homophobia

Co-optation and bureaucratization are great strategies for squashing attempts to create social change. There are some kids in South Carolina who are facing exactly that problem right now. They fought for and won the right to have a GSA in their school (the Irmo High School principal announced his resignation last month after the district ruled that the GSA must be allowed) but their victory might have some unintended and negative consequences.

The school board for District 5 of Lexington and Richmond Counties is now considering new rules regulating "student-initiated noncurricular clubs" that will "allow" GSAs but make them difficult to form and will hinder their effectiveness.

If we can thank Anthony Comstock, founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and famed censor, for nothing else, there is this: much of what we know about the sexual subcultures of 19th-century New York is thanks to the efforts of Comstock. Much of the Society's intelligence on the moral depravity of the time came from the personal efforts of Comstock, who went to the fleshpots of the city himself to observe the offenses to common decency and recorded them in meticulous detail to be included in the Society's reports. For this, at least, we can thank him, and perhaps advocate that he be let out of whatever hellpit he's roasting in now, for a few seconds each millenia.

I agree
with the first commenter in this post by Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars: can we please just get the fucking Rapture over with already, so that we can rid ourselves of these subliterate cretins who seem to want to Love the rest of us to death? Failing that, can we just buy all of them first-class tickets to one of the places in the Middle East that they hunger so badly to blow up?

This is a good-news/bad-news kind of story: it's good because it shows idiocy and homophobia given the trouncing that it so richly deserves, but it's bad the fact that it took place at all shows that this country persists in treating lunatics seriously when in a just world, they should be laughed at.

A twist on an old joke has cropped up around CineKink, surfacing more frequently around festival submission time:

"What's the difference between art and pornography?"

"Pornography arrives with its 2257 compliance properly identified."

Bah dump bump.

Anyway...an expansion on some of the topics we discussed during our recent SXSW panel, The Porn Police: Know the Rules, an article by attorney Alan Levy has just been published in The Yale Law Journal.

First tracing the history of federal 2257 record-keeping regulations and its recent judicial back-and-forths, the article then goes into the implications that they present to all filmmakers, including those working with actual and with simulated depictions of sexual conduct.

So, it seems that it's official. My favorite fag-bashing fratboy media figure is no more. He's not actually going to die of a fatal disease. It's even worse; Tucker Carlson has had his television series taken away.

I can't tell you how much it angers me that people who claim to care about the dangers faced by gender non-conforming teens contribute to that danger by insisting that the closet is the only source of safety and by spouting the kind of rhetoric that endangers the teens in the first place.

(Transcript here.)

So you might have been following the ENDA stories and known that it was scheduled to come up for a vote in the House last week or the week before. And you might have noticed that that didn't happen. And you might have been waiting for news about that. I even tried to put a legislation tracker on the site so we could more easily keep up with bills like ENDA. (Aside: you'll probably have noticed that so far it is only working in Safari browser.) Even with all that, I'd noticed that, well, nothing seemed to be happening. So, I've been poking around trying to figure out what's going on, and I just came across this, from October 31, by EJ Graff at TFM Cafe:

The latest news on this front: ENDA, which had been scheduled for a House floor vote this week, has been taken off the table.

The official reason that ENDA won’t come up for vote: it’s been pushed aside by other business. The generally accepted reason is the split between the Barney Frank faction and the Tammy Baldwin faction.

Are he and his small band of followers on the lunatic fringe of the Christian Right, or aren't they? First they blame the wildfires in California on homosexuality. Now the loss of American troops is also the fault of gays and America's failure to properly condemn them?

The New York Times today has the story of a lawsuit against the Westboro Baptist Church, which is being sued for creating a media circus outside of a soldier's funeral. They protested outside the funeral carrying signs that blamed the deaths of American soldiers on the fact that the U.S. condones homosexuality. Actually they've been doing this for at least two years now, but because the father of a soldier whose funeral was protested has filed a lawsuit, Fred Phelps and his crew are back in the news.

I was waiting for a clearer, sharper intellect than my own to come along and make clear the reasons for the holocaust that's consuming Southern California. First, the hard-hitting journalists told me that it was all a plot by Al Qaeda. Fair enough; that seemed plausible at first, but I couldn't help noticing the lack of smug declarations of responsibility from Osama Bin-Laden. But then, I got it. Who's really responsible for all the bad stuff that happens to this country?

FAGGOTS!

Or, as former-homo-current-closet-case-fundamentalist James Hartline puts it:

They shook their fists at God and said, “We don't care what God says, we will issue our legal brief to support gay marriage in San Diego!” Then Mayor Jerry Sanders mocked the Christian vote and signed off on this rebellious legal document to support same-sex marriage.