Sunday, November 14, 2004

Choose, and be destroyed

There’s this great scene pretty much exactly halfway through Say Anything. Lloyd Dobler is wandering around nighttime Seattle, desolate and crushed after being dumped by the beauteous and brilliant Diane Court. He chances across a small group of single guys, some he knows, some he’s never met before, hanging out on the curb outside a local service station/convenience store, drinking Slurpees. They tell Lloyd to hang with them, because they are stallions, and when Lloyd walks with them, he walks tall. They offer to take him to a party, where they will set him up with one hot, lit babe instantly. They deluge him with advice, like, he needs to find a girl who looks just like Diane, nail her, and then dump her.

Lloyd, being a fairly sensible guy, asks them at this point “If you guys know so much about women, why are you here, outside the Gas N’ Sip, at 10 o’clock on a Friday night, with no women around… anywhere?”

After a pause for thought, this batch of lunkheads tells Lloyd: “It’s by choice, man.”

Yeah.

They’re choosin’ it.

In John Varley’s novel Demon, one character tells another:

“It’s by choice, man.”

“…with overwhelming societal reasons to be heterosexual, there have always been those who were not.”

I don’t ask women out any more, face to face. I suppose that’s an admission of something bad about myself… cowardice, lack of character, overwhelming social failure… but the simple fact of the matter is, for about the last five years of my life, I have become overwhelmingly unattractive to women… at least, to women I myself find attractive. It is an unfortunate but irrefutable and invariable truth… every time I have asked a woman out, face to face, since, oh, 1998 or so, she has said no. Some have said it nicely, others have come very close to laughing in my face. Whichever response I get, a rejection is still a rejection, and rejection hurts, and I simply am not going to seek out that experience any longer.

However unpleasant rejection is, here’s what I do not have to face: the prospect that, 90% of the time, the person I have just summoned up every ounce of my courage to ask out on a date… may fly into a hostile, or even violent rage, and revile me virulently, or even beat me up, because I indicated I was attracted to them.

To be openly gay in today’s world is to be a faggot, to be a queer, to be a dyke. If you are gay and other people know it, you are not a human being. You are a homo, a rugmuncher, a fairy, a fruit. You are a pervert and a deviant. You will be looked askance at by the vast majority of people you meet, to put it mildly. Half the candidates for public office will run on a platform of undoing your insidious agenda. The other half will tug their collars and look down and shuffle their feet and mutter things like “Well, we feel matters like that are best addressed on a private and personal level, without official intervention.”

If you are openly gay, your parents and your siblings may not want to ever see you again, and even if they aren’t that extreme, there will always be the fear that on some level, you have disappointed them, and made them ashamed. Straight members of your own gender will avoid you, for fear they may send you the wrong signals and be misunderstood. If you get a bad review at work, you will always wonder if your sexuality had something to do with it. And if you are attracted to the wrong person, and they find out about it, you may get beaten up, or even killed, it the attraction is revealed on a talk show.

To be openly gay is to be punched out in parking garages, as happened to one gay man walking with his boyfriend in nearby Ybor City just a few years ago. It is to be insulted and reviled on talk radio, to be told you cannot ever work with children, to be treated as a leper, to have to listen as the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center are blamed squarely on you, and occasionally, it is even to be tied to a tree and have rocks thrown at you by your classmates until you die.

In short, to be openly gay in the world today is to be hated.

“It’s by choice, man.”

I think about these things, whenever I hear some hateful bigot… even a hateful bigot I love as much as I love my friend Nate, or my brother Pat… say something truly ignorant and ridiculous and spiteful, like “Homosexuality is a choice.”

In a way, though, it gives me a small, tiny, glimmering spark of hope. Because, yes, it’s just hate… but we may have come to a point in human social evolution, where for the very first time, hate has to justify itself… just a little.

Bias against homosexuals is hatred… and that’s all it is. My sex life is none of your business, and your sex life is none of mine, and that applies to everyone else as well.

Here’s the conservative line, placed on this blog’s comment threads by someone who is one of the better friends I am likely to have in this life:

Twenty years ago, hatists did not need to justify their bigotry. You wanted to beat up a queer outside a fag bar, you just went ahead and did it. If a redneck with flecks of someone else’s dental enamel on his REAGAN/BUSH t-shirt was approached by a reporter who thrust a mike into his face and said “Sir, you’ve just broken that queer’s jaw against a concrete curb. Now, tell me… do you think homosexuality is a choice?”, the redneck could have replied “Who gives a shit?” and gotten a round of applause from the bystanders in the background.

Forty years ago, any white male could have done the same to any black guy he caught holding hands in public with a white girl. No justification required.

Fifty years ago, you couldn’t allow integrated schools, or integrated units in the military. You didn’t need to explain it. Everybody knew you couldn’t have coloreds mixing with whites; that was no way to run a railroad.

Nowadays, however, hatred has to be justified. This is why it is so imperative for those who simply, blindly, passionately, uncontrollably, hate homosexuals to insist that homosexuality is a matter of choice… that, in fact, it is akin to using illegal narcotics.

It’s a good thing, in a way. These people are on the defensive. They’re explaining themselves. They’re insistent that this isn’t just blind bigotry. Why? Because they know hate is no longer acceptable in our society. We will no longer tolerate bigotry against any human being on the basis of something that human being has no control over. Race. Place of birth. The amount of money in their pockets. The religion they were born into. An accent in their speech.

The horrifying fact, for hatists, is that you can no longer use the word ‘nigger’ at work without being fired. Even if you’re talking to white people, someone will still report your miserable no-good intolerant racist ass.

It must be hard for them. It must give them ulcers, and eat them up inside. They live in a world that is a bizarre and alien place. You can’t tell a spic joke in public any more. Someone with darker skin and woolier hair might very well end up being your boss. A woman could make just as much money as you do for doing the same work. The goddam Republican Party tried to get Colin Powell to run for President… and the fucking jig would probably have won if he’d been willing, too.

Can you believe that? A fucking JIG could be President of the United States right now… if he’d wanted to run. What the fuck is the world coming to?

What’s a hatist to do these days? Who’s left? What minority is still out there that has no champions? Who is it still safe to pick on?

Well, thank god for faggots.

Nobody’s going to stick up for them.

Still, even Archie Bunker has some street smarts. The bigots have all learned that you are no longer allowed to revile someone if they can’t help being what you loathe. Nowadays, if you’re going to hate someone, it has to be for something they have chosen to do. It has to be for behavior, not physicality.

Thus, and so: homosexuality is a matter of choice.

And, you know, maybe they have a point. After all, I clearly remember, back in 9th grade, the guidance counselor took me aside one day. He sat me down in his office, and he put one of those pre-printed forms in front of me. It said FEDERAL SEXUALITY OPTION FORM. And it had two little boxes on it. One said STRAIGHT. One said GAY.

There was an asterisk, and in small print at the bottom, it said “Bisexuals must fill out optional rider form C-127A and file three copies with the Clerk of the Court, and pay a yearly Sexual Versatility Fee of $20.”

I had to check one of those boxes. It was my decision. The guidance counselor didn’t try to influence me. The fact that Tim Hanley had hit me in the fat part of the arm the day before hard enough to raise a bruise, kicked my books down the stairs, and then laughed at me and called me a faggot, in front of a girl I had a huge crush on at the time, who had giggled, didn’t even influence me at all.

I gather all of us, at one time or another, had to go into the equivalent of that guidance counselor’s office and fill out that form, choosing, once and for all, our sexual orientation for the rest of our lives.

Um… no, wait.

I just made all that up. I never actually filled out any such form. To the best of my knowledge, I have never consciously chosem my sexual orientation.

I just, you know, would much rather ball Heather Locklear than David Hasselhoff.

In fact, I have never in my life met a fellow heterosexual who would claim to have chosen to be straight. Not my brother. Not even Nate. “Say, Nate,” I imagine asking, “do you choose to get a stiffy when you see a nice pair of boobies? Is that a consciously exercised physical response on your part?”

Similarly, it is difficult for me to imagine anyone consciously choosing to get an erection while looking at Jude Law or Rob Lowe.

Nothing against Jude Law or Rob Lowe. I’m just saying. Anyone who thinks my dick gets hard as a matter of choice when I’m watching Katie Holmes take her clothes off at the end of The Gift is nuts. That is what you call an involuntary reflex on my part.

In point of fact, I find it impossible to imagine really choosing to have an erection. I mean, yeah, you can try to get yourself turned on by thinking of stuff that turns you on, if you’re in a peculiar position where you have to perform on demand… it happens. But the nature of the fantasy that gets your willie up… that’s not something you pick.

When I was in college, I read about an anonymous survey that had been conducted on several different campuses, with admittedly gay college students. They were asked, “If you could choose to be straight or gay, which would you pick?”

Not surprisingly, an overwhelmingly majority… something like 94%… said they’d pick being straight. If they could.

It would just make their lives so much easier.

So it’s a good thing, all this virulent, rabid, foam flecked, semi-hysterical, shrill voiced insistence coming from the far right wing regarding homosexuality being a choice.

In a way, it shows how far we have come.

Not far enough.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch

What am I doing with my life lately? Not much. Re-reading Colin Wilson’s A Criminal History Of Mankind. It is, oddly, both as good, and not as good, as I remembered it. Which is to say, all the stuff about the actual Criminal History of Mankind is really interesting. Fascinating stuff about more or less modern criminals like Hermann Webster Mudgett (better known as Dr. “H.H. Holmes”, who built and operated a ‘murder castle’ in Chicago in the 1890s), Jack Henry Abbot, Carl Panzram, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, Dr. Sigvard Thurneman (a real, honest to god secret supervillain/crimelord type who ran a murder-robbery ring in the early 1930s around Stockholm), along with details of various historical criminals like many of the Roman Caesars, Vlad the Impaler, Ivan the Terrible, the Borgias, Gilles de Rais, and Tamurlane.

However, when Wilson is trying to create a thesis from all of this, well, he’s hit and miss. For the most part, I suspect he’s a bit resentful at the notion of even having to try, since he clearly has a lot more fun just writing about the gruesome escapades of all these historical fiends and madmen than he does trying to piece together some sort of ‘moral of the story’.

Probably his best moment is early on, when he makes the rather striking observation that the overall types of crimes throughout human history have changed and grown along with civilization, and seem to fairly directly mirror Abraham Maslow’s famous (and brilliant) categorization of the ‘hierarchy of human needs’ – Food, shelter, sex, self esteem, and self actualization. Crimes early on in human history are generally all about securing food, then, eventually, a bit later on, they seem to be about territory. More recently (more or less since the Industrial Revolution) with nearly everyone having basic food and shelter covered, overall crime patterns have turned towards sex crimes, and in the very late 19th and early 20th Centuries, we have seen the first self-esteem crimes… crimes people commit to make themselves feel better about themselves. And now, towards the end of the 20th century, we are starting to see self actualization crimes… crimes committed, more or less, by individuals who want to exert their individuality, who want to make the world take notice of them.

It is, as noted, a striking observation, although it seems to me to be one that Wilson then spoils with his exhaustive catalogue of horror and atrocity down through the ages. Most of the more lunatic Roman Emperors committed crimes that, by Wilson’s definition, would have to be seen as self actualization crimes… crimes committed for no reason other than to exert their individuality and make an impression on their world.

Wilson also goes into fascinating detail regarding the ‘levels of dominance’ in human nature, and spends quite a lot of time on A.E. Van Vogt’s interesting “Right Man” hypothesis, and talks about how the human brain is essentially dichotomous, with the right and the left brain frequently at odds with each other. From all of this, he draws the conclusion that the criminal impulse is essentially… well, I’m not sure what it is, actually, Wilson often seems confused. Sometimes two people of differing dominance patterns get together, and they drive each other into criminal behavior as a way of displaying some twisted dominance/submission synergy with each other. Other times, it’s because a person who has been raised to be intolerant of contradiction or obstruction to his own desires is given enormous political power. Yet other times, it’s because the creative impulse is not properly channeled into socially acceptable areas. Honestly, I don’t know what Wilson is trying to say.

I do know, however, that the true crime stuff is really interesting, and Wilson has probably the best non-fiction narrative voice I have ever encountered, and I enjoy reading his work enormously.

Other than that, the Bucs lost today, which was disheartening. The Bills lost too, but they were playing the Patriots, so what do you expect.

My newspaper subscription, which I stopped paying for a month ago, finally seems to have run out today… at least, there was no paper out there when I got up this morning, so I’ll be living without my daily fix of The Boondocks and Doonsebury from now on.

This weekend I turn 43. My birthday, and the Thanksgiving on the following Thursday, look to be quiet. My mom invited me up for Thanksgiving at her place way up (well, two hours or so) north of me in the middle of the Florida backwoods, but I think I’ll just get my own Thanksgiving dinner this year. I have the Tuesday and Wednesday before Thanksgiving off… I had hours suddenly appear in my time bank at work at the start of last week, and everyone else on my team had already put in bids for Thanksgiving weekend off, so this is what my boss suggested as an alternative, and that’s fine. I’ll be working the Friday and Saturday after Thanksgiving, but I doubt anyone else on my team will be, so that will be fine, too.

I’m hoping to order a case of Mutant Mayhem as a birthday present to myself, but money is pretty tight. I’ll just have to see how that goes. I’d like to pick up about half the set for my collection, and if I buy them all as singles it will probably cost around as much as a case will, and it would be fun to open all those boosters and see what I got… but again, we’ll just have to wait and see. I spent way too much money on orphans this week, and have very little left over.

That’s kind of an amusing story. I’d promised the woman at work who is organizing the Christmas gift drive for this local foster home that I’d pick up a DVD player for the home itself (she called over and checked to see if they needed one, and they said yes). I didn’t particularly want to buy a present for any one kid in particular because, while I generally do that whenever I see one of those foster kid angel trees (or I have in the past, anyway) I always worry they’re not getting something they really want or need, despite the fact that their preferences are right on the little sticker. So I figured this would be something they could all use.

So I went to Wal-mart, looked over the DVD players, and picked out a $60 model. I also got the first season of the Garfield and Friends cartoon on DVD. I did a little more shopping, went up to the cashier, and discovered that apparently God wanted me to buy the little brats the more expensive $80 DVD player/VCR combination, because that’s what somehow ended up in my cart. So I sighed and bought the damned thing.

I got it home, and was musing to myself, “You know, I could really USE a DVD/VCR combination.” And I could, it would save a lot of space on the table beside my TV, and would probably be easier to copy DVDs onto videotape with.

But then I thought about how I’d have to open the box and get the styrofoam off the damned thing and bite open the plastic bag with all the cords and undo my VCR and DVD player and set up this one, and I decided, fuck it.

Now, I’ve told this story to a few people and they all insist that I am swell, because THEY would have gone back and gotten the cheaper DVD they originally intended to buy. But that’s not it. I was just too lazy to push the cart all the way to the back of the store, which is where Wal-mart keeps the electronics and the DVD section, so every guy in the world has to walk past all the rest of the merchandise twice before they get out with their copy of Operation: Swordfish or The Director’s Cut of Showgirls, featuring extended make out scenes between Gina Gershon and Elizabeth Berkeley. And I recognized this impulse, because it was the same one that kept me from just keeping the frickin thing, which I would have liked to, once I got home.

In addition to grubby little pukes, money also went to the phone company, the power company, and the water department of the little town I live in, leaving me with a grand total of Not Much. So my birthday will necessarily have to be quiet. What’s left I will probably spend on whatever it is I’m going to throw together for my very own Thanksgiving dinner, which I will probably start putting together, oh, next Wednesday, since I’ll be off work. If I can squeeze it out, I’ll buy something on DVD to watch on Thanksgiving. If not, I don’t know, I’ll just watch something I already own, again. As one of my ex girlfriends liked to say, there’s no point in owning a few hundred movies if you don’t watch them once in a while.

Oh, I have gotten some interesting email from utter strangers lately. One guy wrote and said my Basic Training memoir, In The Early Morning Rain was a very accurate description of his more recent journey through Basic Training in the late 90s. So I guess the military experience hasn’t changed that much in a decade or so. Some girl who did not give me her name wrote in to tell me I was wrong about there being no female Heinlein fans, because she was one. I don’t remember ever stating there were no female Heinlein fans, and I can’t imagine what would possess me to do so anyway, since I’ve met a few. As a general rule (and I probably did say this) there are far more male Heinlein fans than female… but there are far more male SF, fantasy, and comics fans than female, also (a sad sad thing about being a geek). And a fairly cool guy named Jack Shaver sent me a few long emails, which I responded to, but I seem to have alienated him utterly (as I am wont to do) so I guess I shall not be hearing from him again. Which is a bummer, but life goes on.

It’s not much, but it beats what I’m sure they are still saying about me over on the John Byrne boards.

Oh, another buddy of mine who transcribes interview tapes for a comics fanzine mentioned that at the end of an interview with Steve Englehart, Steve E. and the editor who was interviewing him got into a brief, apparently very positive, exchange about my article on Englehart’s Silver age work, DOING COMICS THE STAINLESS STEVE ENGLEHART WAY , so that’s good, too.

No new word on any of the novels I’ve submitted to various publishers.

No winning Lotto tickets.

But if someone out there wants a kitten, my brother Paul has four or five he’s trying to give away. They’re really cute. But my apartment is way too small.

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, "Wow, I didn't recognize you in men's clothing". According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I'm reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I'd take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here's The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people's blogs, you MUST NOT:

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin's Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron's blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don't really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren't related to me by marriage, I'd most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I've learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don't care if you:

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I'd get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don't Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.