GayWisdom

20/20 on Gay PDAs

In case you missed it, ABC's program 20/20 had an interesting segment on the public reaction to gay public displays of affection.  It was a hidden camera investigation using two real gay couples, one male, one female.  They started in Birmingham, Alabama and then redid the experiment in New Jersey.  The responses were what you might expected but some were heartening.

Jesse's Journal - Tales from the Gay Outdoors

by Jesse Monteagudo

Tales from the Gay Outdoors

Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people love camp, in both senses of the word.  According to CampGayUSA, there are over a hundred GLBT-owned or GLBT-friendly campgrounds in the United States alone. My own State of Florida has two popular gay campgrounds:  the Sawmill Camping Resort in Dade City and Camp Mars in Venus.  Most of the time, GLBT campgrounds were created with little or no controversy.  This is not the case of a camp established on Route 226 near Casar, North Carolina; one which bears the provocative name of Camp Lickalotta.

Camp Lickalotta is the child of Nancy Leedy and Joanie Beasley, two business and life partners who describe themselves as “unabashed environmentalists, Christians and lesbians.”  According to the Camp Lickalotta Web site, “our dream is to establish a LGBT Campground for adults in Western North Carolina that is earth-friendly.  A SAFE place, where ALL who come are welcome to enjoy camping in a non-threatening environment. Where they can relax in nature.” According to an article published in the Gaston Gazette (a local paper), Leedy said that she and Beasley chose the name Lickalotta because their goal is to “Lickalotta prejudice,” “Lickalotta pollutants” and “Lickalotta pessimism.” To these ends, the women rented space at the straight-owned Golden Valley Campground, and planned to inaugurate Camp Lickalotta with the first annual Bushstock, a women’s music festival, on May 16-18. Leedy and Beasley planned to use the money raised at Bushstock along with public donations to buy land for a permanent Camp Lickalotta.

Unfortunately, Leedy and Beasley reckoned without the residents of their Bible Belt community. When the women tried to attend services at nearby churches, they were told to leave outright or to attend early, less-attended services. When news about Camp Lickalotta spread around the community, the neighbors were outraged. They complained to Golden Valley owners Joe and Lynn Hoyle, threatening to keep themselves, their children and their grandchildren away from the camp if the Hoyles allowed the dykes to stay. Though Leedy and Beasley expected a fight - they knew what they were getting into when they picked the name Lickalotta - Mr. and Mrs. Hoyle caved in. According to a letter that they wrote the women, the Hoyles “decided that the best thing for all parties involved is for [the camp] to find another place to host their events. This also means that Nancy Leedy and Joanie Beasley will have to find another campground to park their camper.” The Hoyles also complained that the women promised that Bushstock was going to be a “family-oriented” festival, not the “adults-only” event that it eventually became.

Perhaps Leedy and Beasley were foolish to make their intentions so blatantly clear, and to give their Camp a name that served as a red flag for the local bigots. But the Hoyles were wrong to cave-in to local pressure, out of fear, greed and prejudice, even as they claimed that “there has never been any dispute between any of these parties related to or arising out of the sexual preferences of Joan [sic] Beasley and Nancy Leedy.” “Joe and Lynn have a strong commitment to the citizens,” said the Hoyles’ lawyer, O. Max Gardner III, “and would never knowingly and willingly take any actions that would do anything to tarnish the image of this area with respect to our high moral standards and commitment to traditional family and religious values.” Beasley and Leedy were only given seven days to pack and leave Golden Valley, under the protection of the local sheriff’s office. Undeterred, the women found a new location for Bushstock and are working hard to find a new home for Camp Lickalotta. We wish them all the luck.

  Whatever you might say about the wisdom of their methods, Joanie Beasley and Nancy Leedy were clearly in the right. More controversial are the Gy and bisexual men who, since time immemorial, have used public parks and preserves for sexual activity. In the Dutch city of Amsterdam, long-known as a center of sexual liberty, men have sought sexual satisfaction in the city’s Vondelpark, around the rose garden (or so I’m told). Recently the City government shocked conservatives there and elsewhere when they moved to allow public sex in the Park. (However, most of the complaints came not from moralists but from dog owners, who still have to keep their dogs on leashes.) Even so, City Alderman Paul Van Grieken defended their decision, asking “why should we impose a rule on something you can’t impose a rule on?  Moreover it isn’t a nuisance for the other visitors and gives a lot of pleasure to a certain group of people.”  Cruisers are still expected to pick up their used condoms and other trash, stay away from the children’s playground and limit their sexual activities to night hours. The Netherlands Police National Diversity Expertise Center asked other cities to follow Amsterdam’s example, noting that it would free the police to deal with more serious matters, such as anti-gay violence. The Dutch approach to park cruising is sensible, reasonable and humane, which means it will never be adopted in the Untied States.

Jesse Monteagudo is a freelance writer and Gay American who lives in South Florida with his life partner.  Write him a note at jessemonteagudo@aol.com.

Finally...some realpolitik analysis:

This requires no explanation:

Poll: Bullshit Is Most Important Issue For 2008 Voters

Wisconsin Historical Society

White Crane is collected in numerous libraries and scholarly collections in the U.S.

We're proud to announce that we are now in the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison.

Gays In The Military

Lemme see if I have this...you'll pardon the expression....straight:

Gay people in the military: Bad for unit cohesion.

Convicted felons...you know, manslaughter, sex crimes, that sort of thing: No problem.

The military and the Bush administration, lecturing us on morality: Priceless.

And...could someone explain to me why we're so damn eager to join up and kill and contribute to a war of aggression?

Are we that desperate? And what is it, precisely, we're trying to prove? And to whom?

Ancestors Issue Online

Excerpts from the Spring issue of White Crane are now up online. 

The topic for the issue was "Ancestors" and featured a cover I'm particularly proud of.  It features the portraits of a number of Gay and proto-Gay writers and activists from the past -- now "ancestors" of course. 

The issue includes a real mix of submissions from our writers and two interviews with folks we were fascinated with.  There's one interview with Steven Solberg, who's working on a documentary about Gay Elders and Aging and an interview with former Clinton gay friend and politico David Mixner (who endorsed Obama this year). 

Subscribers should be receiving their copies in the next few days.

Read excerpts here. 

Hip-Hop Tuba Opera

Howzabout some hip-hop tuba?  Opera rap?  Well, you got that and a whole lot more unpleasantness in a 25 minutes of the "worst music of all time" in one piece.

This is truly boggling.  Apparently the result of polling data used to determine the most hated parts of music.  Then they squonched all of that alltogether and voila! you have this audio din that just has to be heard.

Here's how the description of the finished product:

The most unwanted music is over 25 minutes long, veers wildly between loud and quiet sections, between fast and slow tempos, and features timbres of extremely high and low pitch, with each dichotomy presented in abrupt transition. The most unwanted orchestra was determined to be large, and features the accordion and bagpipe (which tie at 13% as the most unwanted instrument), banjo, flute, tuba, harp, organ, synthesizer (the only instrument that appears in both the most wanted and most unwanted ensembles). An operatic soprano raps and sings atonal music, advertising jingles, political slogans, and "elevator" music, and a children's choir sings jingles and holiday songs. The most unwanted subjects for lyrics are cowboys and holidays, and the most unwanted listening circumstances are involuntary exposure to commercials and elevator music. Therefore, it can be shown that if there is no covariance--someone who dislikes bagpipes is as likely to hate elevator music as someone who despises the organ, for example--fewer than 200 individuals of the world's total population would enjoy this piece.

You can give it a listen to here.  Pretty hysterical at points.

MTV Rock The Vote

MTV's new Rock the Vote ad is visually arresting and features an on screen gay couple and a kiss.  And it has a nice vibe to it too.

On Religious Tests for Public Office

The Millennial Memory...

I was going to defer this commentary until after Dan posted his commentary and addenda to the bowdlerized PBS Whitman hagiography which, while it was a nice attempt, proved once again how subtly Gay people and beautiful same sex love can be written out of history…no sin but omission. But I can’t wait…and since we offered Father John McNeill’s views on things, I feel moved to share my own point of view of this...

The Pope is in America…and everyone is so worked up and excited.

Your first clue that this stinks is George Bush is receiving him at the White House. Church and State, once again, cozy at the highest levels. We live in an age of hypocrisy and perhaps the only way to be able to get out of bed in the morning is to at the very least, call it what it is.

I’m particularly taken with the media coverage of it all that, while reminding folks of the “controversy” -- that is corporate media’s Mother’s Milk (ka-ching!) -- it still manages to gloss over with what is bewilderingly called “balance” these days, with the moony-eyed musings of the “faithful” contrasted with the last seething furious gasps of the thousands of men and boys who have been molested, as though they have equal merit. And somehow they manage to leave out the part where this Pope, in his former job as head of what was the office of the Inquisition in another time, instructed those in charge…those responsible for protecting children (hello Texas!) …to play it out for time so the statutes of limitations would take effect. Bill Maher nails this one beautifully in his recent “Rules.”

But what I am reminded of as we watch the flash and the dash, the pomp and the circumstance, the gold and the satin, the grandeur and the theater of it all, of the Papacy paraded before us as though this was some moral model, is something I was told when I was, years ago, the Parish Council Chairman of Holy Trinity Parish on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

One of my closest friends in those days was a Franciscan priest who was living at the parish (not diocesan, in other words). He shall remain nameless here, because he continues to be a priest…a Gay priest, I might add, who loved his cocktails a little too much…and if reports are true, now the Pastor of a parish in one of the bigger primary states. I loved Michael, and still do, even though I haven’t seen him in years, and I would never want to cause him any embarrassment. Michael was a good friend of the “Saint of 9/11” Mychal Judge, and is the reason I meet Father Judge many years ago.

Anyway…probably the most interesting idea Fr. Michael passed along to me was the idea of the “institutional memory” of the Roman Catholic Church. His point was this: the Church views time in a different way than the rest of the hoi polloi.

I was all ready for some mystical take on time and eternity and what-have-you. But no. What  he meant was the Church and its hierarchy view time in a “millennial view.” That was the term he used. A millennial view.  The very long millennial view. In other words: these things shall pass. A century from now, who will remember? Who will be around to remember? The Church will still be there, of course, but generations of regular folks come and go…and they die. They forget. All that is remembered after a while, say a generation…maybe two…ok, three… is the flash and the dash, the pomp and the circumstance, the gold and the satin, the grandeur and the theater of it all. So…a hundred years…a mere blink of an eye, if that, to an institution like the Catholic Church…200 years…what is 200 years to an institution that has been around in cozy bed with the powers of the world for 2000 years? The one thing this millennial view affords is priceless: people will forget. Who remembers the Inquisition? Who, nowadays, even cares? Who remembers what was done to American Indians in the name of Christianity?

And who…a thousand years from now, will remember the hundreds of thousands of boys who were molested, abused? And how the Church worked not to wash it clean with the cleansing light of day, but to hide it away until the secular laws ran out the clock? How does an institution pull off something like an Inquisition and still maintain the illusion of moral probity? How does an institution pull off something like not only the on-going molestation and abuse of thousands of children, but covering it up and paying people off for years…

Sleepy…you’re getting sleepy. Don’t you worry your pretty little head about these matters.

Father will take care of it for you. Rest your head in his satin-covered lap as he bathes you in incense and architecture and unctuous oils and candles...the flash and the dash, the pomp and the circumstance, the gold and the satin, the grandeur and the theater of it all...

And soon you will forget…