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joyce is down with diversity

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I laughed so fucking hard at this

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I’m watching that documentary “Before Stonewall” about gay history pre-1969, and uncovered something which I think is interesting.

The documentary includes a brief clip of a 1954 televised newscast about the rise of homosexuality. The host of the program interviewed psychologists, a police officer, and one “known homosexual”. The “known homosexual” is 22 years old. He identifies himself as Curtis White, which is a pseudonym; his name is actually Dale Olson.

So I tracked down the newscast. According to what I can find, Dale Olson may have been the first gay man to appear openly on television and defend his sexual orientation. He explains that there’s nothing wrong with him mentally and he’s never been arrested. When asked whether he’d take a cure if it existed, he says no. When asked whether his family knows he’s gay, he says that they didn’t up until tonight, but he guesses they’re going to find out, and he’ll probably be fired from his job as well. So of course the host is like …why are you doing this interview then? and Dale Olson, cool as cucumber pie, says “I think that this way I can be a little useful to someone besides myself.”

1954. 22 years old. Balls of pure titanium.

Despite the pseudonym, Dale’s boss did indeed recognize him from the TV program, and he was promptly fired the next day. He wrote into ONE magazine six months later to reassure readers that he had gotten a new job at a higher salary.

Curious about what became of him, I looked into his life a little further. It turns out that he ultimately became a very successful publicity agent. He promoted the Rocky movies and Superman. Not only that, but get this: Dale represented Rock Hudson, and he was the person who convinced him to disclose that he had AIDS! He wrote the statement Rock read. And as we know, Rock Hudson’s disclosure had a very significant effect on the national conversation about AIDS in the U.S.

It appears that no one has made the connection between Dale Olson the publicity agent instrumental in the AIDS debate and Dale Olson the 22-year-old first openly gay man on TV. So I thought I’d make it. For Pride month, an unsung gay hero.

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Pete Buttigieg is just a faggot.

It’s very important to me that younger queers understand this: to the people who you’re trying to be more respectable for when you say things like neopronouns set the trans movement back or you’re why the cishets don’t accept us or including [aces/bi people with the ‘wrong kind’ of partners/non-binary people/kinksters/non-passing trans ppl/furries/polyam people] just hurts us, can’t you wait until we get all our rights before we talk about some of yours? – to those people? Pete Buttigieg is just a fag.

On Sunday at Pride Northwest, some kids – late teens, early 20s – asked what our button I survived Reagan for this? meant. All of the queer adults at the tables making up our ad hoc counter looked at each other and sighed a little. Emet and another adult started to explain the way that the Reagan Administration handled – or didn’t handle – the beginning of the AIDS crisis. How many people died. How much we were ignored. The Ashes Action. The Time Magazine article which explicitly blamed bisexual men for passing the pandemic to the cishet community, playing on all the worst stereotypical bullshit. The way that even when the CDC started paying attention, they were so focused on gay men that they ignored AIDS in the lesbian community, leading to the “women don’t get AIDS, they just die from it” poster. And so on.

I finished counting out change and passed the last Bear Pride raised fist pin over to a bear a little older than me, then turned my head and interjected, “they didn’t care until it started infecting more than just the fags.” I turned my head back and handed him his change. He laughed bitterly and said, “remember when they called it 'gay cancer?’”

That what I need you to understand. The people for whom you are folding yourself into smaller and smaller boxes will never see you as anything but a freak. A queer. A dyke. A tranny. A fag.

Never.

These are people who will stand by and let you wither away and die alone, gasping for breath in a cinderblock room, and not even claim your ashes, and they will say you deserve it, because of your lifestyle. If they speak of you at all it will be by the wrong name, with the pictures you hate the most. They will curse at your lover, throw him out of the home you shared, and steal the gift you gave last Christmas to throw it in the trash just so he can’t have it and they’ll say Jesus loves you! while they do it. They’ll feel good and righteous and blessed and holy and pure for doing it.

And for them, you spit in the eye of your sister. For them, you disavow your sibling. For their sake, you trim away bits of your heart and lace yourself up tight. Never too loud. Never too queer. Never inconvenient or embarrassing, never asking for too much.

Pete Buttigieg is what happens when your Boomer dad turns out gay. Middle America. Parents still married. Suburban-sprouted. Valedictorian. Harvard-educated. Rhodes Scholarship. Military service. More power to him: I hope he and Chasten are very happy together. Genuinely, I do.

You couldn’t create a more respectable gay if you grew one in a lab run by concerned voter focus groups.

But Pete Buttigieg? Is just a fag.

That’s the part you don’t seem to get: when they abandoned us, they abandoned all of us. Rock Hudson was a beloved movie star and even personally friendly with that horrid pair of ambitious jackals. Nancy Reagan refused to help him get into the only place in the world that could treat him at the time, and he died.

It was 1985, 4 years after the CDC first released papers on what would eventually become known as HIV/AIDS and 7 years after the first known death from an infection from HIV-2. Reagan hadn’t even said the word AIDS by the time Hudson died.

Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, and so am I. Unless I’m a dyke, which seems to depend on who’s yelling what from which window and what day it is.

Yes, there will be people who genuinely love and accept you. Those people are worth all the frustration of the rest, thankfully, and they’re the ones who love you in a pup mask or a leather harness and a neon jock like the ones sold by the men up the row from us last weekend. They’re the ones who laugh out loud when you tell them you hid the word “dyke” in your company name, the ones who love you in all your messiness and uncertainty and the way you don’t fit into neat boxes all scrubbed up and clean.

Most cishets, though… well, they don’t actively mean you specifically any harm, at least not when they have to look at you. Not when you’re right there in front of them. Maybe they’ll be okay with you, personally, especially if you’re the kind of gay who makes a good rhetorical device, and as long as you remain a good rhetorical device.

They need people to know that they don’t have a problem with the gays, after all, and there you are, being all convenient. You make a nice token, and as long as you do, well. You’re useful.

But they call you by your deadname when you’re not around, and they put the wrong pronouns in your medical record even though they met you years after you came out, and they won’t put themselves out to save you. Not one little bit.

I didn’t want to be here again. The year I graduated from high school was the worst year of the AIDS crisis. The world into which I became an adult was a world in which an advisor and friend to Reagan, William F. Buckley, openly advocated for forcibly tattooing the HIV status of HIV+ gay men on their buttocks (and IV drug users on their forearms), and in which my father not only told me that when I was 14 or so, but when was told me that he’d advocated for that tattoo being “over their assholes.”

(Buckley wrote that in '86, but he doubled down on it in 2005.

Fucker.)

But yeah. I didn’t want to be here again. I wanted my daughter to inherit a better world. I wanted Obergefell and Lawrence v. Texas and Hope & Change to really mean something. I work for it, today and all days. I haven’t given up.

I need you to know that, too. This isn’t a white flag. I’m not surrendering. This isn’t over. To misquote Henry Rollins, this is what Marsha and Sylvia and Stormé and Leslie and Brenda and Auntie Sugar trained us for. This is punk rock time.

But I need you to understand that if Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, if that human embodiment of a Wonder Bread, mayo and Oscar Meyer bologna sandwich is not respectable enough for them – and he’s not – then the rest of us have absolutely no hope of measuring up. Not even if we trim away every colorful, beautiful piece of our community, not even if the Sisters Of Perpetual Indulgence vanish into the ether, not even if we sacrifice the five elements of vogue on the altar of white supremacist cishet middle-class conformity: we can’t trim ourselves down to something they’ll accept.

The only other option is radical acceptance of our queer selves. The only other option is solidarity. The only other option is for fats and femme queens and drags and kinksters and queers and zine writers and sex workers and furries and addicts and kids and the ones who can look us in the eye and see all of us to say we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it just the way we did 30 years ago. It’s revolutionary, complete and total acceptance of our entire community, not just the ones the cishets can pretend to be comfortable with as long as we don’t challenge them too much, or it’s conceding the shoreline inch by inch to the rising waters of fascism until we’ve got nowhere left to stand and some of us start drowning.

That’s it. Either it’s all of us or it’s none of us, because if we leave the answer up to the Reagans of the world and all the people who enabled him in the name of lower taxes and Democrats who wring their hands, weeping oh I don’t agree with it but we’ll lose the election if we fight it right now, the answer is none of us.

The brunch gays can come, too, I guess.

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via 2rawtooreal2

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NEVER THROW YOUR VOTE AWAY!

(captions added by me)

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Cory Doctorow reviews “Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream,” a book by Alissa Quart.

Quart addresses “the meritocratic delusion of the ‘self-made man,’ Doctrow says. He adds: “America is not a bootstrap-friendly land. If you have money in America, chances are very good you inherited it.”

… as Abigail Disney has described, in a rare glimpse behind the scenes of American oligarchs’ “family offices,” American wealth is now dynastic, perpetuating itself and growing thanks to a whole Versailles’ worth of courtiers: money managers, lawyers, and overpaid babysitters who can keep even the most Habsburg jawed nepobaby in turnip-sized million-dollar watches and performance automobiles and organ replacements for their whole, interminable lives:

<pluralistic.net/2021/06/1…>

But it’s not just that the America rich stay rich — it’s that the American poor stay poor. … If you change classes in America, chances are you’re a middle class person becoming poor, thanks to medical costs or another of the American debt-traps; or you’re a poor person who is becoming a homeless person thanks to America’s world-beating eviction mills:

<evictionlab.org>

As a factual matter, America just isn’t the land of bootstraps; it’s a land of hereditary aristocrats. Sustaining the American narrative of meritocracy requires a whole culture industry, novels and later movies that constitute a kind of state religion for Americans — and like all religious tales, the American faith tradition is riddled with gaps and contradictions.

Horatio Alger is remembered as the 19th century author of many stories about “street urchins” who raised themselves from poverty to wealth and power. In reality, “19th century American street kids overwhelmingly lived and died in stagnant, grinding poverty.” And Alger’s stories weren’t about self-made men; “the young boys befriend powerful, older men who use their power and wealth to lift those boys up.”

Also:

Alger was a pedophile who lost his position as a minister after raping adolescent boys.

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House on the Prairie” books “recounted her family’s ‘pioneer’ past as a triumph of self-reliance and gumption, glossing easily over the vast state subsidies that the Ingalls family relied on, from the military who stole Indigenous land, to the largesse that donated that stolen land to the Ingallses, to the farm subsidies that kept the Ingalls afloat.”

Wilder collaborated with her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane,

… who used the Little House royalties to fight the New Deal, and, later, to create a school for oligarchs, the “Freedom School,” whose graduates include Charles and David Koch:

<www.politico.com/magazine/…>

All this mythmaking convinces the vast majority of Americans that if they’re struggling, that’s their problem, and they should not “seek redress through mass political movements and unions.” And the myth keep rich people from listening to their consciences.

Quart makes a case that American progress depends on breaking free of this myth, through co-operative movements, trade unions, mutual aid networks and small acts of person-to-person kindness. For her, the pandemic’s proof of our entwined destiny, at a cellular level, and its demonstration of whose work is truly “essential,” proves that our future is interdependent.

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How A.I Will Self Destruct The Human Race

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So the other night during D&D, I had the sudden thoughts that:

1) Binary files are 1s and 0s

2) Knitting has knit stitches and purl stitches

You could represent binary data in knitting, as a pattern of knits and purls…

You can knit Doom.

However, after crunching some more numbers:

The compressed Doom installer binary is 2.93 MB. Assuming you are using sock weight yarn, with 7 stitches per inch, results in knitted doom being…

3322 square feet

Factoring it out…302 people, each knitting a relatively reasonable 11 square feet, could knit Doom.

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Donald Trump has been indicted for allegedly paying hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels just before the 2016 presidential election. To test your knowledge of the case, see if you can guess which sordid details are true and which ones are made up.

1. What happened in 2006? A. Donald Trump met porn actress Stormy Daniels at a charity golf tournament.

B. Stormy and Trump allegedly had sex in his Lake Tahoe hotel room.

C. Melania Trump gave birth to Barron.

D. During an appearance on the Howard Stern Show, Stern joked that Donald Trump was a sexual predator, and Trump replied, “That’s true.”

E. Trump told the co-hosts of The View, “I’ve said that if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.”

F. All of the above, although I wish I were making even one of them up.

2. What did Stormy Daniels say about their sexual encounter? A. They had generic sex and Trump did not wear a condom.

B. He compared Stormy to his daughter Ivanka.

C. He asked Stormy to spank him with a Forbes magazine.

D. He appeared on the cover of that same spanking Forbes magazine with two of his children, Ivanka and Don Jr.

E. Once again, and sadly, all of the above.

3. After the Lake Tahoe affair, what did Trump do? A. He stayed in touch with Stormy for about a year.

B. He said that he would get Stormy on The Apprentice and rig the show for her to win.

C. He said that he would get Stormy a condo in Florida.

D. You guessed it: all of the above.

4. Wait, this is the same guy beloved by American Christian Evangelists, right? A. Yes, they call him a “miracle.”

B. Yes, they worship him more than Jesus.

C. Yes, but no surprises there as this movement has a history of aligning with racism.

D. It’s one of the saddest aspects of this whole era, but all of the above.

5. Okay, what happened in 2011? A. Stormy Daniels tried to sell the Trump affair story to celeb magazine Life & Style for $15K.

B. The tabloid In Touch magazine got ready to publish a 5,000-word interview with Stormy Daniels about her affair with Trump.

C. Donald Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen threatened to sue Life & Style.

D. Donald Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen threatened to sue In Touch magazine.

E. Life & Style and In Touch killed their Stormy stories.

F. A man approached Stormy Daniels and her infant daughter in a Las Vegas car park and told her to, “Leave Trump alone… That’s a beautiful little girl. It’d be a shame if something happened to her mom.”

G. All. Of. The. Above.

6. In Touch magazine? I thought it was the National Enquirer. A. No, you’re thinking of how the National Enquirer conspired with Donald Trump’s 2016 Presidential campaign to buy the story about Trump’s affair with Karen McDougal and then kill the story so that the affair wouldn’t hurt his campaign. I bet you forgot about Karen McDougal, didn’t you?

B. No, the National Enquirer publisher offered to buy the rights to the McDougal story and also to other stories that might hurt Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and then not publish them—a practice known as “catch and kill.”

C. The National Enquirer’s publisher was named David Pecker.

D. Seriously, his name was David Pecker. Also: all of the above.

7. The National Enquirer? I thought it was Access Hollywood? A. No, you’re thinking of the Access Hollywood tape in which Donald Trump said, “I moved on her like a bitch. But I couldn’t get there. And she was married. Then all of a sudden, I see her, she’s now got the big phony tits and everything.”

B. No, you’re thinking of the Access Hollywood tape in which Donald Trump said, “I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it.”

C. No, you’re thinking of the Access Hollywood tape in which Donald Trump said, “Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”

D. I remind you that this is still the same guy beloved by American Christian Evangelists, who make up the base of his supporters. And, obviously, all of the above.

8. Why is Trump being indicted again? A. Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen set up an LLC shell company to secretly pay people off on behalf of Trump, and used this account to pay Stormy Daniels $130K, once again to keep the story about the affair quiet.

B. Michael Cohen said that Trump didn’t know about the payment.

C. In May 2018, Donald Trump’s other lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show and said that his client, the President of the United States, did, in fact, know about the payment.

D. In December 2018, American President Donald Trump also admitted to knowing about the payment to Stormy Daniels.

E. It’s anyone’s guess. Was the reimbursement to Michael Cohen made from campaign funds? Did Trump falsify business records when he reimbursed Cohen? Was there money laundering involved? The indictment is sealed, so we won’t know the exact charge until next week.

F. Whatever happens, we’ll always have Rudy’s astonishing incompetence on that Hannity interview, not to mention the Four Seasons Total Landscaping press conference. Oh, right, we’re still doing this part: all of the above.

9. How will all this affect the 2024 election? A. Trump is already fundraising off the right-wing outrage over this indictment.

B. Trump is claiming victimhood, his favorite role, to drum up support from his grievance-addicted-white-people-are-the-real-victims supporters.

C. All the Republicans are rallying around Trump, and not one of them cares that he broke the law.

D. They also don’t seem to care that Trump is going on trial for allegedly raping E. Jean Carroll.

E. This is the same man that took away women’s reproductive rights in the United States.

F. The January 6th crowd is preparing for a civil war because Donald Trump cheated on Melania and paid a porn star hush money?

G. I hate it here. I genuinely wish I had made any of these up. Anyway, yep, of course, all of the above.

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Drag Wil kicking and screaming into the White House and seat him behind the Resolute desk!

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Life's a F***ing Fantasy for Santos - A Randy Rainbow Parody

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Ah, the 70's really were a special time. We certainly are facing a challenging age now.

TRACK LIST:

A1 Boy Meets Boy A2 Party In My Room A3 Giving It Up For Love A4 Me A5 The English Rose A6 Marry An American A7 It's A Boy's Life A8 Does Anybody Love You? A9 You're Beautiful A10 Let's B1 Just My Luck B2 It's A Dolly B3 What Do I Care? B4 Clarence's Turn B5 Reprise: Does Anybody Love You? B6 Finale

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This was one of those moments when he was able to feel that the accusation of sentimentality so persistently laid against his work by superior critics was rebutted out of the very mouth of real life.

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Yup. Still would.

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