Phoebe Cates Made Me Gay

Oh, my childhood love for Phoebe Cates, which I've never outgrown. From the skin-baring tawdriness of "Paradise" (if you're gonna rip off a film, why rip off a film as lousy as "The Blue Lagoon"?), and "Private School", to the 80s classics that are Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Gremlins. The typical 80s-curios that are Lace and Lace II ("Incidentally, which one of you bitches is my mother?"), Date With An Angel, and then her all-too-fleeting but actually wonderful work in the 1990s. Drop Dead Fred? It's a cult film my generation has embraced. Princess Caraboo? One of the sweetest of the 90s-era of lavishly-mounted period romps. And then "The Anniversary Party", where her ecstasy-fueled breakdown about motherhood stops the show.

I LOVE HER. And I always have. And I always will.

Feeling Sigourney

Yeah. That's right. I'm channelling my inner Ellen Ripley. I kinda love it, actually. Sure beats having to, you know, do my hair. Look at me, I'm a daddy now!

A Tree of Life Grows in Brooklyn?

First, thanks to my good friend Sally for that title! ;-)

Second, I actually loved the film. Cannot wait to see it again a few more times. It stands as a singular experience, the most Malick-y film ever made. This is Malick's skill as a director - his choice to share an experience and tell a story without the expected trappings of conventional narrative, structure, exposition and linear storytelling. In a way, it's sort of like a mega-budget feature-length "thesis project" of a film. Those experimental short films where the filmmaker "tells a story" in a non-traditional way. Well, he's the long-ass version. I hear similar criticisms from people about films like this, or films by David Lynch - "it didn't make any sense, I didn't know what it was trying to say."

Uh...ok. I can list a couple hundred films that "made sense" and that were clear in "what they were trying to say" that still totally and utterly sucked donkey balls and were failures. It's abstract art, folks!

It's an emotional story, told through the memories of a child and a grander sense of life on Earth that keeps reminding the viewer that all this complexity and the questions of life were and are the ongoing evolutionary process of single-cell organisms.

The use of music in the film is as flawless as always. The photography absolutely stunning in its clarity and composition. The performances so real and unforced that it just feels as if an invisible camera just happened to catch the action.

The heartbreaking simplicity of small insightful moments; a gesture of love when one young boy puts his hand on the shoulder of another, who lost his home and received burn scars from a house fire. The guilt and intense shame of adolescent hormones rushing through a young man's mind. The need to destroy and exert power over others coupled with a clashing message of love and understanding and empathy.

There are moments in this film that will haunt me forever. For those who just didn't like it...well...I made this video for you.

EX-GAY Confessions/Lies/Apologies

EX-Gay? No. Just one more in a long line of young men whose families are so bigoted and closed of heart that they convince themselves of lies and untruths (thus breaking God's Ninth Commandment) in order to win back the love of their families. It happens all too often, and it needs to stop.

The Rapture. Armageddon. End of Days.

ANTI-CLIMAX! The Musical

International Day Against Homophobia & Transphobia

Oops...

After a day of reading scripts on the Highline park in NYC I had a spring in my step, a song in my heart, and a stupid (and painful) tanline that makes me look like an asshole.

Oh, well.

Note to Self - you're Scottish. The sun doesn't like you.

Never Blend In

My contribution to David E. Watters' "Give 'em Hope" campaign initiative.

Mother's Day

The Death of Osama Bin Laden

Perhaps I shall have more thoughts as news and information and gravity and "the next step" and all that jazz set in. For now, I'm feeling this.

Love, Little Kiwi

I'm not really *happy* about his death. I'm definitely relieved, but it's not as if his death suddenly means that the world is a safer place, and that those who believe what he believed no longer believe it. I hope American Conservatives don't give in to their typical bloodlust and demand to see the photo(s) of his dead body. I hope that in this moment, Americans show some class and take a moral highground - an enemy is vanquished, and the time is now to start remembering how to proactively change world culture toward understanding, not vengeance nor gloating or neanderthal-level machismo.

We do not need to see the photo(s). Those demanding that we do are sick lowlifes in this country, who should be ashamed of themselves. America, find your grace.

A Father's Message

My Dad wrote this as part of the PFLAG newsletter back home in Toronto. Thought I'd share it with y'all. Love.

The first Pride Parade that I attended, not as a participant but as a bystander, was in San
Francisco, while on vacation, in 1978. This was shared with my future wife, Irene, and well before our marriage and children.
Who knew it was a portent of things to come. Fast forward more than 30 years and I am now a member of the Board of Directors of PFLAG Toronto and its Treasurer. Why? Our son is a gay man. I watched him grow up alongside his sister, and both of these wonderful children filled me with love and pride – from toddlerhood to adulthood.
When our son came out the dismay to us was not that he was gay but the realization that throughout his youth he had worked at acting straight and tried to fit in, while suffering the taunts of schoolmates who picked on him. He missed out on fully enjoying his early teen years and we could not go back and “fix” it for him. Sadly this is a story often heard at PFLAG of youngsters being bullied, ostracized and marginalized because they are, or are perceived to be, ‘different’.
Through our children and my PFLAG Toronto involvement I have met so many people who accept each other for being exactly who they are. It has truly opened up my life, and made me a better person.
I am a Chartered Accountant by training, and have held a number of senior positions in large North American companies; Chief Financial Officer for Woolworth Canada and Club Monaco –Polo Ralph Lauren, to name a few. Today, I am happy to be known as a proud PFLAG Dad.
I am currently a part time professor of Finance at Seneca College. I proudly wear the rainbow bracelet when I am teaching and have found that occasionally students will ask why and what it means. This starts a dialogue that invariably ends with the student indicating that they have friends or acquaintances who are gay and they either talk about the difficulties they face or they ask about them. Often they thank me for speaking openly and personally about a topic they have not explored before. They say they will think about sexual orientation with more positive feelings.
It illustrates that we can educate the world, one person at a time. I am proud to be a part of PFLAG Toronto, helping to support the LGBTQ community and all families.

Gary Miller

Anti-Gay Conservatives Still Love Lesbian Sex

Male-male anal sex is the focus topic of anti-gay bigots. Not lesbian sex. We all know why. Men who have sex with men are "traitors" to their gender, and women who have sex with women don't count because women are "just sexual objects", to them.

So they obsess with gay male anal sex. It's fanatical. I'd love to hear, one day, the logical rationale wherein heterosexual oral sex is holy and it only becomes a sin when two people of the same gender do it....

Don't Fear Barbra Streisand

The senselessness that is the knee-jerk reaction that 'stereotypes' are inherently negative and harmful.

I grew up in a world where I learned, very early on, that there were certain types of gay men that were mocked, belittled, insulted and denigrated.  I also learned very early on that not only was it a *cough* "gay stereotype" to love Barbra Streisand, but the gays who loved her were deserving of derision.

Like an idiot, I accepted that knowledge without challenging it.
Oh, but then all that changed....




I suppose the question I have now, when people say things like "Why do gay guys like _______?" is actually to reply with "Why doesn't everyone like _______?"

That's what I always find so puzzling - we're asked why "gay guys" like something, and yet for the life of me I cannot wonder why non-gay people don't love it just as much.  Likely, they do.  They just don't talk about it cuz, you know, people might think they're gay.

;-)

LittleKiwi, OUT!

Support for the Trans Community

Queer Talk - Part Four

Queer Talk - Part Three

Words to friends and family of LGBT people.

DADT and Affirmative Action

Queer Talk - Part Two

On approaching your parents and family as an adult, and not a child. Asserting yourself as an adult, and setting the tone for how you expect, and indeed demand, to be treated both as an LGBT person, and a human being of worth. Change comes when you demand that change come. Progress does not stand still.

Queer Talk - Part One

Part One in a short little series of conversations with my parents about dealing with LGBT family issues.

HAM BISCUITS

Which must be Southerner Closet-Speak for some deviant sexual act. Word, yo.

DADT Repeal - And So It Continues....

Gender-F**K

So, Thanksgiving night at my friend's house, and as the night goes on and we all get more and more inebriated it turns into Dress-Up Time with a side order of the macabre. The Grand Guignol merging of sex and death and gender-norms that typifies Williamsburg-ian art.

I posted the photo online, and within hours had message after message, comment after comment, all digging it. Which, frankly, surprised me. Messages from strangers, especially. Dudes I don't even know, most comments being on how "Hot" the pic is. I'm just stunned. Guys tend to be such conformists when it comes to how gender is represented, and yet I've literally had dozens of messages in the last few hours from guys who have a hard-on for this photo.

Something to think about.

Colds: The One Thing Everyone Loves To Share

The Importance of Being Allies - How Supportive are Your Supporters?

The above photo greeted me this morning when I signed onto Facebook. It's my sister and my brother-in-law; shirts they ordered from stonewall.org.uk. Wonderful, eh? And powerful.

All-too-often I hear members of the community saying that they don't need to "proclaim" their orientation or "wear or on their sleeve" or "be defined by it", which (to me) sounds more like cowardly gay-apologist nonsense that anything else. Look, the reality is this: anti-gay bigots sure love to scream from the rooftops how much they hate gay people. And as America refuses to pass hate-speech legislation, we cannot shut them up. What we can do is raise our voices to match theirs, and be just as vocal, just as visible, and combat their shouted lies with truth and love.

And so, these thoughts came to mind....