Track Mangoes

I seldom hear my own name. Generally I've been referred to by saccharine terms of endearment. My family has given me many, my favorite being "Poo-Goo," a play on the Tibetan "Pugu," meaning "Kid," most frequently used in a pejorative sense. In elementary school I was referred to as "Jensy," and "Jensy-Poo." In middle school I was known as "faggot" or "that kid who wants to turn you gay." Upon moving into the liberal inner-city, my friends, many of whom were gay, referred to me as "Jenzabelle" and "Nippolean," a play on Nepalese (my heritage), Napoleon (my penchant for the french language), and Nipple (?). When a fatty scholarship subsumed me into the thightly knit circle of Portland's private education, having developed a reputation as a Libertine, I was often referred to as "Pacific Rim." In college I've heard "Jensicle," "Jenzelle Washington," and "Jenzle Bear." Most currently my roommates refer to me as "Dick," "Douche," "Boiye," "Papa Parrot," and "Baba Hadoor," a play on my Nepalese given name, Bamba Hadhur.

The terms of endearment given by our parents is no mystery, "Little One," "Young One," etc. Yet the nicknames manifest in yet stranger cultural ways, such as the quintessentially American habit of referring to our presidents by their initials. This power of the nickname to dismantle the materiality of an object has been widely studied by post-structuralists and perhaps explains the phenomenon of the human desire to refer to genitalia through grade-school abstractions, even late into life. Naming, for these paranoid theorists, is a violent act.

The Bible tells us the most secret name of God, the Shem Ha Meforesh, could be uttered only by the high priest in the afternoon of Yom Kippur. Alone he enters the Holy of Holies and there would say the name. Rope tied around his ankle, so that, should he die while in the Holy of Holies, he could be gotten out. No one else, of course, was permitted to enter, for the power of God would slay the unholy. Hence, if the high priest was insufficiently cleansed or impure of heart he would die upon entry. Just like the lot of us.

I am hard pressed to find any individual who, when asked if they would enter the Holy of Holies, would not, for a moment, in the very least, pause. For the question is not Would You Go In That Room, but Are You Pure?

Take the tale of Rumpelstiltskin. Trapped in a tower a girl must complete the impossible task of spinning flax into gold in three days time, or ELSE. All hope is lost until a dwarfish creature helps her along in return for her first born child. The flax spun to gold, the daughter marries the Evil King and bears a child. Little Man comes back and demands the child payment for his services. When the daughter just-can't-let-go the little man strikes her a deal: "Guess my name and I'll leave you alone." Upon realizing that every man in her life is, in fact the oppressor (the father who sold her, the king who raped her, and the little man who deceived her) she guesses his name and is free from strife. What is this but the myth of psychiatry?

To say one's own name is more painful than any act of self-mutilation. For, when we refer to ourselves by our own names, a sociologist would tell you, we conceptualize our being on terms that we have seldom created. The deeper aspects of our self-image come even more powerfully from our experiences with other people. And just as the rape victim who wonders "was my skirt too short" knowing-the-self can be used to oppressive ends. But this is no mystery.

What is mysterious is the extent to which such a "looking glass self" reaches into what a Christian might call the "soul." For our very consciousness is not, as Cooley would have us believe, social. Or at least not purely social. For that pause upon entrance into that Room Where God Dwells is a reflection upon this fundamentally American question: is there something inside me which is authentic?

It comes as no surprise to me, then, that secular humanists believe in the power of the ritual act of religion, the value of the "community," solidification of the tribe, identification with the totem, all outside of a regime. Of course these people, addled by Foucault, belive in the power of the tribe: they don't believe in god. At least not in a meaningful way. And it is certainly not that they don't believe in God. A true atheist sees the bloodshed that religion has brought upon the world and runs through the streets preaching the path to salvation. No, these secular humanists believe in nothing at all, save for, perhaps, the benefits of circle songs and potlucks.

"But wait!" you will say, and you are right. Anyone who has spent a modicum of time in an American Studies course knows that no one in their right mind would ever say, "Everything is pretty good." To do so would be blasphemy. Instead we say, Your bigotry, your racism, your hatred stem from your ignorance and your backward way of life is detestable. And these people who act as the butt of our own hatred are the supposed monsters. That is, in the very least, debatable.

Perhaps this is what Lady Gaga is trying to tell us, that we are, all of us, in fact, monsters paving the path of our own destruction, and since we are on the verge of killing ourselves through war, and famine, and environmental crisis, through hate crimes (from the left and right), and destitute we should at least look good while we do it. She is, I feel, a pop Oscar Wilde. Well, not her, per se, but the army of gay men that are employed full time to keep her standing.

As Freud taught us, the resistance is the neurosis itself. And it is not the employment of the name itself that is oppression, nor is it simply our awe of the secret name of god, but the manipulation of our awe. So as the government assigns colors to levels of threat we must come to the understanding that such a stratification is the avowal that there is, indeed, no threat at all, or that if there is a threat there is little to nothing we, or the government, can do to stop it.

Simply "owning" the name does not remove it from that system of oppression we so often like to think we're in. My love of referring to myself as a "fag" does not change the fact that others will think it unseemly, just as Malcom X disowning the name given to him by the white man does not solve the problem of racism in and of itself. It's never enough to "take it back," whatever that means. For the construction itself is far more powerful for the absence of its content.

When Mrs. Klimbacher asked me whether or not she should worry that her four-year-old son asked her to buy him an Easy-Bake oven, I told her that she probably didn’t have to but that it might feel nice if she did.

I started babysitting for Mrs. Klimbacher’s fraternal twins, Richie and Hans, three years after she divorced her husband. From an early age Hans exhibited a fondness for football, while Richie preferred far more delicate endeavors. On a crisp fall day I recall seeing Hans on the front lawn, red leaves stuck to his black fleece and woolen cap. He circumambulated the grass, tossing a Nerf ball and reciting football penalties. Now I don’t claim to know much about football, but I know the things Hans belted out into the autumn air had absolutely no meaning whatsoever; they were simply a hodge-podge of phrases referees might say, like “First down!” and “Five yard penalty!” I then recall going into the house, setting my shoulder bag on the kitchen counter, and scouring for Richie. I found him sitting at his mother’s vanity and applying her makeup to his face. He had one of her silk scarves wrapped around his forehead like a turban and smelled distinctly of her Crabtree and Evelyn sandalwood perfume.

The thought crossed my mind then, and it would continue to cross my mind as I babysat for the Klimbachers, that Richie may have been—brace yourself—gay. When I watch Richie lavishing in beautiful things, the necklaces and the Sunday hats, I cannot help but contemplate the inborn difference between him and his brother. While Richie was pretending to be cat woman Hans was killing Nazis in the backyard. How, at such an early age, could two boys differentiate their tastes so stridently?

Richie never has expressed an interest in men or in anything technically homosexual. Yet I cannot help but observe my tendency to color him thus. He was born, I think, not as a homosexual, but with a hyper-sensitivity to color and form, smells and sensations. I know he will grow up with homosexual tendencies, but I also know he was born with good taste. Is it a coincidence that so many of our brothers are tainted with such a cursed flaw?

When I babysit for Richie I never discourage him from playing with beautiful things. I think it might traumatize him if I did. Instead, I tell him that, yes, that smells delightful, and yes, that looks fantastic, and yes, he does look dashing in fire engine red. I do this because, to him, the vanity is a temple—a sanctuary from a world that discourages his odd form of expression. Why should I hinder him from playing with his mother’s makeup, which, to him, is essentially paint on the canvas of his face.

In ancient Greece small penises were coveted over large penises. This particular aesthetic preference, though strange to our modernized afro-fetishized culture, fit in perfectly with the characteristically Greek adoration of the beautiful boy.

Pretty boys (and their small penises) represented what could be beautiful about the more Apollonian side of human existence. The seething Dionysian, found in the expression of the Gods, ie nature, and the portrayal of animals, who, consequently had large penises, was something to be conquered. The calm, cool, collected Apollonianism of the Greeks sought, more than anything else, to subdue the Dionysian, but in a way that did not require brute force, the way Neanderthals subdued nature. Apolloniansim sought to, in effect, subdue Dionysianism with beauty, put it in a frame, to colonize nature with human brilliance.

The beautiful boy aesthetic carried on in western art for hundreds of years after. The want for big penises really emerged with the advent of pornography, which didn't exist (as we understand it today) until the Victorian Period. It is no accident that pornogprahy was created at the same time major archeological digs uncovered thousands of erotic artifacts from Rome to Pompeii. Up until that time a penis was simply enough to get you up and out. We weren't so blasé, not immured by sex as we are now. It was around this time, with the emergence of pornography, that the mode by which the western cultural apparatus viewed the beautiful boy shifted to something more sinister.

I used to date a man who's entire artistic oeuvre centered around the sinister aspects of the beautiful boy aesthetic, how it has hindered culture at least as much as it has helped it, how it has decimated as much emotional material as it had created. He thought he was cutting edge. But the main idea around which he centered his work, that being the "beautiful boy as destroyer" aesthetic, was entirely not his. Indeed this idea is quite old. It, in fact, was the precursor to European modernism. Case in point: Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray."

After the ACTUP riots (oh and they were riots) during the later part of the AIDS crisis, around 1987, the "beautiful boy as destroyer" aesthetic was no longer interesting as cultural material. The pearly faces of the Stonewall demonstrators showed a much more politically involved way of being and manner of expression. With the maundering of beautiful boys and politics came the idea of the sissy boy as badass, and, consequently, queer culture, for a short while, merged with punk culture, which, for all intents and purposes, was stolen from street culture, which had been there all along (punks just gave a name to it).

The Death of Matthew Shepherd complicated things. Here we had a beautiful boy who was the victim of homophobia, tied to a fence in a Jesus like pose...the story was ripe with meaning. In demonstrations queers held up his face on posterboards and demanded justice. His face became a symbol for all gay justice. And for awhile we used his image ethically. But as it happens with all images, people began to fetishize his position of martyrdom. Beautiful boys essentially reverted to the old Greek way of being: they represented something already dead, something temporal and delicate, like a wilting flower, ready to be plucked. In a way Matthew Shepherd holds a cultural place that is enviable. He, like a Lancelot, died in his prime and is remembered in state of perpetual youth. Lucky him.

Yet cultural consciousness never forgets. And we cannot forget the tenor of modernism, the sinister side of things, the multiplicity of consciousness that complicates any straightforward view of any one thing. (Damn you modernism, you make life so difficult.)

This is why Gay Martyrdom is about to end. Gay culture is, like western culture, is experiencing a postmodern renaissance thirty years late. And then, it's fitting. The cynicism and reductive attitude of Postmodernism was preceded by the eclectic sixties, in which academe and art tried to get back to its roots, sampling from all over the world, experiencing a kind of cultural nirvana, a connection that we find almost comical these days. Peace and love and vegetables. Et cetera.

The peace and love for Gays is over. The contemporary sincerity, think Cascade AIDS project, SMYRC, the "we are just like you!" rhetoric of the nineties, coupled with the radical sexual questioning on college campuses in the naughts, and now it follows of necessity that gay culture will begin to explore the ineffable sides of sexuality, the maddening emptiness of queer expression. Where is our nihilism, some ask. Don't worry your pretty little heads off, I say. It's coming. And when it does, when it does, I don't think you'll like it.

What I am saying is that Gay culture is on the verge of apocalypse. Gay will no longer mean gay. Straight will be a moniker of mundane inanity. Naming is violent, but we will, as postmodernism did for art, find that it poses a satisfying artistic paradigm.

Gay culture is becoming normalized. When it does, when gays become straights, are allowed to marry "just like everyone else" then a subculture will form. Nope, no Golden Era for the Fags. No time in which we will revel in the goal we have sought so long, equality; but when we finally get what we are looking for we will suddenly realize that it wasn't all it was cracked up to be and then we must ask the really hard question: if equality isn't really what I want, then what do I want. My answer to the question we as a queer culture have yet to ask is this: the point is to experience the existential pain of the question to which there is no answer.

To quote Plath, sometimes if we are wanting many things it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing at all.

The only justifiable usage of the word "gay" as a synonym for "stupid" is the one in conjunction with any discussion of Notre Dame's football team. Case in point, Irish QB Jimmy Clausen.

I could expound on the myriad injustices Clausen has brought against culture, but instead I will just direct you straight to his myspace page. He is a Virgo, in case you were wondering.

Now don't get me wrong. Football is great. I often think of myself as a free-safety, constantly roaming the field, scanning the players, being furtive, until, WHAM, you take someone down when they least expect it. Gay men and lots of women, I feel, through their inattention to football have missed out on an education in strategy. The reason conservative women like Clinton, Palin, Rice and Reno have enjoyed so much success in Washington is due, in part, to the fact that these women grew up around football, around strategy. I almost want to liken the sport to military tactic. But I digress. No one should miss out on a well rounded education in ass-kicking.

Maybe if I start watching football again I will be able to finish that novel. Or, worst comes to worst, I'll jut get a boner.

Now maybe someone can explain to me Brady Quinn.

"We have all of you courageous plaintiffs to thank: Go get married, live happily ever after, live the American dream."
--Des Moines attorney Dennis Johnson, who argued on behalf of the gay and lesbian couples

Maybe we weren't ready for Iowa to become what some conservatives have been calling "The New Gay Mecca." As Iowa joins the ranks of Connecticut and Massachusetts I can't help but wonder if it's all worth it. Is the "American Dream" really something we should want?

"It's a big win because, coming from Iowa, it represents the mainstreaming of gay marriage. And it shows that despite attempts to stop gay marriage through right wing ballot initiatives, like in California, the courts will continue to support the case for equal rights for gays. Once again, Iowa is leading when it comes to political dialogue in the country." --Richard Socarides, an attorney and former senior adviser on gay rights to President Clinton

It certainly does represent that.

"This is an unconstitutional ruling and another example of activist judges molding the Constitution to achieve their personal political ends. Iowa law says that marriage is between one man and one woman. If judges believe the Iowa legislature should grant same sex marriage, they should resign from their positions and run for office, not legislate from the bench ... Along with a constitutional amendment, the legislature must also enact marriage license residency requirements so that Iowa does not become the gay marriage Mecca due to the Supreme Court's latest experiment in social engineering." --U.S. Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa

The same thing recently happened in OR, where the judicial system decided to amend the law. It didn't last very long and, as I hear, there is already legislation moving to repeal the new marriage laws. How long will it last? How long can it go? And Must we follow Iowa? We're all very aware of Iowa's somewhat archaic relation to civilized depravity. We judge them for it. But the Iowa marriage law was simple and understandable, saccharine in its ability to provide a kind of eerie calm to the state. What is more, it was overwhelmingly supported by Iowans. Gay marriage will have to be a consensus. Despite what liberals tell you, gay marriage IS a threat to the institution of marriage, an institution that has been essentially monopolized by the Judeo-Christian establishment. Homosexual couples who want to be accepted into that kind of institution should consider the what it means for Conservatives to accept it. Right wigners think that homosexuality is an existential threat because it is an existential threat to society as they know it. We ought to be sensitive to the fears that we induce in conservatives. We are crushing their world, and in Iowa, we are doing it unfairly.

"Gay-porn star Brent Corrigan testified in court on Friday that he was approached by murder suspect Harlow Cuadra on MySpace -- to ask about producing a film together. Twenty-two-year-old Corrigan, whose real name is Sean Lockhart, is at the center of the Luzerne County, Pa., trial of pornography producer Cuadra, who allegedly attempted to lure Corrigan away from slain rival Bryan Kocis, owner of Cobra Video. Kocis was found dead at his Pennsylvania home in January 2007 -- he had been stabbed 28 times, and a fire set to his home burned his body beyond recognition. Cuadra is charged with his murder."

If I ever write a novel it will have all the themes presented in that paragraph. Full Article.

During WWII the Third Reich issued identification cards to all the citizens living in Germany and the provinces that Germany ruled outside the Berlin jurisdiction. Among other things, as I'm sure you can guess, the card took special note if you were Jewish, a Gypsy, a homosexual, mentally challenged, and the list goes on.

Today in Queer Activists and Feminists are re-instigating this Fascist tradition of identification. Under the guise of "building awareness," that term that the Left uses as a stand in for "the proliferation of propaganda," Lefties in San Fran and New York have been issuing "Safer Sex Licenses." You can read all about them here: http://www.stfree.com/.

The company, STFree Certifications, was founded in 2003 by Eli Dancy. According to the site "At the age of 22, Dancy decided to do something about the irresponsibility concerning unsafe sex practices in the society he lived in." In other words: he got an STD, felt bitter about it, and decided to get revenge by creating a company that would demonize STD's because he hates himself. The bio goes on to claim "past attempts from outsiders to do STD/AIDS prevention in neighborhoods such as his had failed. He felt the failure of current prevention methods was strongly due to the lack of knowledge decision makers had on the true issues that really go on in affected communities." In other words: STARS and Judeo-Christian abstienence only education programs, or government funded hoo-haw, came into the schools, and, like they always do, failed to teach anyone a lick about safer sex practice. STFree is supposedly "experienced by socially responsible individuals across the globe." Of course you can only be "socially responsible" if your a bitter-queer from New York that needs to push his agenda on the rest of the well meaning horny people of New York City.

Notice how Mr. Dancy, rather than taking it upon himself to ameliorate the educational system decided to found a company whose only capacity is for alienation. How can this card possibly be good for sexual freedom?

This card, to me, is, yet another, perfect example of how 80's and 90's feminism has failed sexual liberation and how its residue is haunting our country. In the 50's college administrations would lock women in their dorms at night. Witht he sexual revolution of the 60's women began to say "hey let us out, we know it's risky, but we would rather take the risk than rot here." The women of the sixties understood the potential danger of sex just as gay men have understood this danger. These women were fully aware that they could get brutally raped if they opened themselves up to casual sex, just as gay men who were having late night rendez vous's in central park understood that their "random hookup" could have been Jeffery Dahmer.

The women and gay men of the 60's were brave, but they were also stupid. They didn't realize the health risks involved in casual sex. 80's and 90's feminism, which told women that they could wear what they wanted, say what they wanted, and do what they wanted without having to worry about the dangers of casual sex, ruined the common sense that fueled the sexual revolution of the 60's. Granted it was also that common sense that lead to so many STD infections among women, and the AIDS epidemic among gay men. You can't have casual sex without the risk. That's how it works. The left, however, always propigating its double standard of responsiblity and lechery wants to find a way to make a middle ground between healthy living and ravid sex. There is none.

I'm not saying people shouldn't have rabid, anonymous sex. Hell, I LOVE Rabid anonymous sex. Who doesn't? But I, unlike feminists and Queer Activists, understand the dangers involved in it and I don't need or want a company like STFree to make a feeble attempt at trying to make my depraved lifestyle seem somehow wholesome and responsible. IT'S NOT...THAT'S WHY I USED THE WORD DEPRAVED.

Dancy introduced the "Safe Sex License" in New York City in Dec. 2004. Now, going on 3 years later and over 15,000 members strong, STFree introduced its’ online registration for HIV/AIDS testing. The epidemic is becoming global.

The card itself isn't even that useful. It, of course, cannot guarantee that the cardholder does not have an STD. Just as a drivers’ license won’t give you information about the cardholder's particular level of responsibility (DUI's, parking tickets, accidents, etc.), the same idea holds true for a STFree cardholder. The card does, however, contain information about your HIV status. All memebers must then take a "pledge" to not engage in irresponsible practices which could increase their risk for contracting an STD. But something tells me this pledge might be pretty useless.

Furthermore this card system is still falling prey to the anti-progressive sexual rhetoric. Anyone under the age of 18 cannot obtain a card, as if to say that if you are younger than that you can't get HIV because, of course, 18 year olds aren't having casual sex. In my expereince, at the seasoned age of 20, it is predominately 18 year olds who are having casual sex. Again, the bourgois idea of age and sex has taken over this supposedly progressive system.

Luckily there is no central database which people can look up your sexual health status. But with the online version of this card in construction I wonder how long that will last. Could it be that we could have a section on Facebook for your sexual health corroborated and validated by the STFree company?

Finally, the site asks "Why would anyone with the right intentions refuse to share their status with a potential partner?" Let me try to tackle that one, STFree. It's because of companies like STFree that STD's are so demonized in the first place. If there was no stigma about having HIV in the first place, as full well there shouldn't be, then people would free disclose their sexual health status. But the Left has been dishonest, as has the Right. STD's need to be treated like any other disease: treatable and not the end of the world. Having gonorreha, to most people, might be the end of their sexual lives when it full well doesn't have to be.

We can force people to be honest about many things. Sex is just not one of them.

the whole debacle makes me think of that scene in "The Pianist," where Adrien Brody is walking down the stairwell in the apartment complex where he is hiding and a woman sticks her head out of the door, her head covered in blond Aryan curls, and she says, obviously suspicious of his dark hair and large nose, "I demand to see your identification card!" Brody runs away and she screams at the top of her lungs, "JEW! JEW! JEW!"

If you want to have casual sex you've got to buck up and be prepared to die for your right to have it.

When I came out at age twelve my sexual-preference didn’t feel like a choice. Biology seemed to confine me in pubescent shackles and all I wanted was any male that would (sexually) give me the time of day. I wouldn't have called myself promiscuous ("but who knows?!") and finding a sexual partner proved tricky in the dominantly Christian suburb where I lived. Luckily, at thirteen, my family moved to inner city Portland where I could surround myself with gay culture.

After a two year binge on gayness [where I was constantly surrounded by like minded people (read: the well meaning progressives) who taught me that--above all else--I was a normal teenager,] I realized that, ironically, it has been conservatives (Christians, Mormons, Jews and the blue collared, like the loggers on my mother's side of the family) who have always upheld the unique role homosexuals play in society. The liberal idea of homosexual equality, to me, is far more bigoted and backward than anything I've ever heard from an "ignorant" "anti-gay" conservative.

Gay men are cultural refugees who have power and wealth in things that have no price. Their legacy and contributions to society can be traced from late 19th century photography back to the dreamy statues of the Greeks, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, through Romanticism, the Pre-Raphaelites, and up into the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe. They are, it seems, responsible, in effect, for western aesthetics. (That's right, I said it, FUCK Georgia O'Keefe.)That makes gay men powerful sentinels of aesthetic culture.

Are Gay Men hyper-sensitive to art? Could it be in born? Like a kind of autism, could sensory stimuli overwhelms the gay-male brain? How do we explain, in a rural family, why there will sometimes be a boy who Sticks Out, a boy who is uninterested in paternal pursuits, like throwin-the-ole-pigskin-around? Instead of Tonka Trucks and building blocks he is hypnotized, overwhelmed, by the lushness of his mother’s clothes, the silks and the linens, the seductive scent of her perfumes, sandalwood, vanillas, orange blossoms and rose buds, and struck by the vibrancy of her make up, the deepness of the mascara, the pastel shadows, and the violent beauty of a streak of lipstick across a palid face. Makeup, to him, is simply a paintbrush. How do we explain this behavior in children? It's an international and timeless phenomenon.

Of course claiming that gay men are born hyper-sensitive to art makes me sound like I'm saying all gay men are pansies. It's like saying black people are born hyper-sensitive to (INSERT STEREOTYPE HERE TO AVOID THE RACE POLICE). But maybe something about their biology does, perhaps, predispose them to take a liking to art? There. Now it's less acerbicly worded.

I've worked with children in my church and in summer camps. I’ve noticed that this nascent fascination with aesthetics, for boys, often couples with a predisposition towards sensitivity and/or shyness. This predisposition leads, inevitably, towards a failure to bond with peers, particularly the ones uninterested by paper and string. This disjunction causes a feeling of Otherness which is tantamount to the gay experience. It's a uniquely gay Otherness unlike racial exile. I want to, almost, call it "queerness."When gay adults claim that he or she has been gay since childhood what they are remembering is, in effect, this particular kind of Otherness, this queerness, rather than the actual sexual attraction.

Because of this it seems odd to me that gay activists would align themselves so stringently with biology. The widespread desire to find a biological basis for homosexuality is still moot (I doubt we will ever find a substantial biological foundation for gayness) and, furthermore, will lead to claims that gay people are deformed at the prenatal level. The desire itself is symptomatic of an over-politicized social climate. The left actually believes that finding the “Gay Gene” will force everyone to submit to the rhetoric of “acceptance.” Quelle fascisme!

The LGBT community needs to stop harassing Christian people. Gay people should also get over Christian hangup on male gayness. The tradition sees homosexuality as an existential threat because it is an existential threat if you follow the rules in the bible! And besides, if Gayness is the antithesis of Puritanism (which, go with me, I think it is) gay men owe a lot to the church for how it has influenced gay culture: decadent, colorful, and lubed up like KFC chicken. (Then, when I think of the alter boys in Catholic churches, the contra altos in the choir of Europe, and the statues of young'ins lashed, crucified, bleeding, naked, I can't help but think that the church also owes something to gay culture...).

The Gays found their crack-pot prophet and he was nastier and crazier and ten times more insane than Coulter and Limbaugh. Yes, his name was Chris Crocker. Crocker was the crazed messiash from the woods, who spent all his life silently collecting Britney paraphanellia until finally the Lord called him forth to speak, to SHOUT from the highest mountain the internet had to offer, and he did. Chris Crocker told everyone to leave Britney Alone and the scary thing that nobody wants to admit is that they did. He broke the silence long enough to shout the truth and tell America something it didn't want to hear: it needed Britney.

But I digress.

Wihtout crazy people like Chris Crocker gay culture will fall into genteel dandyism, no longer the radical social experiment it once was. A truly progressive gay culture should not be a middle-class, elitist posturing with a paternalistic attitude toward the religious working class’ “ignorance.” I hate it when people insist that "We are the educated ones, and your homophobia comes out of deep ignorance."

Gay Culture has historically been the only true believer in the fact that sexuality is highly fluid. They've constructed their entire culture around the outer limits of sexual spectrums, fetishisms, fantasy, taboo and permiscuosness.

It occurred to me early on in adolescence that the feeling, the fright and excitement, the visceral fury of the simple idea of having sex with a woman, was something I had not experienced since, say, I was thirteen and trying to have sex with men. I grew nostalgic for that sensation of the badness of outer sexuality and I had grown weary of men. Gender didn't seem to matter so much anymore, the excitement of something new and "forbidden" was overwhelmingly appetizing. I had also constructed an entire identity that was GAY and unchanging, so to have sex with a woman would be like I was straight and having sex with men. Was I an in the closet straight man? However, like a sixteen year old, I was terrified to peruse anything even though I wanted many things quite badly. WHAT IF I WAS WRONG? Better to just stay in the closet. Keep having sex with men.

If sexuality can be this fluid how are we, then, to concede that gayness is strictly biological? To deny fluidity of sexual preference is to abandon the work academics have put into the study of gender and sexuality. Sex is temporal and always on a continuum, coming in and leaving like the tides. It permeates every relationship, even familial, every dream, every word that comes out of our mouths is in someway touched by sex. How can we find a GENE for this? How can there possibly be one biological factor, nay, one UNWAVERING biological factor that determines our sexuality from birth until death?

We can change our sexuality. Yes. You heard it: sexual conversions are theoretically possible. Though they may not be pleasant or desirable or even valuable, and though Christian fanatics may use this fact against queers, sexual conversion must be, at least theoretically, possible. We are, in effect, more comfortable knowing that sexuality is genetic, rather than letting it loose to the chaotic powers of God.

Instead of mooing about equality the Left should look long and hard at its approach to gay politics. At the same time, we, as they sexually lost, should seriously reconsider our affiliation with the left. While the staunchly gay should question its die-heard pursuit of marriage rights and special legal protection. If that's really what we want then we should at least stop to discuss how gay culture will be affected and if we want that or not. Additionally, gay men ought to embrace their culture’s character in spite of its tendency towards sexual promiscuity and drug use. I say appreciate it BECAUSE of its sexual promiscuity and drug use! To be gay is to be an outsider. To be an outsider is to be an artist. To be an artist is to be hated by society at large most of the time. Join the club.

Even if you think homosexuality is an inborn trait it does no good to seek the approval of government, the Judeo-Christian establishment, and other contenders who know very little about queerness. I'm adopting the view of Parker who once said, "heterosexuality isn't normal, it's just common." We've got to start thinking and behaving along those lines instead of validating the Right's queer-fears and degrading our culture by asking for their approval. I'm not calling for separatism, (though a continent of gay men wouldn't be half bad) but I am calling for enlightened militancy. We’ve got much bigger fish to fry than marriage.

Since homosexuality is a choice, there is no need to harbor self-hatred by thinking that our choice to love who we want to love is somehow wrong. It’s fabulous and truthful and totally against all the rules. Love is radical. And it’s how culture survives in the face of obliteration.