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Make sure you pick up a copy of Pride 2011 when you head out for your local events this weekend. I was the guest editor this year and I wrote the cover story interview with Dan Savage. Brag!
After last night's visit to the Saloon, the consensus is to have tonight's JMG reader meet-up at the Eagle/Bolt, which is at 515 Washington Ave South. I'll should be able to get there by 10pm, based on what tonight's Netroots schedule looks like. Hope to meet some of you there!
The Saloon, Minneapolis, Thursday 11pm
After thirty minutes in line for what turned out to be "18 and over" night, I finally handed my ID to the doorman. He looked at me and raised his eyebrows.
JMG: I know, I'm the oldest one here. Hah.
Doorman: Naw, there's one older dude in there tonight.
JMG: (Jokingly) Great! Is he hot?
Doorman: How could he be?
And still I went in and had a pleasant time.
UPDATE: I should have noted that Saloon was just one stop on the LGBT Netroots bar crawl, otherwise I wouldn't have gone in.
At the moment I'm blogging from a big comfy floral sofa in the Daily Kos Lounge, an oasis of recliners, couches, and power strips (yay!) that runs down the center of the main hall of the Minneapolis Convention Center. That's my 'puter in the foreground and Good As You's Jeremy Hooper is across from me. I have no idea what the deal is with the kiddie pool.
Even though they've blocked me from their blog, their YouTube channel, and their Twitter feed, NOM still reads JMG.
Gentle readers, I'm rerunning my annual Pride rant for the seventh year. I wrote this post in 2005 a couple of days after attending Pride here in NYC. In the following years I've reposted it in advance of the day in the hope of encouraging you to attend. My apologies to those that have read it before. Have a wonderful Pride. Love each other.
Watching The Defectives
Last Sunday at 12:30pm, I was in position on Christopher Street with Terrence, his glamor 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 through 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-drag 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.
This gorgeous image was taken by famed photographer Marius Bugge for my Pride Magazine 2011 cover story on Dan Savage. (Marius also shot our last two covers with Dan Choi and Rachel Maddow.) This year's issue of Pride will begin appearing in the usual locations this weekend and I'll post an excerpt from my interview shortly. By the way, I had to flee back inside the studio when Dan leapt up on that 18th floor railing for this shot, which embiggens nicely.
GOProud has planted an anti-JMG story on the wingnut site Daily Caller, whose dumb bunny writer manages to spell my name two different ways in consecutive sentences. I'll totally cop to calling GOProud "kapos and Quislings," cuz ya know, they totally are. But Daily Caller also quotes Chris Barron as saying that I regularly post misogynistic comments. (No citation of that bullshit is offered in the article, of course.) This, from the guy who regularly tweets fat jokes about Meghan McCain and who only yesterday said that Rachel Maddow "looks like a dude."
The Key West Business Guild has invited me down on a press junket to cover this year's Pride events, which run June 8th thru June 13th. And of course I'll be hosting a JMG readers meet-up at the fabulous Island House, date and time TBD. My third trip to Key West in 18 months! Hope to see some of you there!
Some of yesterday's posts have magically reappeared, but sadly your incisive and thoughtful comments have not. Boo, hiss and all that jazz.
For those unaware, Google/Blogger experienced a global outage for the last (approximately) 24 hours, taking down tens of millions of sites and doubtlessly losing them zillions in ad revenue. For now, things appear to be working. You'll notice, however, that all of my 25 or so posts from yesterday have vanished. We'll see if they reappear. Thanks for hanging in there.
Christwire has some fun at my expense.
Rest assured that God’s belly churns and is sickened by every mention of this sacrilege leather daddy who calls himself God and ruler. Every day, Joe writes homosexual erotica that masquerades as journalism, on his website JoeMyGod.com. The very name of the site is smeared in the fecality of homosexual sins, so it is no surprise that it is putridly offensive to the sensibilities of the normal folks of America.Read the full article.
Today is the seventh blogiversary of this here website thingy. As is tradition for today, here is my very first post.
April 27th, 2004I appreciate all of you being here for these last seven years. Help yourselves to some cupcakes and punch. Please don't let the cat out.
I was born and raised in rural North Carolina.
My fondest childhood memory is of playing in the dense, acrid, poison fog that was belched out by the county mosquito control truck during its daily dusk-time trip down our dirt road.
The cry of "Smokey! Smokey!" would fly up and down Nine Foot Road once the first faint sound of the pest control truck's generator was detected in the distance. Trailer screen doors would slam open and kids would pour into the street for ten minutes of gleeful, giddy, mad dashing around in the thick white clouds of DDT. We would smash into each other with full force in the blinding swirls and just scream and laugh hysterically, pick ourselves up and start running again. Parents had not a whit of concern about their children playing directly behind the spewing pipes of a pest control truck. In fact, NOT being allowed to play in the poison fog was often held out as potential punishment for misbehavior.
I think this explains a lot about me.
And onward to JMG year eight.
"So GLADD, a self-described anti-defamation group, gives an award to one of the most vicious, vile and vulgar anti-Christian bigots on the planet and expects to be taken seriously? Hey, while we’re at it why not give Muammar Gaddafi the ‘Humanitarian of the Year’ award. Or how about a Nobel Peace Prize for Barack Oba… Oh, wait" - Liberty Counsel douchebag Matt Barber, as quoted by Porno Pete, who's apparently polling other hate groups about my GLAAD award.
TOTALLY FUCKING RELATED: Today the FBI revealed that the Liberty Counsel is being investigated for conspiracy to commit kidnapping in the case of Isabella Jenkins-Miller, an action I first began to call for on this blog more than 18 months ago.
In an article being distributed today by Christian Newswire, SPLC-certified hate activist Porno Pete LaBarbera attacks GLAAD for my recent award. According to LaBarbera, GLAAD is hypocritical for going after Kobe Bryant while not minding my criticisms of the Christianist anti-gay hate industry.
"Apparently GLAAD's leaders despise critics of homosexuality so much that they fail to see the irony of an 'anti-defamation' group rewarding an abject hater like Joe Jervis who -- rather than engage in civil discourse about ideas -- uses gutter code words like 'Jeebus' to malign opponents." LaBarbera said. "GLAAD's hypocrisy is right up there with homosexual activists lobbying against the hiring of African American Crystal Dixon -- in the name of LGBT 'civil rights, diversity and nondiscrimination.' "Through its Media Award, GLAAD joins itself at the hip with Jervis' brand of malicious, demeaning, anti-religious bigotry," LaBarbera said. "This is the flip side of GLAAD's ongoing campaign to shut down the voices of pro-family Christians -- e.g., ex-"gay" Americans like Richard Cohen -- from being heard in the media. "Americans must learn the truth about GLAAD's absurdly two-faced 'anti-defamation' charade," he said. "This same media-coddled organization that tenaciously pursues anyone who 'defames' homosexuals -- or dares to challenge homosexual activist assumptions -- honors hate-filled extremists like Jervis who cruelly vilify pro-family conservatives, to the point of ridiculing Jesus Christ Himself and 're-naming' a Catholic ex-Senator as the vile by-product of homosexual sodomy."Of course, it's fucking hilarious that Porno Pete, who routinely calls us "perverts" and "deviants" is acting all butthurt over words like "Frothy Mix" and "Jeebus." And contrary to his press release, the latter is not an "atheist term," but actually comes from The Simpsons.
I guess it's about time for my annual plea for forgiveness regarding my lousy email habits. I am very appreciative of all of your news tips and personal messages and I totally suck for not being able to get back to everybody. (Including on Facebook!) But this here website thingy, for now, is a one-man show. I'm pedaling as fast as I can!
Tonight this here website thingy won the first-ever Outstanding Blog category at the 2011 GLAAD Media Awards! The word went out on Twitter hours ago while I was still working the red carpet downstairs and I totally didn't know I'd won until at the after party when I congratulated another winner on the escalator and they said, "Oh, you too!" That sent me running to one of the video screens where the names of the winners were scrolling. Totally worth missing my traditional pre-Black Party disco nap! Many photos of the evening to come!
Ten years ago today I moved to New York City after six years in San Francisco (gay) and eight in Fort Lauderdale (gay). I spent my first year here living in Chelsea (gay), then I lived in Hells Kitchen (gay) for a year, then I spent a year in the heart of the West Village, one block off Christopher Street. Gay, gay, gay. But for the last seven years I've been on the Upper East Side, living a couple of blocks from the tallest building in the above photo. A neighborhood that is SO not gay. I've sometimes pondered why I'm now content to be living in relative remoteness from "the scene" which once had such an irresistible draw, lying to myself that it's inertia that keeps me on the UES. And certainly not, you know, aging. Ahem.
I don't think that on March 18, 2001 I seriously thought I'd be here three years, much less ten, but New York City has this strange power over you in which you become almost afraid to leave, lest you "miss" something. On the other hand, I never really fell in love with this town, not in that heart-stopping "OMG, this place is amaaaazing" way that I did with San Francisco. In fact, I spent my first year here mired in great regret, logging in every morning to look at live traffic shots of the Golden Gate Bridge. But still, everything you hear about NYC is true. It's the most, the least, the best, the worst. It's that funky stew that keeps me here. And probably will for a long time. Decade Two begins today.
