The Power of Porn, by Christopher White

I regularly recieve links and updates from the National Sexuality Resource Center (NSRC) through my work with the local sexual health service providers network, here's one I got today that I thought might raise a few eyebrows.... DR


Retrieved 4/11/09 from http://nsrc.sfsu.edu/dialogues/blog/view/3539/6241?utm_source=NSRC+News&utm_campaign=f910b24a6d-NSRC_Newsletter_November_03_2009_draft_211_3_2009&utm_medium=email

I believe in the Power of PORN!
Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 02:50:09pm
by Christopher White

Today, I'm writing in honor of the the Morality in Media's (MIM) WRAP Week: White Ribbons Against Pornography, which is also supported by one of my favorite anti-gay organizations, Concerned Women for America (CWA). According to the MIM website the event, which is being held all week from October 25 through November 1, "WRAP week is intended to educate the public about the extent of the pornography problem and what can constitutionally be done about it." The CWA goes on to point out the truth about all of us "Pornography advocates" who apparently claim that porn is a "victimless crime" are delusional and spreading lies - I'd like to point out that I am a proud advocate and voracious consumer of pornography, particularly of the online and amatuer produced variety and I have NEVER stated that it is a victimless crime. Mainly, because pornography is no longer a crime in United States - either producing it or viewing it. Of course, I know there are legal issues regarding the production and distribution of porn and that these laws may vary from state to state. I'll let my lawyer friends weigh in on this one.

I want to counter their claims (and misuses of research) with the idea that pornography is actually the opposite of "dangerous" and can actually be beneficial to helping individuals and couples practice lifelong sexuality education and explore their sexual pleasures, fantasies, and desires in a safe and practical way. First, I want to point out that my own research has shown that young men tend to claim that pornography is one of the main resources for understanding the realities of sexual behaviors. That fact may frighten some of you because you might be concerned that what they see in commercial porn may not be truly representative of what happens in real life. To that, I suggest that you give them a little credit for having the critical skills of being able to distinguish between highly produced movies and reality. I would also suggest that this is one more reason why it is so very important that schools and parents provide the necessary education to make sure they have critical thinking skills when it comes to being media consumers. Then, think about it. Where else are young people (or adults for that matter) going to turn to get the graphic depictions that enable understanding of the physics and mechanics of behaviors if not pornography? I am pretty sure there are not many health education books or biology books that provide the actual details of intercourse much less oral sex, anal sex, playing with sex toys, rimming, mutual masturbation, and I could go on and on and on.

Next, I want to ask you to consider the reasons that adults consume pornography. Let's say that it's because we get tired of the same old sexual activities we've been doing since puberty and allow us to consider what the anti-porn people refer to as needing more and more to be able to achieve sexual arousal and pleasure. So what. I think we might want to openly acknowledge that our sexuality and our sex lives change over time, whether it's due to age and changing bodies or because we are in long-term relationships. We crave novelty just as we do in other parts of our lives. Contrary to the idea of porn being dangerous, I suggest that porn is one of the best places to explore your sexuality, to learn new things to try out, and to fulfil your fantasies. It is not an accident that every time a new technology emerges that one of the first things we do is make new, more easily accessible forms of pornography or perhaps that it is actually the desire for new and more easily accessible pornography that drives technology. Most of us love to access porn and want to do so without any fear, shame, or guilt for doing so.

Finally, let's consider ways in which individuals, couples, or even groups of people can have safe, consensual sexual experiences without having to leave the safety and comfort of their own homes. Of course, I am not in anyway suggesting that porn or any kind of online interactions become a replacement for actual live human interactions. But I do think it can be a safe alternative for some people who may want to explore and have a little fun but aren't necessarily interested in picking someone up at a bar, going to a sex club, or cruising in a park or highway rest area. Then there's the individual or couple in a committed relationship who may want to have other types of sexual encounters but have agreed to a boundary that live, in the flesh sexual encounters are off limits. They may choose to engage and interact with others online by chatting, camming, exchanging photos and videos, or even just going online to look at user-generated porn on amateur sites.

For all of these reasons, I think that we ought to consider promoting greater pornography consumption (and production in this user-generated content world we live in) for people of all ages as a way of learning about sex and sexuality throughout our lives and as a way of expressing and exploring our sexualities. We hear a great deal of discussion about the blurring of the virtual and real worlds as more and more people participate in online social networks and other sites on which content is produced by users - photos, blogs, music, videos, and even live video streams from our offices and homes. So why not think the same way when it comes to our sexual lives?

On that note, I encourage all of you to celebrate WRAP by getting off online just a little bit more than you were probably going to do anyway. Have fun!

The Right Words

Retrieved 4/11/09 from http://amerinz.blogspot.com/2009/11/i-dont-have-time-for-this.html

I DON'T HAVE TIME FOR THIS
By AmeriNZ



I don’t have time for this. This is the busiest week of the month for me, and I have a lot of work to do, so I don’t have time for a blog post. But that’s not what I’m talking about: I just don’t have time for the bullshit anymore: Tonight Maine repealed marriage equality.

This came about because our opponents ran a campaign filled with lies and distortions made possible by millions of dollars in out-of-state contributions. This came about because of out-of-state agitators organised by a prominent national organisation quietly backed by the Mormons.

The people fighting for our side were brilliant: They ran a strong grassroots campaign involving thousands of ordinary Maine folks who made phone calls, went door-to-door and did all they could to keep equality in Maine. However, they had one major handicap: They were in the reality-based world where facts and reason matter, something our opponents know little about, but, apparently, didn’t need to.

Our opponents played on people’s fears, as they always do. They played on people’s ignorance, as they always do. They played on people’s prejudice and hatred, as they always do. And for good measure they just made stuff up, as they always do. Our side couldn’t match the millions of dollars the right’s churches collected to promote the lies and hatred, so it was always an uphill fight.

It’s time to make one thing abundantly clear: Our opponents don’t have a minor disagreement with us—they hate us. It’s not the word “marriage” they have a problem with—it’s that we have any rights whatsoever.

In California, they claimed their problem was with “activist judges” (a term they only use when they disagree with a ruling). If “the people” don’t enact it, it’s not legitimate, they said. Then when Maine’s elected legislature enacted marriage equality, and its elected Governor signed it into law, the religious extremists tripped all over themselves to repeal the law the people’s representatives had enacted. Apparently, by “the people” the religious extremists meant only themselves.

In doing so, the religious extremists glossed over the gross immorality of the majority ever being allowed to vote on the rights of the minority, as if it’s ever proper for voters to decide who has full equality and who does not.

Maine’s governor—who formerly opposed same-sex marriage—was a strong advocate. So were many other prominent Mainers. But the national Democratic Party, including President Obama, were absent. The president issued a mild, vague statement but never said, “vote NO”.

The mainstream news media failed miserably. They treated it as an interesting, possibly significant, curiosity. They never once called out the religious bigots on their lies; maybe they’re too frightened of them.

Still, despite all that, we'll win because we’re on the right side of history. Those who oppose us will be remembered like the famous bigots of the near past—Thurmond, Wallace, and so on—and that day is fast approaching.

So, I refuse to give up on America. Despite all the hate, despite all the money and power being deployed against us, despite the evil being done in the name of their god, I know we will win. I have that hope because America gave it to me as a birthright. I have that hope because generations of Americans have fought and died to nurture it. I have that hope because at this moment, all across America, millions of people are hanging their heads in sadness or shame over how GLBT people are being treated—again. I have hope because, as the president once said, “In the unlikely story that is America, there is nothing false about hope.”

An activist friend suggested the song in the video at the top of this post as an antidote for those filled with sadness from this defeat. I love how very gay it is to take courage from a song by Liza—Judy’s daughter—but I also love the sentiment.

This isn’t the end: It’s just the beginning. We will win—if not tomorrow, then the day after that.
Posted by Arthur (AmeriNZ)


AmeriNZ writes some brilliant posts commenting on life in both in New Zealand and the USA, check out his blog at http://amerinz.blogspot.com/

'What I Do' (The Sequel)

Maori Issues In Research - Short Assignment
by Danny Rudd

My name is Danny Rudd, I am a Pakeha New Zealander, born in Rotorua, and I have lived most of my adult life in Christchurch and Wellington. My mother lived her entire life in the central North Island, her parents were both first generation New Zealanders born to English parents. My father was born in Hokitika on the West Coast of the South Island, and spent his early adulthood in Christchurch before moving north to settle in Rotorua. His father was a second generation New Zealander of Scottish heritage, and his mother was a first generation New Zealander born to English parents. There is not a drop of Maori blood in my body, but as a gay man with a half-Maori partner, I believe I can relate somewhat to the concerns of Maori in regards to the range of approaches that have been taken in researching Maori people and communities. The following will outline the research approaches described by Walsh-Tapiata (1997) and Ruwhiu (1999), arguing that for someone of my standing in relationship to Maori, a Maori-Centred research approach is optimal.

Ruwhiu (1999, pp. 44-50) describes seven research approaches that have been taken in studying Maori and their communities, and which together comprise a continuum from disempowering to empowering. The first of these is the Pirating approach (Ruwhiu, 1999, p.44), in which non-Maori researchers make use of Maori informants and then present the resulting knowledge as their own insights without acknowledging the contributions of those informants. This approach was commonly taken by anthropologists and other social researchers in Colonial times, it would be a mistake however to believe this approach is no longer taken.

The second research approach identified by Ruwhiu (1999, p.45) is the Restructuring approach, in which the particular, culturally and geographically bound experiences and understandings of Maori are fitted into the cultural understandings of another group, commonly of the European settlers, downplaying the differences between them and misrepresenting Maori in so doing. Ruwhiu (1999, p.45) notes that while this approach is inherently limiting to the group being studied, it has paved the way for more equitable relations.

The third research approach described by Ruwhiu (1999, pp.45-46) is the Third-Party approach, in which researcher and researched agree upon an aide or supervisor who facilitates the process of information-gathering. Ruwhiu (1999, p.46) notes that this approach is not optimal however, for while it gives credit to all contributors, it does not necessarily benefit both parties equally.

The fourth research approach mentioned is the Mentor/Tiaki approach (Ruwhiu, 1999, p.46), in which a researcher gains the benefit of cultural guidance particular to the community being studied and has access to the community as a participant observer, and is accountable to the community. This approach gives Maori a measure of control over the research outcomes.

The fifth approach is the Whanau/Whangai research approach (Ruwhiu, 1999, pp.46-47), where the researcher effectively becomes a member of the Whanau and is expected to meet the obligations of a Whanau member. This approach benefits both the researcher and the researched, allowing the former a far greater understanding of Maori life in being a full participant observer, and benefitting the latter in that the research is intended to strengthen the Whanau, addressing issues that are relevant to that Whanau. This ‘adoptive’ status is conferred on the researcher by the Whanau or Iwi, and cannot be presumed by the researcher. It is entirely possible that my ethnic background and sexuality may prevent my inclusion in this manner.

The sixth approach is the Power-Sharing/Partnership approach (Ruwhiu, 1999, p.47) which emphasises partnership, participation and protection, observing tikanga or appropriate cultural practice, ensuring that both parties derive equal benefits from the work that is done together. Walsh-Tapiata (1997, p.140) notes that this approach affirms the validity of both Maori and Pakeha methodologies, but asserts that Maori methods are most appropriate in dealing with Maori. This approach may be most appropriate for me where I am working with Maori researchers, but may not always be practical, and arguably will limit my own understanding and my usefulness to Maori communities.

The seventh and most optimal approach is the Empowering Outcome approach, which is focused on researching the questions that Maori want to know about and are concerned with creating beneficial outcomes for those researched (Walsh-Tapiata, 1997, p.139). This approach can be divided into Kaupapa Maori and Maori-Centred research models.

Kaupapa Maori research is specifically focused on culture (Walsh-Tapiata, 1997, p.136), it is that which has Maori life and experience as its subject, which is done by Maori researchers, for the benefit of Maori. Kaupapa Maori research highlights the fundamental importance of Whanaunatanga (the establishment of relationships of trust and respect), Te Reo (language and expression), Tikanga Maori (appropriate custom), Rangatiratanga (the right to self-determination) and Mana Wahine/Mana Tane (acknowledgment and respect for the differences between and contributions of both men and women) to Maori people (Ruwhiu, 1999, p.49-50; Walsh-Tapiata, 1997, p.152). I am excluded from participating in Kaupapa Maori research because I have no Maori blood, however I do not feel excluded in this respect, for while the insistence of Kaupapa Maori researchers that only Maori do research on Maori can certainly be seen as being biologically determinist (Ruwhiu, 1999, p.50), I can sympathise with the sentiments that underlie this position.

I understand that retaining some control over the research that is done on one’s own community is an assertion of the validity of that community’s unique perspective, and affords some protection against researchers unsympathetic to the issues faced by that community. Certainly there has been plenty of research done on queer communities and individuals by ‘outsiders’ which has failed to describe the realities of queer people’s lives and has in fact been used to further marginalise and even criminalise them. Like Maori, lesbian and gay people still face discrimination and issues of invisibility (Baker, 2001, pp.99-100).

I believe however that it is not necessary to experience first-hand the particular form of oppression, discrimination and exploitation faced by a minority to see how unjust it is and work to change it, and indeed there are plenty of Pakeha who sympathise with Maori (Melbourne, 1995, p.16). Maori must seek alliances with other oppressed and marginalised groups across ethnic divisions, as they have many of the same concerns. The insistence that research on Maori communities and Maori people should only be conducted by Maori researchers is inherently limiting, depriving Maori of valuable allies and access to the often greater resources of the non-Maori majority (Poata-Smith, 1996, p.114-115). Maori, particularly, are often materially disadvantaged and thus lacking in resources to challenge the prevailing system (McLennan et al., 2004, pp.208-209; Poata-Smith, 1996, pp.114-115).

It can be argued that circumstances only really improve for minorities when they have allies who are not part of their group, as those ‘alien’ to the wider society often need endorsement from others in the mainstream to be accepted. The application of the Maori-Centred research approach presents an ideal opportunity to forge such alliances. Maori-Centred research shares with Kaupapa Maori research the privileging of Maori experience and world-views, the emphasis on Maori participation at all levels of research, and the expectation that Maori research be conducted in ways that are culturally appropriate to Maori (Ruwhiu, 1999, p.48). It does not, however, necessarily exclude non-Maori, and is therefore the optimum approach for researchers like myself.

Walsh-Tapiata (1997, p.134-135) notes that researchers often find themselves greeted with suspicion and even contempt by Maori, who have been marginalised, misrepresented and exploited by Eurocentric academics in the past. Given my ‘outsider’ status and the various Iwi’s potentially differing responses to the prospect of a non-Maori researcher, I would expect some resistance from Whanau and Iwi, as such it would be appropriate for me to approach the community’s leaders for guidance, and to make myself and my intentions known. I would need to demonstrate an awareness of the validity of Maori understandings and emphasise that the work is to be collaborative, and that the community will be involved in the decision making process at every step if they so choose, including in deciding the intended outcomes of the research.

Key to this process is the principal of Whanaunatanga, the establishment of relationships of respect between myself and the community or individuals I wish to work with, a transparency about who I am, what the research is intended for and how it will benefit them. If possible, the involvement of Maori researchers held in high esteem by the Iwi should be sought, and I should demonstrate some proficiency with Te Reo (Walsh-Tapiata, 1997, p.153). This last may present a particular challenge, however preparedness (perhaps through enrolment in a Maori language course at Te Wananga O Aotearoa or similar provider) may offset this difficulty, and certainly under a Mentor/Tiaki approach some assistance may be provided by the Whanau or iwi. A third and final issue that may cause difficulties, as already noted above, is my identity as a gay man, this may be too problematic in some cases, and yet I would venture that openness, persistence, and the support of a respected takatāpui advocate may overcome this barrier.


 
References
Baker, M. (2001). Families, labour and love: Family diversity in a changing world. Crow’s Nest NSW, Australia: Allen & Unwin.

McLennan, G. Ryan, A. & Spoonley, P. (2004). Exploring Society: Sociology for New Zealand students, 2nd ed. New Zealand: Pearson Education.

Melbourne, H. (1995). Maori sovereignty: The Maori perspective. New Zealand: Hodder Moa Beckett.

Poata-Smith, E. Te Ahu. (1996). He Pokeke Uenuku i Tu Ai: The evolution of contemporary Maori protest. In P. Spoonley, C. Macpherson and D. Pearson (Eds.) Nga Patai: Racism and ethnic relations in Aotearoa/New Zealand (pp. 91-115). New Zealand: Dunmore Press.

Ruwhiu, L. A. (1999). Maori knowledges, philosophies and research. Te Puawaitanga o te ihi me te wehi: The politics of Maori social development policy. New Zealand: Massey University.

Walsh-Tapiata, W. (1997). Te Rangahau: Methodological concerns. Raukawa Social Services: Origins and future directions. Waiho ma te iwi e whakarite. New Zealand: Massey University.

More of 'What I Do'

176.206
Understanding Social Life
by Danny Rudd

"Critically discuss the relationship between the politics of research and how social scientists investigate the social world."

Course Coordinators:
Lesley Patterson, Avril Bell



The research process does not begin and end with the conducting of a study, rather, research inquiries are always situated within political contexts, and may have wide-ranging and possibly unintended consequences. In conducting research, social scientists strive to be objective and systematic, however their attempts to impose scientific rigour in the investigation of social phenomena may ultimately be unrealistic, as the politics of research that come into play may render such attempts at objectivity futile. What then are the politics surrounding research, and how do they constrain or enable research inquiries?

To understand the relationship between the politics of research and how social scientists investigate the social world, we first must define what is meant by the ‘politics of research’ and ‘how social scientists investigate the social world.’ We begin with the latter question: how do social scientists investigate the social world? Commonly employed research techniques include conducting interviews, designing and administering survey questionnaires, engaging in participant observation and making use of well-chosen informers to create ethnographies, life-histories and analyses of recorded communications and other representations by means of content analysis and semiotic analysis (McLennan, Ryan & Spoonley, 2004, pp.12-13). A fundamental difference between these methods is whether the techniques employed are quantitative or qualitative. Quantitative research may be characterised as “based on precise measurement” (Bilton et al., 1996, p.109), concerned primarily with description of the parameters of a population in regards to a variable or variables. Chamberlain (2000, p.290) notes that in quantitative analysis description is seen as a perfectly valid and desirable outcome. Ajwani et al.’s (2003) Decades of Disparity: Ethnic mortality trends in New Zealand 1980 – 1999, which counts and compares mortality across ethnic and gender and age categories in New Zealand, is an example of quantitative analysis.

Qualitative research, on the other hand, can be described as “the nonnumerical examination and interpretation of observations, for the purpose of discovering underlying meanings and patterns of relationships” (Babbie, 2007, p.378). It is concerned more with the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ than with precise measurements. Chamberlain, (2000, p.286) notes an increasing acceptance of qualitative work in sociology, health psychology and other fields, and suggests that this is indicative of “changing notions” of what constitutes research. Qualitative methods include participant observation, content analysis, case-studies, life histories and interviews (Babbie, 2007, p.377), such as those conducted by Hargreaves for her study Constructing families and kinship through donor insemination (2006). What all these quantitative and qualitative methods have in common is that they are critical, reflexive, and disciplined (Bilton et al., 1996, p.100), they are systematic and methodical attempts to accurately describe and understand the social world.

Having now described how social scientists investigate the social world, we turn to the politics of research. What is meant by the ‘politics of research’? Gelles (2007, p.42) uses the term to mean “how research is utilized, abused, and misused in policy and practice”. Similarly Babbie (2007, pp.74, 77) writes that political issues in social research are concerned with the findings of the research and how these are used, noting that “there is probably a political dimension to every attempt to study human social behaviour.” The politics of research therefore refers to how research is applied, and what it means to various interested parties or ‘stake holders’.

Giddens (1997, p.551) notes that “sociological research is rarely of interest only to the intellectual community of sociologists... [but is] ...often disseminated more widely.” Among those interested are members of the public, the government and the media. Social scientists study contentious issues, phenomena that people have much invested in. Members of the public care less about the extinction of a particular forest species or the mechanics of light and sound than they do about their children’s education, their access to healthcare, gender inequalities in the workplace or their likelihood of finding themselves unemployed. The findings of social scientists often inform the ‘common sense’ opinions of the public (Giddens, 1997, p.551), and thus members of the public are stake holders in research.

Politicians are also interested in social research. Social science especially is open to political interference because it is concerned with social life, and this is also the domain of Politics, the arena of policy-making and government (Babbie, 2007, p.79). Politicians need research done; Hodgetts et al. (2004, p.457) note that government can act on issues brought to its attention by social research, as the New Zealand government did with the findings of Decades of Disparity by addressing the health inequalities the report identified as existing between Maori and Pacific populations and the wider population. The authors of the study, Ajwani et al. (2003, p.1), also assert that governments need “reliable and valid information on population health outcomes, how equitably these outcomes are distributed, and the causes or determinants of both the level and distribution of these health outcomes” to reach their health goals. Governments use the information provided by social researchers to decide both where to intervene and how effective these interventions are.

Babbie (2007, p.77) notes that social research is intimately bound up with policy-making and government, and as an example he notes Laumann’s proposed 1987 studies of human sexual behaviour at different stages of life, requested by the National Institutes of Health to direct funding to populations at risk of HIV/AIDS in the United States. Politicians decried this proposed research as being intended to legitimate homosexuality, and diverted the requested public funding to ‘abstinence-only’ sex education for teens. Laumann therefore had to apply for funding from private foundations, and published his findings some years later (The Social Organisation of Sexuality, 1994), but the above is illustrative of the intertwined nature of Politics and social research, and of the fact that politics come into play in research inquiries even before the research is conducted. In this case, the politics of research and funding limited the size and extent of the study.

Another example of the intersection of Politics and research given by Babbie (2007, pp.77-78) is census data, which is collected every few years in different states around the world and used to determine proportionate representation. Parties that have reliable voting blocks (for instance, the Democrats in the United States, who rely on the fact that the urban poor overwhelmingly vote Democratic) are resistant to changes in counting or method, as this might weaken their position. Political parties are important stake holders in social research.

One of the most important ways that social research findings are disseminated is through the news media. Hodgetts et al. (2004, p. 458, 470) note that policy makers are part of the audience of the mediated reporting of research findings, and argue that addressing media coverage of research is important because the media is an important influence on policy formation, as politicians take the content of media reports as a good indication of what the public understands and supports. Hodgetts et al. (2004, pp.455, 458 & 470) note that in New Zealand as in other former colonial societies, media and government are dominated by the heirs to the colonising power (in New Zealand, by Pakeha), and there is a real media reluctance to report research findings that challenge the status quo and advocate societal change, with the effect that such findings are often misrepresented by the media [as was the case with the Decades of Disparity report, which media commentators characterised as attributing Maori and Pacific peoples’ greater ill-health and higher mortality to their own ineptitude and carelessness when the study itself had stressed structural explanations]; this means that researchers “need to become more actively involved in issue management”. Babbie (2007, p.80), citing Gans (2002), notes that social scientists have an obligation to speak out on social issues, because social scientists have in-depth knowledge of society and social inequalities, and can therefore shed much light on contentious issues.

This position is shared by Marxists and Neo-Marxists, who often believe that research should inspire and contribute to activism for social change, that research which stops at description and explanation of social phenomenon can be used to legitimate or justify existing inequalities, and as such it is irresponsible for researchers to ignore the social consequences of their research (Babbie, 2007, p.75). Certainly social researchers often become deeply committed to and involved with civil rights movements, such as the anti-segregation movements in the United States (Babbie, 2007, p.76).

Babbie (2007, pp.74-75) notes that in research “there are no formal codes of accepted political conduct” as there are ethical codes, but that it is generally accepted that a researcher’s own political views should be kept out of their research, they should try to be objective, to aspire to Weber’s value-free sociology. This means avoiding the temptation to distort one’s own research findings or use “shoddy techniques” to further one’s own political agenda, as is occasionally the case. Exodus International in the United States, for example, is known for publishing substandard articles and misrepresenting the research of others to achieve their political goals (Grace, 2008, p.547). But perhaps social scientists cannot in fact be objective, as human beings studying the behaviour of other human beings; if so, then perhaps the most that can be achieved is a degree of intersubjectivity, whereby anyone, regardless of their personal political views, should be able to come to the same conclusions using the appropriate techniques (Babbie, 2007, p.75).

Postmodern perspectives, which consider all claims to ‘truth’ equally valid, are increasingly being adopted by social researchers, and a principle tenet of postmodern social analysis is the assumption that objectivity is impossible (Bilton et al., 1996, pp.102, 129, 610). Babbie (2007, pp.76-77, 78) argues that “social research in relation to contested social issues simply cannot remain antiseptically objective,” and notes that doing research on hot topics opens the researcher up to a great deal of backlash. A researcher can come under personal attack from people who feel threatened by their findings, even within academia, other researchers who are attached to established wisdom or ideology can savage the work of others. It can be difficult, in such contexts, not to overstate or underplay the significance of one’s findings, and given the time and effort that has gone into the research process it is understandable that researchers may be defensive about their work. Impartiality in regards to one’s work is difficult, if not impossible. And yet it remains true that conflict in science actually benefits in that it serves as a source of inspiration, directs inquiry and forces researchers to refine their arguments, (Babbie, 2007, p.80).

In sum, there is more to research than just conducting a study; the research process is at all stages bound up in political concerns. What is eventually studied is influenced from the outset by the researcher’s own biases and interests, as well as by practical limitations such as securing adequate funding. In conducting the actual research, the researcher must be careful to remain as intellectually honest and objective as possible, and yet we should be aware that this may prove difficult and that certainly in some cases, the researcher’s personal political views have influenced their findings and the presentation of those findings. Researchers should be especially aware of these concerns where the research or its findings are particularly contentious. In conducting social research, they should be aware also that their findings may become part of wider public discourse, informing public opinion and government policy, and as such, that their research may have very real consequences for people in society. Further, researchers should be aware that their research is subject to interpretation by media and that their findings may be misinterpreted or perhaps appropriated by interest groups that will misrepresent them, and therefore be prepared to engage with media to minimise such occurrences.


References

Ajwani, S., Blakely, T., Robson, B., Tobias, M. & Bonne, M. (2003) Decades of Disparity: Ethnic mortality trends in New Zealand 1980 - 1999. Wellington, New Zealand: Ministry of Health & University of Otago [extracts], pp.i-14, 45-54.

Babbie, E. (2007). The Practice of Social Research (11th Ed.), Belmont, California: Thomson Wadsworth.

Bilton, T., Bonnett, K., Jones, P., Sheard, K., Stanworth, M., Webster, A. (1996). Introductory Sociology, (3rd Ed). Macmillan Press: London.

Chamberlain, K. (2000). Methodolatry and qualitative health research. Journal of Health Psychology, 5(3), 285-296.

Gelles, R. J. (2007). The politics of research: The use, abuse, and misuse of social science data – the cases of Intimate Partner Violence. Family Court Review, 45(1), 42–51.
Retrieved 10/09/09 from
http://www.familieslink.co.uk/download/july07/Politics%20of%20research.pdf

Giddens, A. (1997). Sociology (3rd Ed). Polity Press: Cambridge.

Grace, A. (2008). The Charisma and Deception of Reparative Therapies: When Medical Science Beds Religion. Journal of Homosexuality, 55(4), 545-580.
Retrieved 20/09/09 from
http://pdfserve.informaworld.com.ezproxy.massey.ac.nz/114641_751308139_906684075.pdf

Hargreaves, K. (2006). Constructing families and kinship through donor insemination. Sociology of Health & Illness, 28(3), 261-283.

Hodgetts, D., Masters, B., & Robertson, N. (2004). Media coverage of ‘Decades of Disparity’ in ethnic mortality in Aotearoa. Journal of Community and
Applied Social Psychology, 14,455-472.

McLennan, G., Ryan, A. & Spoonley, P. (2004). Exploring Society: Sociology for New Zealand students (2nd Ed.), Pearson Education: New Zealand,
pp. 77-95.

Danny's Angry Letter

[Submitted to CHAFF and published 12th October 09]

Leah was smart, beautiful, hilarious, cheeky, warm, friendly, generous, outgoing, popular and passionate. She was also gay, and very recently she committed suicide. Her community is devastated, we miss her terribly, and we’re struggling to come to grips with what happened, searching for answers to heal our broken hearts and finding few. I suspect it will be a long time before our hearts heal.

Bernie was gentle, witty, considerate, daring, charming, fun-loving and funny. He too was gay, and he killed himself a couple of months ago. His friends are still reeling from the shock, and grieving the loss.

The lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities in New Zealand and around the world are disproportionately represented in suicide statistics. We are more than three times as likely to commit suicide as our heterosexual peers. We live in a world with few visible role models, we often grow up always looking over our shoulders to make sure we’re not being noticed, laughed at, jeered at and threatened. We sometimes experience complete rejection from lifelong friends and from our families when we finally try living honestly and openly as ourselves, and in some towns and rural areas we have no one to share our struggles with. And sometimes, we are the victims of horrific violent assaults.

We live in a world that tells us we’re pathetic, sick, unwanted, un-thought-of, unimportant. We hear you, Girl in the Library, when you gossip with your friends and you laugh about some guy you know, calling him a ‘fucking faggot.’ We hear you, Dude on the Bus, when you laugh with your mates, saying that [insert object of humiliation here] is ‘gaay!’ You either think we’re not there, that it doesn’t matter, or worse, that those words really do mean stupid, lame, disgusting, pathetic and worthless. You don’t go around saying ‘that’s just Maori!’ or ‘He’s such a nigger,’ cos you know that hurts people. So why do it to us? Every time you say it you tell yourself, the world around you, and maybe some lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender person who might be sitting right next to you that anyone not heterosexual isn’t worth the same human decency you extend to others.

My 10 yr old cousin Reece is gentle, clever, kind, funny and cheerful, he already knows he’s gay, and his mother tells me he comes home crying from school more often than not.

So stop it. Just fucking stop it, ok?

DR

Kicking A Few Hornet's Nests

This guy speaks my language. Here's Tim McCarthy, the founding member of President Obama’s National Leadership Council and Director of the Human Rights and Social Movements Program at Harvard, the video comes via bigthink.com

It Has To Be Said...

The Strange, Strange Story of the Gay Fascists
By Johann Hari
Retrieved 02/09/09 from
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/the-strange-strange-story_b_136697.html

The news that Jorg Haider - the Austrian fascist leader - spent his final few hours in a gay bar with a hot blond has shocked some people. It hasn't shocked me. This is a taboo topic for a gay left-wing man like me to touch, but there has always been a weird, disproportionate overlap between homosexuality and fascism. Take a deep breath; here goes.

Some 10,000 gay people were slaughtered in the Nazi death-camps. Many more were humiliated, jailed, deported, ethnically cleansed, or castrated. One gay survivor of the camps, LD Classen von Neudegg, has written about his experiences. A snapshot: "Three men had tried to escape one night. They were captured, and when they returned they had the word 'homo' scrawled across their clothing. They were placed on a block and whipped. Then they were forced to beat a drum and cheer, 'Hurrah! We're back! Hurrah!' Then they were hanged." This is one of the milder events documented in his book.

So the idea of a gay fascist seems ridiculous. Yet when the British National Party - our own home-grown Holocaust-denying bigots - announced it was fielding an openly gay candidate in the European elections this June, dedicated followers of fascism didn't blink. The twisted truth is that gay men have been at the heart of every major fascist movement that ever was - including the gay-gassing, homo-cidal Third Reich. With the exception of Jean-Marie Le Pen, all the most high-profile fascists in Europe in the past thirty years have been gay. It's time to admit something. Fascism isn't something that happens out there, a nasty habit acquired by the straight boys. It is - in part, at least - a gay thing, and it's time for non-fascist gay people to wake up and face the marching music.

Just look at our own continent over the past decade. Dutch fascist Pim Fortuyn ran on blatantly racist anti-immigrant platform, describing Islam as "a cancer" and "the biggest threat to Western civilisation today." Yet with two little fluffy dogs and a Mamma complex, he was openly, flamboyantly gay. When accused by a political opponent of hating Arabs, he replied, "How can I hate Arabs? I sucked one off last night."

Jorg Haider blasted Austria's cosy post-Nazi politics to rubble in 2000 when his neo-fascist 'Freedom Party' won a quarter of the vote and joined the country's government as a coalition partner. Several facts always cropped up in the international press coverage: his square jaw, his muscled torso, his SS-supporting father, his rabid anti-Semitism, his hatred of immigrants, his description of Auschwitz and Dachau as "punishment centres". A few newspapers mentioned that he is always surrounded by fit, fanatical young men. A handful went further and pointed out that several of these young men are openly gay. Then one left-wing German paper broke the story everybody else was hinting at. They alleged Haider is gay.

Rumours of an Indian waiter with "intimate details" of Haider's body broke into the press. The Freedom Party's general manager Gerald Miscka quickly quit, amid accusations that he was Haider's lover. Haider's close gay friend Walter Kohler - who has been photographed showing off a holstered pistol while Haider chuckled - declared his opposition to outing politicians. Haider - who was married and has two children - kept quiet while his functionaries denied the rumours. The revelation that he died after leaving a gay bar suggests these rumours were true.

On and on it goes. If you inter-railed across Europe, only stopping with gay fascists, there aren't many sights you'd miss. France's leading post-war fascist was Edouard Pfieffer, who was not batting for the straight side. Germany's leading neo-Nazi all through the eighties was called Michael Kuhnen; he died of AIDS in 1991 a few years after coming out. Martin Lee, author of a study of European fascism, explains, "For Kuhnen, there was something supermacho about being a Nazi, as well as being a homosexual, both of which enforced his sense of living on the edge, of belonging to an elite that was destined to make an impact. He told a West German journalist that homosexuals were 'especially well-suited for our task, because they do not want ties to wife, children and family.'"

And it wouldn't be long before your whistlestop tour arrived in Britain. At first glance, our Nazis seem militantly straight. They have tried to disrupt gay parades, describe gay people as "evil", and BNP leader Nick Griffin reacted charmingly to the bombing of the Admiral Duncan pub in 1999 with a column saying, "The TV footage of gay demonstrators [outside the scene of carnage] flaunting their perversion in front of the world's journalists showed just why so many ordinary people find these creatures repulsive."

But scratch to homophobic surface and there's a spandex swastika underneath. In 1999, Martin Webster, a former National Front organiser and head honcho in the British fascist movement, wrote a four-page pamphlet detailing his 'affair' with Nick Griffin. "Griffin sought out intimate relations with me," openly-gay Webster explained, "in the late 1970s. He was twenty years younger than me." Ray Hill, who infiltrated the British fascist movement for twelve years to gather information for anti-fascist groups, says it's all too plausible. Homosexuality is "extremely prevalent" in the upper echelons of the British far right, and at one stage in the 1980s nearly half of the movement's organisers were gay, he claims.

Gerry Gable, editor of the anti-fascist magazine 'Searchlight', explains, "I have looked at Britain's Nazi groups for decades and this homophobic hypocrisy has been there all the time. I cannot think of any organisation on the extreme right that hasn't attacked people on the grounds of their sexual preference and at the same time contained many gay officers and activists."

Griffins' alleged gay affair would stand in a long British fascist tradition. The leader of the skinhead movement all through the 1970s was a crazed, muscled thug called Nicky Crane. He was the icon of a reactionary backlash against immigrants, feminism and the 'hippy' lifetsyle of the 1960s. His movement's emphasis on conformity to a shaven, dehumanised norm resembled classical fascist movements; Crane soon became a campaigner and leading figure in the National Front. Oh, and he was gay. Before he died of AIDS in the mid-1980s, Crane came out and admitted he had starred in many gay porn videos. Just before he died in 1986, he was allowed to steward a Gay Pride march in London, even though he still said he was "proud to be a fascist."

The rubber-soled friction between gay fascists and progressive British gay people sparked into anger in 1985 when the Gay Skinhead Movement organised a disco at London's Gay Centre. Several lesbians in particular objected to the "invasion" of the centre. They felt that the cult of "real men" and hypermasculine thugs was stirring up the most base feelings "in the very place, the gay movement, where you would least expect them."

And this Gaystapo has an icon to revere, an alternative Fuhrer to worship: the lost gay fascist leader Ernst Rohm. Along with Adolf Hitler, Rohm was the founding father of Nazism. Born to conservative Bavarian civil servants in 1887, Ernst Rohm's life began - in his view - in the "heroic" trenches of the First World War. Like so many of the generation who formed the Nazi Party, he was nurtured by and obsessed with the homoerotic myth of the trenches - heroic, beautiful boys prepared to die for their brothers and their country.

He emerged from the war with a bullet-scarred face and a reverence for war. As he put it in his autobiography, "Since I am an immature and wicked man, war and unrest appeal to me more than the good bourgeois order." After being disbanded, he tried half-heartedly to get a foothold in civilian life, but he saw it as alien, bourgeois, boring. He had no political beliefs, only prejudices - particularly hatred of Jews. Historian Joachim Fest describes Rohm's generation of alienated, demobbed young men humiliated by defeat as "agents of a permanent revolution without any revolutionary idea of the future, only a wish to eternalize the values of the trenches."

It was Rohm who first spotted the potential of a soap-box ranter called Adolf Hitler. He saw him as the demagogue he needed to mobilize support for his plan to overthrow democracy and establish a "soldier's state" where the army ruled untrammelled. He introduced the young fascist to local politicians and military leaders; they knew him for many years as "Rohm's boy." Gay historian Frank Rector notes, "Hitler was, to a substantial extent, Rohm's protégé." Rohm integrated Hitler into his underground movement to overthrow the Weimar Republic.

Rohm's blatant, out homosexuality seems bizarre now, given the gay genocide that was to follow. He talked openly about his fondness for gay bars and Turkish baths, and was known for his virility. He believed that gay people were superior to straights, and saw homosexuality as a key principle of his proposed Brave New Fascist Order. As historian Louis Snyder explains, Rohm "projected a social order in which homosexuality would be regarded as a human behaviour pattern of high repute... He flaunted his homosexuality in public and insisted his cronies do the same. He believed straight people weren't as adept at bullying and aggression as homosexuals, so homosexuality was given a high premium in the SA." They promoted an aggressive, hypermasculine form of homosexuality, condemning "hysterical women of both sexes", in reference to feminine gay men.

This belief in the superiority of homosexuality had a strong German tradition that grew up at the turn of the twentieth century around Adolf Brand, publisher of the country's first gay magazine. You could call it 'Queer as Volk': they preached that gay men were the foundation of all nation-states and represented an elite, warrior caste that should rule. They venerated the ancient warrior cults of Sparta, Thebes and Athens.

Rohm often referred to the ancient Greek tradition of sending gay solider couples into battle, because they were believed to be the most ferocious fighters. The famous pass of Thermopylae, for example was held by 300 soldiers - who consisted of 150 gay couples. In its early years, the SA - Hitler and Rohm's underground army - was seen as predominantly gay. Rohm assigned prominent posts to his lovers, making Edmund Heines his deputy and Karl Ernst the SA commander in Berlin. The organisation would sometimes meet in gay bars. The gay art historian Christian Isermayer said in an interview, "I got to know people in the SA. They used to throw riotous parties even in 1933... I once attended one. It was quite well-behaved but thoroughly gay. But then, in those days, the SA was ultra-gay."

On June 30th 1934, Rohm was awoken in a Berlin hotel by Hitler himself. He sprang to his feet and saluted, calling, "Heil Mein Fuhrer!" Hitler said simply, "You are under arrest," and with that he left the room, giving orders for Rohm to be taken to Standelheim prison. He was shot that night. Rohm was the most high-profile kill in the massacre known as 'the Night of the Long Knives'.

Rohm had been suspected by Hitler of disloyalty, but his murder began a massive crackdown on gay people. Heinrich Himmler, head of the Gestapo, described homosexuality as "a symptom of degeneracy that could destroy our race. We must return to the guiding Nordic principle: extermination of degenerates."

German historian Lothar Machtan argues that Hitler had Rohm - and almost all of the large number of gay figures within the SA - killed to silence speculation about his own homosexual experiences. His 'evidence' for Hitler being gay is shaky and has been questioned by many historians, although some of his findings are at least suggestive. A close friend of Hitler's during his teenager years, August Kubizek, alleged a "romantic" affair between them. Hans Mend, a despatch rider who served alongside Hitler in the First World War, claimed to have seen Hitler having sex with a man. Hitler was certainly very close to several gay men, and never seems to have had a normal sexual relationship with a woman, not even his wife, Eva Braun.

Rudolph Diels, the founder of the Gestapo, recorded some of Hitler's private thoughts on homosexuality. "It had destroyed ancient Greece, he said. Once rife, it extended its contagious effects like an ineluctable law of nature to the best and most manly of characters, eliminating from the breeding pool the very men the Volk most needs." This idea - that homosexuality is 'contagious' and, implicitly, tempting - is revealing.

Rohm is venerated on the Homo-Nazi sites that have bred on the internet like germs in a wound. They have names like Gays Against Semitism (with the charming acronym GAS), and the Aryan Resistance Corps (ARC). Their Rohmite philosophy is simple: while white men are superior to other races, gay men are "the masters of the Master Race". They alone are endowed with the "capacity for pure male bonding" and the "superior intellect" that is needed for "a fascist revolution." The ARC even organises holiday "get-togethers" for its members where "you can relax amongst the company of our fellow white brothers."

So it's fairly easy to establish that gay people are not inoculated from fascism. They have often been at its heart. This begs the bigger question: why? How did gay people - so often victims of oppression and hate - become integral to the most hateful and evil political movement of all? Is it just an extreme form of self-harm, the political equivalent to the gay kids who slash their own arms to ribbons out of self-hate?

Gay pornographer and film-maker Bruce LaBruce has one explanation. He claims that "all gay porn today is implictly fascist. Fascism is in our bones, because it's all about glorifying white male supremacy and fetishizing domination, cruelty, power and monstrous authority figures." He has tried to explore the relationship between homosexuality and fascism in his movies, beginning with 'No Skin Off My Ass' in 1991. In his disturbing 1999 film "Skin Flick', a bourgeois gay couple - one black, one white - are sexually terrorised by a gang of gay skinheads who beat off to 'Mein Kampf' and beat up 'femmes'. He implies that bourgeois gay norms quickly break down to reveal a fascist lurking underneath; the movie ends with the black character being raped in front of his half-aroused white lover, as the racist gang chant, "Fuck the monkey."

I decided to track down some gay fascists and ask them directly. Wyatt Powers, director of the ARC, says, "I always knew in my heart racist and gay were both morally right. I don't see any conflict between them. It's only the Jew-owned gay press that tries to convince us that racialism is the same thing as homophobia. You can be an extreme nationalist and gay without any contradiction at all."

One comment board on a gay racist website goes even further into racist lunacy. One gay man from Ohio says, "Even if you are gay and white, or retarded and white, YOU ARE WHITE, BOTTOM LINE! Instead of letting the white race go extinct because of worthless races such as the Africans or Mexicans popping out literally millions of babies a day, we have to fight this fucked up shit they are doing. They are raping our country." It's true that racism and homophobia do not necessarily overlap - but as Rabbi Bernard Melchman explains, "Homophobia and anti-Semitism are so often part of the same disease." Racists are usually homophobic. Even after reading all their web rantings, I didn't feel any closer to understanding why so many gay men ally themselves with people who will almost always turn on them in the end, just as the Nazis did.

Gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell has a sensitive and intriguing explanation. "There are many reasons for this kind of thing," he says. "Some of them are in denial. They are going for hyper-masculinity, the most extreme possible way of being a man. It's a way of ostentatiously rejecting the perceived effeminacy of the homosexual 'Other'. These troubled men have a simple belief in their minds: 'Straight men are tough. Queers are weak. Therefore if I'm tough I can't be queer.' It's a desperate way of proving their manhood."

'Searchlight' magazine - the bible of the British anti-fascist movement, with moles in every major far-right organisation - offers an alternative explanation. "Generally condemned by a society that continues to be largely hostile to gays, some men may find refuge and a new power status in the far right," one of their writers has explained. "Through adherence to the politics espoused by fascist groups, a new identity emerges - one where they aren't outcasts, because they are White Men, superior to everyone else. They render the gay part of their identity invisible - or reject the socially less acceptable parts, like being feminine - while vaunting what they see as superior."

But there's another important question: will fascist movements inevitably turn on gay people? In the case of the Nazis, it seems to have been fairly arbitrary; Hitler's main reason for killing Rohm was unrelated to his sexuality. From my perspective as a progressive-minded leftie, all fascism is evil; but should all gay people see it as inimical to their interests? Is it possible to have a gay fascist who wasn't acting against his own interests? Fascism is often defined as "a political ideology advocating hierarchical government that systematically denies equality to certain groups." It's true that this hierarchy could benefit gay people at the expense of, say, black people. But given the prevalence of homophobia, isn't that - even for people who don't see fascism as inherently evil - a terrible risk to take? Won't a culture that turns viciously on one minority get around to gay people in the end? This seems, ultimately, to be the lesson of Ernst Rohm's pitiful, squalid little life.

The growing awareness of the role gay men play in fascist movements has been abused by some homophobes. In an especially nutty work of revisionist history called 'The Pink Swastika', the 'historian' Scott Lively tries to blame gay people for the entire Holocaust, and describes the murder of gay men in the camps as merely "gay-on-gay violence." A typical website commenting on the book claims absurdly, "The Pink Swastika shows that there was far more brutality, rape, torture and murder committed against innocent people by Nazi homosexuals than there even was against homosexuals themselves."

Yet we can't allow these madmen to prevent a period of serious self-reflection from the gay movement. If Bruce LaBruce is right, many of the mainstream elements of gay culture - body worship, the lauding of the strong, a fetish for authority figures and cruelty - provide a swamp in which the fascist virus can thrive. Do some gay people really still need to learn that fascists will not bring on a Fabulous Solution for gay people, but a Final Solution for us all?

Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent newspaper.

Charming...

Is it wrong that I find this guy attractive?? ;)

This video comes to you courtesy of The Gay Atheist at http://www.thegayatheist.com/2009/08/more-video-of-pastor-anderson.html

Squicked

squick
1. Noun. The physical sense of repulsion upon encountering a concept or situation one finds disgusting.
2. Noun. A situation or concept which engenders this reaction.
3. Verb, transitive. To cause someone to have this reaction.
4. Verb, intransitive. To experience this reaction.

The concept of the "squick" differs from the concept of "disgust" in that "squick" refers purely to the physical sensation of repulsion, and does not imply a moral component.

Stating that something is "disgusting" implies a judgement that it is bad or wrong. Stating that something "squicks you" is merely an observation of your reaction to it, but does not imply a judgement that such a thing is universally wrong.

DO NOT WATCH THE FOLLOWING VIDEO IF YOU ARE EASILY SQUICKED!! I POST IT MERELY FOR HILARITY'S SAKE!!



Retrieved from http://www.somegreybloke.com/

Also...

It's the 40th Anniversary of the Stonewall riots today. Viva la resistance, etc etc.

Cos I Can't Actually Be Bothered Writing Anything...

Cracker Lilo found this very good post about the Gay Generation Gap...

The Gay Generation Gap
Forty years after Stonewall, the gay movement has never been more united. So why do older gay men and younger ones often seem so far apart?
From http://nymag.com/guides/summer/2009/57467/
By Mark Harris Published Jun 21, 2009

This week, tens of thousands of gay people will converge on New York City for Pride Week, and tens of thousands of residents will come out to play as well. Some of us will indulge in clubbing and dancing, and some of us will bond over our ineptitude at both. Some of us will be in drag and some of us will roll our eyes at drag. We will rehash arguments so old that they’ve become a Pride Week staple; for instance, is the parade a joyous expression of liberation, or a counterproductive freak show dominated by needy exhibitionists and gawking news cameras? Other debates will be more freshly minted: Is President Obama’s procrastinatory approach to gay-rights issues an all-out betrayal, or just pragmatic incrementalism? We’ll have a good, long, energizing intra-family bull session about same-sex marriage and the New York State Senate, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, Project Runway and Adam Lambert.

And at some point, a group of gay men in their forties or fifties will find themselves occupying the same bar or park or restaurant or subway car or patch of pavement as a group of gay men in their twenties. We will look at them. They will look at us. We will realize that we have absolutely nothing to say to one another.

And the gay generation gap will widen.

You hear the tone of brusque dismissiveness in private conversations, often fueled by a couple of drinks, and you see the irritation become combustible when it’s protected by Internet anonymity. On the well-trafficked chat site DataLounge, a self-described repository of “gay gossip, news, and pointless bitchery,” there’s no topic, from politics to locker-room etiquette to the proper locations for wearing cargo pants and flip-flops, that cannot quickly devolve into “What are you, 17?”–“What are you, some Stonewall-era relic?” sniping. And some not entirely dissimilar rhetoric is showing up in loftier media. In April, a 25-year-old right-of-center gay journalist argued in a Washington Post op-ed that many gay-rights groups are starting to outlive their purpose, and chided older activists for being stuck in “a mind-set that sees the plight of gay people as one of perpetual struggle … their life’s work depends on the notion that we are always and everywhere oppressed.” The scathing message-board replies pounded him at least as hard for his age as for his politics. “You twentysomething gays seem to think being out equals acceptance … Don’t be so quick to dissolve the organizations that made it possible for you to be so naïve,” wrote one reader. Another, blunter response: “Forgive me for not falling all over myself to do exactly what an inexperienced 25-year-old decrees … Don’t waltz in and start barking orders, little boy.”

Public infighting is a big minority-group taboo—it’s called taking your business out in the street. And it may seem strange to note this phenomenon at a juncture that, largely because of the fight for gay marriage, has been marked by impressive solidarity. But let’s have a look. Here’s the awful stuff, the deeply unfair (but maybe a little true) things that many middle-aged gay men say about their younger counterparts: They’re shallow. They’re silly. They reek of entitlement. They haven’t had to work for anything and therefore aren’t interested in anything that takes work. They’re profoundly ungrateful for the political and social gains we spent our own youth striving to obtain for them. They’re so sexually careless that you’d think a deadly worldwide epidemic was just an abstraction. They think old-fashioned What do we want! When do we want it! activism is icky and noisy. They toss around terms like “post-gay” without caring how hard we fought just to get all the way to “gay.”

And here’s the awful stuff they throw back at us—at 45, I write the word “us” from the graying side of the divide—a completely vicious slander (except that some of us are a little like this): We’re terminally depressed. We’re horrible scolds. We gas on about AIDS the way our parents or grandparents couldn’t stop talking about World War II. We act like we invented political action, and think the only way to accomplish something is by expressions of fury. We say we want change, but really what we want is to get off on our own victimhood. We’re made uncomfortable, or even jealous, by their easygoing confidence. We’re grim, prim, strident, self-ghettoizing, doctrinaire bores who think that if you’re not gloomy, you’re not worth taking seriously. Also, we’re probably cruising them.

To some extent, a generation gap in any subgroup with a history of struggle is good news, because it’s a sign of arrival. If you have to spend every minute fighting against social opprobrium, religious hatred, and governmental indifference, taking the time to grumble about generational issues would be a ridiculously off-mission luxury; there are no ageists in foxholes. But today, with the tide of history and public opinion finally (albeit fitfully) moving our way, we can afford to step back and exercise the same disrespect for our elders (or our juniors) as heterosexuals do. That’s progress, of a kind.

These unnuanced generalizations, as everyone who makes them quickly notes, do a gross injustice to both groups. The gay community—or more accurately, communities—is hardly monolithic, and its divisions, not just of age but of race, gender, region, and income, are too complex to paint with a broad brush. And Pride Week—which this year falls on the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Inn riots—is a reminder that we have always been able to unite when faced with either a common cause or a common enemy. It’s when we’re not on the front lines that tensions flare. “On its simplest level,” says Jon Barrett, 40, the editor-in-chief of the 42-year-old gay magazine The Advocate, “we think they’re naïve. And they think we’re old.”

Even on those front lines, it’s a complex moment. Last November, eight days after the election, I found myself marching with thousands of gay men, lesbians, and friends of the cause from Lincoln Center to Columbus Circle to protest the passage of Proposition 8 in California. The air was charged; many of us were eager to call out the enemy—a well-organized, well-financed coalition of conservatives who were using churches as political-action bases designed to roll back civil rights for gay Americans. And our response was anger. We held up signs with slogans like TAX THIS CHURCH! We yelled ourselves hoarse.

But the demeanor of many of the young attendees felt unfamiliar to older protesters. They were smiling more than seething, and I noticed that many of their picket signs—LET ME GET MARRIED, LOVE ISN’T PREJUDICED, NYC LOVES GAY MARRIAGE—were more like let-the-sunshine-in expressions than clenched fists. Shouting did not come as naturally to them.


“There’s nothing duller than a young gay man whose curiosity about the world doesn’t appear to extend past his iPod.”


Activism is an unlikely realm in which to spot a generation gap; by definition, a rally attracts people who identify themselves by a shared goal. But it’s sometimes an uneasy union; the march marked an encounter between age groups that, although part of the same community, had previously spent little time together. And a difference in outlook was unmistakable. “After Prop 8 passed, a tremendous number of young people who had never been to a protest before wanted to release that energy,” says Corey Johnson, the event’s 27-year-old organizer. “And that night was a great example of the two generations being bridged in a productive way. But my impression is that there is a difference. Young people are, I think, upset, but it’s not with the level of anger that a lot of older folks feel, and perhaps there’s more hopefulness involved.”

To many young gay people, the passage of Prop 8 was shocking but not alarming; it has jolted them into action, but one suspects it’s out of a Milk-fed belief that identity-politics activism can be ennobling and cool. What doesn’t seem to be driving them is fear; their cheerful conviction that history is going their way seems unshakable compared to ours. That can lead to callousness on both sides; we patronizingly warn them that their optimism is dangerous; they patronizingly tell us that we’re too embittered by our own past struggles to see the big picture.

The notion that anger no longer has a primary place in the gay-rights movement can feel awfully uninformed to anyone raised on the protests of the late eighties, when say-it-loud outrage was one of the movement’s only effective weapons. To some of those whose identities as both homosexuals and activists were forged in the early years of the AIDS epidemic, this new aura of serenity is way too “Kumbaya.” It’s hard to overstate the centrality of the AIDS crisis in any gay generation gap (the divide between those who are currently 45 and their elders once yawned at least as wide). If you want to know where you stand in gay history, ask yourself where you were in 1982, when the disease took hold in public consciousness. If you were already sexually active by then and you’re still here to read this, you are someone who surely knows that fury has its uses. If you were in your teens, wondering how to take even your first steps into life as a gay man in a world in which a single encounter could become a death sentence, you understand fear, and its warping effects down through the decades. And if you were a kid, you grew up seeing AIDS as an unhappy fact of life.

But what about the ever-growing cohort of gay men who weren’t even born in 1982? For most of them, AIDS is not their past but the past. No wonder some of us feel frustrated; when we complain that young gay men don’t know their history, what we’re really saying is that they don’t know our history—that once again, we feel invisible, this time within our own ranks.

Were we that uninterested when we were that young? Actually, no, we weren’t; we were thirsty to acquire the vast range of knowledge, tastes, and encoded references that seemed to derive from some mysterious User’s Guide to Homosexuality, because even if we then rejected them, they still constituted a lingua franca (in an era well before LGBT studies programs or even many books on gay history made that kind of information easily accessible). Now, a familiarity with those movies, those plays, and those books will likely get you branded an “old queen” by people for whom “old” is by far the worse of those two epithets (unfortunately, a morbid fear of aging is one of the few ideas we seem to have done a good job instilling in the young).

For gay men who came of age 25 years ago in a tougher environment, knowing your (sub)cultural iconography was not only a way of connecting to past generations but a means of defiantly reorganizing the world, of asserting your right to literally see, hear, and perceive things differently. The need to hide yourself was thus transformed into the privilege of joining a private club with a private language. But to many younger gay men who grew up with gay public figures, fictional characters, and references, it’s a dead language—a calcified gallery of Judy Garland references and All About Eve bon mots that excludes them as much as it does the straight world.

So they react, as they react to many things, with a pose of bored indifference. Which is, of course, infuriating: There’s nothing duller than a young gay man who ornaments his ignorance with attitude and whose curiosity about the world doesn’t appear to extend past his iPod, certain that anything not already within his firsthand experience is by definition antiquated. But once we start blaming gay twentysomethings for not having gone through what we did, we turn into sour old reactionaries telling ourselves self-flattering lies about how misery builds character. Worse, we may in fact be doing damage. According to a 2005 report by the Institute for Gay and Lesbian Strategic Studies, our “emphasis on suffering reflects not the current reality of many LGBT adolescents so much as recollections of previous generations’ own ‘horror’ … LGBT adults’ residual fears and pain may be acting to magnify the real difficulties of LGBT teens.” Put simply, we talk too much, telling nightmare stories about AIDS and the Reagan administration when we should be listening—and then we get angry that they’re not listening to us.

“We’re just like our parents,” says a colleague of mine who came out right after college, in the mid-eighties. “We fought really hard so that our children would have things easier than we did, and now we resent them for it and sit around complaining that they lack character because they had everything too easy.”

That parent-child analogy also points to a larger cultural change, one that helped breed the hurt feelings that created the gay generation gap, which is that young gay men are, by and large, not our kids, even symbolically. The last twenty years—thanks to political progress, activism, education, the dying-off of a lot of homophobes, the Internet, and the mighty guiding arm of popular entertainment—have brought about a remarkable growth in straight America’s acceptance of homosexuality. Without forgetting that for too many gay kids, coming out is still hell, we’re also witnessing the rise of a parallel generation of gay kids with unflinchingly supportive parents, buddies who cheer their comings-out on Facebook, high schools with gay-straight alliances—in other words, kids who have grown up in a world that’s finally beginning, in a few places, to look like the one we wanted to create for them, or for ourselves.

And it would be dishonest to suggest that those kids—brash, at ease in their own skin, exuberant, happy—are being greeted by older gay men with nothing but uncomplicated joy. We can’t help but wonder how our lives might have been different if things had been easier for us, too. Some envy, some wistfulness, even some resentment is only human. And to add one further injury: Those kids don’t seem to need us anymore. For decades, gay men functioned as unofficial surrogate parents to the newly out and/or newly outcast. They’d offer reassurance that being gay didn’t mean being lonely. It was a bond that linked many generations of gay men across the age spectrum and created a real emotional connection, even if what necessitated it was pervasive prejudice. Today, though, the notion of quasi-parental gay mentorship feels ancient, a trope out of Tales of the City.

Unlike heterosexuals, most gay kids don’t grow up around adults who are like them, and gay adults in their forties, fifties, and sixties don’t have many occasions for routine, ordinary contact with a younger group of gay people. One of the benefits of Pride Week is that, however artificially, it breaks that barrier down and restarts the conversation. That’s appropriate for an occasion that’s meant to be steeped not just in optimism but in an awareness of history—a history that, by the way, includes a generation gap of its own. As author David Carter reminds us in his excellent 2004 book Stonewall, back in 1969, gay New York was deeply factionalized. Gay older men “passing” in coat-and-tie jobs on Madison and Park Avenues and then discreetly meeting each other in Turtle Bay bars had contempt for long-haired, sideburned Village hippies, and the reverse was also rudely, robustly the case. Even though gay Americans seem to have lived a century of tumult and progress since then, it’s good to know we still have something in common with our ancestral brothers-in-arms.



Comments:

I am a 29-year-old queer male and it is my belief that gay 20-somethings with no interest in the culture that gave birth to their own luxurious insularity are not so much a symbol of a generational gap as they are a reminder that LGBTQ History has been successfully marginalized in the education system -- despite the proliferation of Queer Studies as a tokenized academic discipline. LGBTQ Studies have been effectively relegated to a self-selecting minority of queer youth. From a pedagogical standpoint, the best course of action is to ensure the inclusion of the LGBTQ struggle for equality (and the slices of surrounding cultures that informed, inspired & supported those movements) within a broader framework of a living civil rights history. Trying to overturn Prop 8 is a noble and necessary stepping stone, but we won't bridge any gaps within or beyond our own movement until _all_ youth are educated that everyone is entitled to equal rights and treatment under the law (however far behind legislation is in making this a reality), and that all movements of oppressed groups are connected in that they all must struggle against bigoted policy. Our voices (angry or...gay) are important at a protest, yes, but perhaps not as paradigm-shifting as they are in history books.
By jorkane on 06/26/2009 at 2:14 pm


I'm 63. I came out during the Stonewall era. I feel enormously proud of what my gay brothers and sisters have accomplished over the last 40 years.
I feel proud every time I see how matter-of-factly kids say they don't think it's any big deal to be gay. It's only natural that they have a different point of view, and, in fact, we wanted them to feel the way they do.
But, if you're 25, it's unlikely you know how hard it was to get to this place. And, in a way, I'm glad you don't. But at the very least you should be aware that every gay man and woman who came out in the Stonewall era made social, financial, familial, and personal sacrifices to live openly and freely. And so did everybody else who came out after us.
If you're 25 and want to know what we were up against back then, take a trip to Saudi Arabia, or Nigeria, and live openly gay in those societies. Think I'm kidding?
When you're at the parade and see somebody my age, ask them what it was like. They'll appreciate being asked, and you might be surprised by what you hear. Don't assume we disdain who you are. We love who you are.
By ekeby on 06/25/2009 at 6:05 pm

Dirty, DIRTY, Eugh!!

I found this video over at http://rosephase.blogspot.com/2009/06/propaganda.html and I have to say, for a film that that rails so insistently against pornography, nudity and sexuality, it sure doesn't leave much to the imagination...

;)

Marriage etc etc.

Also, this guy is HOTT ;)

No 'Mosexual

I'm a thief!! I thiefed this from The Colonic :)

Visibility at what cost: gay marriage and gay night life
My pal over at the Gluten Freeway sent an interesting article about the demise of the Boston gay bar scene. While the internet and online social networking has been described as a contributing factor, the acceptance of gay marriage is also thought to be nurturing mixed-orientation socializing at the expense of gay bars.

This raises the issues of "visibility at what cost?" Enclaves, whether religious, ethnic, or sexual, are created when a group of people is "othered" or differentiated on the basis of a specific characteristic. This is why I believe that Judaism is alive today--because of the vicious and even more subtle forms of Antisemitism that have followed Jewish people throughout history. Tolerance and assimilation would not have forced into preservation a strong identity and rich cultural heritage the way fierce hatred excluded and thereby cultivated a growing and strengthening sense of Jewry over time.

I think it's far too utopian to suggest that the acceptance of diverse sexuality will lead to the magical disappearance of gay bars. Exhibit A: Prop 8. However, I think communities will face changes differently at different times. And while many people choose to assimilate, others still choose to self-segregate--and some prefer a hybrid of the two.

Murder?? Jumpin' Jiminy Cricket!!

Ready for some serious reading??

Through Polyamory In The News I found a link to the following rather sordid story:

Heads up; here's a really ugly case of "polyamory in the news" that bodes to get more attention in the coming year. The online edition of the Washington Post presents a very long, thorough story on the impossibly strange killing of a young lawyer named Robert Wone, in the Dupont Circle home of three wealthy, well-connected gay professionals living as an MMM family.

"We need an ambulance," Victor Zaborsky blurted, his delicate voice pitched so high that the operator mistook him for a woman.... "We had someone . . . in our house, evidently," Zaborsky said, gasping, "and they stabbed somebody."

...So began a real-life parlor mystery — an unsolved killing and alleged coverup in the guest room of an elegant home in the heart of Washington's gay community, with a trio of seemingly unlikely suspects: a self-described "polyamorous family" of three men. The bizarre murder that evening of a young Ivy League lawyer named Robert Wone, still grist for gossip and conjecture on the city's gay blogosphere, has vexed police and prosecutors since the 911 call just before midnight Aug. 2, 2006....

..."These three males describe themselves as a family, using the term 'poly-amorous' to describe their relationship," a detective wrote in an affidavit....

The Post didn't print the article in its paper edition, but it did tease it there:

The housemates he was visiting — three professional, highly educated men, a self-described “polyamorous family” — immediately fall under suspicion. But how could they have done it? And why would they?

A trial isn't scheduled to start until May 2010. The lawyer for the victim's wife was Eric Holder before President Obama named him attorney general.

June 7, 2009
Murder in DC; Poly gay triad suspected
Paul Duggan
Washington Post online
Retrieved June 8th, 2009 from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/31/AR2009053102510.html

A 911 call from a million-dollar townhouse in Dupont Circle on a sweltering summer night three years ago:
"We need an ambulance," Victor Zaborsky blurted, his delicate voice pitched so high that the operator mistook him for a woman.

"What's wrong, ma'am?"
"We had someone . . . in our house, evidently," Zaborsky said, gasping, "and they stabbed somebody."
Over the next eight minutes, stammering breathlessly on the phone, he would report that while he and his two housemates were asleep, an unseen "intruder" had slipped into the residence and attacked a visiting friend of theirs.
"Are they bleeding?" the operator asked. "See someone bleeding?"
"Yes," said Zaborsky, then 40, in words that echo today: "Someone is bleeding in our house."

So began a real-life parlor mystery -- an unsolved killing and alleged coverup in the guest room of an elegant home in the heart of Washington's gay community, with a trio of seemingly unlikely suspects: a self-described "polyamorous family" of three men. The bizarre murder that evening of a young Ivy League lawyer named Robert Wone, still grist for gossip and conjecture on the city's gay blogosphere, has vexed police and prosecutors since the 911 call just before midnight Aug. 2, 2006.

"Is he conscious?" asked the operator. As she spoke, paramedics and patrol cars were being dispatched to 1509 Swann St. NW, the 19th-century townhouse where Zaborsky, a marketing executive for the milk industry, lived with his registered domestic mate, Joseph Price, then 35, a partner in a major D.C. law firm, and another gay man, Dylan Ward, then a 36-year-old massage student with degrees in international relations, children's literature and culinary arts.
"He's not conscious," Zaborsky said of Wone, 32, who lived with his wife in Fairfax County.

Earnest and meticulously efficient, Wone had planned about two weeks in advance to stay in the city that evening to introduce himself to the night-shift staff at Radio Free Asia, where he was the new general counsel. Rather than trek home late on the Metro, he had arranged to bunk at the townhouse, a mile from his office, with his old college pal Price and his friends Zaborsky and Ward, whom he had met through Price.

Now, less than 90 minutes after walking into the Swann Street home, Wone was dead in the second-floor guest room, lying on the mattress of a convertible love seat, three knife wounds in his chest and abdomen.
"Okay, who was the person that stabbed him?" the operator asked.
Zaborsky, sounding terrified, was soon heaving sobs. "I don't know. We think it's somebody . . . an intruder in the house. We heard the chime at the door."

But there was no stealthy intruder, authorities allege. Citing a strange-as-fiction web of circumstantial, forensic and autopsy evidence, investigators have publicly theorized that one or two of the housemates, or the three together -- all professional, highly intelligent men, none with a criminal record -- murdered Wone in a weirdly elaborate sexual assault involving the injection of an incapacitating drug.

Having a theory is one thing; proving it is another, especially when the theory has significant holes. Without a cooperating eyewitness to help cement a murder case, the U.S. attorney's office has filed no charges in the killing. And despite being pressured by prosecutors to turn on one another, the men have steadfastly denied any wrongdoing.
"The person had one of our knives," Zaborsky said to the operator, composing himself momentarily.
"Okay, any type of description of the person that came in the home?"
"We have no idea," he replied. "We have no description." Then a note of sadness crept into his voice. "We heard the chime," he said. "And we heard the screams from our friend."
No description, no witnesses -- just a dead man in the guest room and three housemates with a shaky story, as detectives see it.

This is an account of what is known and not known about a murder that remains unpunished, a tortuous whodunit with elements straight from a pulp novel: the boning knife missing from the cutlery box; the spider seen crawling on the patio light; the curious findings (and lack of findings) of the autopsy; the botched search for blood traces by the crime-scene techs; the neatly made bed; the mishandled BlackBerry; the peculiar stains on the white cotton towel.

An odd, unfinished tale.

Indicted last fall for allegedly obstructing justice in the case, the housemates are scheduled to go on trial May 10, 2010. In agreeing on the date recently, the defense and prosecution told a D.C. Superior Court judge that it probably will take at least two months to present the complex evidence to a jury. The men are accused of carrying out an ambitious, albeit flawed, coverup the night Wone died, disposing of evidence and altering the crime scene to hide their suspected involvement in the killing -- after which Zaborsky dialed 911.

"Here they are, here they are," he said abruptly, sounding relieved as an ambulance pulled up out front. Then the magnitude of what had happened that night seemed to hit him again like a punch, stealing his breath.
He was crying hysterically.
"Oh, dear. . . . I can't believe this. . . . I can't believe this."

A College Friendship

Williamsburg, 1991:

After leading a tour for prospective students at the College of William and Mary, Joe Price, a junior, stood patiently outside a campus building for more than half an hour, answering questions from the diligent parents of Robert Wone, who eventually would be salutatorian of his Catholic high school class in Brooklyn, N.Y.
In helping their firstborn child pick a college, Wone's mother and father, a school librarian and a technology executive at Chase Manhattan Bank, were leaving little to chance. As other tour guides smiled at the scene, Wone, 5-foot-4 and boyish looking, stood quietly with his parents while they politely interrogated Price.

That was the first meeting of the two future lawyers. As their friendship grew, Price, older by three years, would remain Wone's guide, introducing him to student government at William and Mary, where each majored in public policy, and later helping him navigate law school. Both would land jobs at prominent Washington firms: Price at Arent Fox, specializing in intellectual property rights, and Wone in the real estate department at Covington & Burling.
And finally Price, a suspect in Wone's murder, would be one of his pallbearers.

The story of how Wone, Price, Zaborsky and Ward came to know one another -- how the four ended up together in the townhouse Aug. 2, 2006 -- has emerged from public documents, including court filings, and from people familiar with the men's backgrounds, most of whom declined to speak on the record because of the criminal case.

The three suspects, advised by their attorneys to keep low profiles, have said almost nothing publicly about their friend's death, while the lore surrounding the murder has grown in the city's gay community. On the Web (particularly a blog called whomurderedrobertwone.com), armchair sleuths debate the arcana of the case, parsing the clues and speculating on a psychosexual meaning to it all.

Price, a popular and busy man on the William and Mary campus, met Wone again in the spring of 1992, months before the studious New Yorker began his freshman year. As one of a group of academic high achievers entering the college as Monroe scholars, Wone was invited to spend a weekend in Williamsburg. While there, he was paired with Price, an honor society member soon to be a senior who was president-elect of what is now called the Student Assembly.

A former Eagle Scout, just under 6 feet tall with a broad face, Price was an energetic campus organizer and openly gay. Raised in Texas, Japan, the Florida Keys and Cape Cod, a son of career Navy petty officers, he had whimsically titled his college-application essay "My Mother Wears Combat Boots." As the student government's new chief executive, he appointed Wone to a presidential advisory council, which seemed to suit the freshman's interests and personality.

"Robert always stepped up as a willing and able leader when asked to lead or when he saw a need that was not being met," his wife, Kathy Wone, said in an e-mail interview not long after the killing. "But he was most comfortable being the man behind the scenes so that the man at center stage would truly shine."

Price graduated in 1993, bound for law school at the University of Virginia. By the time Wone (affectionately nicknamed "the Congressman") got his degree in 1996, he had been involved in so many service projects at William and Mary that he received a prestigious commencement award, citing his exceptional "characteristics of heart, mind and helpfulness to others."

By all accounts, he was at ease with his friend's sexuality. "They respected each other," wrote Kathy Wone, who has since filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the housemates and recently declined to be interviewed again about the case. Recalling her husband as open-minded, she said, "He understood that every person had this innate desire . . . to be accepted."

The two men stayed in touch throughout the 1990s while Price was at U-Va., then while Wone was a law student at the University of Pennsylvania and Price was a new associate at Arent Fox.

The year 2000 brought big changes for both of them -- a law firm job for Wone, who was hired by Covington & Burling, and a romantic union for Price, who met Victor Zaborsky, a marketing executive for the Milk Processor Education Program, or MilkPEP, the trade group behind the long-running "milk mustache/Got Milk?" ad campaign.

A native of Philadelphia, soft-spoken and slender at 5-foot-8, Zaborsky, like Price, had grown up in scattered places: His father is a chemist whose corporate job took the family to the South and Midwest. After graduating from the University of Tulsa in 1988 with a degree in finance, Zaborsky, five years older than Price, eventually moved to Washington as a branch manager for First Union Bank, then switched careers, joining MilkPEP in 1996.

The two men, who in time would exchange gold wedding bands, were introduced by a mutual friend March 24, 2000, and six months later they took up residence on Capitol Hill, buying a two-story brick townhouse with a basement apartment. Price was gaining stature as a legal advocate for the gay community in addition to handling trademark litigation at Arent Fox. A longtime board member of the gay-rights group Equality Virginia, he became its chairman and general counsel in 2002.
By then he also had a biological son, a toddler being raised by a lesbian couple in Silver Spring.

Shortly before meeting Zaborsky, Price had donated sperm to one of the women, a friend, who gave birth to a boy in December 2000. Zaborsky later donated sperm to the same woman, fathering her second son. "We are forging new territory here," he told USA Today before he and Price witnessed the younger child's birth.
The mother's partner adopted both boys as infants, and the men are active in their lives, attending school events and birthday parties, soccer games and karate lessons. The brothers, now 8 and 5, call Price "Dad" and Zaborsky "Papa."

A New Housemate

Wone found a soul mate, too.

When he wasn't racking up billable hours at Covington & Burling, he continued immersing himself in service projects, doing pro bono work for such groups as AmeriCorps in Virginia, which now presents an annual Robert E. Wone Award, named for "a tireless activist and volunteer who advanced the interests of many charitable organizations." Meanwhile, he was deep in a long-distance romance with Kathy Yu, a lawyer on the staff of an American Bar Association commission in Chicago, whom he had met at a diversity conference.

"On the last weekend of June 2002," she wrote, "Robert and I were admiring a friend's wedding invitation, when suddenly he asked, 'What would you like our wedding invitation to look like?' The word 'our' stunned me, as we had not talked much about marriage. . . . The realization hit us both very suddenly (at least it did for me). We were never more certain about how perfect we were for each other."

They were married June 7, 2003, in Itasca, Ill., near the bride's home town of Hinsdale, a Chicago suburb. Price and Zaborsky, who had celebrated their third anniversary a few months before, flew out for the wedding. That was the summer when Dylan Ward leased the English basement of the gay couple's Capitol Hill townhouse, and the partners' domestic life took on a new dimension.

Finished with graduate school in Boston, Ward, then 33, decided to move to Washington. He was a gay friend of a friend of Price and Zaborsky, so they rented him the apartment. Over time, though, he would become more than just their downstairs tenant, authorities said. "These three males describe themselves as a family, using the term 'poly-amorous' to describe their relationship," a detective wrote in an affidavit.

Although police and prosecutors have declined to comment on the investigation, details have come to light in numerous court filings, including about a dozen affidavits used to obtain search and arrest warrants. The housemates' lawyers recently denounced the government's case in a joint statement but would not discuss specific evidence or the men's private lives.

Ward, 5-foot-8 and wiry with piercing brown eyes, had been raised mostly in the Pacific Northwest, spending some of his childhood in Germany, where his father, now a cardiologist, was an Army doctor. "Incredibly smart and truly engaging," one professor in Boston said of him. Yet "not really career-minded," Ward has said of himself, according to acquaintances.

After graduating summa cum laude from Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service in 1992, he taught English on the Japanese island of Kyushu, where he befriended a couple who owned a restaurant. That got him interested in cooking, and he enrolled in the Culinary Institute of America in New York's Hudson Valley. With a two-year degree in culinary arts, he worked as a caterer in Oregon for a while, then quit in 1996 to teach English again, this time in Taiwan.

When a friend in Taipei, Taiwan, opened a small publishing business in 1999, Ward joined her. The company, called House of the Tiger Aunt, produced storybooks, which Ward helped write, and other materials used to teach English in Taiwan's primary grades. That got him interested in children's literature theory, and in 2001 he began studying for a master's degree in the subject at Boston's Simmons College.

In the District, meanwhile, a friend of his, Peter Dernbach, was living with his domestic partner in the basement of the Capitol Hill townhouse. Dernbach had gone to law school with Price and was a fellow associate at Arent Fox. While Ward was a student at Simmons, he occasionally visited Dernbach -- which was how he met Price and Zaborsky.

Then, just as Ward was finishing the master's program in 2003, Dernbach left for a job in Asia. With the apartment available, Ward moved back to the city where his higher education had begun, an intellectual wanderer unsure of what to do next.

Price, the chairman of Equality Virginia, helped him get a fundraising job with EV early in 2004. By all accounts a persuasive writer, Ward worked mainly from his apartment, composing donation appeals and assisting with the group's annual Commonwealth Dinner. At the same time, he got to know friends of Zaborsky and Price -- including Price's good friend from William and Mary. When Wone turned 30 in June 2004, the three men hosted a party for him in the Capitol Hill home.

As for what went on privately among Price, Zaborsky and Ward, that was their business, until the hot light of a police investigation later shone on them. A detective said in an affidavit that although Price and Zaborsky are "committed, intimate" partners, Price at some point also became involved in a sexual relationship with Ward. The affidavit says nothing about any physical relationship between Zaborsky and Ward but quotes Zaborsky as calling him "one of the nicest, sweetest people I've ever met."
Unconventional, yes. But to acquaintances, they seemed a happy trio.

In the spring of 2005, after seven years at Arent Fox (where the starting salary for new law school graduates is $165,000), Price was about to be made a partner in the firm.

By then, the townhouse on Capitol Hill was worth $900,000, or 2 1/2 times what Price and Zaborsky had paid for it. In a sizzling real estate market, they sold the home and bought a nicer place, paying $1.25 million for the three-story brick townhouse at 1509 Swann St. Built in the late 1800s, all modern inside, it has six rooms plus a basement apartment and a coveted historic preservation marker attached to its pale gray exterior.

Ward's growing closeness with the couple showed in their living arrangement. When Zaborsky and Price moved to the more spacious Swann Street residence, Ward moved with them -- but no longer as their downstairs renter. He settled in a bedroom upstairs in the main quarters, while another tenant, a female friend of theirs, leased the English basement.
To the siblings in Silver Spring, he became part of the family.
"Uncle Dylan," they call him.

A Domestic Partnership

And so there they were, ensconced in Dupont Circle in the months before the killing.

Price continued to thrive at Arent Fox, representing companies such as Netscape, Warner Brothers and America Online in trademark and Internet domain-name disputes, and Zaborsky traveled frequently in a job he enjoyed, promoting milk as a hip and healthier alternative to Coke and Pepsi. On April 13, 2006, a few weeks after their sixth anniversary, the couple made their relationship official, registering with the city as domestic partners.

Ward, meanwhile, had decided what to do next: While still with Equality Virginia, he began 18 months of study at the Potomac Massage Training Institute, and by June 2006, he was nearly two-thirds finished.

That spring, when Price's term as board chairman ended, Ward left the gay-rights organization and took an office job three blocks from the townhouse. With a recommendation from Equality Virginia (specifically from Price), he was hired by A.B. Data Ltd. to help solicit donations for the company's clients, mainly progressive nonprofit groups. After work, he attended massage classes.

Those were the men the public saw.

To give jurors in the obstruction-of-justice trial a fuller picture of the housemates, the U.S. attorney's office said, it will seek to introduce evidence of their intimate connections. In addition to Price's spousal union with Zaborsky, authorities said in court filings, Price and Ward were involved in a "dominant-submissive sexual relationship," which prosecutors said is relevant to the case in light of what they think happened to Wone.

Ward kept a wide array of esoteric sexual implements in his Swann Street bedroom, many of them designed to inflict pain, according to a police affidavit. Investigators said Price used the name "culuket" on the Web and posted a member profile on the fetish-oriented site Alt.com, listing "electrotorture" among his "activities enjoyed." Culuket's posting listed a dozen other favored sex practices, described in explicit terms, and sought a third man to join a sadomasochistic relationship with "me and my dom."
Later, in a police interrogation, Zaborsky would refer to his and Price's emotional commitment to each other, saying Ward did not "share an equal part" in that relationship. But he added, "We're trying to develop it in that way."

A respected law partner. A successful marketing manager. A direct-mail fundraiser studying for a massage license.

A gay family.

Those were the housemates Robert Wone visited the last night of his life.


Aug. 2, 2006, a Wednesday: The sun had gone down after baking the region in triple-digit heat.

Wone, no longer with Covington & Burling, now the new general counsel at Radio Free Asia, got off the Metro near his office in Dupont Circle and telephoned his wife. He had worked all day, then had sat through an evening seminar in grant law at a conference center downtown. It was about 9:30 when he spoke with Kathy Wone, who was home in Oakton. He let her know he was headed back to the radio station at 2025 M St. NW to introduce himself to the night staff.

"Robert was, as usual, upbeat and happy that day," she said in the e-mail interview.

A Chinese American proud of his heritage, he was pro bono general counsel to the Museum of Chinese in the Americas in New York's Chinatown and to the national Organization of Chinese Americans. That summer of 2006, he was elected president of the Asian Pacific American Bar Association's Washington area chapter. And in July, he joined U.S.-backed Radio Free Asia, which broadcasts news to Asian countries where the media are shackled by government controls.

Wone was a careful planner, a man who urged friends to draft wills and buy insurance. In July, Kathy Wone said, her husband began arranging "to take care of three things all at once" on Aug. 2. He was scheduled to be in the seminar until 9 p.m., so he figured "that night would also be a good night" to meet the 10 o'clock crew at Radio Free Asia. "As an added bonus, he thought it would be nice to spend the night" in the city with Price, who lived just a mile from the radio station.

"I thought it was a great idea," Kathy Wone wrote. Then "a few days before Robert's death, Robert did tell me that plans between him and Joe had been confirmed, and that he would be spending the night at Joe's house."

In three years of marriage, she said, "This was the first time Robert ever chose to stay overnight at a friend's house. . . . The only times we were away from each other was when one of us had to travel for business." Yet, "as with all his friends," she said, "Robert was good about keeping in touch with Joe."

As Wone walked from the Metro stop to his office that evening, talking with his wife for the last time, "we ended our call with, 'Okay, have a good night, I love you.' "

Colleagues said he arrived at the radio station before 10. At 10:22 p.m., finished shaking hands with the staff, he called the Swann Street townhouse from his office, saying he would be there shortly.

Tomorrow: A murder investigation leads to a strange theory.
Staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.



The Robert Wone Killing Remains 'a Head-Scratcher'
Alleging Coverup by Housemates, D.C. Police Probe Theory of Bizarre Attack in Dupont Circle House
By Paul Duggan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 1, 2009; 8:50 PM
Retrieved June 8th, 2009 from
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/01/AR2009060103472.html?sid=ST2009053102566


(Second of two parts)

A narrow street of century-old townhouses in Dupont Circle, the three-story dwellings elegantly remodeled, fronted by red-brick sidewalks and ginkgo biloba trees grown rooftop high.
Quiet now on a stifling midsummer evening.
Victor Zaborsky, just back from a business trip Aug. 2, 2006, was in bed when Robert Wone arrived at 1509 Swann St. NW about 10:30 p.m., toting an overnight bag that his wife had helped him pack. Zaborsky's domestic partner, Joseph Price, and housemate Dylan Ward greeted their friend and showed him into the kitchen, where they chatted for a while, sipping water.
That was what Price, Zaborsky and Ward later told homicide detectives, a police affidavit says.

"Then Joe went outside for a second because he saw a spider or something on the light," Ward said. The rear door of the townhouse leads from the kitchen to a patio. Price said it was "completely plausible" that he neglected to lock the door when he came back in after looking at the bulb.

Questioned separately by detectives for hours after Wone was stabbed, Price, Zaborsky and Ward would provide detailed statements about what took place that night. A former law enforcement official involved in the case in its first year said the men's stories were consistent. According to one of numerous police affidavits filed in court, the housemates gave this account of how the rest of the evening unfolded:

Ward said he and Price led Wone to the second-floor guest room, which overlooks Swann Street, and showed him the bed he would be using, a convertible love seat. Ward's room also was on the second floor, at the rear of the house. "I went in my room," he said. "I was reading for, like, five minutes or so, and then I took my sleeping pill." Before nodding off, Ward said, he heard Wone showering in the second-floor bathroom.

It was about 11 p.m. on a Wednesday. Price said he retired for the evening, too, joining Zaborsky in their third-floor master bedroom. Kathy Wone said her husband and Price had planned to finish catching up over an early breakfast the next day, before work.

Time is critical to figuring out what happened to Wone that night. If the 32-year-old lawyer was killed in the strangely drawn-out sexual assault that authorities have described, and if an elaborate coverup ensued, then everything occurred within 79 minutes or so, between Wone's arrival at the house and Zaborsky's frantic 911 call. For every moment that Wone was not in peril, the time frame in which the crimes could have occurred shrinks, weakening the prosecution's theory.

That's why a vital issue concerns e-mails that Wone either did or did not write shortly after 11 o'clock.

Examining Wone's BlackBerry after the killing, a detective noted "an e-mail purporting to be from Mr. Wone to his wife, timed 11:05 p.m., indicating that he had just taken a shower and was going to bed," prosecutor Glenn L. Kirschner told the housemates' lawyers in a recent letter. He said the detective saw another e-mail, typed at 11:07 p.m., "purporting to be from Mr. Wone" to a colleague at Radio Free Asia, confirming a lunch date.

From the tone of the letter, it appears that investigators suspect the e-mails were written after the stabbing by someone other than Wone as part of the alleged coverup. The detective noted that the messages were "unsent." In a major foul-up, however, authorities failed to preserve data from the BlackBerry for closer analysis.

The U.S. Secret Service was supposed to copy the device's hard drive, according to Kirschner. After it was believed to have been imaged, "the Blackberry was retrieved" from the agency, he said. By the time investigators realized that the data had not been replicated, the BlackBerry had been given back to Radio Free Asia and 'recycled.'
"The government does not presently have a copy of the contents of said Blackberry," Kirschner informed the defense.

'Someone That's Stabbed'

Then, Price and Zaborsky said, they heard noises.

In bed on the third floor, the couple said, they were awakened by a security chime that sounded whenever an exterior door of the house was opened. Price said they were not worried. The basement tenant, Sarah Morgan, had gone out hours earlier, saying she planned to be away overnight. When the chime went off, Price said, he mistakenly thought Morgan had changed her mind and come home.

Minutes later, the two men said, they heard what Zaborsky described as "kind of a low scream." They said they got out of bed to investigate, and as they approached the stairs just beyond their room, they heard "another kind of low scream," as Zaborsky put it. The couple said they rushed down to the guest room at the foot of the stairs and looked inside.

Seeing their horribly wounded friend on the bed, Zaborsky said, he let out a scream of his own.

Price said he went to Wone's aid, telling the hysterical Zaborsky to go back upstairs and call for help. At this point, Ward said, despite having taken a sleeping pill, he was awakened by the ruckus down the hall from his bedroom. Price said Ward "came out of his room and . . . it looked like he had no [expletive] clue."

A boning knife from the kitchen butcher block was lying on Wone's stomach, Price said. He said he put the knife on an end table and lifted Wone's gray William and Mary T-shirt. There were three stab wounds in his torso, and Price said he saw "a lot of blood on his chest."

Up in the master bedroom, Zaborsky dialed 911 on a cellphone at 11:49 p.m., sounding frightened and overwhelmed.

"Ma'am, calm down," the operator said, asking, "The person that stabbed him, is he still in the home?"

"I don't know," Zaborsky answered, lapsing into sobs.
As they waited for the ambulance, the operator told Zaborsky to tell his spouse to put pressure on the victim's wounds with a dry towel. "Once it gets saturated with blood," she said, "tell him to get another one." Zaborsky, indicating that he had returned to the second-floor guest room, replied calmly, "My partner . . . is applying pressure right now."

Price later said: "I put the towel on Robert. . . . I just held the towel on him."
Time ticked by, Zaborsky gulping air, alternately gaining composure and losing it in waves of panicked impatience.
"We really need the ambulance here," he said on the phone.
And then came a response by Zaborsky to the operator that defense lawyers say was spontaneous and genuine, showing he truly was scared of an intruder in the house.
"They enroute now, ma'am," the operator said of the paramedics. "Go to the door. They should be pulling up any moment, okay?"
To which Zaborsky, with barely a pause, replied in a quivering, desperate voice, "I'm afraid to go downstairs."

A minute later, from a guest room window, he saw the strobing red lights. Wearing a bathrobe, and still on the cellphone, he hurried outside to the front steps, pleading to the medics, Jeffrey Baker and Tracye Weaver, as the two gathered their equipment from the idling ambulance.
"Help us!" Zaborsky cried over the engine noise. "We have someone that's stabbed; they're on our second floor . . . Please hurry!"

No Signs of a Struggle

Lugging their gear, the medics tromped upstairs.

Wone, in gym shorts and a T-shirt, was on his back atop the bedcovers, his head on a pillow, his arms by his sides -- dead. In his mouth was the night guard he routinely wore to prevent his teeth from grinding in his sleep. Beneath him, the comforter and sheets were neatly turned down at a 45-degree angle. His wallet and Movado watch were in plain view on the table at the foot of the bed. A crumpled white bath towel was on the floor nearby. On the end table to the right of the bed was a kitchen knife.

That comes from crime-scene photos and a police affidavit recounting what Baker, Weaver and homicide detectives said they saw in the guest room.
There were no signs of a struggle, they said. Although at least one of the victim's wounds was big enough to "fit your fingers into," as Weaver put it, the medics said they saw hardly any blood on his body or in the room. And there were only a few small bloodstains on the sheets and pillow. Weaver said it looked to her as if the body had been "showered, redressed and placed in the bed."

As police officers fanned out around the house, the affidavit says, they noticed that "Price, Zaborsky and Ward were together in the living room, all wearing crisp, white robes and appearing as if they had just showered."

Separated by detectives, the three were driven to a fortress-like building in Anacostia, six miles and a world removed from Swann Street. At the offices of the D.C. police violent crimes branch, in a blockhouse of brick, chain-link and safety glass, they were interrogated individually well into Thursday.

This was long before authorities developed their theory of a bizarre murder involving an incapacitating injection and elaborate coverup. This was before the autopsy produced its curious results, before the sadomasochism came to light and before various crime labs analyzed dozens of items taken from the residence.

This was in the predawn hours after the stabbing. And just from the looks of things in the townhouse, detectives weren't buying the intruder story, according to the former law enforcement official who was involved in the investigation and who declined to speak on the record because of the criminal case.

There was no evidence of forced entry and no disarray in the house, and nothing had been stolen. Detectives wondered instead about a possible sex angle connected to the housemates being gay. In an interrogation room, for example, Detective Daniel Wagner, then a 23-year veteran of the force, goaded Price, saying it was obvious to him that the men had planned to make Wone a part of their family that night.

"I got three homosexuals in the house and I got one straight guy," Wagner said to Price. "What's he doing over there? What's he doing over there?"
Then he answered his own question. "I think we were all drinking wine," the detective said. And he imagined the men's thoughts toward their visitor: "You are coming to Jesus tonight; that's what is going on tonight."

But the housemates held fast through sunrise, denying any wrongdoing, Price saying: "I know Victor and Dylan better than I know my mom. There is no chance on the face of the earth that anybody did anything to Robert." He said, "They couldn't even spank a child that was being bad." After the three finally left Anacostia -- Price having been grilled intermittently for about six hours, Zaborsky for about eight and Ward for about 12 -- the men hired criminal-defense attorneys.

No more would they talk with the police.

A Head-Scratcher

The autopsy raised as many questions as it answered.
Lois Goslinoski, a deputy D.C. medical examiner, conducted her postmortem examination of Wone the day after he died and filed her eight-page, single-spaced report two weeks later.
She said she found two tiny spots from broken capillaries in Wone's right eye and left eyelid. The spots, called petechial hemorrhages, are caused by the flow of unoxygenated blood in a person who is fighting for air, as with a victim of strangulation or suffocation. In Wone's case, though, the "asphyxia event" wasn't fatal, she said.

It was the stabbing that killed him, she concluded. The blade had pierced his heart, pancreas and right lung.
Stab wounds tend to be irregularly shaped, a result of the victim struggling and writhing during the attack. Yet Wone's three wounds were "perfect, slit-like defects," clean and symmetrical, Goslinoski noted. She said she saw no defensive cuts anywhere on him.

Although he suffered no injuries consistent with a sexual attack, she said, she discovered semen around his genitals and in his rectum. DNA showed that the semen was his own.
She said she counted six premortem needle marks on his chest, right foot and left hand and several more on the left side of his neck. If the marks had come from hypodermic injections, she said, she couldn't tell what was in the syringe.

Searching for drugs in a body is hit-or-miss. There's no single, all-encompassing test that can identify every foreign substance in a dead person. There are specific tests for thousands of different substances, so toxicologists need to know what they're looking for. If they just aimlessly run tests, hoping to stumble on something, they might grope in the dark for months, using up all the bodily fluids that were saved before the victim was embalmed and buried. Then later, if detectives were to find a clue to a particular drug, the lab would have no way to confirm it.

The medical examiner's office ran a standard battery of tests in Wone's case.
The toxicology lab searched for alcohol, cocaine, barbiturates, opiates and amphetamines. It looked for the date-rape drug gamma-hydroxybutyrate, or GHB. It checked for benzodiazepines, a class of sedatives that includes at least three other date-rape drugs. It looked for phencyclidine, or PCP, a hallucinogen, and depending on how the PCP screening was done, the test also might have found any traces of ketamine, another common date-rape drug.
All the results were negative.

By the time Goslinoski wrote up her findings, authorities had taken control of the townhouse and were scouring it for evidence in a case that fast became "a frustrating head-scratcher," as the former law enforcement official put it.

For three weeks after the stabbing, investigators dismantled parts of 1509 Swann St., hauling away computers, household appliances, slabs of floors, walls and staircases, bags of goop from drain traps, and boxes of the men's belongings. In Ward's room, besides discovering a large collection of sadomasochistic sexual implements, detectives said, they found a box for a three-piece cutlery set that the culinary school graduate kept in a cabinet. In the box, they saw a carving knife, a serving fork and an empty space for a smaller knife different from the one in the guest room.

With so little blood visible in the room, investigators suspected the scene had been wiped down. Police technicians applied forensic chemicals and discovered traces of blood that were too faint to be seen with the naked eye, according to an affidavit written two days after the killing. "This trace blood evidence was located on the walls, floors, sofa bed and door frame."

Or so it seemed. For here was another foul-up in the case.

Crime-scene chemicals react not only with blood, but with other substances containing proteins or iron, causing a glow or stain, depending on the chemical. The reaction isn't proof of blood; it's just an indication. The traces then have to be tested to determine what they are. At the townhouse, the technicians sprayed a product called Ashley's Reagent, which reacts with proteins, creating a blue stain. It is designed to enhance suspected blood traces so they can be photographed. But the crew botched the job, applying the chemical "in a manner not intended by the manufacturer," Kirschner later said in a letter to defense lawyers.

After the misapplication of the chemical, the former official said, authorities were unable to confirm through lab tests that the "trace blood evidence" was, in fact, blood.

The crumpled white towel on the floor, which Price said he had used to put pressure on Wone's wounds, also raised suspicions. Detectives saw only a few small blood blotches on it.

The towel was among scores of items given to outside forensics experts for analysis. Then, as investigators waited weeks and months for lab reports to come in, they delved into the housemates' backgrounds. They talked with Kathy Wone about her husband. They consulted with Goslinoski, who expanded on her findings. And they brainstormed in meetings, reviewing what they knew or suspected, arranging and rearranging the puzzle pieces, hoping a clear picture would emerge.

"None of it made sense," the former official recalled. "The intruder theory had problems. The theory that it was one or all of these guys had problems. There was simply no cohesive theory that we could come up with to account for everything."

The intruder problems: Guy tries the rear door, which -- lucky him -- just happens to be unlocked. Detectives suspected that the spider story was a lie to explain how someone could have sneaked in. Undeterred by the chime, he picks up a kitchen knife, crosses two more rooms to get to the front of the house -- bypassing a flat-screen television, a laptop computer and other valuables -- and, without being heard, climbs 16 hardwood stairs to the second floor.

At the top of the steps, he's staring straight at Ward's bedroom. But instead of going in there, he turns 180 degrees and walks noiselessly down the uncarpeted hall to the opposite end of the house -- where he just up and stabs the guy in the guest room. And he abandons his weapon on the victim's stomach. And he leaves without grabbing the wallet or watch.

Another problem: The intruder scenario did not explain the strange autopsy results or the suspected cleanup of the room.

But if not a stranger, then who? And why? Sifting through reams of the housemates' e-mails, detectives saw no hint of a conspiracy in the days before Wone's visit, the former official said. By all accounts, Wone and the men were good friends. Consensual sex gone violently awry? Investigators said they found no indication that Wone had a secret lifestyle. And the night guard in his mouth suggested he was about to go to sleep when whatever happened to him happened.
A head-scratcher for sure.

Charges in the Case

Under a cloud, they resumed their lives.

Price, then a 35-year-old partner at Arent Fox and the general counsel of the gay rights group Equality Virginia, continued his law practice, litigating a trademark case for America Online and winning a major appellate decision in a groundbreaking child-custody fight between estranged lesbian parents.

Zaborsky, who was 40, stayed with MilkPEP, eventually sharing in an Effie award from the advertising industry for the "milk mustache/Got Milk?"campaign. And Ward, then 36, went on soliciting donations at A.B. Data Ltd. until he finished massage school in February 2007. The following summer, he traveled to Thailand for more training. Then in the fall of that year, he rented a condo from friends in Wilton Manors, Fla., near Fort Lauderdale, and joined the staff of Chi Spa, a candlelit massage parlor featuring deep sea mud wraps and body butter treatments.

The investigation plowed on, focusing for a time on Price's troubled younger brother, Michael, who lived in Silver Spring. Just weeks after the stabbing, Michael Price (who was later treated for substance abuse) and another man allegedly burglarized the townhouse and were quickly arrested. Detectives tried for months to link Michael Price to Wone's murder, a tangent of the case that put a whole new cast of offbeat characters under scrutiny, the former official said. But it reached a dead end.

Fixing the townhouse after the police were done searching it (including replacing floors and walls indelibly stained blue by the Ashley's Reagent) cost Price and Zaborsky $250,000, their lawyers said. They sold the place for $1.47 million last summer and bought an investment property in Miami Shores, Fla., about 25 miles from Wilton Manors. Ward, still a Chi Spa massage therapist, moved to the Miami Shores house as caretaker, and Zaborsky and Price leased a luxury apartment in Dupont Circle, three blocks from Swann Street.

And they waited.

Until two days before Halloween last year, when the case finally popped.

Ward was arrested first, in Florida. Price and Zaborsky were charged three weeks later. All are accused of tampering with the crime scene, disposing of evidence and lying to investigators. Although authorities have yet to seek an indictment in the killing, an affidavit made public Oct. 31 lays out their theory of what happened.

Page 12: "The evidence demonstrates that Robert Wone was restrained, incapacitated, sexually assaulted and murdered."

Restrained . . . in a way that halted his breathing long enough to cause the petechial hemorrhages. The affidavit uses the example of an attacker "placing a pillow over" someone's face.

Incapacitated . . . by an injection, while being restrained. To investigators, the clean wounds (which Goslinoski said had been "methodically" inflicted) indicated that Wone neither struggled nor flinched in pain during the stabbing, meaning he was unconscious or paralyzed. Questioned by detectives, Kathy Wone said her husband had no medical appointments in the days before Aug. 2 that might have accounted for the premortem needle marks on his body.

Injected with what? No lab finding so far. In court recently, Kirschner said toxicologists would soon conduct a final test, using up the one remaining milliliter of Wone's blood. As for what they hoped to find, the prosecutor said: "It's a little bit of a shot in the dark. . . . All of this is a little bit speculative, quite frankly."

Sexually assaulted . . . while incapacitated, before the stabbing.

As for the semen on and in Wone's body being his own, Kirschner explained at a court hearing how investigators think the alleged assault occurred. "The government has now, courtesy of experts, learned a lot more about electro-ejaculation than frankly this counsel ever knew," he said. "And there was, indeed, an electrocution unit in Mr. Ward's bedroom that can produce electric ejaculation of a person who is under anesthetic or otherwise incapacitated."

And murdered. . . . after which came the alleged coverup, detailed in the affidavit and in a subsequent indictment charging the men with obstructing justice (punishable by up to 30 years in prison) and the lesser crimes of conspiracy and evidence-tampering.

The housemates, "individually and in combination," washed the victim, cleaned the guest room and neatly remade the bed, the indictment alleges. Then they "placed the body of Robert Wone" atop the turned-down sheets and comforter.

Not so, said the men's lawyers.

"This is a case of a prosecution theory chasing evidence and coming up empty," the defense attorneys declared in a statement recently, saying some of the forensic findings are "demonstrably inaccurate" and others have been misconstrued by investigators. "The government has cobbled together its case with tidbits of information that it interprets through innuendo and speculation, and then calls 'evidence.' "

The Evidence

And the rest of the story, as authorities tell it:

The Wusthof boning knife that Price said he found on Wone's stomach has a blade approximately 5 1/2 inches long. Each of the stab wounds was four to five inches deep. Goslinoski, who has handled dozens of stabbing cases, said it was unlikely that a knife-wielding attacker would inflict multiple wounds of nearly identical depth while each time stopping short of plunging the entire blade into the victim. The knife on the end table was inconsistent with the holes in Wone's body, she said.

Investigators showed her another knife, its blade an inch shorter. A weapon that size was consistent with the wounds, Goslinoski told them. The second knife, obtained by detectives from the manufacturer, was a duplicate of the one still missing from Ward's cutlery set.

An expert in blood-splatter patterns examined the knife from the end table and said he found blood on both sides of the blade. Yet there was no blood on its cutting edge, he reported. And after inspecting the modest blood spots on the white cotton towel, he said he did not think the towel had been used to put pressure on the victim's wounds.

The towel appeared to have been wetted with Wone's blood for a different purpose.

"The blood pattern on the towel was consistent with the pattern one would expect to see if someone . . . placed the knife on the towel, folded the towel over the blade of the knife, and swiped the blood from the towel onto the knife," the affidavit says.

A trace-evidence examiner put the knife from the end table under a microscope and reported finding more than 10 tiny fibers on it -- all white cotton. Although Wone's gray William and Mary T-shirt had three holes in it corresponding to his wounds, the examiner reported finding no gray fibers on the supposed murder weapon.

So, the theory goes, inside of about 79 minutes, with no apparent planning: The victim was subdued, drugged by injection and sexually assaulted electrically before being stabbed to death, then washed; the room was cleaned, a phony murder knife was doctored and planted, and the real weapon and other bloody leftovers were made to vanish -- with time remaining for the housemates to shower off and get their story straight.
Inside of 42 minutes, if Wone wrote the BlackBerry e-mails.

A head-scratcher.

Price, who went on leave from Arent Fox a few weeks before the indictment, has since resigned from the firm and ended his association with Equality Virginia. Zaborsky isn't with MilkPEP anymore. And Ward no longer works at Chi Spa.

"Our attorneys estimate that the cost of a trial, which will necessarily involve a number of experts, will run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars," the three told friends in an e-mail late last year, seeking donations to their legal defense fund. "We have no choice but to sell and liquidate every asset in order to pay this staggering sum as our very freedom hangs in the balance. Our parents are doing the same, sacrificing retirement savings and taking on unprecedented debt to aid us."

Released from custody to await the trial, which is set to begin in May 2010, the men now live on a third of an acre just outside of Washington, sharing a two-story, 2,600-square-foot home of brick and aluminum with its owner, Zaborsky's widowed 64-year-old aunt.

A trio of house guests now.
A family still.

Staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.


Murder on Swann Street: The Robert Wone Stabbing
Authorities Think Housemates Killed the Lawyer in Dupont Circle Home, but Proof Is Elusive
Paul Duggan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 2, 2009; 1:00 PM
Retrieved June 8th, 2009 from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2009/05/31/ST2009053102566.html?sid=ST2009053102566

Washington Post staff writer Paul Duggan was online Tuesday, June 2, at 1 p.m. ET to discuss an unsolved killing and alleged coverup in the guest room of an elegant home in the heart of Washington's gay community. The bizarre murder of a young Ivy League lawyer named Robert Wone is still grist for gossip and conjecture on the city's gay blogosphere and has vexed police and prosecutors since the 911 call just before midnight Aug. 2, 2006.

Paul Duggan: Hi ... Paul Duggan of The Washington Post here, welcoming any questions about the Swann Street murder narrative running yesterday and today on Washingtonpost.com. ... Ask away.

_______________________

Washington, D.C.: Thanks for your reporting on this case. I can only imagine how frustrating it is to report on an event with so many unanswered questions, but I thought you told the story well and fairly.
One thing I don't understand is the motive behind the alleged murder. The prosecution has theories and some evidence, but there doesn't seem to be any reason behind the murder, right? It is a long jump from sexual assault to stabbing.

Paul Duggan: You're right about that -- there's no clear evidence of motive that I know of. One thing people sometimes get confused about, though, is the notion that prosecutors in trial need to prove a motive. They don't. Evidence of motive is great to have, but at all not necessary. They don't have to prove or even suggest WHY someone did something. They only have to prove that the person actually did it. Period.

_______________________

Delmarva: So how firm is this timeline? By their actions described in the article these three look guilty as can be but I can't reconcile that all this took place (the sexual activity, the death, the cover-up, the call to 911) took place in that amount of time.
How firm are Wone's activities prior to arriving at the house around 10:30? Is it possible that Wone got there earlier or that he went there, possibly for sexual activity, left and went back to work and later returned? Even with that the timeline seems a real stretch.

Paul Duggan: I can't speculate on what might've happened at various times when the whereabouts or activities of one or some or all of the people in the story are unaccounted for. I can only tell you that Wone, the general counsel of Radio Free Asia, went to the night seminar (with a friend, the general counsel of Radio Free Europe), that he called his wife afterward, that RFA colleagues remember him arriving back at the station before 10, that he called Swann Street at 10:22, and that Zaborsky called 911 at 11:49. The tight time frame (even without the BlackBerry issue) is a big part of the stubborn, confounding mystery of this.

_______________________

Washington, D.C.: The word on the street is that these guys were methamphetamine users and that their partying and S and M activities got out of control that night. Have the police investigated the meth angle? What do they know about the history of drug abuse by there three men? It would seem to explain quite a lot.

Paul Duggan: I can't say. ... But I'll tell you, in all my years of doing this kind of thing, I've never been able to actually locate the person who is in charge of putting out "the word on the street," to ask him how he knows so much. Unless he was hiding in the closet of the guestroom, I'm not sure how he'd know what did or didn't get out of control that night.

_______________________

D.C.: So a few questions. The articles don't really address how or why they were charged. How, according to the indictments, did they specifically obstruct justice? Also, why did it take two years for them to be charged? I'm not doubting the charges, just the content and the timing.

Paul Duggan: I think the story, at the end of Part 2, is pretty clear on how they allegedly obstructed justice -- by allegedly disposing of evidence and altering the crime scene. One reason it took so long for charges to be filed, I believe, is that it often takes many months to process forensic evidence. When the D.C. police turn something over to an FBI lab, for instance, they typically have to wait their turn, while the lab, slowly but surely, processes stuff from a hundred other cases in a hundred other jurisdictions or whatever. And it this case there is quite a large amount of forensic evidence.

_______________________

Fredericksburg, Va.: Why is it that no one has been charged when it is very clear that there was no intruder?

Paul Duggan: I'm obviously not privy to the decision making in the U.S. attorney's office, but here's some educated speculation: Prosecutors believe (rightly or wrongly) that they can make a case on obstruction based on the forensic evidence they have, which they say clearly indicates that the men engaged in a cover-up. But they simply don't have what they think is sufficient evidence to prove that one, two or all three of them committed murder. Their mere presence in the house that night isn't enough by itself. Prosecutors can theorize all they want that the housemates are responsible for Wone's death. But in a trial, they'd have to prove it (four important words here) "beyond a reasonable doubt," which isn't as easy as you might think.

_______________________

Washington, D.C.: Can't the District charge all three with murder and hope one of them cracks? With all the circumstantial evidence I would think they could get a conviction.

Paul Duggan: Generally speaking, when the government charges someone with murder or any crime, the speedy-trial clock starts ticking, meaning the prosecutor better be ready for trial within a certain period, and then comes the trial, and if the evidence isn't there, and the jury acquits, then that's the end of it. The government gets one shot, and that's it. So in this case, until they feel they can prove someone guilty of murder beyond a reasonable doubt, the US attorney and police will keep looking for evidence, and hold off seeking an indictment.

_______________________

Logan North, D.C.: Two basic questions:

1. Why was this series published at all at this time? Nothing new has happened in this case in recent weeks, and no trial proceedings are imminent. The articles, notwithstanding their length and luridness, contain little new information. Nearly all the pertinent information was reported by local outlets such as Legal Times and the Washington Blade last year. If this article was worth publishing by the Post, shouldn't it have been published six months ago, when the information was actually timely?

2. If the information was worth publishing, why wasn't it published in the print edition? Aren't the Post's subscribers who pay good money for the print edition entitled to at least a summary of the article's findings? (Of course, that would have required an article that merely recited facts, not the sort of extensive yarn-spinning that characterizes the series.) What message is conveyed about the value of the print edition when such an extensive article is only available in the free online edition?

washingtonpost.com: The Robert Wone Killing Remains 'a Head-Scratcher'

Paul Duggan: It's being published now because, after weeks of reporting and many late nights of writing, it's done now. Yes, the Legal Times, the Blade and others have done a fine job covering incremental developments in the case -- but nowhere (that I'm aware of) has the entire story been laid out, top to bottom, in one coherent narrative, which is what I set out to do. And I'll be venture to say that many thousands of Post readers haven't followed the case in those blogs, as evidently you have. As for new details, yes, in fact, the story does contain a fair amount of them, especially concerning the backgrounds of the three housemates and how they came to be together in that place on that night. Beyond that, I think just having the complex case explained clearly is something new in and of itself to many Post readers. As for why the story isn't in the physical newspaper, that's a question for senior editors here, not me. I'm a mere typist. But I will say, generally, that some stories, to be told right, need A LOT of space, and there is a finite amount of it available in the printed paper. Fortunately in this age we have a boundless digital venue that can accommodate narratives like this one.

_______________________

Washington, D.C.: I understand that they were charged with obstruction, etc. because they refused to testify at a grand jury inquiry into the matter.

Paul Duggan: No, the obstruction charge has nothing to do with the grand jury. No one can be compelled to give evidence against themselves. The obstruction (and conspiracy and evidence-tampering) charges are related to the alleged cover-up in the townhouse after Wone was stabbed.

_______________________

Washington, D.C.: Is it proper to use the word "murder" when describing this case? Isn't is technically a homicide until someone has been convicted?

Paul Duggan: Ah, a copy editor!! ... You're absolutely right. Murder is a legal term, the unlawful killing of another with premeditation. We don't know that Wone's "murder" wasn't actually a "manslaughter," and not a murder, do we? That's why newspapers use that awful word "slaying" so much (which absolutely no one uses in ordinary conversation). ... Anyway, I argued (and won) that we should use the term "murder" in a generic sense in the story, to make it more readable. "Slaying mystery" doesn't quite have the ring of "murder mystery."

_______________________

Washington, D.C.: Did they dust the blackberry for prints? I can't believe they lost that info.

Paul Duggan:

I tried really hard to find that out, and I got no indication whatsoever from the people I spoke with that the police fingerprinted the BlackBerry. It'd be interesting to know if any of the housemates' prints were on it, no? I can't be sure, but it would not surprise me at all if the BlackBerry wasn't fingerprinted.

_______________________

Arlington, Va.: Who does Robert Wone's wife think killed him?

Paul Duggan: She has alleged in a wrongful death lawsuit that the three housemates were responsible for his killing. Her attorney has made no secret of the fact that he (and she) believe all three were complicit in his death.

_______________________

Arlington, Va.: That really is a weird story. What are the chances Ward did it acting alone? But that maybe the other two helped clean up the aftermath? Could Ward have done it under the influence of the sleeping pills somehow? You hear stories about people doing all sorts of things in their sleep that they have no idea about having done afterwards, including killing people.

Paul Duggan: You'll have to weigh that yourself.

_______________________

Washington, D.C.: There is an old film -- Mandarin Express or something -- where all accomplices to a murder each stab the victim once so that they each share accountability, ensuring that nobody sings to the police. 3 roommates, 3 stab wounds. Coincidence?

Paul Duggan: I'll let you ponder that one.

_______________________

Dupont Circle, D.C.: Where was the basement tenant during all of this? Is there any hint that she might be involved? And what's Michael Price's alibi for that night?

Paul Duggan: The basement tenant, Sarah Morgan, said she had gone out to spend the night with a friend. The Michael Price aspect of the case is almost as tortuous as the story I wrote, but the long and short of it is this: In August 2006, Michael Price was living with a man in Silver Spring. This man provided an alibi for Michael Price, saying he and Price were home in bed together on the night Wone was killed. There's a lot more to it, but that's the gist.

_______________________

Vienna, Va.: Were any lie detector test given to the three suspects and, if so, what did they reveal?

Paul Duggan: Ward took a polygraph test, according to some court filings I've read. It's unclear whether the other two took polygraphs (or were asked to), but I don't believe they did. I'm not sure what conclusions the polygraph examiner reached in Ward's test.


_______________________

Fairfax, Va.: Has the former involvement of Eric Holder (current Attorney General) created any pressure on the prosecutors and detectives involved to obtain a confession or conviction?

Paul Duggan: I can't say, but I doubt it.

_______________________

Washington, D.C.: In all of your interviews with law enforcement officials and the prosecution, did you get the impression that homophobia is a driving force behind this investigation? It sounds like during the first interview with Price on the night of the murder that the lead investigator was pushing that theory without having any facts to back it up. It just seems to me that first impressions rooted in homophobia have colored the direction of this case from the get-go.

Paul Duggan: I think when the homicide detectives first encountered these three men, and the nature of the relationships among the three started to become clear, the cops' minds went straight to a possible sex angle to the case. It's obvious from Wagner's questions to Price that the idea of a straight guy spending the night in a house with three gay men was pretty foreign. Did that social/cultural divide amount to homophobia? I suppose you'd have to look into the heart and mind of each individual cop to answer that.

_______________________

Venice, Fla.: Mr. Duggan, has anyone looked at whether the needle marks could have been the result of an acupuncture-type event? Since the housemate is schooled in massage therapy and has trained in Thailand, it seems plausible that he may have picked up some training in the use of acupuncture to sedate or immobilize someone -- something that would fit in with his fetish lifestyle and also would leave no traces of drugs in the victim's system. Thanks for a great series and for keeping the attention on this case.

Paul Duggan: That's a very interesting question, on the acupuncture, and I know it's been looked into by at least one interested party, in Kathy Wone's wrongful-death lawsuit against the three men. Perhaps it's been a focus of interest on the criminal-investigation side, as well. I don't know.

_______________________

Washington, D.C.: On a website called alt.com Price used a name, culuket, that someone suggested combined might be a combination of the Spanish word for anus and a short form of the drug (keratine?). Do you know about this?

Paul Duggan: I've heard that before, yes.

_______________________

Washington, D.C.: The first thought I had when I read your article was that Wone's family should file a wrongful death civil lawsuit, and your answer confirmed that they have. Do you know the current status of the law suit?

Paul Duggan: It's pending. One complication has to do with discovery. Kathy Wone's lawyers, in pursuing the civil case, obviously want access to all the evidence that the police and U.S. attorney's office has gathered in the criminal case. The housemates lawyers in the criminal case have successfully argued that Kathy Wone's lawyers in the civil shouldn't being allowed access to that evidence until the criminal case is resolved. So the civil case is essentially in a pause. Got all that?

_______________________

Anonymous: The brother of one of the housemates trying to rob the place seems an odd angle -- what more can you tell about that?

Paul Duggan: You want another 8,000 words? Because that's what it would take to explain that whole tangent. The bottom line: The burglary, allegedly by Michael Price and an accomplice named Phelps Collins, was almost laughably inept, and they were quickly arrested (though the charges eventually were dropped). There was a long effort by the police to link Michael Price to Wone's death, but it ultimately led nowhere.

_______________________

Washington, D.C.: Have you discovered any explanation for why the burglary charges (of 1509 Swann Street) were dropped against Michael Price and his accomplice? It seemed like a slam dunk case, and you'd think the police would want to keep pressure on the parties involved/their closest relatives ...

Paul Duggan: Good question. There are some followers of the case who think that the government suspects that the burglary was part of an overall cover-up conspiracy, to show that, yes, it was possible for an intruder to get in the house -- and that was why the government didn't pursue it. To this day, prosecutors refer to it as "the alleged burglary." But I can't say for certain why the charges were dropped.

_______________________

Anonymous: Do the Wone's have any children?

Paul Duggan: No. At the time of his death, the couple had been talking about adopting a baby from China, Kathy Wone said.

_______________________

Washington, D.C.: Hi Paul -- What was reasoning for scheduling the obstruction trial a year from now? Do prosecutors hope that more evidence will emerge at that trial or do they anticipate discovering more in the interim? What if the defendants are found not guilty of obstruction? Does that all but quash the possibility of indicting one or more of the men for the homicide?

Paul Duggan: The reason is simple. The defense has to wait for some of its own testing to be done. That may take into the fall or early winter. The obstruction trial is expected to take two months. But two of the housemates' lawyers also represent defendants if the Blackwater case, the killings in Iraq. That is locked-in to start in January, and will occupy them well into March. Then they'll need a month to gear up for the trial in the Wone case. Thus the May 2010 trial date.

_______________________

Paul Duggan: Thanks everyone, for reading and for your questions. We'll try to keep you up to date on developments in the case the months go by, headed toward the schedule trial beginning next May. Have a great rest of the day.