This is not a flattering picture of my ass, but I thought it suited my sentiments here. Please rest assured it looks better, usually.

I was undecided between this post’s current title and “Cock and Circumstance,” but I’m very proud of both.

Well, folks, I’m done. After ten days of heart palpitations, sleepless nights and scraping my bowls for resin because near-unemployment (and living in DC) leaves me unable and unwilling to just buy more weed, I’m finally hitting the ol’ dusty trail. I wanted this post to be in before the weekend started and I wanted it to be long and poignant. I wanted it excepted in “Chicken Soup for the Alt-Fag Soul.” I wanted it to make you weep. But none of that ended up being possible, so I’m just going to tell you my final thoughts as I leave TNG.

The queer universe is made up of a staggering breadth of unique individuals. Whatever happens to us, to “the movement,” as we move forward, things will be decided by you. YOU have the talent, YOU have the drive, YOU have the ability to mold the world in the image you wish to see it in. YOU are free to decide what work and actions will make a difference. Don’t let anyone tell you that you’re frittering your time away with a community garden when you could be lobbying your senators. If you want to lobby your senators, and you are good at it, then by all means do so. But you know there is more to life than politics and more ways to change a person’s life than legislation.  Change is a tapestry of small small and large actions.

Other people will not make this easy for you. They will tell you that you’re too young, too old, too privileged, too radical, too marginal, too principled, too anything that they are not, to be successful in changing your corner of the world. You should tell these people to go fuck themselves. No one has the right to tell you that your version of a queer identity is better than theirs. If you think something is important, it probably is. Do not let anyone convince you you’re not doing “real work.” A lot of people died to get us where we are now and last I checked they did not vote on who to put in charge.

Beware any person, system or individual with its own built-in anti-criticism mechanism. Just as our political rhetoric has, in too many circles, turned to one of “criticizing America is anti-American,” so do far too many of us confuse homophobia and self-hatred with legitimate critiques of the culture we live in. Roger Ebert has spent 40 years as a “movie critic.” Would anyone say that Roger Ebert hates movies? No. It is clear that he loves cinema so deeply that he has dedicated his life to explicating its qualities and failures. Remember this. If queer culture moves so far into this “with us or against us” attitude, we will develop a “real queer” identity as damaging as that of a “real American.” I would prefer this not to happen.

Criticism is a privilege. I doubt that in a place like Uganda they can afford to debate the relative merits or drawbacks of something like the “It Gets Better” project because the queers there are in constant danger of death or bodily harm. Remember that our ability to tease out the excruciating minutiae of queer-based discourse in this country comes from the fact that we have some very, very basic rights. We argue and we denigrate because we can.

Speaking of privilege, I have noticed that one needs about 12 years of higher education to have a successful conversation on the subject. That is very amusing to me. Do not confuse the concept of privilege with its use as a conversational gambit to silence or shame a person whose legitimate question or opinion has pissed you off. There should be no word that has absolute power to shut down an legitimate exchange of ideas, yet that is one of them. Same with anything ending in “-ism” “-ist” or “-phobic.”

Words, like antibiotics, lose their potency when overused. These are some very powerful words and I fear they will begin to mean nothing when thrown around willy- nilly. The politics of offense are deep and complicated, but until every queer person in the world signs off on a preferred nomenclature document we have to do the best we can. Politely correct someone on their verbal missteps and they will learn something. Bring the fires of hell down on them and they might learn to stop engaging outside of their own identity. That’s a great way to close lines of communication. There is a thin line between genuine mistakes and hurtful language, between political correctness and thought policing.

(It is here that I should also mention that being honest, that speaking with your mind, will get you called an asshole, a racist or worse. It’s worth it. If you’re not going to be honest, what’s the point?)

Always remember that culture is politics. The music you listen to, the TV shows you watch, shape your life and the world around you as much as any bill or governmental acts. That’s why I spill more ink on Katy Perry than I ever will on Rick Santorum. We know Rick Santorum is a villain. But Katy Perry has millions of the worlds teenagers at her beck and call. Culture shapes the future, defines the rhetoric and reaches MILLIONS more people than any blog post in history can ever hope to. Will Truman, Law and Order‘s continued use of trans characters as victims and prostitutes, Dean Pelton on Community: Those things are important. As long as the world assumes that a gay dance party NEEDS to play Lady Gaga, that gay men don’t like sports, that lesbians like cats, that trans people will tolerate use of the word “tranny” in gay spaces because it’s vernacular, then someone else is telling you how to be yourself. And that’s not OK.

You are queer and so, by proxy, are the things you like and the way you choose to live your life. As long as you don’t give that up in search of acceptance or a community then you are helping change the world.

And before I go, here are some stray observations:

- Dry fingers do not go in asses. That hurts. I don’t understand how so many people don’t know that.

- Combative flirting is not cute. If the only way you can engage with me is to talk shit then I probably won’t be going home with you, or even caring to remember your name the next day.

- To the established elders in the blogging and activists community: Please treat the younger generation as you would like to have been treated, not as you were treated. Like it or not we’re going to be around. We’re willing to work with you insofar as you can respect the fact that we have different viewpoints and experiences as you. You fought for our right to express ourselves and live free of harassment, not to kowtow to your sacrifices.

-Have you had sex, ever? Then there is probably a straight person that thinks you are a slut, whore or freak. To use those same words pejoratively against any members of your community is absolutely unacceptable. It is the intolerant world that has the problem, not the sexually liberated queer.

-Be nice to other people. For those unaware of the concept of “other people,” that is everyone in the entire world except for yourself. This is easier to do than some might lead you to believe.

-Don’t change who you are, for anyone, unless you’re doing it for your own reasons. Not fitting in will reward you in ways you can’t possibly imagine until you embrace it.

-Don’t do anything you don’t want to do and don’t exclude yourself from doing anything you do want to do (safely) due to outside pressure or judgement.

And finally: It is totally acceptable to use a song quote to express a sentiment that is too hard to say in your own words.

Like goodbye.

I’ll tell you the rest when I see you.

Peace.

Every day my laziness hits an apex (or nadir, if you’re pessimistic) when I drop what I’m doing to sprawl on my couch for half an hour, usually with my dog on my chest, and watch something shitty on Hulu. I usually spend this time half-watching something while playing Angry Birds, lackadaisically checking my emails, or convincing myself that I’m not actually napping. Lately, however, Hulu has given me a reason to pay attention.

And that something is Bob Harper. If you watch Hulu as much as I do (god forbid) or even just once in a while, you might have seen this blonde bomber in his always-airing, never-ending, oddly-masturbatory shill spots for Quaker Oats. I was fairly assured that Quaker Oats were good for you in the first place, due to my inborn prejudices on the harmonious bodily effects of both Quakers and oats, but good lord. This commercial posits said oats somewhere between a store-bought cure for cancer and an all-knowing benevolent deity who lives in a microwave packet and actualizes your dreams.

Though I would scoff at any person on earth intoning with the pep and gravity of a marriage proposal, “In fact, its the only cereal I eat,” I’ve started looking forward to my interludes with Mr. Harper. (And, for a fun party game, replace every mention of Quaker and/or oats with the phrase “Zack’s dick.)

Because, per the commercial above, Bob Harper is gorgeous. A mere still photo of him plays up killer stubble, eyes like a June sunrise, and the kind of Aryan ruggedness that makes my third leg get Reich hard. The commercial expands on that, offering us a golden vision of big tattoos, a gentle voice and the apparent ability to get his leg all the way up on an exercise bike without breaking a sweat or tearing an anal gland. Have I made it clear yet he’s cute? But cute guys are a dime-a-dozen on TV. Bob distinguishes himself by setting off an ambiguous, yet 12-alarm, activity warning on my gaydar.

I’m against stereotypes. I know that there are many different ways to be gay and that the lilt of your voice or snap of your wrist has as much to do with inherent sexual preference as hair color does to IQ. I don’t think that there’s one particular “gay” look or way of acting. However, everything about this guy makes me think he’s gay, and not for any good reason. I could put together a minute checklist of evidence but that would be insipid. Instead, he just brings out a leftover impulse from the high school/college closet: This guy “looks” gay. I better get to know him.

And as bad as I feel for calling out Bob Harper on an issue that really has nothing to do with him, personally (he only wants to brighten my day, not get a visit from the verbal stiff one-eye) I know this: It’s really hard for me to be attracted to straight guys. Since the day I was 18, driving through Chicago’s frat-tastic Wrigleyville on a Saturday evening and taking in the sea of wide hips, potato-salad-bellies and drunken hetero mating calls and told my best girlfriend, “Have fun, as this may be your dating pool,” the grip of the elusive straight guy has relaxed itself in favor of, well, guys that I can actually get.

Translated: I see a lot of hot guys in commercials. I’m rarely tempted to write articles about them. It’s like a guy I see on the street with his girlfriend. He might have calves like a Redwood giving birth to a cantaloupe, but I’m not gonna think about him two seconds after I spot him. Take away the girlfriend, and add a moment of mutual eye contact, and I’ll be smitten for a week. The difference is that one guy is as attainable to me as not having a muffin top when I wear overly-tight jeans and the other could — if he liked me, was single, shared my time zone, felt like it, didn’t mind my having a boyfriend, wasn’t allergic to dogs, had a thing for lanky guys and was receptive to my flirting— make out with me.

Turns out I’m not the only person to wonder about Bob Harper either. A quick Google search of his name returns many enquiries into his petting preferences and a long, in-depth article exploring whether or not Bob is gay and was outed on a radio show. Turns out he was also a coach on The Biggest Loser. Who knew? I usually feel that a celebrity should have some vague connection to the gay arena to be outed. That is, if he’s playing up a gay image for his fans it’s fair to enquire, because he’s taking something from the community without giving anything in return. (See also: The Presets.) But after last week’s harsh and potentially dangerous rumination on the more malicious side of outing it’s nice to remember another reason a person might care:

We’re gay and are constantly searching out other people in the world that might be like us. And if that person happens to look like a wet dream with a side of Holy Fucking Shit! then it makes the question even harder not to ask.

Here on TNG I complain. A lot. I complain with the frequency and intensity of a colicky infant watching an episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia during a Columbia Heights 4th of July. So I try to scale back. Be positive. Write about things I like. Music, TV, Frank Kameny. But I can’t always do it. Some things in this world are abominations, brown smears down the fresh white sheets of gay life, and I can’t keep my mouth shut about them.

Silicone-based lube is one of those things.

Remember last year’s BP Deepwater Horizon oil disaster and how terrible our country’s gorgeous coast lines looked when covered in a viscous black slime? Well, that’s how my balls feel for about three weeks after one brush with a bottle of Gun Oil. I like the emotional aspect of sex, the sense that two (or six) people come out of an encounter slightly changed. However, the feeling of sex should linger in your brain or heart, not on the top three inches of your pubes. When even the waistband of your underwear starts to slide around untethered it is clear that you’ve let a substance touch your skin that shouldn’t be there.

Lube is one of those things that is deeply personal, like how they eat corn on the cob. So it makes sense that a substance that might make me violently ill seconds after ejaculation could be another man’s treasure. Why they prefer a lube that allows them to be fucked not just once, but theoretically by several other men in the next four days without reapplication, is beyond me. But I’m trying to keep an open mind.

So I put up a query on Facebook and got some decent answers as to why people might favor the stuff:

” I actually prefer it. It doesn’t seem to gum up like water-based stuff does.”

“Better lubrication, for sure. For fun with a partner or alone. I prefer the feel (of it) to the sticky, time-limited feel of water based lube.”

However, the holder of the second opinion also offered this:

It never goes away. Silicone lube now covers my bed, desk chairs, door knobs, light-switches, and chandeliers. Can come in handy if a kid gets his head stuck in the banister on the stairs, a la every sitcom we’ve ever seen.

And that is the heart of the double-edged lube bottle. Sure, regular lube might require a couple reapplications throughout the course of the sex, but at least you won’t break your neck on it while getting up to pee at 5 am. One friend of mine has clear memories of an old apartment that had become almost uninhabitable due to one errant jerk-off session with a silicon lube sample.

Apparently, it went something like this: Lube is poured on penis, lube spills on bathtub floor. Lube sticks to bottom of feet, is tracked to the sink where it will not wash off hands. Lube is then tracked pedally on the remainder of the bathroom floor, then throughout the apartment, leaving slimy penumbras on all intervening door knobs. Resident of apartment moves out. Apartment is then rented off at a “haunted house rate,” i.e. has its market value driven down by a slick, tactile form of ghost.

I know that silicone lube (or Slube) serves a purpose. That moment when “ooh, ooh” turns into “OW! OW!” is about as mood-killing as a breach birth. Taking the extra second to re-up on the slippery stuff can mean the difference between the best sex you’ve ever had and “just jerk off on me so I can go to bed.” However, so can adjusting one knee for balance and suddenly finding yourself 8 inches in the air, then crashing down onto a hardwood floor. Slube turns bedrooms into slip-n-slides, solid sheets into tie-dye, and inner thighs into bacterial breeding grounds on par with a Steamworks‘ hot tub.

But hey, why take my word on it? Here are some other musings I collected from Facebook to prove I’m not the only one who thinks silicone should be relegated to Nancy Pelosi’s lips where it belongs:

Silicone degrades silicone so it’s not really any good for FTM guys. Just saying

I don’t allow it in my house because it will ruin leather.

It stains sheets. I hate it – unless I’m at someone else’s house/car/alley.

Can you think of any other issue that can single-handedly bring together disparate strands of the trans, leather and sheet-buying community? I sure can’t. I’m actually going to go ahead and make up a statistic here that I hope will scare the living shit out of you:

68% of gay household injuries come as a direct result of silicone-based lube. So there you have it. It’s great for sliding into a buddy, but less fun when you’re sliding headfirst into a bookcase because of that one time you tried to have sex in your living room. Thanks, Slube. I’ll just be sticking to Liquid Silk at my own house.

At another’s place, though? I guess when you’re in slippery Rome, you do as slippery Romans do. Just have a can of turpentine ready when you get home or forever feel the consequences.

I don’t remember if he was talking about me fucking her or just getting a bj, but the general presumption was that a gay guy could suck it up, close his eyes, and just enjoy the thrill of someplace warm to put the proverbial it. My reply to that — which wasn’t even sarcastic — was to ask if he’d let me blow him. I’ve never had much luck with on-the-fence straight guys and I thought it was too good to pass up. I told him that by his logic he could let a dude blow him. He said no, as I more or less expected.

The easy answer to why I wouldn’t do anything with a girl, no matter how cute or sweet, is because I’m gay. Lesbians don’t turn because they’re bored of dick, straight guys aren’t just waiting for the right male bottom and I know – from personal experience – that if you’re 100% gay the Queen of Sheba’s pussy itself couldn’t turn you.

I spent high school and my first year of college subscribing to the “you have to get it somewhere” school of human sexuality. That is, I wasn’t out and was too old for daily wet dreams so I pursued and “had relations” with ladies. I had fun, and it helped me learn what a blowjob was like before my penis grew back into itself from disuse, but it wasn’t what I would’ve chosen in an ideal world. I spent my summer after  high school graduation doing everything-but with my first boyfriend but then my first year of college got confusing.

I was one of about ten gay men at an extremely small, stiflingly rural Ohio college and had to balance what I was against what I wanted. I was hiding under the banner of “bi now, gay later” (as my first gay friend put it) I slept with guys here and there, when I could find them, and messed around with girls when the urge and/or the need to keep my friends confused about my sexuality struck.

It worked as a temporary solution in that my testicles didn’t explode in the middle of an IPHS class and I got to stay as under-the-radar as any skinny, un-stubbled, pink-shirt-wearing, gay-friend-having, Belle-and-Sebastian-listening, 19 year-old protofag could. Though I found out later that the small-world nature of my campus  had my roommate knowing I was a homo before he even met me, but he was a good sport about seeming surprised when I let the non-cat out of the non-bag.

I used to take a lot of pride in not being a gold-star gay. 19 year-old me was even more aggressively, obnoxiously anti-gay-culture than I was now. The creeping rot of the closet had me rejecting everything that I thought “gay guys did.” I complained that 4 or 5 of the gay seniors always had dinner together in the dining hall. (Don’t they have other friends?), were active in queer issues (What are they, like, only gay?) and went to GLBT campus support meetings (No thanks, I have frat parties to attend.) So my ultimate public act of rebellion,  oddly enough, was acting straight.

It wasn’t like girls did nothing for me. I had some crushes, some lust objects, some angry, ranting nights when a date went poorly. But I knew what I really was after and which of my actions would be left in the dust with my baseball caps and girl-on-girl porn. As a guy who hates unfinshed business, can’t stand doing anything haflway, I made myself a promise: I would hold onto my bi identity until I could go all the way with a girl. I figured (unlike an actual bisexual person) that I could just get lady-sex out of the way once before moving on to the thing I actually, exclusively liked.

And wow was it not fun for either party. I woke up on the morning of March 23rd, 2003, and proclaimed to my friends “I’m tired of being a virgin. Tonight’s the night.” In the resulting severe case of “careful what you wish for” (and I’ll spare you all the gory details) I had clumsy, obtrusive, lucky-I-knew-where-to-put-it sex with a gorgeous, smart friend of mine who really deserved a better way to end her Saturday night. Though much about the event was unfortunate  (on my part, to her chagrin) the only thing you really need to know is that I ended up sleeping in the condom and then slinking into a woman’s bathroom the next day to throw it out.

I’ve since made peace with the woman in question, which is lucky because there aren’t enough apologies in the world for an unsuspecting straight girl who fell into the path of a curious gay man’s heterosexual explorations. That was the last time any part of me touched any part of a girl that wouldn’t already have been exposed at a museum gala or business lunch. I didn’t feel like explaining that to the guy from after the LCD show, but I figured why not tell three thousand strangers online?

Sexuality is never as easy as choosing between two different flavors. The queer lady community is usually given more freedom to sleep with men than gay guys have to occasionally experiment with women. But I know I’m not the only one out there who dabbled. Anyone in TNG-ville have such an experience that ended better for either you or the girl? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Though I don’t have enough here for a “queer cartoons” Television Man column, it is worth noting that Fox’s Bob’s Burgers has been dipping its hairy feet into queer comedy. A couple weeks ago they portrayed a couple of what Julia Serano would call “pathetic transsexuals” as Bob began hanging out with some poorly-passing transvestite/transgender (the show never differentiated) prostitutes. Last week’s episode “Art Crawl” brought back a trope from the like-written “Home Movies” with a pair of young boys whose selfless desire to be together forever marked a welcome spiritual return of HM’s Walter and Perry. And less overtly-gay, though very close to home, was the fact that seemingly every other word in “Art Crawl” was “Anus.”

The episode centered around a town-wide art crawl and Bob’s sister-in-law covering the walls of his titular restaurant with lovingly rendered animal anuses. And when confronted with all those anuses – those puckered, oil-painted, attached-to-elephants-and-chickens-and-highly-unsexualized anuses – all I could think of was “Wow. This episode is really fucking gay.” I thought it was daring that the show got away with the use of the A word. I appreciated that not a single person made a buttsex or gay sex joke when confronted with said anuses. And I was happy I wasn’t watching it with my parents.

In short, anuses are gay! Or, at least, they’ve come to be. Bob’s Burgers was nice enough to conflate anuses with their standard usage: going to the bathroom. However, I’ve spent about 9 years living with the deluxe model and it’s very difficult not to think that I have a special relationship with a potentially gross part of the body that most people take for granted. I would’ve lost my virginity about five years earlier had I known my butt as anything other than the part of me that starts to get grungy after a long hot summer’s day.

When I did give up the proverbial brown flower, I had to watch myself become an unwilling expert to those who strove to know more. “No, he didn’t poop on me.” “No, no one had to go to the hospital afterwards.” “Yes, it smelled a little weird in the room but douche kits exist for girls too so leave me alone.” I remember a straight friend of mine turning down anal with his girlfriend time after time, expressing interest in the ass itself but lamenting “We’ve been together for four years. I really don’t feel like putting my fingers in her butt.”

That’s why I was happy to watch “Art Crawl” with a room of fellow gays, and not anyone that would be either get waaaaay grossed out by the general conceit or who didn’t view the anus as a fact of day-to-day life as I have been blessed to. I’m guessing the show was going for a certain degree of discomfort humor with the whole premise, but at this point I am so far away from being grossed out by anuses… at least cartoon anuses. I still find myself thinking “put your tail down. Put your tail down. Good god, please put your tail down” about 3 times a minute when I’m at the dog park, but that has more to do with my affection for canines than it does squeamishness.

I guess I can be proud that I belong to a caste of dudes that has grown to know the butthole as few other groups of people can. And its really fun that I got to type the word “anus” as many times as I did over the last couple paragraphs. But do you think that, given the connotations it has in polite society, there is something about a joke on anuses that might have just a little bit of a gay tilt to it? If not, I sincerely apologize for the last ten minutes of your life.

Two days into my five-day test membership I ran into an acquaintance by the bench press. Dropping the formalities usually seen in accidental gay run-ins, I was greeted simply with a “What are you doing here? This has been my private gym for four years.” I assume the question was friendlier than it came out. I also assume that this well-stocked Dupont club was not in fact his “private” facility, but I knew what he meant. This place was a sanctuary. I’d be protective too.

Results was a great place. Big windows, friendly staff and none of the oppressive spa/nightclub atmosphere seen in the fitness chain that is taking it over. More importantly it was a great way to meet gay people outside of clubs. Sure, it was full of sweaty, under-dressed men that would soon be showering together. But that makes more sense at a gym that it would at a book club. I made some legitimate friends at Results and always welcomed its social release after slaving over a hot laptop all day.

However, like anything that is explicitly gay, it can be a bit much if you weren’t prepared for it. It’s hard to focus on your breathing with Beyonce blaring through the speaker system and occasionally I just wanted to lift without hearing the two men next to me squawking about their weekend plans. And sometimes I just wasn’t in the for mood for everyone in the group shower to point their boners at me when I was just trying to wash my armpits. So my new gym has been a respite.

In fact, its an insanely different place. Apples and oranges. Cats and dogs. Day and… vaginal intercourse? I’m not used to gyms where the men and women associate with each other. While Results was both a gym and a destination, Mint is merely someplace where a majority-hetero crowd goes to get in shape.

Instead of blaring club music, they have what sounds like an instrumental version of Massive Attack’s “Mezzenanine” on perpetual loop. Where I used to emerge from my workouts humming “to the left, to the left…” I now leave with vaguely masturbatory fantasies about Liz Frasier. Gone are the ubiquitious tank tops and too tight/too short gym shorts. I’ve seen plain t-shirts, head to toe body armour and, most discrepantly, khakis. There are a surprising number of men who arrive not already bearing a Dieux du Stade body, but are there because they want to maintain a healthy BMI or stave off a late-in-life coronary incident.

A man in his 50s talked to me in the locker room yesterday and it wasn’t because he was hitting on me. He was actually making conversation. When I took off my towel in front of him to get my undies on it had no sexual charge. No undercurrent of “How can I make this clear I’m just getting dressed, not pulling a flirty dick flash?” It changed the dynamic entirely.

In fact, the locker room culture of Mint is as different from my old gym as “Born This Way” is from “Express Yourself.” Whoops, bad example. They are actually different. Results’ locker room was nearly palatial in scope. It held a huge gang shower, tanning booths, wall to wall mirrors and a sauna you could see into from the entrance. Like “House of Leaves,” it was a footnote that could not be seperated from the greater body of work. At Mint,though,  it’s just a place to clean off.  The sauna’s tucked away in a corner near the individual showers. The mirrors are scant and small and no one is on walking around with their junk on display. I don’t usually get uncomfortable being naked around in locker rooms (because that’s the point) but I did here. It just wasn’t that kind of place.

So back to my buddy who wanted it to himself. Out there in gay culture it does not hurt to be in shape. I’ve put about 8 years into my body and I’d by lying if I said it hadn’t “opened a door” or two. Call it “fit privilege” if you like, but lord knows I’ve worked for it. Lifting weights quells anxiety, keeps my confidence up, separates who I am now from who I was when I was 12 and made Kate Moss look like latter-day Marlon Brando. But I’d never really been to a gym that didn’t feel like an extension of the party I was headed to later. So its been nice to embrace the utilitarian aspects of where I am now. Get in, get sweaty, get out. I miss the company and the cammeraderie, but not the three hours’ expenditure it can take to fit those things into my workout.

I’d be miffed too if all of DC’s gays suddenly turned up to make the place something it hadn’t been previously. So I promised this guy, only a quarter joking, that I’d never talk to him when I saw him. So far I’ve kept to it. I know what this kid looks like with his shirt off. So if a vow of silence can give me the barest semblence of substantial musculature, I’ll gladly take it. Two fags, taking our solitary steps through a place so alien that we can’t help but fit in.

I’m halfway through the second season of Skins, the recently-Americanized British drama that will make you want to take pills and fuck a 15 year-old. It is a show about partying, shagging, emotional teens, but it is well-written. The symbolism and syntax is purposeful. That is why I found something particularly interesting in a season the season-one episode “Michelle.”  Anti-hero Tony, who has cheated on his girlfriend with seemingly half of Bristol’s available females, finally goes to0 far by giving his friend Maxxie an exploratory (and painful) BJ while Michelle is passed out in a bed next to them.

Michelle wakes up in the middle and spends the next couple days waiting for Tony to apologize. He doesn’t.  She decks him. Though Tony has deserved an ass-kicking since episode 1, Maxxie gets reamed out as well. When he tries to apologize to Michelle calls him “dirty little slut who fucks around with other people’s boyfriends.” With most shows I would just find that to be a insensitive double standard, but its Skins so it’s making a point.

The idea of two men having sex tends to make people uncomfortable. I could fill a post with inadvertently ignorant or hurtful things that the people closest to me have said on the subject of my sex life. My parents, my sister, my straight friends all view gay sex as something that is, if not dirty, a path to physical violence or life threatening disease. So when gay guys have the exact same amount of sex as a straight counterpart, it is the homo that gets called the slut.

Take this for example: There are two guys that go out together one night. Both flirt with the people they find attractive, both make out with a couple of them at the bar. Both stumble out together and start talking to a pair of attractive friends at the bar’s 3 am “sidewalk sale.” Both take one of the friends home and have sex. However, one of those guys is gay and the other is straight. How are their friends reactions going to differ?

The straight guy’s friends will high-five him and ask the details. He’ll further his reputation, at least among men, as someone who is enough of a “stud” to always be able to score ass. But the gay guy’s friends? They’ll call him a whore.

As proved time and again (frequently by Advocate commenters, thanks guys) gay men love to call each other whores. And whore tends be categorized as “anyone who has had more sex than the person doing the name calling.” I think most gay men out there are brought up to believe that gay sex is something very wrong (often through comments like the one in Skins) and most of us, even the most sexually liberated, have to struggle with the societal implications of being naked with another man. So calling each other whores seems to be the easy way out.

It’s another great example of gay men internalizing years of negative remarks and turning them against each other. Grow up in a world that demonizes effeminate men? Check how many Grindr users demand St8-acting sex partners and then try to claim those feelings have no effect. So gay men get taught their the way they have sex is somehow worse than the way straight guys do, and then they give it just as bad as they get it to the people around them.

If there is anyone out there who has never had sex, and never plans to, then I might be a little more inclined to give them leeway on the language they use. But for everyone else I wanna ask this: If a straight guy can’t be a slutty, why can you? That word has so many of its own problematic roots, most having to do with misogyny, that retiring it amongst our own community would be a nice breath of fresh air.

“Love is in the morning,” he said, “after a long night spent sleeping together. “We sat at his table. Eggs steamed in the air before us, a bottle of milk waited to fill empty glasses. “Why in the morning?” I asked. “Because in the morning,” he said, “you’re just awake.”

The above quote comes from pg. 141 of Dale Peck’s Martin and John. One of the best passages of my all-time favorite gay novel, it takes place after a couple have woken up from a night of bar-induced sex. The first man insists that love lies in the ordinary and the mundane, and is able to make his companion understand it’s not in the heat of sex and desire. To that sentiment, a heartbreakingly-gorgeous standout in a gut punch of a book, I’ll add my own:

Love is in the bathroom.

You’re reading this on the day after Valentine’s. I’m writing it on the holiday itself. I have no real plans for this Monday. My boyfriend and I agreed years ago that we wouldn’t get caught up in the trap of forced celebration when our day-to-day life together already conveys how we feel about each other in acts as simple as making dinner or a goodnight kiss. That was shortly after our 6-month anniversary, and months before I even moved in, but everything I’ve learned about love since February 2008 has strengthened the conviction that tying up your emotions in extravagant gestures and meaningful moments will just lead to frustration.

Lemme change tones and put it this way: I had my purest moment of joy last week, that moment that lets you think “Wow, maybe forever isn’t that scary.” The moment that, in a movie, would be underscored with twinkling lights and the perfect song, the moment when you know what love means. And when it happened I was sitting on the toilet.

After three years of being vegetarian-by-proxy I still have a touch-and-go relationship with seitan. I always like it on the way in but its exits are, frequently, neither graceful nor brief. On this particular night it took me an hour to do the dishes because I was taking frequent breaks of the bathroom kind. And, I shudder to type, they were audible. The wooden floors and narrow hallways of our old apartment make a perfect sound conduit and neither of us felt like cranking Crystal Castles at full blast to provide an adequate but jarring sound cover.

There’s a bit of Rosen family apocrypha stating my uncle used the bathroom in the library across the street for the first year of his newly-wed number twos. It must run in the family because that act was simply something that I would not formerly have considered doing within two miles of a love interest.

The bathroom at the other side of the restaurant was scary, but ideal. Certainly not at their house. Maybe when they were sleeping and I ran the water and was absolutely assured they wouldn’t be waking up anytime soon, but even that could induce cold sweats. These fears were ameliorated slightly when I learned some of the realities of buttsex but for years I preferred we both pretend the receiving party was only in the bathroom afterwards to powder their noses and study their post-coital glow in the soft light of a steamy mirror.

Following seitan-pocalypse though, I was comfortable. Not physically, but romantically. Our honeymoon period was just as intense in its lows as in its highs. The first couple months of cohabited bliss were novel and exciting, but contained more fights about dishes and dirty socks than I could fit in one post. So many sitcoms and movies suggest that things get boring, not better, as the years go on. I would disagree. To be caught in a moment that would be downright humiliating in anyone else’s presence, and to have it dismissed with a chuckle, is about as close to “real love” as I can think of.

That’s my example. Not all love is born from shit, but when when they go hand-in-hand is when you have something real. I hope everyone out there enjoyed Valentine’s Day and didn’t let Modern Family or something similar sucker them into thinking that one arbitrary day should stand for everything that matters in a relationship. Same for the single folks: No matter how you feel about your single-dom, remember that the actual, pedestrian facts of a relationship bear as much resemblance to the real thing as a McDonald’s milkshake does to actual ice cream.

In short, it’s not all flowers.

Here’s what you should do next. Turn off your stereo. Open your windows. Take a deep breath and just listen. That noise you hear? It isn’t nearby construction or birds cawwing. Its not the rumbling of a train or even the low roar of the ocean. It’s not an American Eagle-clad youth screaming “Whoo!” in your ear at a megadisco.

That noise is one million gay men simultaneously vomiting up the kool-aid of arbitrarily prescribed cultural icons. And I don’t know why it took so long.

This morning, Facebook was abuzz with disappointment about the latest lump of sequined coal to fall from Stephanie Germanotta’s meat diaper into our open ears. And by some blessed miracle, some divine intervention of truth and common sense, that buzz was not good.

Activist types were dismayed about Gaga’s exclusive marketing deal with Target. Club fags found the song to have crossed the line between “Madonna homage” and “‘Express Yourself’-related intellectual property lawsuit.” And everyone else imploring the world to shut up about Lady Gaga, already,  was finally in some good company.

Lady Gaga is a brilliant self-marketer who writes stellar hooks and looks good wearing items that appear to have been fished out of Karen O‘s dumpster. I find her songs to be as emotionally evocative as lichen but they make me dance. And that’s pretty awesome. I do not, however,  understand how she transitioned into the shortcut for all things gay. She doesn’t represent my life, no matter how many times she might be played at a gay bar or how many men take pride in knowing the entire “Bad Romance” dance by heart. Contemporary gay culture has become so entwined with this one woman that I can barely breath.

I am forced to keep abreast of her every single move by the endless, breathless accounts of gay blogs, gay clubs, and overly enthusiastic gay friends. So I might crank “Paparazzi” when I’m at home alone, but the rest of the time I just want her to be de-canonized as a homosexual omnipresence so I can go on with my life. I do believe in culture as politics. But Lady Gaga is not culture.

She can scream at Barack Obama on our behalf all day and I’ll appreciate her as a political voice. She came out as bisexual before she blew up, so she has my love and support as a member of the greater queer “family.”  And hey, I wouldn’t wanna wear the meat dress. So good for her. But otherwise?  Her songs are too disposable to be highbrow, and her public persona too self-important to be lowbrow or camp. Instead,  that shadowy kabal in the backroom of the Stonewall Inn decided she would be our new god and, remarkably, no one asked why.

So I’m not amazed that this one particular piece of derivative, image-heavy pop might be declared the ultimate gay anthem to a chorus of angry ears. I’m just astounded that it didn’t happen earlier. What is the difference between “Born This Way” and everything else Lady GaGa put out? Is it the fact that, for the first time, the content of her music matches the gay-rights messages that spill from her mouth? You’d think that people would embrace that, revel in her outright musical acknowledgement of our struggles. (And no, the video for “Alejandro” does not count.)

Maybe, then, the months of anticipation she engendered towards this song could not match the what it delivered. I always thought that gay male sheepism was a universal certainty on par with death and taxes but even that, it seems, has its limits. Declaring yourself an icon can only take you so far. Eventually the worshippers catch on and will drop you faster than an unclean bottom at an OCD sex party.

It’s scary in a different way, though, that the backlash at this point seems so unified. All that does is create a power vacuum for the next intellectual vacuum with blonde hair and unconventional brassieres to come along. To hijack my life with a song about clubbing and keep me struggling in her clutches until that mythical “they” decides she’s done. I don’t know if “Born That Way” spells the end of Gaga or just the last step of her current iteration. I could pray for a time that Antony Hegarty or CSS is revered the way she is, but I know that will never come.

I know I can “be a queen” if I want to. I didn’t need a limp, pink-wigged strand of fettuccine to give me permission. If “Born This Way” leads to a wide scale act of rebellion, if it causes Lady Gaga to fall by the gay wayside, if it allows us to stop being defined from the outside, even for a minute, then I’ll count it as the single best song of the year and wash my hands of the whole thing.

We started at Season 6, where Detective Olivia Benson had just begun her slow transition from human superhero to immortal messiah figure. When we tuned in she was just a kick-ass woman who anchored a hit TV show while providing succor to every victim of sexual abuse in the greater Manhattan area. In short, someone I’d love to have on our side in D.C. I was even brewing her as my next “New Gay Icon” for being a strong woman in a male dominated tv show/profession who also exudes sex-positivity and queer friendliness. Then the craziness started.

In one episode, she single-handedly talked a 6-year old South American immigrant into revealing the location of her child-pornographer captors, busts said  kiddie-porn ring and rescues the child from a live burial. In another she tracks down her half-brother and prevents  him from shooting an evil, revenge-seeking DA by literally talking a gun out of his hands. Then — and I wish this was just a fever dream — she is driving her partner’s wife, Kathy, to a late-term prenatal checkup when they are hit by a drunk driver. Not only does Detective Benson save Kathy’s life when the paramedics are unable to enter their battered car, but she actually delivers Kathy’s baby in the ambulance.

I can deal with melodrama in decidedly over-the-top TV franchises, and after 5 seasons of Battlestar I’m very inured to the idea of one character having a myriad of undiscovered superpowers. So while I stopped finding Benson’s behavior to be believable (or even grounded in the laws of physics and mortality) I still appreciated her as a role-model for anyone who is stronger than the world wants to believe. That is, until I finished season 11 and returned to the beginning.

Some things are the same in SVU season 1. Specifically, Elliot takes his shirt off a lot and Olivia wears extremely unflattering vest-over-t-shirt combos that remind me of Bronson Pinchot. But there was a particular difference that threw me off.  One very early SVU episode begins with Benson in bed with the detective that I can only think of Dennis Duffy. The shot opens with them in post-coital cop bliss and follows her as she gets dressed. Detective Dennis Duffy says what a great time he had, and Benson quips that it wont happen again. They then avoid each other for the rest of the episode. Whatever show that was, it wasn’t the SVU I know and tolerate.

This early iteration of Benson bears as much resemblance to Season 11′s as a guy’s Grindr pic does to his actual face. Season One Benson could almost have been in an episode of Friends. She has so strong a “single girl trying to make it in New York City” vibe that is glaringly incongruous with her characterization today. She was unsure of herself, and prone to mistakes, and most importantly she dated.

And now I know what bothers me so much about Olivia-Benson-as-supewoman: She seems to further that ol’ idealogical chestnut that a woman can be sexual or smart, but not both.

She dates one guy in a later season, but their relationship happens offscreen and she keeps it a secret. Juxtapose that with season one, where her dalliance with a newspaper reporter is the driving point of the whole episode. In season 10 and 11, Olivia’s celibate omniscience even becomes a running joke within the show. In one (particularly surreal) episode, she saves an undercover-Stabler from a crew of murderous animal smugglers by stripping into her bra and pretending to be a southern prostitute. In another she is dressed as a high-powered madam to infiltrate a sex-trafficing ring. As she sits at a bar, in a fur wrap and elbow gloves, trading suggestive quips, the punchline is clear: This is funny because Olivia is too strong and dedicated to her job to ever actually sully herself with such mortal desires as pleasure.

It rubs me the wrong way because gay men face the same trap. No one calls straight guys whores, no matter how many Zeta Pi’s they take home, but when women or gay men try to own their sexuality they are judged for it. It’s invariable. I entered Season 6 thinking that Olivia Benson never had a sexual (and by extension, human) side. Season 1 disabused me of that notion and now I can’t see her character development in the same light.

I still love Olivia Benson, and I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t take a lot of inspiration from her. However, it kills me to see her become a straight, female version of Will Truman: Sanitized to sainthood because TV characters (with a few notable exceptions) can be powerful and capable, or sexual, but never both.

Remembering the music that kept me off the brink when I was in the closet, I compiled a list of 19 anti-suicide songs that I thought could be helpful for queer youth.  Taking this theme one step further,  I recruited a couple indie bands to play thematically appropriate anti-suicide tracks for IGB. Given my abilities and interest, it was the best way for me to add to the project and further its noble aims.

Last Friday I saw an official response from The Bilerico Project. Bil Browning had written a post called “Making a Killing: Rocking Out To Dead Kids” where I was accused of being some Katy Perry-level hack, approaching a sensitive personal topic with dollar signs and fame in my eyes. Most damming, in the comments, Bil called me out for being “not an activist,” as if that was the least forgivable of sins.

Folks, welcome to the world of queer organizing.

I personally think of queer activism — in my definition, any and all attempts, on any scale, that an individual makes to better the world for LGBTs — as a group effort akin to building a city. If you are building a city, you will want parks and schools. You would not ask a math teacher to plan a playground. You would not ask a construction foreman to coach softball. But the second one enters the so-called “activist” arena, their individual skills, intentions, and decisions go the way of the dodo. No sooner will a person announce their desire to try and help than six others will pop up to tell them exactly how they’re doing it wrong.

In DC this past summer a group of individuals organized “The Big Commit,” a counterprotest to the nearby NOM hate-fest that rolled through town the same day. They brought in members of DC’s religious, musical, artistic and organizing communities to make a strong statement for gay rights. What did they get in return? They got their own counterprotest!

Yet another group of change-minded queers disrupted said Big Commit with their own banner and message. The change that the Big Commit folks were striving to create, their message, got so tripped up in another’s ego and vitriol that effort was spent in-fighting when it could have been used to undermine an actual hate group.

Those attempting small-scale awareness campaigns are now arm chair activists. High-profile fundraisers are dismissed as “Gay Inc.,” whether or not it’s deserved.  I’ve seen gay marriage panels hijacked by one angry person who wonders why their own (unrelated)  pet cause was ignored.  People would never order sushi at a pizza restaurant,  yet the anger of an activist scorned can rival that of Jerry Falwell at his most hilariously apoplectic.

I have met some folks within the traditional activist circles that are among the nicest and most supportive I have encountered since I came out. People who greet others’ attempts at change with open arms and encouragement, even if they don’t agree with the cause or the tactics. (Bil Browning, in fact, is one of those people.) But on the other end of the spectrum, I can safely say that a couple activists I’ve met count among the pettiest, nastiest and most self-centered people I’ve encountered in last five years of my life.

GetEQUAL’s experience has been a spectacular example of the ire directed at an activist group who is “doing things the wrong way.” Inequality is a puzzle. Many forces conspire, in many insidious ways, to keep us down. Hence it makes sense that a surfeit of solutions might be advantageous to when finding a solution. It’s been shocking, then, to see such a visible and hard-working group become the whipping children of the queer blogosphere. So they have a budget? Awesome, that means they can support a full time staff that fights for equality. So they’re not transparent? For the work they’ve done, I don’t care if Hitler himself is writing checks from some slow-moving line in Hell’s Kinko’s. Most ridiculously is the notion that they are somehow setting back the movement with their high-stakes actions. Our lives are high-stakes and it’s not like any other one group has gotten the job done on their own.

(God, even HRC deserves a word here. Trans-exclusive ENDA is the absolute nadir of our equality movement, but it’s probably better having HRC around than not. Black tie fundraisers have their place too, unfortunately.)

The word “activism” carries some terrifying connotations when, really, there should be no barriers to entry for those who are interested in doing something constructive, especially not from within the community. I’m dreading the day when some 16 year-old will put up a coin collector at his suburban supermarket and get criticized for collecting money for the wrong factions, the wrong identities, the wrong causes. For having the wrong intentions, for not having enough life-experience to know that he’s wrong. To get bandied about by a queer blogosphere with its head so far up its own ass that it only writes about itself.

Activism is a personal decision to go out in the world and do anything to make it more positive. If it must pass some nebulous consensus vote, weather criticism and a stinging paucity of community support, how is anyone going to work up the courage to try?

Activism, as defined by certain activists, is quickly becoming a members-only club. It’s time to open the doors and let in the public. Embrace the incredible breadth of skill sets and interests possessed by the individual members of our community and — I shouldn’t even have to say this — embrace our differences.

(That said, as I write this I’m gearing up to participate in Creating Change. I’m praying it’s a more positive experience than Netroots. If you agree with me here, say hi. If you don’t please write your name on the flaming bag of dogshit before you place it on my doorstep so I can keep them straight.)

Well, not straight people per se. Our problem is more a lack of non-gay spaces. Our weekend nights tend to revolve the alternative and “alternative” queer events that have been popping up around The District like Thai restaurants in a gentrifying neighborhood. First Fridays are Raw, Second Fridays are She.Rex, Fourth Saturdays are Shift, fourth Mondays are liver replacements (more of a personal engagement), and so many more. My friend and I have decided that it would be cool to start exploring the other things there are to do in the District. Petworth house parties. Dupont gallery openings. K St. lounges, H St. DJ nights, Capitol Hill… coke orgies? Organized power grabs? I’m not that brave. But I digress.

Most of the above options sound great in theory, but if I branch out I lose the comfort of an all-gay surrounding. I can be relatively assured in many parts of DC that I won’t be beat up or called names for being gay. What I can’t be assured of when I leave my gay social bubble is any chance of getting laid. And maybe it’s winter fever, or maybe I’m a heathen, but I’m running out of ways to hide the extent to which shared nudity is a driving impulse for a good 80 percent of my actions.

If I sat back and wrote a list of things I want to accomplish in a given weekend night, they probably read like this: 1) Get drunk. 2.) Get super-stoned. 3.) Dance to something non-remixed (though that’s easier said than done) 4) Ejaculate in a memorable and creative manner and 5) remember not to bite my nails  until I’ve washed my hands.

At heart I’m a simple man with simple  interests. On weekend days I live to sleep late, snuggle on the couch with my boyfriend, take the dog to the park. If I mention a “heavy load” before 8 PM on a Saturday I’m talking about laundry. My weeknights have lately been spent in a threesome called “my boyfriend, Elliot Stabler and Olivia Benson.” If I opt for that second cup of wine on a Tuesday night I’ll spend all of Wednesday in a dark, grumpy cloud. In short, 5 days a week I’m pretty square.

And when I’m not at home picking kettle chip crumbs out of my chest hair, I’m doing my best to be a productive member of gay society. Running this blog, involving myself with local activism when I can, buying Le Tigre albums instead of just pirating them. It starts to feel like pollution credits. Call them cock-footprint offsets? I hate going through the mental arithmetic of “I earned this blowjob by attending a queer poetry night.” Yet I make those calculations often.

And Jesus, the things I’ve done to get laid. I’ve found myself at a bar at 3 am, following one of the most fun nights of my life, thinking “I know one thing that would make this even more fun!” Flash forward two hours and I’m sloshing down 14th st. wondering when buttsex got boring. Flash forward a week and it’s happening again. I got in the frame of mind a while ago, back when my only connection to the queer community was the guys I slept with, that a night doesn’t count if you end it alone. Being gay means so much more to me now, and I try to give back as much as I take, but I can’t help wondering: What’s the point of being gay if I’m not practicing? It starts to seem like those Art History majors that work at gas stations. Just a lot of time and practice for nothing.

I don’t actually think that getting laid is all there is to life. I know that would be depressing and am glad that sex is just the pepper on my salad days, not the whole nicoise. But take off the spice and things start to taste boring. Is that so bad?

Last year, after incorrectly theorizing that plaid had reached its apex in the indie-fag community, I attempted to chart the upcoming trends of 2010. Skinny jeans haven’t gone anywhere and the Deep V continues its reign of terror on this nation’s chests and eye sockets. Yet, I haven’t given up my dream of a better tomorrow. In that spirit, here is my forecast of 2011 trends. Some things we loved will be “out” and some trends you hoped to never see, not even with someone else’s eyes, might be “in.” Some are just my attempts at padding this article so it’s long enough. Whether or not they come to pass, I know that Ghandi will smile upon my efforts to be the change I wish to see at The Black Cat.

***

OUT: Beards
IN: Merkins

Honestly, what self-respecting alt kid doesnt’ have a beard? Maybe razor purchases were a victim of the flagging economy or Abraham Lincoln is ascending to Bowie-like levels of iconhood, but a naked face is as common in the clubs these days as Michele Bachmann at a NAMBLA rally. They just aren’t there. How long can this last? I dread the day when beards go out of vogue, since I look like a pockmarked 12 year-old without one (and my stubborn Jewish stubble takes 45 minutes to fully eradicate) but I suspect their days are numbered.

So what will rise in their place? My theory is merkins. Pubic wigs. Pubes are already a viable fashion accessory for those not blessed with happy trails and mass-marketed merkins would be a logical extension of that. My guess is that Universal Gear will have its own merkin display by April.  By May the hipsters will already shun the overly-manicured Diesel line for the more shaggy, individualistic American Apparel options.

OUT: Lady Gaga
IN: Schizophrenic panhandlers

My favorite avant-garde musician dresses unpredictably and has outspoken views on sexuality. She is a rail-thin poster of androgyny, given to contorting her limbs into impossible shapes with no warning. She likes red wine and gambling metaphors. Yet you won’t see her at the VMAs or on the cover of Vanity Fair. Instead she is quite accessibly stationed at the L’Enfant Metro stop with an open guitar case and a gaggle of grotesquely-intrigued pedestrians who know the statistical correlations between homelessness and mental illness yet can’t look away. She means more to me as a queer person than Lady Gaga ever will.

OUT: It Gets Better
IN: I know a gay person, give me money

I unquestionably support the “It Gets Better” project but doubt the motives of many who participate. Barack Obama can’t see the case against hateful pastors at his inauguration ceremony, but he drops everything when a force like Dan Savage points out that people are dying and maybe he should do something? I’m a big fan of truth in advertising (a Crunch Wrap Supreme should be called the “Taco Bell Diarrhea Shell“) and I would love to see an opportunistic politician or pop singer call a spade a spade.

I can see it now: Katy Perry sits in front of a fireplace with a docile exotic bird nestling quietly in the upper folds of her skirt. She faces the camera and a single tear rolls down her cheek, smearing the top-most layer of her makeup. She says “When I was growing up a knew a gay person. Well, I didn’t know him but my girlfriends used to throw used tampons at him in the cafeteria.It made me laugh and laugh.  His life was not easy. But it could be. Hope. Life. Perseverance. Sunset kitten dandelions chicken soup lesbian. Please buy my album.”

30 years later she’ll still get awards from the HRC.

OUT: Chely Wright comes out
IN: Betty White comes out… as a water-sports enthusiast

Betty White is everywhere. She’s proven herself as a strong woman in a male-dominated industry since 40 years before Adam Lambert soiled his first diaper with glitter and strained okra. The idea of her octogenarian sexuality fueled literally every sketch she did on SNL. What does she have to lose? Chely Wright took a stand for queer equality last year and Betty White will add a dose of sexual freedom to the canon.

Barbara Walters will ask her, “Betty, ith there thomething the folkth at home thould know about you that they don’t?” and Betty will say, in her sweet Rose Nylund voice, “Yes Barbara. I absolutely adore urine.” She’ll then go on for forty minutes about the taste and smell of it, and how she once took a golden shower on Milton Berle. Just like that, the world will become slightly easier for those on the outside.

OUT: Glee
IN: Monastic vows of silence

Fox’s new hit show will be called Monk…But Not the Tony Shalhoub One! Set in a secluded keep in upper Mongolia, it will document the lives of a racially diverse group of ascetic believers united by a slightly older, though no-less attractive, ascetic believer who makes them appreciate themselves and the power of music. The catch? No one can talk.The “Madonna” episode will reach its exciting conclusion when the girl with multi-colored hair holds up a chalkboard reading “like a virgin” without changing her facial expression and the legless indigent, rescued from the impoverished gutters, then holds up a sign with the word “hey” scrawled on parchment with ripe berries. It will be cancelled ten minutes into its pilot.

OUT: The Tea Party
IN: FUCKING ANARCHY, BRAH!

What’s the next logical step from a bigotry-spawned, small-government-promoting, glorified-militia of a political party? FIRE IN THE STREETS! ZOO ANIMALS STALKING THROUGH ABANDONED DEPARTMENT STORES! ENRON EXECUTIVES BURNING MONEY UNDER A BRIDGE TO STAY WARM! The riots began when Christine O’Donnell became president and outlawed masturbation. They never ended. All gay people are sent to an island off the coast of Novia Scotia where gay men begrudgingly fuck lesbians to avoid dying out. American infrastructure crumbles away to nothing and those who can still read brush up on their Chinese.

OUT: Marriage Equality
IN: Trans-inclusive ENDA

While the end of DADT struck an major blow for queer equality, I predict that the year 2011 will see Marriage Rights lose their stronghold on queer activism. While I support those rights, I know that there are many other fights; fights that aren’t won on the backs of others. Since the Trans-Inclusive Employment Non-Discrimination Act will have the biggest tangible gains in the lives of our most disenfranchised, I know that the community will unite as one to guarantee its success…

Aw fuck. A guy can dream, right? Maybe in 2011 I’ll also get a pony.

Note: It is reductive, but for the purposes of this article “cisgender” means “not trans.”

***

At the end of this summer, I had the fortune to attend a sexual freedom conference in D.C. A point made frequently there was that inequality is not equal. Race, gender, and gender expression conspire to strip a person of their freedom just as much as any outside prejudice or hateful legislation. I enjoyed this conference and what I learned there. At one point, however, an extremely (and admittedly) butch Latino lesbian took a genuinely moving speech about her resulting personal struggles to a crescendo. That crescendo was ending a sentence with something about “fighting against the oppressive tyrannies of white men.” She paused then, as the entire room lit up with the kind of furious applause usually saved for a game-saving Steelers touchdown. I cheered too but didn’t feel good when I was doing it.

I am a white, cisgender gay man. I’m Ronald Reagan at a bathhouse, the queer equivalent of “The Man.” I am a freezer-burned vanilla Häagen-Dazs at the bottom of the Ben & Jerry’s case. The oppressive, dingy pigeon in the flamingo pen. Parties become less diverse the second I walk in.

Four years spent in queer media have taught me a fair amount about privilege, about the ways that my gay life is easier for reasons as basic as the color of my skin and the fact that my gender matches my biology. But the more I try to reconcile these privileges with my desire to create an equal queer world, the more I am left with one question: Can a nontrans, white gay man ever truly leave the comforts of his own identity without having to make frequent and loud apologies for the crimes of his ilk?

I realized pretty early on that I would probably never fit into the mainstream gay community for the mere fact that I prefer, say, Kate Bush over Madonna, David Byrne over Elton John. If something as basic as my chosen queer icon could make me uncomfortable in 90% of existing gay spaces, then I can only imagine how set apart a woman, trans person, or person of color must feel in the supposedly all-accepting gay universe. I am frequently called out for, at best, my excess of privilege and, at worst, the ways that people like me have disenfranchised the rest of the queer community through our existence and our actions. And I don’t think it’s fair for another person to label me an oppressor without the barest knowledge of what I have done in my life or what kind of person I actually am.

The aforementioned statement about white men undercuts the very point it is trying to make: In any community people should be proud of who they are. We should not be told that the color of our skin or what is between our legs makes us “less than” or should make us a viable target for another’s vitriol. Yet as a cisgender white guy who feels more comfortable outside of the mainstream, megaclubs-and-Abercrombie world than inside of it, it is frustrating that I must prove myself any time I take a foray out of my own identity. I end up having to do what no one of any identity should have to do: Apologize for what I am.

If things are going to get better, become as they should be, everyone should have a nuanced understanding of the ways that race and gender intersect with sexuality. All races and all genders. If cisgender people must always fear reprisal when talking about trans issues, if men are deemed too privileged to fit in with the lesbian community, how can there actually be a dialogue? The idea that men like me have marinated too long in their own excess to ever understand anyone else’s struggle propagates something harmful: the idea that gender is simply the lack of maleness, race a lack of whiteness, sexuality a lack of gayness. It takes a whole population interested in making a difference and cuts them out of the dialogue completely.

This is not an article about the ways I am disenfranchised for being white or biologically male. I know that the gay world traditionally and invisibly revolves around people like me and am not shallow enough to begrudge others their own spaces and struggles. But it would be nice to share my own thoughts about race and gender without fear of immediate chastisement for my ignorance.

For instance, I do not know what it is like to be trans, and I am scared to ask. I am scared to write articles on the subject because I will never know all the nuances of language and experience necessary to write do so without offending someone else. When I bring this up to my trans friends I am often told to research, to read a couple “Trans 101″ blogs for some basic knowledge to keep my ass covered.

But trans people are just that — people. It makes me uncomfortable to research them as I would a term paper or the purchase of a new oven when there are actual individuals, friends, that I can glean this knowledge from personally. Race and gender are especially thorny topics in any community, but at least in the queer community we are united by our supposedly “abhorrent” sexual and gender identities. I honestly and nonaggressively mean that I don’t know how to bridge gaps within the community when the very existence of these gaps disallows me from being able to enter the conversation as an equal.

For instance, I like a lot of queer musicians. If I write about a band I like that is made up of white men, I wait for the inevitable frustration that I am writing about yet another group of white men. No matter how many times I might have written about the alternatives, artists like Kele Okereke or Nomi Ruiz, J.D. Samson or Shunda K, the idea that I might also support artists who fit the same identity category as me, whose lives were probably hard but not as hard as others’, means that I’ve set things back. No one wants me to begin every article with a screed about “some of my best friends being ___,” but the assumption that this is not true exists every time I open my mouth or touch fingers to keyboard.

Let’s go back, then, to the woman at the sexual freedom conference. What should I have done? Raise my hand and apologize? I don’t think that I, personally and knowingly, had done anything to this woman that I should be sorry for. Do I fight back, respond with bile that white men have feelings too and that we don’t like being denigrated in public? I don’t think it would have gone well.

I want to ask how I can help and how I can change without having to atone for crimes I did not commit. I might never be considered an ally again after writing this article, but if I come out of this with some answers, I’ll consider the whole thing worthwhile.

If a recent shower at my gym is any indication, DC’s gay men are developing pubic alopecia at the frequency of Sonic the Hedgehog running laps at a meth party. I hung up my towel, turned on the water, soaped myself up and then took around and nearly called Olivia Benson, because it looked like someone was in the midst of a kitty porn video shoot right in Results. No pubes. No happy trails, no nothing. I recently saw a nest of Naked Mole Rats in Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo and it looked exactly like the middle sections of every guy I was bathing with.

I’m not that hairy, so I treat each of my sparse body follicles like firstborn male children in 15th century Persia. They are groomed, pampered and individually said-goodnight-too, lest they decide to abdicate and rob me of the only thing that really seperates my body from that of Kate Moss’. I believe that body hairs are a special, attractive thing, and it saddens me to see nary a thigh sideburn or buttcrack combover in what I thought was the least-high-maintenance of all DC gay gyms.

For one thing, penises are kind of weird looking. Removing the hair is like shaving a Maine Coon Cat. Something that was formerly luxuriant, appealing and endlessly petable turns into an anemic string cheese swamp creature with two swipes of a Gillette hand-held. I have enough trouble as it is opening my eyes while giving head because the site of a close-up wang gives me the giggles. This gets even worse when I’m confronted with an overly-shorn region and can see all the nooks and crannies before I even start. Nooks and crannies are great on a Thomas’ English Muffin, but if your crotch looks like a receptacle for butter and jam I’ll probably not want to get to close to it.

To be clear, I’m not advocating that every guy adopt the “70′s porn pubes” look. If you’re not familiar, these pubes stretch roughly between the knees and belly button on the vertical axis, and horizontally can prevent a particularly hirsute gentlemen from making it through narrow doorways. I happen to be a fan, but I know that look isn’t for everyone. That’s why most people tend to fall somewhere in the middle. Natural pubes have enjoyed a rennasiance in the hipster/Butt Magazine porn worlds, which celebrate hairiness and versimilitude. They also have their own connotations of masculinity and subversion. But what is the accompanying culture of crotch-shaving born from?

The desire to turn your partners lips into hanging strands of roast beef on your unrelenting stubble? The curiosity as to what exactly the base of your penis looks like where it meets your pelvis, and the desire to let everyone else know too? Or, more likely, I fear that this has the same underlying cause as so many other puzzling trends in gay society: A couple people do it, the media portrays it, and all of a sudden Kojak-balls are the hottest thing since sliced Deep-V‘s.

I usually try to respect people’s style-choices, but I can’t really see the case for making your manhood look like Jimmy Dean sausage struggling to break free from a puddle of Elmer’s glue. Everytime I’ve gotten accidentally too enthusiastic in my own manscaping attempts I’ve miserable for days. Walking hurts, sitting hurts and my boyfriend needs a pair of rubber kitchen gloves to get in my pants. So living like that all the time, on purpose, seems like a needless example of suffering for fashion that 90% of the world will never see.

Suffice it to say, it’s not a Russian LGBT Group. That I would like. Instead, they are the purveyors of that cover of “Carol of The Bells” that sounds like Satan’s performance in “The Devil Went Down To Georgia” crossed with a special holiday sale at Target where three underprivileged orphans are trampled to death and not discovered until the following morning:

I remember the first time I hear it when I was 14. My sister and I were doing some last-minute grocery shopping for Christmas Eve dinner (yes, Jews have that too) when all of a sudden the store started shaking. Wine bottles began jittering themselves off the shelves. All the olives in the deli aisle exploded in a hale of pimentos and vinegar. Children began to cry and customers flooded for the exits en masse the second the string section kicked in. My sister grabbed my arm, with tears in her eyes, and pleaded: “Zachary, what is this? It sounds like Guns ‘n Roses covering Johnny Mathis!”

I didn’t find out until the next day, when the much-missed Chicago pay-per-view music video channel The Box played it again. And again. And pretty much every half hour until the sun came out, the grass re-grew and marshmallow peeps replaced candy canes on the CVS seasonal-candy shelves.

Since that moment I have come to hate Trans-Siberian Orchestra (and its comparatively-sedate younger sister, Mannheim Steamroller) with a passion usually reserved for babies crying into cellphones on overly-turbulent cross-country flights where the only food is stale prune bars and the only in-flight movie stars Lisa Lampanelli and a CGI orangutan.

See, as I mentioned above I’m Jewish, thought not necessarily  immune to the charms of Christmas time.  I love when it first starts to snow, and that my whole family has the time off of work to get together. I absolutely adore our annual Chinese Food/Movie Xmas day routine. But for me, Christmas is not “the most wonderful time of the year.” Its a religious holiday turned cultural institution that means very little to many Americans, and is vehemently defended when that fact is pointed out.

The religious, overpowering, “you must like this at all costs” connations of Christmas are like a nuclear winter, as everything that drifts anywhere near its floating particles is immediately tainted with the mingled relics of consumerism, Christianity and unearned-import. Can you imagine if someone went number two on December 22nd 1987, and then trotted it out the next year as a part of a hallowed American tradition? Maybe by putting some gold dust and a star on it? That’s what Christmas is like. Anything remotely associated with this time of year is folded into Christmas Industrial Complex, never to be relinquished again.

So “Chorus of the Bells” at one point was a nice, evocative piece of music that suited the winter mood and was probably hammered out on an old-fashioned player piano by, say, the two main characters in “Gift of The Magi” as they giggle, bald and watchless, about the true meaning of Christmas. And now? A band that combines the worst qualities of ELO and Jars of Clay has turned into something that sounds not celebratory, but actually evil. I half expect the demon Pazuzu to have a co-writing credit on it and pick up royalties every six weeks at its local post office.

The worst part is that there is no escaping this song until this time of year is over. So I’m going to hear it again and again and again. And when that happens, I have to admit, my only coping mechanism is to consider liking it. Who knows? After five more years of inundation I might be at their next concert, front-row, wide-eyed, throwing my underwear at the three creepy Michael Bolton clones who ruined Christmas for a guy that doesn’t really even celebrate it in the first place.

I’m a sucker for anything that is dark, moody and contains tinges of the supernatural. Hence my attraction to, say, Zachary Quinto or guys who work at comic shops but still have tans. So I’ve been excited to see Black Swan for quite some time. Other people’s excitement, though, particularly guys who comment on The Onion AV Club, seem way more drawn in by the Portman/Kunis kiss than things like the movie’s plot. Hell, when the trailer first came out there was very little to be gleaned about its plot and yet people (mostly straight guys and queer girls) were pretty damn excited about it.

Though there has been better luck with mainstream movies featuring gay characters in the last couple years (thanks, Brokeback) it is also common to get films that have intense gay love stories and a scant portrayal of physical love between between its gays. (Fuck you, Brokeback.) Take the new Ewan McGregor/Jim Carrey love-story-in-prison flick I Love You Phillip Morris. That one has been delayed for years at this point and it’s pretty safe to guess its combination of gay romance and actual sex (including that rare cinematic breed, The Nelly Top) is behind Philip Morris’ slow crawl to a theater near your single, well-dressed uncle’s house.

Black Swan, however, has been given a mainstream marketing campaign on par with a new flavor of Pepsi. Any culture-focused website is likely to be graced with either its still picture or streaming preview, and at this point there aren’t many people alive who can view Black Swan‘s iconography without remembering “Hey, femme girls totally go at it in this one!” It is extremely hard for me to imagine a movie studio greenlighting a similar campaign focused around McGregor kissing Carey, no matter how much broad box office appeal either man possesses. Can you imagine logging onto Entertainment Weekly‘s website and being greeted with a still image of two actual men, actually kissing? I can’t either.

Widely-marketed movies with queer themes tend to be either relatively-sexless blockbusters with straight appeal (Yup, Brokeback) or queer-people-have-tragic-lives-lets-get-some-awards-for-it biopics like Milk or Boys Don’t Cry. Fox Searchlight seems to have put a lot of money into Black Swan and its campaign reflects neither of those categories. That mean’s they either wised up and are heavily targeting the queer women demographic in mixed-readership arenas or they are trying to horn up straight guys who would never otherwise see a movie that didn’t showcase Dwayne Johnson and gunfighting.

My money, of course, is on the latter. What do you think?

I have a theory and many of you will disagree with me. Some may not even know what I’m talking about, but bear with me: Vida Metropole, an ultra high-class gym in the heart of DC’s gayborhood, is actually a cult. What looks from the outside like a perfectly normal gay workout facility, with a clean, pleasant lobby and an attached salon, is in fact a brain-washing facility for DC’s gorgeous gay elite.

It starts when you go inside. Has anyone seen the show “Dollhouse?” Where an elaborate underground facility exists beneath L.A. that turns normal people into programmable living dolls? Vida looks just like it.With DJ music and colored panel lighting borrowed directly from either the bar Mova or the circuit party lounge of a Virgin Air flight, the main gym is like a lux version of Morpheus’ cave-shaking end-of-the-world party from The Matrix Reloaded. It’s also one story underground.

Beyond that is a spa-like locker room replete with granite counters-tops, stainless steel fixtures and womb-like showers with body scrub dispensers and rain-fall spigots. If you make it out of this modern-day Lotus Eater’s island you can travel through the land of flat-screen TV’s displaying unsettling platitudes like “Would you rather be right, or happy?” to the queasily serene lap pools and tepid, co-ed, molded-white-plastic sauna straight from the Starship Enterprise.

And if that doesn’t sound like your idea athletic experience, be warned: It’s coming for you.

The owner of the Vida franchise, David Von Storch, also owns another nearby building (1612 U St.) that has housed rival gym Results since 1994. Results’ lease runs out in March and Von Storch will be taking the building back, kicking out all of its tenants and building a gym that sounds about as fun as a 40-hour Ken Burns documentary on moss. Besides presumably adding that Vida flair to what is already a great gym — no frills, great lighting and it actually feels like an athletic facility — the new Vida will feature 13,000 sq. foot pool with cabanas, fire pits and a lounge. Those things sound great for a weekend in The Keys, but I have literally never thought to myself “Know what my yoga class is missing? Sunscreen and a funnoodle!”

I should say here that people have every right to choose whichever gym they want, but I have no idea where the idea came from that the instant way to appeal to the gays is to make everything ultra-high end and indistinguishable. If I wanted all the features of Vida, I’d be going to a spa. If I wanted to throw on old Adidas shorts and sweat for an hour I’d go to a gym. And it’s sad to know that there will be one fewer of those gyms in DC come March.

While Von Storch has every right to take the building back, since it is his, I’m dismayed to see his aesthetic spreading beyond the bounds of Logan Circle. Vida, at its core, annoys me for one reason: It makes assumptions about what gay people like. His A-List appeal is contained not just within the “luxurious to the point of not being athletic” vibe of Vida, but even his own public persona. Von Storch financed a trailer for his own reality show which is cut from the same cloth as Bravo’s The A-List: New York, where a bunch of attractive men tromp around shirtless and talk about how handsome he is. (Good fucking god do I wish I could embed that video here, but it’s worth watching on youtube if you want a treat.)

David Von Storch is clearly a very talented businessman and has probably pumped more revenue into the city, and the community, than I could hope to in my whole life. But the loss of Results just means that there is one fewer space in DC for gay people to congregate without being assaulated by all the stereotypical, overbearing niceties that we are assumed to want.

Besides, when there are cabanas it is safe to assume that cabana boys will be close behind. And if that happens I’m moving to Richmond and not looking back.

So apparently Michael thinks Thanksgiving is the best holiday of the year. I personally think Michael should get his head checked. Sure it’s a great time to eat and drink, but for anyone going back home it can also mean a whole year’s worth of family bonding, brawling and back-stabbing packed into one four-day weekend. Factor in flight delays, crying babies and newly-introduced significant others and its a miracle that people put the turkey into the oven and not their own heads. So without any delay I present TNG Zack’s guide to surviving Thanksgiving.

1:You Can Get Anything You Want at Alice’s Restaurant (Excepting a Fucking Minute to Yourself.)

If your family’s anything like mine (and if it is, I’m sorry) than your holiday weekend might be ridiculously overbooked. Skip out on that post-dinner movie, get in a nap before you go to see your grandparents or even just take a walk around the block. You’d be surprised at the difference it makes. I have one really hallowed Thanksgiving tradition: sneaking away from dinner to listen to Arlo Guthrie sing “Alice’s Restaurant.” Its the story of a funny thanksgiving mishap that turns into a pretty relevant commentary on war.Chicago’s WXRT plays it about ten times every Thanksgiving Day and it provides a really nice 18 minute respite from the chaos. I couldn’t embed it here, which sucks, but be sure to check it out. Even if you don’t need the break its something you should be familiar with.

2. Expect Maturity, Prepare for Regression.

The last time my entire nuclear family lived in the same house, I was 8 and my oldest sister was 18. I am now a college graduate and she is a successful publicist in New York City, but you wouldn’t know it by watching us. At dinner tonight, she referred to bathing her 18 month old daughter as “the vagina show” and casually remarked that our house smelled like anus. Earlier today, my dad politely asked me to set the table and I snapped “Jesus, you said that already” as if I was 13 and angsty. My point? No matter what you do, it is inevitable that some of your old family dynamics will come back in play. Am I happy that, come tomorrow night, I’ll have spilled peas, hit my head on a door frame and picked up my old stutter? No, but I’m ready for it and that’s what counts.

3. If You’re Out to Your Family, Get Ready to Answer Inappropriate Questions. If You’re Not Out to Your Family, Keep It That Way.

Coming out to your family is like handing them a little card that says “Hey, feel free to ask me whatever pops into your head.” Combine that with the aforementioned regression and really anything goes. Be prepared to describe your safer sex habits to your niece, explain to your brother-in-law that cross-dressing and homosexuality are entirely different things and give your grandmother an impromptu lesson on the top/bottoms dynamics of the modern gay relationship. Whether these queries are born from rancor, ignorance or just genuine misguided curiosity is moot. Just be ready to answer them.

If you haven’t spilled the beans yet, this is definitely not the weekend to do so. There will probably be so much else going on that the moment will not get the quiet reflection it deserves. Even if you come down to dinner sporting nail polish, eyeliner and a tampon string hanging out of your ass, its to everyone’s benefit that you still make small talk about your Canadian girlfriend.

4. Figure Out Which of Your Relatives Will Irresponsibly Get Drunk or High With You.

Almost everyone has a family member that also wants to alleviate the holiday stress through ill-timed substance abuse. It could be your pierced and tattooed cousin, your black sheep uncle or your grandpa who is furtively pouring wine into his colostomy bag. The drinking can happen throughout the course of the day, but it is best you not smoke until after dinner. You’ll need your conversational skills, plus munchies and a 30-pound turkey are a bad combination. The latter activity is to be strictly avoided if you have to drive anyone home or help carry your wheelchair bound great-uncle up a very steep flight of stairs (though that’s a story for another day.)

5: For The Love of God, Don’t All Use The Same Bathroom.

I can’t stress this one enough. My parent’s house has three bathrooms. Two are located upstairs, the other is directly between the kitchen and the dining room. Guess which one requires a hazmat suit come 5 o’clock? You can’t combine the delicate Jewish digestive system with four pounds of mashed rutabaga and not expect there to be some problems. One year my sister started screaming “Is there no common decency?” because every single one of us had visited the commode before the meal was even cooked. You can’t give those family recipes the time and attention they deserve when the fires of Mordor are emanating from your throne room.

6. If You Have to Masturbate, Do It Somewhere Discrete.

Many of us are stranded at home with neither significant others nor bedroom doors that lock. While a moment of onanism can be a wonderful stress reliever, it will also be seered permanently into the memory of whichever family member happens to walk in on it. Unless you want the task of explaining your sister-in-law’s newfound hysterical blindness, keep your hairy palms to yourself until you’re sure its safe. My bed is 100% out of the question, as my room shares a wall with both of my sisters’, so I usually end up taking care of business in the aforementioned (and thoroughly aired-out) downstairs bathroom. Its cold down there, and extremely un-erotic,
but that’s a small price to pay for piece of mind and a moment of relief.

So there you have it. Six foolproof (and I hope not overly puerile) ways to make it through the weekend. Feel free to share some hints of your own and let me know if any of mine were helpful.

Hence, you have a chat service that a guy from Pittsburgh once used to request that I pee in his butt (true story), which you can get booted from if the Grindr powers-that-be think your main profile is inappropriate. I have been reprimanded for using the tagline “Indie Rock Fag.” A friend of mine was warned for using a photo of a naked Greek statue, and I like to think his dick is bigger than those candy-corn sized marble things that tend to litter the sculpture galleries of the various Smithsonian museums .

Recently, and even more mysteriously, I got the photo above yanked from my main profile on the grounds that it was inappropriate. Sensual? Maybe. Suggestive? Yes. But inappropriate? No. That pale, dangling thing between my legs is my hand. As much as I wish I had a prehensile penis, like a monkey’s tale, that won’t happen until I can afford a couple of major surgeries. So my wang will not be able to smoke a cigar or even do long division anytime soon. (Well, mostly because I can’t even do long division. But still.)

When I interviewed Grindr’s founder Joel Simkhai back in February he would not, under torture, coercion or threat of death, admit that it was an app used for sex. And this makes sense because Big Brother Steve Jobs knows all and an app like Grindr is essentially on a high-wire act above the twin razor edges of too sexy and not sexy enough. Too sexy and it gets deemed “adult” and won’t fly in the app store. Not sexy enough and no one’s going to use it. So I can only imagine how stressful that job is, and how weird the day-to-day life is of the person who holds it.

Do they sit at a big futuristic computer screen like Tom Cruise in Minority Report? Do thousands of pictures fly by at the wave of a hand, while the 21st century embodiment of Gay Alfred Prufrock sits there in a brown shirt and judges? “There is a slight tinge of pube at the bottom of this torso shot. Deny!” “It appears this man is cupping his bulge, but it could just be a sock filled with buckwheat husks. Accept!” It can’t be easy.

But what that man doesn’t know is the context of the pictures. That guy who is holding a red, swollen erection between two withered talons might be doing so because he is looking for true love in the only way he knows how. And me in the robe, that supposedly inappropriate picture? My boyfriend took that. In Big Sur, California, in one of the most romantic and genuinely happy days of my entire life. We spent the whole time on the couch, or in front of a fire place, or sitting in a bathtub that smelled like lavender. We tried playing scrabble together but gave up because it seemed like too much work. So there was no sex implicit there.

The sex comes only when that picture is posted on a medium like Grindr. Because, no matter who took it, the second I load it in it us being used for sex. So what are the solutions? I don’t think its possible to declare sexual martial law on Grindr and change the name to “Coffee Datr,” because no one would use it. But relax the standards a little and Mr. Jobs flies down from his Antarctic fortress and cuts the power.

I guess the question is this: Is Grindr inappropriate? If so, I just wishthey would fight the power, be honest about its true purpose and let stand any picture that isn’t a direct dick shot or a gaping asshole. And if not? Maybe replace everyone’s profile with a heart and smile and leave it at that.  The little dour man at the computer screen might be out of a job, but at least the gay world would be a smidge more honest.

ADDENDUM: Below are Grindr’s insanely specific guidelines, straight from their website. I guess I broke a rule, but still check these out and see who has the problem:

Grindr Profile Guidelines

We reserve the right to remove or crop any photo and/or text we perceive to be outside of these guidelines, at our discretion.

Profile photo
No bare skin beginning 2 inches below the navel (hip bone area) or above the upper thighs can be shown.
No underwear can be visible.
Appropriate public swimwear is allowed. No pubic hair, no outline of genitals and no portion of the butt can be present.
Pants and shorts must be worn normally, buttoned, and not pulled or hanging down.
No images of hands or fingers placed in pants or pulling underwear outward.
No images of anyone under 18 years of age.
No copyrighted pictures or illustrations.
No images that display semen (or any fluid made to look like semen or ejaculation) on anything in photo.
No images of sexual acts, either real, illustrated or simulated.
No photo that is sexually explicit or overly suggestive.
No photos that have been altered to disguise sexual acts including a black box or blurred filters to hide sexual images such as touching of genitals by hand.
No photos of frontal, back or side nudity.
No nudity (particularly the genitals) covered up by a towel, hat or other means.
No grabbing/holding or touching genitals or genital area.
No pubic hair can be visible.
No photos with sheer, or otherwise see-through or wet material below the waist.
No outline of genitals through clothing will be allowed.
No crotch area only photos, neither back nor front.
No images that show suggestive or overly sexual poses.
No photos that contain sex props and toys, including the use of fruits/vegetables.
No images of illegal drug use and paraphernalia.
No images of firearms or weapons.
No photos of any obscene gestures and/or lewd behavior.
No photos of violent acts to yourself, someone else, or animals.
No image used to advertise services, goods, events, websites, or apps.
No images of any non-Grindr users, including celebrities.
No profanity or curse words.
Profile text
No text referring to genital size or sexual acts.
No sexually explicit or overly suggestive text.
No text that incites racism, bigotry, hatred or physical harm of any kind.
No advertising of services, goods, events, websites or apps.
No mention of illegal drugs.
No references to a desire to engage in unprotected sex will be allowed.
No profanity or curse words, including abbreviations and masking (i.e. f**k, a$$, etc.)
Web Link
A link to your Facebook profile is allowed in the Facebook field. MySpace, Twitter and YouTube links are allowed in the About field; these links cannot contain advertising or pornography or they will be removed. No other web link of any kind will be allowed in any of the profile fields.

Lady Gaga, as much as the annoys the holy living doodies out of me, has at least been a very visible and very vocal ally for us. I’d be happy if I didn’t have to read or type her name for a year or 30, but thats another issue. Right now, most of my “fake gay icons” ire is being directed toward Katy Perry.

When she first hit the scene a couple years ago, I found her to be an incredibly offensive figure. If you recall, her first big hit was “Ur So Gay,” a paean to stereotypes and gay suicide. The song is about a boy that Katy dated who dared be sensitive and well-groomed, and so she assumed he was a big fag. She asked that he “hang himself with his H&M scarf,” for one, and generally acted as if “gay” was the ultimate, be-all, end-all put down to someone that treated her wrong.

Then she followed it up with “I Kissed a Girl,” which panders to my least favorite cliche ever, that of the straight girls who make out at frat parties to turn on frat boys. The same frat boys, mind you, who would probably barf if they saw the actual, gorgeous, butch/faux hawk/anything else kind of lesbians that populate much of the real queer world. When I got the chance to interview Katy in 2008, she not only admitted that she had never kissed a girl (thus relegating her song to queersploitation, not cathartic story-telling) but also referred to her diary as her “Anne Frank.” Thanks, Katy! All the members of my family who died during WWII really appreciate that one.

Flash forward two years and Katy has more or less decided that she is a gay icon. Which, cool, it’s a career move and it makes sense for someone who wants to be a celebrity. But why, please god in heaven why, has the gay world seemed to buy it? First off you couldn’t blow a 19 year-old this summer without running into that stupid “California Gays” video parody. Gay websites covered it with the feverish, breathless devotion of an Orthodox Brooklynite’s first trip to the Wailing Wall. And now the worst has happened. And that worst is the video for “Fireworks.”

For someone who put out the (I believe) two worst mainstream queer depictions of the last decade, and consistently reflects the values of her hyper-religious upbringing, I can’t really buy the “be yourself! Kiss that boy and be great!” message of the video. It would be like Jesse Jackson getting bar mitzvah’d after he called New York City “Hymie town.” It feels wrong at best, and is glaringly offensive at worst.

So my question here is this: Why do so many gay men buy into this? I guess they might just like the music, and see her covered in all the gay blogs and played at all the gay bars and not realize how disingenuous it all is. Our primary mission in starting TNG was to help queer folks create their own culture, not prescribe to the one made for us. And that leads me back to the question I ask in my headline: If Katy Perry presented you with a Domino’s box of her own steaming pea-cacas and said to you “I made this for you. Why don’t you eat it?” how many of you out there would chow down?

Let’s talk about Antoine Dodson. One of 2010′s most unlikely celebrities for his autotuned “Bed Intruder” song — you know, “Hide your kids, hide your wife”– from, of all things, the attempted rape of his sister. I generally think that Autotune The News is hysterical and I’ve had Antoine’s song stuck in my head for the whole summer. It’s funny. But I have sisters, a mom, and a bunch of female friends so it’s hard to ignore the obvious: The song is about rape. I know that time heals all wounds, but if you take a step back you will see that the entire country has been making a big joke out of a topic I’ve been told countless times is never, ever funny.

Then there’s the other elepahant in the room: Dodson is pretty clearly gayer than a three dollar bill wrapped around Liberace’s ball sack while he has a gangbang with Paul Lynde and Tinky Winky. Admittedly, flamboyantly, bravely, obviously gay.  He appeared on the George Lopez show last night in Uggs, with straightened hair that made him look like VV Brown and admitting that he spent some of his “Bed Intruder” cash influx on a Gucci bag. He also admitted that guys and girls were hitting on him and gave an “I’m clearly joking” laugh when he said that he considered impregnating a willing, female fan.

First question: Why is it so taboo to ask someone about being gay? Since he said as much, and certainly isn’t in the closet, it’s surprising to me that Antoine doesn’t get any more specific questions about his personal life than the nebulous query about people hitting on him. I was glad that George Lopez, not generally a bastion of sensitivity, spared him the jokes and actually told him his hair looked nice straightened. (Though I half expected George to look Antoine in the eye imploringly and touch his knee when he said it.) Gay visibility is valuable, no matter where it comes from, and someone is charismatic and charming as Mr. Dodson could do some cool things for us.

However, question number two was elucidated for me by this August AfterElton column. Rob Smith, in his “Black, Gay and Twentysomething” feature, points out that there aren’t whole lot of queer people of color represented in the media and  maybe we aren’t laughing with Mr. Dodson:

Call me solemn, but I simply couldn’t muster up enough smugness to laugh at a poor, black, widely assumed to be gay man being interviewed outside of a housing project; a man who was filled with genuine anger over the fact his sister was attacked in her own home, but who ends up turned into an object of mockery because of his “stereotypical” mannerisms by pretty much every group under the sun if for different reasons.

This brings up that weird corollary where I generally support any individuals creative expression, but have to criticize how it is played up and spread by the wider media. (See also: Lady Gaga and Katy Perry.) If I was Antoine Dodson I would be hard-pressed to turn down the money and media attention that came my way, no matter what the source, but when this whole thing dies down where is he going to be? A life-long advocate against sexual assault and a successful recording artist, or a punchline in the year 2020 for any joke about the fleeting nature of YouTube stardom? I guess time will tell, but I really hope he comes out of this alright.

No, the real distress came after the wedding when I was flipping around on TV and crashed smack-dab into The Robin Byrd Show. TRBS, as I’ll be calling it, is a New York public access sex-show that looks like it was filmed for $25 in 1973, burned onto a beta cassette and left in the trunk of your buick for 30 years before being discovered and aired in the wee hours of the Manhattan night. Its host is a woman who was memorably immortalized by Cheri Oteri and who looks like a troll doll that got breast implants while spending four days straight in a tanning bed. I usually believe that sex is a beautiful, natural thing and should be shared and celebrated the world over. But revisiting TRBS made me rethink that.

The show consists of brief strip tease dances by men and women with the power to make my dick soft in a single shirt-doffing, intercut with monologues by Ms. Bird and graphic phone sex ads that show more penetration and erect penile tissue than the show itself. Last Saturday, before I got too stoned to handle it, I was treated to a gorgeous Canadian man who showed four seconds of his floppy Canadian bacon and a woman who probably has grandkids bending over, over and over again in a g-string, showing nothing and everything at the same time.

As a teenaged scrambled-cinemax afficiano I learned how to deal with less-than-optimal porn. What jarred me so much this time around, though, was the fact that all this used to mean something to me. Starting at age 14 I spent part of every spring break in New York, visiting my sisters and getting a small but sustaining taste of what life would be like when I left home. I remember walking around Manhattan through Christopher St, observing the men who casually held hands like it was nothing. I remember my sister Molly’s 21st birthday party and the fact that her best male friend brought a male date. But I couldn’t really enjoy any of those things as much as I would like because I was under family watch. So when they went to bed, and I stayed up watching cable, the biggest chance I had to be alone with my sexuality was Robin Byrd. Sex was still a mystery to me then, especially the man-on-man variety, so even the site of Al Goldstein’s cock was counted as a check in the “someday, please god someday” column.

I’ve learned a thing or two about dick since then, and even how it grows boring when it is readily available. I like to look back occasionally at my teenage years and marvel at how fresh everything was going to be, but honestly I was still pretty horrified by TRBS when I was 17. It was like find a long-awaited Christmas present in your parents closet wrapped in a decomposing salmon. It was the first time I saw how gross balls could be, and why guys’ asses look worse when they are flexing. It made me vow never to use a phone sex line or escort service in fear that the two men from “Male Meat” (or whatever it was called) would show up in my bedroom and rub self-tanner on me until I came on their Doug Savant haircut.

At that age a fire hydrant covered in cooking grease could turn me on, so it was no small wonder that Robin and friends got the job done. But I remember thinking it was just a bridge to when I could see it all in real life and not have it be hosted by a woman in a crocheted peekaboo top. That was over ten years ago and I had just assumed that the show had faded away into New York obscurity, to be remembered only by a cadre of right hands who were never worked harder, or more shamefully, than when it was airing.

So I’m happy that it’s still airing and that other boys like me could be treated to it while taking their first bites out of the big apple. But mostly I’m amazed that I used to like this, and that so many years later it could still mean something.

If you ever want to do something interesting, and you’ve already masturbated to Lebonese scat porn, you should try watching Modern Family back to back with Family Guy. Besides their shared use of the F-word, it’s striking to see how much both of these shows traffic in stereotypes. While Modern Family has won accolades in the queer community for a fairly honest portrayal of a gay couple, and Family Guy is widely reviled for sucking, and for being offensive to everyone in place of actual humor, the shows are very similar at their core.

This morning I watched the most recent episode of Modern Family, where gay couple Mitch and Cam exploit their status as gay parents of a “minority” child to win a spot at a prestigious preschool. Immediately after, I watched a Family Guy from last season where Peter makes a black friend who is great at darts, buys tacky paintings from the gas station and drives Peter crazy with the knowledge that he used to fuck Peter’s wife with his stereotypically 12″ penis.

At first glance, comparing these shows would seem like comparing apples and an ambrosia salad made from Keith Richard’s precum. After all, one is a look at three diverse families in real life situations, and the other hasn’t done anything worthwhile since I was a virgin. But if you look closer, they are cut from the same reductive cloth.

I do think that Modern Family is smart, well-written, and consistently very, very funny. But its edging closer and closer to “All in The Family” territory (there’s that word again) without an Archie Bunker figure to show that such sentiments aren’t ok anymore. As funny as she is, Gloria’s entire character centers around being a shrill, fiery Latina. No matter how insensitive Jay looks when he makes jokes about her origins, it doesn’t change the fact that we are laughing with him and at her.

Less cut-and-dry are Mitchell and Cameron. I continue to applaud the show for making these characters, for the most part, ordinary. They are older, domestic and don’t do things like go clubbing all night, wear tank tops 24/7 or cut hair to make a living. However, they are too often the subject of wink-wink-nudge-nudge jokes that play on gay stereotypes. While they try to offset this with references to Cam’s athletic prowess or Mitchell’s dowdiness, they fail the “drinking game” test. That is, if you took a shot every time of of them made a comment about gourmet food, home decor, or general sissiness you would have your stomach pumped faster than Ke$ha at a swallowing-mandatory BJ party.

Family Guy, by contrast, makes no attempts at couching its stereotypes in warm fuzzies and group hugs. When they have a trans character, you know that she’s going make another character vomit. The resident Jew in Quahog is cheap and whiny. While the Latino maid on the show sets race relations back about 45 years, at least they’re honest about their bigotry and don’t make any claims towards doing anything new.

I like Modern Family and I don’t like Family Guy. In the end, that’s the biggest difference for me. That’s why one is “appointment viewing” and the other is a backup for when I’m stoned or otherwise unable to leave the couch. But at the end of the day, I know this: Family Guy doesn’t have to worry about having a family audience. Pandering to no one but stupidity, they can take risks.

Modern Family, on the other hand, has been a runaway hit for over a year and still lacks the balls to show their gay characters kissing. And that, more than anything coming out of Peter Griffin’s mouth, is offensive.

Like every other cool person did in 2004, I have finally come around to the awesomeness of UPN’s dearly departed Veronica Mars. I’m only about ten episodes in, so PLEASE avoid spoilers and I’ll extend the same courtesy to our readers who don’t know the program. However, it doesn’t ruin much to say that the show stars Kristen Bell as a high school private eye who solves small cases among her peers while working on a bigger mystery with her dad, the former town sheriff.

Veronica’s gumshoeing has her frequently interacting with a host of attractive high school boys. I don’t just mean attractive within the world of the show. Typical to TV, most of the so-called “high schoolers” are probably in their 20s and dreap-dead adorable. I wasn’t out in high school, and my unrequited jock crushes certainly weren’t, so seeing all of these post-pubescent fetish objects is killing me.

In the above scene, four boys strip to their boxers to prove they didn’t steal money from a high-stakes poker game. While it was tense, and pivotal to the plot, it got my attention for some other reasons. Not being out in high school, for the most part, means being unfamiliar with same-sex high school bodies. I learned enough about female anatomy in those days to know that we don’t really mix (and that built-in bras are the gay equivalent of the sphinx’s riddle) but my male gropings and fumblings were largely confined to games of truth or dare or the front seat of a friend’s black Jeep Cherokee. In the former case nothing really  happened, and in the latter it was dark, nervous and hand-to-crotch only, so it’s not like I really got the full “lay of the land.”

I’m usually proud of myself for growing up enough to A) stop lusting after straight guys (because let’s face it, Adams Morgan on a Saturday night has slightly less eye candy than a Phelps Family Orgy) and B) stop being attracted to the kind of guys I liked when I was 18. I can still pick them out — usually through a combination of hetero swagger, cheesy haircuts, blondness and soccer uniforms — but I’m well aware that I’ve evolved beyond wanting to roger them.

Veronica Mars is changing that. The amount of time I’ve spent with Duncan, Logan, Wallace and the like have totally reawakened a part of me that I thought died when I was 18. (Regrettably, though, not my hair follicles.) I’ve been vividly remembering that desire for exploration, the thrill that comes with a glimpse of bare male flesh, and the kind of pure, unadulterated horniness that makes your balls feel like they’ve been plunged into a wintry Lake Michigan after two hours in a sauna.

Do you think its possible to really get over high school? I used to think that I did. I universally pitied those poor souls who peeked at 18, usually the same guys who got BJs in middle school and always had girlfriends, the ones for whom life has been a steady downward slide when the world stopped being arranged in their favor. But I guess I haven’t left all that behind as much as I thought. There aren’t a lot of remaining things I haven’t done, for good or for bad, but I’ll never bed the captain of the soccer team. And I guess I just have to deal with that.

On a lighter note, let’s end this post with a series of “Fuck Marry Kills:”

Girls: Veronica, Lily, Mac

Boys: Duncan, Logan, Wallace

Please put your answer in the comments.