WKUK Black Doctor

More Whitest Kids You Know hilarity :)

Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ma9i23kFVrI

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 But that’s not what I’m talking about: I just don’t have time for the bullshit anymore: Tonight Maine repealed marriage equality.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/

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

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.

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

Nihilism -- CHAFF 2008

I found a quote on the net somewhere that said nihilism is where you go when you can’t find anything to believe in.

According to Wikipedia it’s “the view that the world, and especially human existence, is without meaning, purpose, comprehensible truth, or essential value.” It’s often defined as belief in nothing, but from what I’ve read that’s not entirely true... we should say faith in nothing to be more accurate. Faith is a firm belief in something where there isn’t or can’t be any supporting evidence. Nihilists see faith as dangerous because when we’re relying on faith we aren’t using our faculties of common sense, reason and critical analysis. According to Nietzsche (you know him – the “God is dead” guy – life of the party), faith is simply “not wanting to know.”

Not wanting to know? Crazy, right? Well, yeah. But understandable maybe. Who wants to know anyway?? It’s a big scary world out there, it’s hard to understand sometimes, so of course most of us would rather just accept on faith whatever sounds like a fair explanation. It gets exhausting asking questions all the time and never having any certainty, and realistically, nobody’s going to be able to think through absolutely EVERY issue and read EVERY book. Especially in the modern Western nations. I’m not really surprised that in the most technologically advanced and modernized societies, like the USA, Australia and New Zealand, so many people believe in a cosmic zombie who communicates with them each individually by means of telepathy... our lives are a lot more sped up and full of stress and hassle in comparison to the rest of the world. We just don’t have the time to think things through.

Sometimes I think that if any of us could see how complicated the world really is it would be enough to drive us mad. But what the nihilists are getting at is that though it’s comforting to just think we know the answers without having to ask the questions, we’re fooling ourselves, and making things worse for ourselves and others in doing so. How? Well, let’s just pull a random example out of our collective arse, shall we? AIDS is killing thousands of people every day, and causes immeasurable human suffering, all around the world but especially in poorest nations. People get AIDS by becoming infected with HIV, most often through transmission of sexual fluids, and this can be prevented by using condoms during sex. There’s more to it than that, but that’s good enough for our purposes. We could fix the problem and alleviate a lot of the suffering if people wore the damn condoms, but faith has stuck its beak in and convinced a whole lot of those people that the father of the aforementioned cosmic zombie, who lives up in the sky and watches everything they do (the dirty perve) will throw them in a lake of fire to burn forever if they wear condoms when they fuck. And other well-meaning faithful people, mindful of the imperilled souls of those people in the populations where HIV is rampant, are kindly puncturing the condom packets before the poor sods even get them, just to be sure that no latex stands between souls and salvation. Faith makes us do dumb things, so nihilism begins to look like an attractive alternative. It’s the rejection of any belief that relies on faith, whether religious or secular.

Another defining characteristic of nihilism is the rejection of the idea that things have a final purpose. Nihilists believe everything is random, that there is no preordained final destination or revelation. In other words, you’re not going to heaven. It doesn’t exist and what’s more, it’s pointless to live your life in some sort of preparation for it. So go on, masturbate, get drunk, call your mother a herpes-riddled crack-whore... it doesn’t matter. You won’t get punished for it in the hereafter (though your mum might burn all your stuff and kick you out on the street). In a nutshell, nihilists reject the teleological arguments offered by most religions. Teleology is the idea that the universe functions a bit like a machine according to some sort of god-given plan or design, and it’s not restricted to the world of religion either. A common, almost sacred belief among people in the secular West is that you and your significant other were ‘made for each other,’ or if you haven’t got one at the moment, that she or he is out there somewhere waiting for you, that it’s ‘meant to be.’ Well the nihilists have got news for you... there was nothing inevitable about you finding that one particular person, there was no plan, no destiny, it was all just chance, and you only think it’s something magical and special because it feels nice, but you fail to see that you probably would have felt the same about almost anyone else. They might remind you ever so politely (or more likely, somewhat sharply) that everyone else is feeling something pretty similar for their own special-someone, you’re just too blind to see it, so shut the fuck up. Nihilists also reject Marxism, Buddhism, and any other set of beliefs that rely on teleology. There is no destiny, there can be no progress.

Nihilism is virtually synonymous with scepticism. There are two main branches: social or existential nihilism, and political nihilism. Let’s start with the existential variety. It’s passive, influenced by eastern philosophy and mysticism, and concerns itself primarily with isolation, human suffering and the futility and hopelessness of existence. It’s bloody depressing. Most people, when you mention nihilism, will think this is what you mean. In the face of all the meaninglessness and randomness, the only coping mechanism is detachment – just stop giving a shit. Don’t do anything for anyone, don’t bother with worthy causes, just don’t care, because ultimately it’s a waste of time.

Now, don’t confuse existential nihilism with depression, though that certainly follows on from it a lot of the time. Personally I’m inclined toward depression when I’m feeling worthless. When I ask someone out or let them know I’m interested and they say “Fuck no, I need space, I’m not ready for a relationship just now, you’re sweet and everything, let’s just be friends, STOP STALKING ME!!!”, I usually take it to me mean that I’m not tall enough, attractive enough, smart enough etc, and I inevitably begin saying to myself: “What’s the point in trying anyway, I may as well stay in my room, give up my hopes and get used to being by myself.” But kids, that’s not quite full blown existential nihilism, because I’m not saying that there’s no point in anyone trying to get laid, only that there’s no point in me trying. Important difference. Even at my most whiny and self-loathing, I would still agree that most people can and should try to find happiness in the whole love and romance thingy.

Political nihilism, the other main branch of nihilism, is active, revolutionary and at once destructive and creative. It’s about social structures and authority. Political nihilism states that things are in such a bad state that the only real option left to us is to smash them up, and whether or not we can rebuild we will at least have done some good. Being a political nihilist is about being in the here and now... rejecting all religious and philosophical debate and all the metaphysical circular reasoning that it ultimately leads to. It’s about challenging all the assumptions we base our values on, even equality and justice. There’s no future goal that we’re aiming for, no reformed society that’s more tolerant or diverse or equitable or prosperous, or at least no goal that’s more important than the present. It’s about realising there’s no life but this one, and making the most of it. It’s about taking responsibility..... if there’s no higher power then your success or failure is up to you, and you alone. Another nihilism quote I found sums it up nicely... “Each human life has the potential, but unless one strives to be a god, they are only a worm.” We can do anything... it’s up to us whether we repeat the patterns of our forbears, killing and subjugating each other for material gain and dominance and letting our masters profit at our expense, or whether we control our lives and reap the benefits for ourselves.

It’s true that nihilism, like anarchism, is usually equated with violence and terrorism, and there’s certainly historical justification. Nihilists generally reckon that violence is not inherent in their philosophies, but I’m inclined to think that if nihilism is your philosophy you’re more likely to be aggressive. Nihilists say there is nothing above man, there is no objective moral, ethical reality, but is that really the case? The argument can be made that we carry our moral absolutes with us, encoded into our brains. I think it’s genetic, we’ve survived as a species because we know instinctively how to interact with each other. We’re a social species, we have survived because we can cooperate, and we know, each of us, how to do this, how to avoid conflict. Something in our brains, other than fear of repercussions, tells us a behaviour is wrong. Why else, for instance, would all these religions around the world have come up with such basic moral tenets as don’t kill each other? Don’t torture people for fun?? And remember to put the trash out???

Just because there’s no ultimate point to anything, and even though nothing I actually accomplish is going to last forever, that doesn’t mean there’s no sense in doing it anyway, does it? In fact, doesn’t that make human endeavour a more precious and amazing thing? Think about it, out of all the randomness, out of all the meaninglessness, we are able to create something that has meaning for ourselves and others. That meaning might be quite arbitrary, we each might see the same thing quite differently, but isn’t that kind of beautiful in itself? There might not be any reason, in the big scheme of things, for me to get out there and make a noise about discrimination, pollution or the suffering of others, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t do it. It will mean something to me, I’ll be taking control, making something out of the nothingness, making the world what I want it to be. And maybe, just maybe, someone else will see the world the way I do.

And that’s meaning enough for me.

Danny Rudd

On Love, And Other calamities (Part One)

The feelings we experience through different stages of love are due to chemicals that we produce within our bodies, hormones that wash over our brains, compelling us to act in ways that are mistaken for fate or folly. Ask any old married couple, and they'll tell you that the excitement of initial infatuation becomes deeper attachment with the passage of time, but inevitably the excitement fades to little more than memory.

There are three stages of what we call love: Lust, Romantic Love, and Attachment, each different, but all in the service of the biological imperative to successfully reproduce. Lust gets us hunting for potential mates, Romantic Love narrows our focus down to just one individual, and Attachment encourages us to stick with this partner long enough to raise children. Each of these stages is characterised by the presence of different levels of certain hormones in a person's circulatory system and neurochemistry.

Let's look at Lust first. We're all aware of this initial stage of love, that jolt of excitement and piqued curiosity when we are in close proximity to a person to whom we are mysteriously attracted. Lust would seem to be a primarily visual phenomenon, and certainly our cultural heritage deals with it in such a way. The words of Jesus were that "anyone who even looks at a woman with lust in his eye has already committed adultery with her in his heart," and further that "if your eye offends you, pluck it out" (Matthew 5:28-29), hence the Religious Right's almost fanatical vendetta against pornography and infidelity.

We now know that it's quite natural to 'keep an eye out' for potential mates, but increasingly scientists are discovering that Lust is fundamentally a chemical phenomenon.It has been found that women are more aromatically susceptible than men - that is, they have a better sense of smell - perhaps because they have evolved to regard smell as a significant indicator of a partner's suitability, being the one stuck with the most work in reproduction. Not only is a woman's sex cell, the gigantic egg or ovum, more biologically costly to produce than the man's millions of tiny sperm cells, she has to carry the developing embryo within her body, nourishing it at her own expense, and this duty does not cease when once the offspring is born, she then has to breastfeed, and gather foods for her infant for years afterward! The man, by contrast, has the option of disappearing after the act of copulation, no further expense incurred.

Smell is indicative of the state of an individual's immune system - we're programmed to seek partners with different immunity to our own so that our offspring will have the strongest immune system possible and thus a better chance of surviving. Heterosexual couples with similar immune systems have higher incidence of spontaneous miscarriage during pregnancy, and frequently have more trouble conceiving in the first place. Interestingly, the Contraceptive Pill confuses a woman's sense of smell to prefer a partner with a scent similar to her own. Consequently, perhaps, among the top complaints heard by divorce lawyers from women is "I can't stand his smell." But on the lighter side, once two people are emotionally attached they're disposed to see (and smell) each other in a more positive light.

Lust is also characterised by a surge of testosterone in both men and women. It is a common misconception that testosterone is the 'male hormone,' but this simply is not true. While it certainly is responsible for the development of male anatomy and secondary sex characteristics (body hair, deeper voice, sperm production) at specific points in the individual's life, it is by no means a chemical exclusive to men. Testosterone, it seems, arouses an individual, be they male or female, in readiness for copulation. Men have more interest in sex, (and in having sex more often, at that) because they have a set of glands that are devoted to full-time production of testosterone. A woman's sexual response is tempered by which stage she is at in her monthly menstrual cycle, as testosterone production waxes and wanes.

Romantic Love is the (far from inevitable) next step in the process, and is quite distinct, introducing the major chemical player in romance, a hormone known as dopamine. Dopamine and norepinephrine levels surge when a person is confronted by the unknown. These are the same chemicals responsible for addiction - and for experiencing elation, hope, despair and rage.In the initial stage of Romantic Love, they cause such exhilaration that we forget to eat or sleep. This is commonly referred to as 'lovesickness,' for indeed throughout history it has been regarded as a sort of madness or illness. It is only comparatively recently in Western societies, in the last two hundred years roughly, that being 'In Love' has come to be seen as a good foundation for marriage and the raising of children.

This wave of dopamine, however, eventually subsides, and is followed by vasopressin and oxytocin, hormones that lead to long-lasting Attachment. These are 'Cuddle Chemicals,' released during sex; they give us the 'warm fuzzies,' making us want to stick together. They condition both partners so that they will maintain a pair bond for the successful rearing of offspring. Oxytocin, in particular, may actually subdue levels of unruly dopamine and norepinephrine, taking away that 'high' of initial infatuation, effectively 'squashing' Romantic Love.

There is something about the way our society is structured - our Western 'rules of propriety' - handed down through Christian tradition and surviving today in secular form - that creates and bolsters the conditions to capitalise on the natural high which accompanies the initial dopamine and norepinephrine surge. We commonly believe that 'dating' is a sensible practice put in place so that we may 'shop around' to find a good match, but perhaps it serves a further purpose. The rules of propriety that accompany dating (no sex before marriage, no sex on a first date and so on) are a restriction or barrier when you have found that one 'special someone,' they serve to frustrate the natural impulse and prolong the 'romantic high,' until marriage and consummation, for it is well known that when it comes to romance, you always want what you cannot have.

This delay may in fact bring about an even more powerful wave of Cuddle Chemicals than would otherwise be the case, leading to even longer-lasting attachment. Gay and lesbian communities in the Western world largely lack such societally-imposed restrictions, and indeed consummation of the natural procreative impulse, though directed at a partner of the same gender and thus confounding its biological imperative, follows swiftly in these communities. It is perhaps unsurprising that gay and lesbian relationships generally do not last nearly as long as 'straight' partnerships, when the conditions for lifelong partnership are largely a product of rules designed to frustrate the urges of 'normal' heterosexual mating pairs.

The problem with the 'Cuddle Chemical' stage is that it too begins to wane with time, as sex becomes less frequent. Men in particular are naturally programmed to seek out new sexual partners, and will inevitably begin to look around, being none too choosy. And women, far from being the passive objects they have been made out to be in much of Western tradition, are actually programmed to be continuously on the lookout to 'trade up' and secure a partner with better genetics, more resources and greater dominance (hence the appeal of shopping and wealthy husbands). And thus even the most the most stable, affectionate couple is vulnerable to infidelity or dissolution in time.

Novelty makes your brain and body pump out the exciting hormones, norepinephrine and dopamine, so if you find attraction waning, if your partnership has lost it's excitement and you want to persevere, then do new and varied things and fall in love all over again. You can fool your brain into seeing your partner as a new one. Studies show that couples who share more exciting experiences (such as entering competitions together and travelling together on vacations to new places) report more happiness and satisfaction. This may in fact explain the success of arranged marriages in other cultures, for while we in the West do not generally like the idea, the anxiety, suspense, and the thrill of Chinese or Indian wedding pageantry may in fact drive dopamine levels up so high that romantic love positively flourishes.

We have other tools to bring on the dopamine. Humour is one of the best. And as if you needed an excuse, having sex elevates testosterone levels in both males and females, which in turn revs up the dopamine, allowing partners to recapture the thrill of romantic love, at least temporarily. The simplest way, however, is enforced separation or a good old screaming row. Arguments trigger a rush of adrenaline, which kicks in during risky, new situations. Separation prolongs the production of dopamine, you want the person more as the barriers to togetherness are increased, which increases the frustration and makes the reward of being together so much richer. The problem with this is that both partners have to be in-sync for what's comfortable or challenging, and not many of us are. Our drives for novelty can be unifying or divisive once the exhilaration of courtship gives way to the routines of partnership.

Most enduring couples, it is found, are seeking similar levels of stimulation. People who seek high levels of stimulation (high sensation seekers) are more likely to engage in risky behaviour, explore unknown territory, experiment with drugs and alcohol and seek out a variety or larger number of sexual partners. High sensation seekers have low levels of dopamine (oddly enough) and serotonin, probably because of low levels of monoamine oxidase (MAO), which regulates dopamine and other neurotransmitters. Low serotonin levels go hand in hand with impulsive behaviour. Men tend to have lower MAO levels than women, which is not to say that they are deficient, but rather that this characteristic serves the man's quite different biological reproductive agenda (more on sex differences between men and women later).

A couple made up of two high sensation seekers is more likely to dissolve out of boredom, and this is almost certainly a factor in the generally rapid dissolution of male-male couples. A couple where one partner is a high sensation seeker and the other is a low sensation seeker will not easily understand each other (the majority of couples fall into this category, this being largely the state of the heterosexual population). The happiest couples are comprised of two people who aren't looking for high excitement, but lest you hastily conclude that lesbian relationships must be more content than any other couple form, it must be noted that even within each biological sex there may be vast disparities in individuals' levels of sensation seeking. It's not always obvious in the beginning stages of a relationship what level your potential partner is.

So there we have it: a brief overview of the chemistry of love and sex. Just as an aside, it should perhaps be noted that the hormones that incite us to couplehood and attachment actually decrease our individual testosterone production, making sex progressively less interesting over time. Couples who maintain interesting and satisfying sexual relationships generally have a lot of fights, go through periods of separation and reunion, have rich fantasy lives or make allowances for infidelity or the possibility (even if unacted upon) of sex with others. But lest you come away from this brief essay gloomy or disillusioned, take comfort in the fact that there are plenty of other areas in a relationship that may deepen and become richer with time, and that long-term Attachment is something wonderful in and of itself.

It's not all about sex.

DannyR

Eight Years

Eight years now I've given and
What have you done for me?
Though I've shown my committment
To this fickle family.
When you needed letters written
I wrote them, signed my name.
When you wouldn't speak up for yourselves
I stood up to be shamed.
You wanted to get married,
I took your cause up as my own
Though I knew I wouldn't benefit
I made your feelings known.
I manned the phones and held the line
Against religious freaks,
I trained to give words of advice
When you were suffering.
I've given up my evenings
And all anonymity,
You fucked me off, I held my tongue,
I didn't cause a scene.
When you were sick I comforted,
I took the time to care -
Though others washed their hands of you
I made sure I stood near
To let you know you're worth it,
That I love you as you are,
But sometimes I have to admit
You make it fucking hard.
You do nothing for yourselves
But it's me that gets the blame
When things go wrong, I'm on my own
To hell with what we've gained
And if I should show my differences
From all the rest of you
You treat me like a lepper,
Words of friendship ring untrue.
Eight years, and now looking back
What have I got to show?
I really did believe in you
But now I just don't know.

DannyR

TAGGED!!

First, post the rules:

- Each blogger starts with ten random facts/habits about themselves.

- Bloggers that are tagged need to write on their own blog about their ten things and post these rules.

- At the end of your blog, you need to choose ten people to get tagged and list their names.

- Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.


1) The first girl I ever fell head over heels for was the biggest bitch I have ever known. She was stunning, her hair was straight and snow-white blonde (not from a bottle, either), it fell to her waist (she never wore it up) and it bounced and swayed as she walked. She was a dancer, so she moved gracefully and was incredibly slim. She was taller than me, and she had freckles across her nose. Her name was Charity, which was kind of ironic, really, because she was unrelenting in her cruelty. Not that she ever swore at me or anything like that, no she was always smiling, and her voice was like honey. Her evil power was in her unerring ability to detect what people were most insecure about and draw attention to it in front of everyone, again and again, smiling sweetly as she did so. She humiliated me all through my teenage years, by saying things like "What on earth possessed you to wear that, sweetie?" and laughing gently at my stature and... other physical attributes... in front of her friends. And I was so smitten that I stumbled over myself trying not to look silly, and making more of a laughing stock of myself in the process.

2) The last time my dad came to visit me in Wellington (a few years back now) I heard him knock at the door and immediately hid under my bed where he wouldn't see me if he looked through the window. I stayed there for nearly three hours, listening to him banging on the door and swearing, hearing him walk around the house and look in through all the windows. Why didn't I just let him in? Because he annoys the hell out of me, showing up unannounced, talking about me to my flatmates as if I wasn't there, saying what he thinks is 'wrong with' me, insulting his hosts and saying every racist, homophobic, chauvanist thing that comes into his Christ-polluted head. Don't get me wrong, he's not saying these things like an ordinary Christian would... he's ANGRY when he says them, and when he gets angry he scares me half-to-death. Ordinary Christians would be horrified, I think, to hear him talking. And he's a minister. Go figure.

3) I cannot save money for the life of me. It's not even that I spend it on stuff, when I look at my bank statement it all seems to have gone on food, rent, power etc. But there's never any left over, and it doesn't matter how much I'm getting on a weekly basis. I think I eat too much.

4) I often fall asleep fantasizing about not waking up, wondering who would find me, what they would find, how they would go about packing up my stuff and distributing it among my family and friends or disposing of it. I wonder if anyone knows me well enough to work out what sort of commemmoration or service I'd want, and who would show up.

5) I had a secret world as a kid, more in my head than anywhere in my real life exactly. It was modelled on a quiet inner-city park I'd found one time when my mum had taken my little brother and me to visit my aunt Thelma and her husband Roy. It was over their back fence, and screened off on all sides by tall trees (I think they were poplars). In the middle of it was a fallen tree trunk, it was thick, hollow, and crawling with spiders and bugs, but I sat there on it enjoying the sunshine until I heard my mum calling for me an hour or so later. Aunt Thelma moved when Roy died, and I never found the place again, but it's still there in my head, I can picture it perfectly, and I escape there whenever I just want 'me' time.

6) I always wanted to be a writer... I still do. I have, under my bed, a good 300 pages of a couple of stories I've partly written. One of the main ways I waste time instead of doing my study is by typing what I've got so far. I think I'm very good at coming up with ideas, but quite poor at taking them to their conclusion, and so I guess I'll never write a book. I think it's because on some level I feel like it's not 'real work' and it would be selfish of me to pursue it.

7) I'm really ashamed of the fact that I did dance classes as a kid... ballet, tap, contemporary, jazz... and I got high marks in the exams. I absolutely hated it, but I loved being on stage, and I knew it made my mum proud so I kept up with it until I was fourteen and was just getting hassled too much by other kids my age. I got bullied a lot for it in primary school, so all through intermediate and high school I tried to hide the fact that I had done it, but it wasn't much good. I was getting called 'faggot' 'poof' and 'queer' before I even knew what the words meant. Retrospectively, I can't help but wonder if that has something to do with who I actually turned into.

8) I once pretended to have lost my wallet and driver's license at a party at someone's house, just so I could ask the guy who lived there to look for it and get back to me. He was one of the most attractive guys I've ever met, and of course I knew he was WAAAYY out of my league but it didn't stop me from obsessing over him for months.

9) I feel like I've lived enough, in that many different places, as that many different versions of me, that the one thing I want in all the world is rest, to not have to be anyone or anything, to not have to think or care or feel anything anymore. I'm feel exhausted, worn out, "thin, like butter spread over too much bread," to use Bilbo Baggins' expression.

10) If I could crawl inside a story, it would have to be 'The Last Continent' by Terry Pratchett, or in fact any of his Rincewind stories. I'd love to be just swept away in the insanity, it would be something new, vibrant and interesting. Rincewind's world conforms to no rules, nothing has to make sense, the only certainty being that you don't piss off The Luggage, or you get eaten. 'The Last Continent' is, I think, Pratchett's most ridiculous story, and it always makes me laugh my socks off.

Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road

This song describes quite well how I'm feeling just now, having today resigned from UniQ and resolved to leave Palmerston North and go back to work. It's about turning my back on being cosmopolitan and fake, and returning to the familiar, the isolated and the genuine. A lot of the bitterness, reflected in references to 'Society Dogs' and being set on your feet again by just another couple of drinks, is directed toward Seth, who I feel at this point cares about nobody but himself and his own interests, least of all my feelings.

The Yellow Brick Road, I feel, is quite apt, too.... too long have I chased after dreams, thinking that happiness lay 'out there' somewhere. There is also, implicit in this song for me at least, a rejection of the Gay Community. I have found it to be shallow, superficial and judgemental - serving only it's own interests, readily abandoning those who cannot so easily conform to 'normalness'.

So then, here, in all their bitter splendour, are the lyrics to Elton John's 'Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road':



When are you gonna come down,
When are you going to land?
I should have stayed on the farm -
I should have listened to my old man!

You know you can't hold me forever -
I didn't sign up with you.
I'm not a present for your friends to open,
This boy's too young to be singing
The blues.

So goodbye, Yellow Brick Road,
Where the dogs of society howl -
You can't plant me in your penthouse,
I'm going back to my plough!
Back to the howling old owl
Hunting the horny back toad...
Oh I've finally decided my future lies
Beyond the Yellow Brick Road!

What do you think you'll do then?
I bet that'll shoot down your plane.
It'll take you a couple of vodka and tonics
To set you on your feet again!

Maybe you'll get a replacement,
There's plenty like me to be found -
Mongrels who ain't got a penny,
Sniffing for tidbits like you on
The ground.

So goodbye, Yellow Brick Road,
Where the dogs of society howl -
You can't plant me in your penthouse,
I'm going back to my plough!
Back to the howling old owl
Hunting the horny back toad...
Oh I've finally decided my future lies
Beyond the Yellow Brick Road!

by Bernie Taupin, Elton John



Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, assholes!!