Christian Musician Comes Out

Wow, who'd've thunk it? Ray Boltz is gay.

I just love this song.

The Scary Palin Interview

...in case you missed it. Follow the link for videos and transcripts.

http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2008/09/sarah-palin-speaks.html

This is kinda painful to watch...

...it's the Backstreet Boys meets Jerry Falwell sorta thing. And, it's also kinda funny too. ;)



h/t to Religion in American History

A Town Called Dobson

I've started reading a new online comic as passed along through the Bilerico Project that I find hilarious. This is today's comic.

(You can click the picture to see a larger version of it.)

Go here to see other ones.

The Show that Changed my Life

This past Sunday, the long-running Broadway musical Rent, ended its 12-year, 5,124 performances, run. Of all the shows I've seen on Broadway, this was by far my favorite. The show has been rumored to be closing for quite some time...and each time, as the last show was scheduled, there was an extension. During one of its supposed closings, I wrote a post* about why I love the show so much. The love I have had for that show hasn't changed much and I still listen to the cast album on my iPod or watch the movie, that was made a few years ago about it.

Here is a song from the show. I hope you enjoy it.

(*Update: I forgot to include the link to my previous post although I had intended to do so but forgot to.)

A Conflict of Value

As most of those who know me know, I am a big fan of Open Source software. I love the idea of free software and esp enjoy that it'll always be free. Who wants to make huge software companies filthy rich off my dime. Besides the upgrade costs to maintain software can get expensive.

Along this thinking, I have installed OpenSource or free utilities on my home computer and laptop. I haven't done so at the church mainly because while OpenSource makes one feel like an Apple artsy/fartsy Matrix-like Neo, it does have its disadvantages. Some of those disadvantages can be troublesome to those who cannot finese their way through various menus or have compatability issues between OpenSource programs.

Mostly for me its a financial thing: buying really good software is expensive. And so, here is my challenge for today. Microsoft just released its new discount for students for its Office Ultiminate Suite, which has almost every product the offer for only $59. Normally the cost would be around $800!!

You know, Microsoft software, its Word, Outlook, Powerpoint, One Note, Publisher... all of it is really nice and workable. To stay with OpenSource stuff can be a pain because, well, it doesn't run as nice or as smooth. Simply put, Microsoft is better software.

Here's the deal, check it out and let me know what you think. Are you challenged by it too?

20/20 Segment on PDA

Being in an openly gay relationship as Jay and I are in, we are careful about how we display our affection--and certainly how we do so in public. Having both moved from NYC, we realize that attitudes are different in New Jersey. Although we live in a very progressive and liberal state, we are mindful that not everyone has the same values and 'live and let live' mentality as those in Manhattan.

So when we're out shopping, going to the movies, or walking Maggie, we're careful not to present ourselves in a way that might warrant negative or hostile reactions. Sure, I am confident that most in NJ are open-minded and peaceful. But it isn't the majority that worries us, but rather the minority of close-minded bigots that carry bats and guns in their pickup trucks. It can be frightening to think about such things so we don't think about it too much while remaining careful how much affection we display in public.

One time not long ago we were shopping at Wal-Mart. While not displaying any PDA, I am thinking we were talking in hushed tones, looking at items pondering whether to buy one thing or another. Such aside displays of affection did not go unnoticed. While checking out, the man behind the register said to us in hushed tones himself, "You two are family, right?" By this he meant that he too was gay but was keeping things on the 'down low'. I supposed to those who are looking, they can see. To those who aren't, perhaps they don't see.

A while back, 20/20 did a television segment on Public Displays of Affection between straight, gay men, and lesbians. All were actors being videoed by the film crews at 20/20. Below is the segment aired on 20/20. You may be surprised at the woman who called 911 upon seeing two men kiss on a park bench. But then, maybe you won't be. Still, it's an interesting video and worth all the conversation about public displays of affection.

Forgetting an Email Attachment

Lifehacker.com has a great post today about adding a script to your Outlook email program (this won't work if you use Outlook Express) or Gmail account. The script looks for words in an email you've typed to include words like "attach" or "attachment" and then checks to see if you actually attached anything to your email. If you forgot to do so (and how many times have you forgotten to attach something only to say "Oops!" in your next email and attach there what you intended to attach before), it'll ask you.

Go here for the Outlook script and directions on how to use it. Go here for the Gmail script and how to use it.

I just did the Outlook script and it was soooooo easy to do.

A Poem

'Invictus'
by William Ernest Henley.

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank what ever gods may be,
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeoning of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how straight the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul.

I found this poem after reading a Facebook entry about a young man who died today after being beaten up in an anti-gay attack in England. Go here to read the story. Go here to see the Facebook page.

It's In.... FINALLY!

The new Ikea catalog is in stores. Go here to see some buzz about what's in the new catalog.

I Can So Relate to This

Amazing! And fun to watch.

Here is the making of this commercial.



h/t to Daily Dish.

Great Doorbell

New JibJab: Time for Some Campaignin'

Send a JibJab Sendables® eCard Today!

Stop Animation Short

The Freemason Funeral Rite

I just returned from officiating at a funeral of a church member. The funeral was held at a local funeral home. Following my church service, we had the opportunity to experience a Freemason Funeral Rite. I have never seen anything like it.

To be honest, when I was a kid, I was a member of the DeMolay. DeMolay is a young Mason organization where its rituals were based on Mason teaching--just geared for teenagers ages 13-18. I had a nice time participating in the organization. As an adult, I've had a couple of opportunities to become a Mason but just haven't pursued it with any vigor. Just a few months ago, I was asked to become a Mason. Again, I declined but was curious just the same.

Tonight's rite was an interesting presentation. Twelve Masons arrived and stood semi-circle at the front of the hall and in front of the casket. The lead Mason with a fancy necklace recited what was an obviously memorized eulogy--and it went on for about 15 minutes. It was rather impressive. The rite began with the recital of the 23rd Psalm (which coincidentally was the same Psalm I used in the service). The rite ended with the placement on the deceased of an apron and a fanned arrangement of what looked like minature palms, and a prayer.

The man who died was a lifelong electrician, union member, and high degreed Mason. He had many friends and was greatly loved. What I gathered from the Mason experience was that many of his electrician buddies were also Masons--it was a fraternity of like-minded guys who exercised their civic duties within the organization.

It was all pretty interesting...although not interesting enough to pursue membership. ;)

Watching the Defectives

A post over at Joe.My.God has to be one of the best gay Pride posts I have read in a long time. I am going to copy and paste it below. Please read it. I am sure you'll be glad you did.

Watching The Defectives

Last Sunday, at 12:30pm, I was in position on Christopher Street with Terrence, his glamour boys, and touring UK bloggers Dave and Darren. The Pride parade was due to round the corner any minute, but I tore off in search of a bodega, crossing my fingers that my desperate need for a soda wouldn't cause me to miss Dykes On Bikes. Half a block away, I found a little place and ducked in, weaving thru the customers clogging the aisles on rushed missions like mine. I was third in line, two bottles of Sprite under my arm, when the man in front of me spotted a friend entering the store.

"David! Sweetie! Where are you watching from? Come hang out with us on Allen's balcony!"

David, a bookish looking middle-aged man, destroyed the festive mood in the little store in an instant. "Absolutely not. Those defectives and freaks?" he spat, indicating the colorful crowd outside the store, "They have nothing to do with MY life, thank you very much. This parade has as much dignity as a carnival freak show. It's no wonder the whole country hates us."

Luckily for David, the Asshole Killer mind ray I've been working on is not yet operational. I settled for pushing him a little, just a tiny bit, just to get by him in that narrow aisle, of course. I returned to my sweaty little group and tried to put what I'd heard out of my mind for the remainder of the day, because I knew that by the next morning, the thousands of Davids of the world, the ones who have media access anyway, would all issue their now familiar day-after-Pride rant. The one where they decry the drag queens on all those newspaper front pages. The one where they beat their chests and lament, "Why don't the papers ever show the NORMAL gay people? Where are the bankers and lawyers? Why must all the coverage be drag queens and leather freaks in assless chaps?"

And every year, the logical answer is that bankers and lawyers are boring to look at and that pictures of marching Gap employees don't sell newspapers. There's no sinister media agenda intent on making gay people look ridiculous, no fag-hating cabal behind the annual front page explosion of sequins and feathers. It's just good copy. Drag queens are interesting. Even the bad ones. Especially the bad ones.

Yet right on cue, the day after Pride, the Davids of the blogosphere dished out their heavy-handed dissections of parades around the country. Only this year, there was a palpably nastier tone to an already traditionally nasty annual debate. Blame the election, blame the recent avalanche of anti-gay legislation, but this year, the usual assimilationist arguments went beyond the hypothetical speculations that maybe our Pride parades were too outlandish, that maybe we weren't doing the movement any favors by showing the country a face that happened to be wearing 6-inch long false eyelashes. This year there was some actual discussion about HOW we were going to "fix" Pride parades. Of how we might go about "discouraging" certain "elements" from taking part in the parades.

This is the part of the story where I have my annual post-Pride apoplectic attack. This is the part of the story where the swelling volume of Nazi analogies overwhelm my ability to speak and all I can do is twitch and bark out little nonsensical bits. This is where I always forget the name given to the Jews who went to work for the Nazis, helping load the trains. "Because that's what you are asking us to do, you assholes!" Then I always ask, "Who are we going to sacrifice to 'save' ourselves? Which child will it be, Sophie?" And this is the part of the story where my friends accuse me of being a hyperbole-laden drama queen, wasting spiritual energy on a non-crisis, and of co-opting the Holocaust as well. More on that later.

These people that want to "fix" Pride don't understand the role that Pride parades have come to play. Initially, the gay parade was about visibility. It was about safety in numbers, and more importantly, "normalcy" in numbers. It was about the idea that if only straight America could see us, could just SEE US, that they'd love us. And accept us. That if we'd mass and march by the righteous millions, the sheer unstoppable force of our collective image would topple bigotry. Would right wrongs. Would stop hate.

Of course, that didn't happen then and it doesn't happen now.

What DOES happen, is that Pride parades, at least in the big cities, have become nothing more significant to straight America than an annual traffic nightmare. As a tool of the gay movement, the Pride parade is now merely a walking photo op for politicians and perhaps not much more. A couple of years ago, the ultimate arbiter of America's cultural zeitgeist, The Simpsons, made note of this:

(The gay pride parade is going past the Simpson house.)

Chanting marchers: "We're here! We're queer! Get used to it!"

Lisa Simpson: "You're here every year. We ARE used to it."

What does all of this mean to the Davids of the world, the gay assimilationists that want to, wish they could, somebody do something, there's gotta be a way we can, Dignify This Parade? The ones begging: "Can't we get our people to at least DRESS respectfully for one lousy day? Is that too much to ask of our people? "

Yes, yes it is.

Because you are kidding yourself if you think Pride parades, in any form, will EVER change the minds of homophobes. The straight people who show up to see Pride parades are already largely convinced. We're parading to the choir, Jesse. Those straight people love our freaks, bless them.

Oh, you could test run a "defective" free parade. You could form urban anti-tranny squads and go around to all the gayborhoods on the morning of the parade and give all the drag queens 50% off coupons for Loehmann's, offer good during the parade only. And they'd GO, of course, cuz hey, those girls love a bargain. But the resultant bland, humorless, "normal" gay parade wouldn't change the course of the gay movement one bit. The part of straight America that is repulsed by drag queens is quite possibly even more terrified by the so-called "normal" gays, because "those clever calculating creatures look JUST LIKE US, and can infiltrate and get access to our precious children. And that's been their disgusting plan all along, of course."

So where does that leave us? Are we post-Pride? Is the parade just a colossally long waste of a miserably hot summer day? Is the Pride parade just an event that does a better job of moving chicken-on-a-stick than it does of moving hearts? I'd say that, yes, as an effective tool of the gay movement, Pride's usefulness has largely waned in many U.S. cities. So do we even need to keep having these parades, since they no longer seem to have much of an impact on the state of the movement? No, we don't.

But...YES, WE DO.

Because even if Pride doesn't change many minds in the outside world, it's our PARTY, darlings. It's our Christmas, our New Year's, our Carnival. It's the one day of the year that all the crazy contingents of the gay world actually come face to face on the street and blow each other air kisses. And wish each other "Happy Pride!" Saying "Happy Pride!" is really just a shorter, easier way of saying "Congratulations on not being driven completely batshit insane! Way to go for not taking a rifle into a tower and taking out half the town! Well done, being YOURSELF!"

I'm not worried what the outside world thinks about the drag queens, the topless bulldaggers, or the nearly naked leatherfolk. It's OUR party, bitches. If you think that straight America would finally pull its homokinder to its star-spangled bosom once we put down that glitter gun, then you are seriously deluding yourself. Next year, if one of the Christian camera crews that show up to film our "debauched" celebrations happen to train their cameras on you, stop dancing. And start PRANCING.

All you suburban, lawn mowing, corpo-droid homos out there, hiding behind your picket fences, the ones wringing your hands and worrying that Pride ruins YOUR personal rep, listen up. Do you think that straight Americans worry that Mardi Gras damages international perception of American culture? America, land of the free, home of "Show Us Your Tits!"? They don't and neither should we. Our Pride celebrations are just our own unique version of Mardi Gras, only instead of throwing beads, we throw shade. No one has to ask US to show our tits. We've already got 'em out there, baby. And some of them are real.

A co-worker of mine heard me discussing my Pride plans last weekend and said, "I really don't understand what it is you are proud about. I mean, you all say that you are born that way, so it's not like you accomplished anything." She wasn't being mean, just genuinely curious, and I think that a lot of gay people probably feel the same way. On this subject, I can only speak for myself.

I'm proud because I'm a middle-aged gay man who has more dead friends than living ones and yet I'm not completely insane. I've lived through a personal Holocaust (here we go again) in which my friends and lovers have been mowed down as thoroughly and randomly as the S.S guards moved down the line of Jews. You, dead. You, to the factory. And you, you, you, and you, dead. I am inexplicably alive and I am proud that I keep the memories of my friends alive. I am proud of my people, the ACT-UPers, the Quilt makers, the Larry Kramers, the Harvey Fiersteins. I'm proud that I'm not constantly curled up into a ball on my bed, clutching photo albums and sobbing. And that happens sometimes, believe it.

And outside of my personal experiences, I am proud of my tribe as a group. Sometimes I think that gay people are more creative, more empathic, more intuitive, more generous, and more selfless than anybody else on the planet. Sometimes I think that if an alien culture were surveying our planet from light years away, they might classify gay people as an entirely separate species of humans. It's easy to spot us because of our better haircuts.

But sometimes I think we are the worst people in the entire world when it comes to standing up for each other. The gay people who'd like to soothe their personal image problems by selectively culling some of our children from Pride events? They disgust me. They appall me. They embarrass me. To them I say: the very road that YOU now have the privilege of swaggering upon was paved by those very queens and leather freaks that you complain about,as you practice your "masculine" and give us butch face. If you want to live in the house that THEY BUILT, you better act like you fucking know it. United we stand, you snide bitches. America's kulturkampf ain't gonna be solved by making flamboyant people go away.

I'll end this by making one final Jewish reference. Possibly you've heard the Jewish in-joke that sums up the meaning of all Jewish holidays? "They tried to kill us. We won. Let's eat." My Pride version?

They wish we were invisible.

We're not.

Let's dance.

Simply Fascinating

Did you know that your cell phone can help you unlock your car (in the event you lock your keys in you car?

"Locked your keys in the car and the spare is at home or with a friend? Call that person on their cell phone with your cell phone, then hold your phone about a foot from your car door. Have your buddy press the unlock button holding it near the cell phone on their end. Your car will unlock, no matter how far away your buddy is. Beats waiting for AAA."

Go here to see the other 4 things you probably didn't know your cell phone could do.

Confusing Christianity

Here is a great video about how confusing our Christianity sounds to many others.



h/t Creatio Ex Nihilo

Don't you just love satire?