads of these places are frequently from out-of-state (or even out-of-country), as well as living in a separate social sphere where appearances are everything and normalness is next to godliness.  (The plaintiff was also black, adding race to the equation, which makes the situation even stickier.)  But it’s amazing in this day and age that the heads of these companies will permit this kind of harassment to continue; at the very least, even if their brains haven’t caught up to 21st-century ideas of acceptance, don’t they know that they’re going to get sued if they allow this sort of shit?  Maybe Aramark feels like it’s big enough to let small-scale issues like this slide, but if you allow one kid in your headquarters to be harassed, then it’ll happen to others, word will spread, and pretty soon your home base will have a bad rap.  Not such a good situation for a company.  I’m not well-versed in economics, but that’s my impression at least…

Oh God, it’s always gratifying when you turn the page after an irksome article like that, and you see a photo of a really hot guy.  Mmm.

~~ PQ

Tina

I’m in a little bit of a state right now, and have been off and on for the past couple days.  I think I said recently that I didn’t know anyone in the gay community who had actually died, primarily referencing AIDS, but just in general it held true as well.  And that has changed, as of Wednesday evening, when I found out that a friend of mine passed away.  He was 24 years old.  Not really sure what happened, but apparently his mom went to wake him up, and… he didn’t.  I find this so bizarre in many different ways, but for this blog at least (on other ones I’ve had different perspectives), I’m thinking of it primarily from the queer point of view: he really was the first gay person I knew personally, fairly well, to pass on.

I really don’t want it to be suicide.  I really hope that it hasn’t claimed someone in my circle of friends after such a long time without such things happening in our group.  This is a friend from high school, who I’ve known going on a decade, and though we weren’t particularly close in school or afterward, we still talked on a semi-regular basis (I think I last spoke to him in September?), and we would share gay drama stories from time to time.  What weirds me out is also that we were very similar people in high school – both closet cases, both interested in the same things, both fairly driven people set on grades and the future – who ended up in completely different places.  And I really hate to think about it, but the primary cause of this was his drug use.

There was one night a few years ago when we went out to Chili’s or Applebee’s or somewhere, and he basically just laid down his entire drug history for me.  I don’t know why I was the one to hear it and offer advice on his life, but maybe I was his only gay friend that he had known for a while that he could trust with that information.  And even I was pretty amazed at how long he’d been using really heavy stuff.  He used crystal meth and cocaine with regularity; I don’t remember if he had been doing heroin, but I suspect that it or one of its oxy-cousins was in there somewhere.  (I remember at the time that he was drinking a zombie cocktail that looked to be about one quart of alcohol, and I was a little nervous about him driving me home.)  He was in rehab for a good long time, but as I think back, it seems like most times I saw him subsequently, he was either relapsing or had just left rehab again.  I wasn’t one of his closest friends, so I couldn’t give you exact dates, but I suspect it was every few months that he started on the meth again.

He used to tell me about getting high out of his mind and then going to airport bathrooms and fucking guys in the stalls.  He’d come up with all kinds of crazy shit to get money for drugs.  A few times, especially when I was at college and living in Drug Central at my university, he’d ask if I knew anyone who could get him some Tina.  (And it was from him, in fact, that I first learned what this meant.)  I wish I could have said or done something to help, but he always made his own choices, and the most I could do as a friend was to voice my disapproval and offer to be there if needed.  I guess I didn’t succeed in that duty.  The shit he was doing will fuck you up pretty badly for a long time, and it’s just as probable that he died suddenly from some kind of complication several months after he stopped using (again) (this time).  But for all of his faults, and for all of the poor decisions he made, he was still a fascinating person with a great mind and razor-sharp sense of humor.  And now all of that is gone because of stupid, motherfucking drugs.

Hard drugs have claimed enough people in my family; if this is how it starts with my friends, I don’t know what to do.

~~ PQ

Boys on the Left Side, Boys on the Right Side

A busy few days, so I haven’t posted much…

The boy situation has become rather critical, though.  I’m not sure what to do.  After months of complaining about the lack of decent guys, suddenly there’s a whole bunch of them.  And what’s rarer is that they all seem to like me.

First, there’s the Art Student.  He’s absolutely adorable, charming, and very fun to hang out with; on every occasion we’ve hung out (four so far, and in different social situations each time), we click really well and can just talk for hours about anything.  We finally kissed for the first time – he’s shy and coy like me, so it took a while for our flirtations to catch on, I think – and any fears that I had about that part were allayed, because he’s got very nicely shaped lips.  But he’s not totally out, and he’s going home for Christmas for the next month, which is just unreasonable.  Do I ask him before he goes if he wants to, you know, get a bit more serious, or do I wait till he comes back and see what happens in the meantime?

Because then there’s this other one, the one from a couple weeks ago at Tavern, who I’ve been hanging out with.  And we’ve made out hardcore pretty much every time I see him, even though, to be honest, he’s not the best in the world.  He’s got a fucking amazing body, though, and he’s very nice, though a bit socially awkward in some way that I can’t define.  (I’m being nitpicky about habits, but sometimes it’s those little things that really rub you the wrong way; he sounds like a robot sometimes, I don’t know.)  Also, he rooms with one of the baristas at my morning coffeeshop, so I’m afraid to start some drama, for fear that I’ll hear about it later on.  But in the next month, I’ll be quite lonely; maybe we’ll hang out some more?  I don’t want to go around town breaking hearts left and right, but a boy’s got needs, dammit.

And those are just the two serious ones.

There’s also the other guy (“Mike”) from Tavern a couple weeks ago, who will be back in Philly at Christmas.  As I said before, the tricky part is that he’s got a boyfriend (open relationship) and lives far away, so I would never see him otherwise.  But aside from that, he’s a lawyer, absolutely charming, intelligent and fun, all the good stuff.  He’s somewhat older, which I don’t mind much, but I can’t help but wonder sometimes if I’m a midlife crisis life preserver for some of these guys.  Another guy with similar descriptors chatted me up at Tavern (it really is a hotbed for this kind of thing, isn’t it?) on Sunday, and keeps texting/calling to see if I want to hang out.  Again, very nice and attractive, older but not too old, and going through some depression right now, making me question his long-term motives.  As I said to one of my friends, I don’t mind being a one-night stand, as long as I know beforehand that’s what I’m getting into.  I miss the glory days of college when you could just get a booty call through Facebook and call it a day; then you could be awkwardly pleasant friends for years afterward.

Probably I should just stick to the Art Student boy and pursue him madly.  I’m not the world’s greatest romantic, but I’d like to think I have some restraint in the courtship department (hell, it took us four meetups before we kissed).  What sucks is when you attain that goal, you get one pair of lips against another – and then immediately you feel the urge to run for the hills.  Why is commitment so scary?  I wanted him so bad, and I still do, but now that I’ve gained even just an inch of ground, it’s like suddenly I’m much less interested.  It’s a gay man thing or it’s a Libra thing, or both, but sometimes I wish I weren’t so goddamn fickle.  It’s a good defense mechanism for keeping your heart from getting broken, but it gets a bit frustrating when you feel as though you’re always on the prowl, and you’ll never truly be settled and happy.

God bless us, everyone. 

~~ PQ

Start Spreading the News

Oh my God, it’s colder than a witch’s tit out there tonight.  So I’m curled up inside with my trusty laptop and a copy of this week’s PGN.  Let’s scan what’s new in the news for Phillygays…

A lot of people asked me if I would be participating in this “Day without a Gay” thing on Wednesday, which I didn’t even know about until the beginning of the week.  I would have liked to — I am a staunch supporter of cutting out on work or other responsibilities in the name of social justice — but when you plan that kind of thing, guys, you have to give more than a day’s notice.  Anyway, I hear that it went well.  I don’t know how much of an impact it would have had if I’d called out gay anyway: you have to actually contribute in the workplace and spend money for people to notice when you don’t show up.  Maybe next year I will, if this Project Impact group keeps themselves together and keeps having events like this.

In NJ, the “Civil Union Review Commission” released a report saying that civil unions in the state are actually NOT equivalent to hetero marriages; the members of the commission unanimously agreed that NJ legislators should pass laws at once to rectify this situation.  I think this is pretty friggin’ awesome, myself.  There are times when my home state really makes me proud.  We may not be as ridiculously liberal as Vermont, or as diverse as California, or as progressive as Massachusetts all the time, or as influential in blue politics as New York, but damn if the state doesn’t play a fantastic second fiddle.  It bugs me that I’m literally a mile away from the river, a very strong stone’s throw away from home, and yet I’m in a state where they’re still working on some of the kinks in that whole gay rights issue.  What’s up with that, PA?  At least Philly is cool…

PGN is continuing their series about homeless LGBT teens, which, as I mentioned back around Thanksgiving, pulls at my heart every time I read about it.  The unfortunately-named Mary Scullion (it sounds like “scullery” + “scallion”…), founder of Project HOME, talks this week about how one of the reasons homeless teens are so vulnerable is that they don’t panhandle on street corners and walk around acting crazy like older indigents.  They’re “out of the public view and therefore [are] incredibly vulnerable”.  Some of the stories that these people throw out there are just astounding, and it’s  difficult to think about this kind of abuse and neglect going on right under the noses of those of us privileged enough to have roofs over our heads and food on our tables.  The article ends on a depressing note about how there are hundreds of teens looking for a place to call home this December, “from Bethel House to Jefferson’s ER to the city morgue”.  Crikey.

(A spot of bright light: the new Foyer organization opens this month, specifically for homeless LGBT teens.  Hopefully that will help with the problem…)

And lastly on the front page, the killer of local porn mogul Bryan Kocis was convicted this week, and will serve life imprisonment, or possibly even the death penalty.  Ordinarily, I’d pass over that news story, except that the way the murder came about is kinda ridic: the killer and his accomplice were starting up their own industry, and killed this guy so that some of his male porn stars would be freed from their contract and able to work for them instead.  What.  The.  Fuck.  Is the porn industry really so competitive and so cut-throat that studio directors have to kill their rivals to succeed?  And since when is there such a seamy hotbed of male lust in Philadelphia?  I thought this kind of thing was supposed to happen in Los Angeles.  Face it, guys: there’s always a surfeit of recently-turned-18-year-olds who are more than willing to do whatever you want in front of a camera for a few hundred.  (Hell, I would have.)  Don’t go around killing people just to shoot a porno.

One more piece of fun news: the Philadelphia Freedom Band is performing at Obama’s inaugural parade.  Tres cool, no?

Back to my weekend ministrations.  No rest for the wicked.

~~ PQ

World AIDS Month – Part Deux!

Two new AIDS-related items…

A commentator at the BBC said something similar, though not quite identical, to what I was talking about on actual World AIDS Day about the perception of the disease in the US throughout the past twenty-five years.  You can check out his piece here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7754007.stm.  He starts off with a discussion of Elisabeth Glaser, wife of the actor who played Starsky on Starsky and Hutch (before my time, I admit), who was a very high-profile sufferer of AIDS (she contracted it through a blood transfusion).  Apparently – and I wasn’t aware of it – she addressed the DNC in 1992 about her condition and its cost, making HIV and AIDS treatment a touchstone for American healthcare.  He also mentions Ryan White, a hemophiliac teen who also got the virus through a transfusion and showed how difficult it is to live with not just a life-threatening illness, but also a “gay disease”, especially as a high school boy.  This stuff happened 15 to 20 years ago, and yet (as I said earlier, in agreement with this guy), we’re still seeing sweeping judgments about people living with the virus, as well as disregard of its transmission and effects.  You can’t even call it ignorance anymore.  Show me one junior high or senior high health class that doesn’t bring up AIDS at least once.   As the article says, this is 2008, so come on, people.

But it’s also true that the gay community has higher visibility these days, and so there’s more awareness of HIV issues.  And even though the chances of a poz guy dating someone without the virus are infinitesimal, some people do seem to have the responsibility and wisdom to not allow a virus to stop them from having fulfilling lives with themselves and/or others.  This pandemic brings out the worst in people, through prejudice (against AIDS victims), stupidity (for not getting tested), paranoia (of catching it), and anger (if you do catch it), but it also creates a new hurdle to test just how high we’re willing to push ourselves and our morals: you say you’re accepting, so will you hug someone who has AIDS?  You say you believe in true love, so will you still pursue that love even if your partner is poz and you won’t ever feel comfortable expressing that love sexually?  Also, I think I mentioned before that I felt it’s a pretty unique experience that I don’t know anybody with AIDS.  The previous gay generation (which seem to come and go every decade or so) dealt with the disease on a much more personal level, and before that, in the 80s, it seems to have been a common bit of queenly nostalgia to reminisce about friends and loved ones who had passed away.  But it’s somewhat heartening to know that despite all the problems that still remain, we’ve come far enough that someone like me, who has met hundreds and hundreds (hell, over a thousand) of gay men over the past several years, can say that everyone he knows is negative.  Keep that education, protection, and responsibility going.

The dark lining to this silver cloud is another article I came across: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7768059.stm.  In South Africa, teenagers (and others; I shouldn’t just lay it at their feet) are stealing AIDS drugs from clinics and smoking them, occasionally mixed with marijuana, for their powerful hallucinogenic effects.  Bam.  It’s like two awful scenarios in one… drug use on the rise (though it’s always been high in South Africa), and people being denied their health care through what basically amounts to gang activity.  And this is in one of the areas that’s most affected by AIDS; not quite as bad as Botswana and the like, but still pretty high.  Africa has always baffled me with some of their myths about the virus, such as the infamous “sleep with a virgin and you’ll be cured” one (no, actually, you’ll just infect a virgin, which is usually a pre-pubescent child).  It’s almost as though they’ve taken a backwards step in the education department about the disease, in contrast to the US — a case of African postcolonial infrastructure lacking the staying power of the American system.

There must be something we can do, even if such bizarre practices are outside our scope of experience.  Because it’s WORLD AIDS month, and UNIVERSAL Health Care, not just American or US.  I think we’ve pretty much got things on the right path here, though not by any means under control; it’s time we devoted at least some of our resources to helping others who can’t get control at all, and as a result, are causing this pandemic to get worse and worse.

Just my two (or, well ~800) cents.

~~ PQ

Ice Queens

Oh.  My.  Freakin’.  God.  It is fucking FREEZING outside.  They say this is going to be one of the coldest winters we’ve had in a while, thanks to La Niña in the Pacific, but seriously, this cold is just unreasonable.  I can function pretty well into the 30s, but once it gets below freezing, it’s all over.  Since this morning, the temperature has risen to a balmy 29 degrees, but with wind chill in the low 20s, I am running from work to my apartment at top speed as soon as I get done.  Tomorrow it’s supposed to be in the 50s, and Wednesday in the 60s; if there’s one thing that bugs me about Philadelphia weather more than extreme cold (or extreme heat + humidity, for that matter), it’s weather that can’t make up its mind.

The problem is that I don’t believe in long sleeves, generally.  I’ll gladly layer three hoodies on top of each other, but once I get to an informal heated environment where I can settle in, don’t expect me to wear more than a T-shirt with a short-sleeve button-down or polo over it.  Long sleeves irritate me when they’re unnecessary.  However, three hoodies also irritates me, because they’re a pain in the ass to get on and off, they look ridiculous, and they STILL do nothing against wind chill.  I want some kind of fashionable ensemble made from thermal fabric, that’s well-cut and sleek, where each item matches the others.  Pretty high demands, though.  Especially because my wallet is more empty than full.  I suppose I could just go raid H+M for some sweater vests and those form-fitting turtleneck jacket things, but finding something that matches with everything, that can be layered with other stuff, is nigh-impossible.  What is a freezing cold gay boy with next to no body fat supposed to do?

I passed this guy wearing a bright pink patterned scarf, denim jacket over a white fleece, and dark brown slacks.  No thank you.

Generally, I don’t even have the money to care too much about fashion; I don’t usually have the money to buy clothes.  H+M, Express, and other mall outlet type stores are all nice because they offer people like me, who live from paycheck to paycheck, a slightly more upscale version of the Macy’s discount rack, for cheaper.  (And God forbid I come within 20 feet of Abercrombie, Hollister, and other traditional Meccas for the shopping queer.  I disapprove of most things that have the designer’s name obnoxiously blazoned across the front, especially if I have to pay more for it.  Then you get even further up the food chain, and you have places like Armani, where you have to pay even more for them to make the logo smaller and/or tasteful.  Me going into Armani is like a vampire walking into a church.)  But I would like to look nice and keep warm if, say, I’m trolling around the Gayborhood on a chilly evening, or hanging out at Bump en route to somewhere else, as I was on Friday night.  And I saw outfits far better put together than the fellow this morning.

I wanted to make it my goal to be well-dressed and put-together this winter, but I suppose I’ll have to suffer through yet another where I make do with my baggy coats and cheap (but cute) hats, a cashmere scarf that has seen better days since I received it five years ago, and gloves where my fingers are slowly poking out.  The look this season is waifish gay kid.  Guess I’ll just have to make up for it with charming demeanor and witty speech!  But you can’t wrap those around you like a blanket on a blustery day.  Maybe this 60-degree spell on Wednesday will come in handy after all, because even if I get a cold from the fluctuations in temperature, at least I can wear short sleeves and let my arms breathe a little bit.  Hell, maybe I can go without a jacket even!  (But probably not quite as free as the gentlemen in this picture, who seem to feel that the best thing to wear under a warm jacket is… er, nothing.)  We shall see.

~~ PQ

Lazy Saturday

I missed out on the PGN post last week because I was home for Thanksgiving… but I dutifully picked one up yesterday, smuggled it into work, and gave it a good read-through.  Nothing huge going on — the election is over, the Prop 8 protests seem to have subsided for the time being (although the Governator himself was in Philadelphia this week), World AIDS Day has come and gone — but rather a bunch of little things.

For example, Florida has just overturned their gay-adoption ban.  As I mentioned a few weeks ago, the whole Prop 8 thing meant that a lot of the other bullshit propositions in other states got ignored because they didn’t blow their budgets on advertising, and people didn’t really care about whether or not Arkansas added yet another backwards Ozark-minded ultra-conservative proposal to their lawbooks.  (Doesn’t make it any less fucked up though.)  Florida was another one of those states that decided that gay marriage should be banned this November, but they’ve now axed a decades-old law that forbade gay adoption.  On the one hand, that’s really cool: Florida isn’t traditionally one of the more liberal states (at least once you get away from the Lauderdale area), and it’s one of the most populous in the country, setting a precedent for other major red states (such as, perhaps, nearby Georgia?  Or Indiana, which is slipping towards the blue, bit by bit?)  I worked for an adoption center for a summer, and one of the things I was consistently told was that gay couples are almost, without fail, the best foster parents.  I suppose it might be because having grown up misunderstood and rejected themselves, they can connect better with foster children than parents that are looking for easy money and an easy target for their abuse.  (Case in point: the teenager who escaped his foster home in – surprise! – California this week.)

And also in terms of legalization stuff: Kalamazoo, Michigan, has decided orientation can’t be the basis of job discrimination.  Well done, Kalamazoo.  Hopefully the Big Three car companies won’t close and empty the city of its residents in the next month.  And Michigan, while bluer than most Midwest states, could also benefit from Florida’s adoption example…

Another front-page topic this week is the possible appointment of a lesbian to Obama’s Cabinet.  The chances of this happening are roughly equivalent to those of a snowball’s survival in Hell, but the fact that it’s even under consideration is still progress.  True, it’s not one of the top positions (Secretary of Labor), and she’s not necessarily who I agree with most in policy, but it’s still pretty amazing.  I can only imagine what might happen if she gets appointed, though; people in remote, blue-collar establishments will be mega-pissed if a lesbian is dictating their labor laws from Washington.  (I can’t help but remember the quote from Kids in the Hall, though: “Man, lesbians are great; they get so much done in a day!”)  We’ll see how the Cabinet picks progress, but after Hillary, I’m pretty much satisfied with whoever shows up next.  He could appoint a small cute dog for Secretary of the Interior, and I’d probably just say, “AW!”, rather than, “wtf”.

In more mundane news, I want to share a super-awkward story from yesterday.  One of the guys I met last weekend (it feels so weird saying that) expressed an interest in hanging out, so I texted him Thursday night to see if he wanted to grab lunch.  We talked back and forth, agreed on a time and place, etc.; he said he’d text me when he came over the bridge from Jersey.  So yesterday, I got the text at about 1:30, said I’d meet him in 10 minutes, and then headed over.  Except when I got there, I didn’t see him.  I was about to call, when I saw another friend of mine…who I realized had the same name…and would therefore be right next to this guy in my phone…

…so the moral of the story is, put surnames or other qualifiers in your contacts list to avoid having lunch with people that you do not, in fact, want to see.    (To my credit, I masked the shock on my face really well, and got through the meal.  And then the other guy texted me later on.  And we had a lovely evening.  So there.)

~~ PQ

Bringing Home the Bacon

WordPress seems to have updated their interface thingee.  I don’t really know why I transferred to this site instead of Blogger, or one of the plenitude of other sites in the blogosphere, because it doesn’t really seem any more functional than any other; in fact, sometimes it seems less though.  Prestige, maybe?  I don’t know.

Anyway, as I am often wont to do at work, today I was slogging through Wikipedia in between projects and bored out of my mind.  But at one point I ended up at the article about that quintessential 20th-century painter, Her Majesty Francis Bacon, and I learned quite a bit about this historical figure that I didn’t know much about.  Turns out he’s just about the prototype for homosexuals everywhere, covering all of the traditional overdramatic bases in gay life.  For starters, as a child he was an extremely shy boy who had a very close relationship with his mother.  He used to play dress up, and his father would beat him in an attempt to “make a man” out of him.  He used to dress up as a flapper when he was a teenager for his friends’ fancy dress parties, and then when he was 17, he got kicked out of his house when his father found him admiring himself in the mirror wearing his mother’s underwear.  It sounds like a pretty common experience of gay youth, but this was 80 years ago, so I guess some tropes never really die.

After this, Bacon travelled around Europe, basically living off his wits and the occasional generosity of older men — Roaring Twenties sugar daddies!  (Sort of like the Great Gatsby, only gayer?)  While in Paris, he determined that he wanted to be an artist, beginning his career by becoming an interior designer.  Go figure.  He moved back to London, sharing a flat with some friends and supporting himself both by hanging out with patrons and advertising his services as a “gentleman’s companion”; later he met his first long-term lover (Eric Hall) in a bathhouse.  In the next decade or so, while Bacon was in his young and virile 20s, he became well-known first for his design work, then his paintings, featured in exhibitions across Europe.  The outbreak of World War II didn’t really slow him down, as he was too sickly for active service.  I suppose the Brits must have something like “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” as well, but I confess I’m not well versed enough in their laws to know for sure…

Postwar, he continued to be productive, producing his most famous works, like Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, Painting, the Heads series, and the Screaming Popes.  A lot of his works seem to feature what Wikipedia describes as “grotesque and austere imagery”, but which I prefer to think of as just plain “freaky.”  Pretty cool stuff, though, especially with his use of lines and colors.  In 1949, he turned 40 (which might as well be 98 in gay years), and dealt with his midlife crisis by becoming, in his turn, a patron of modern art in London and Europe.  He broke up with Eric Hall, stayed with his mother for a while (aw!), and floated around until the early 60s, when he began a relationship with George Dyer, a criminal and addict who Bacon met while the latter was breaking into his apartment.  Dyer overdosed in 1971, after which Bacon pretty much retired from the bohemian scene.  He had a long friendship afterwards with Londoner John Edwards, until his death in 1992 at the queenly old age of 83 (which is about 6,052 in gay years).

Overall, he’s a relatively well-known artist of the 20th century, though I’d say he’s more of a B-list painter after the really famous ones (Picasso, Dali, etc.)  But he’s probably the most prominent gay modern artist, and in looking at his life, you have, I think, every gay stereotype at least once.  And for that, I think he’s an equally important cultural touchstone; if he didn’t exactly pioneer the gay bohemian life trajectory, he certainly exemplified it.  That deserves some respect, so, Mr. Bacon, I salute you.

Oh God, I’m doing Oscar Wilde next time!  Much more personal hero.

~~ PQ