Archive for October, 2009
RAAACISM ALERT! Oprah only comes in at #10 in new list of worst celebrity flatulance.
This is indeed RAACISM in its worst, most vile form.
Oprah Winfrey only came in 10th – TENTH – on a list recognizing achievement in an area she’s worked so hard for, and seemingly mastered, the majority of her adult life: celebrity flatulence.
Tenth?
TENTH??
OPRAH???
This is more shocking than Chicago falling flat on its face with the IOC after Dr. and Mrs. Utopia gave long droning speeches about how much they wanted to have the Olympics near where they used to live, so that all the crooks they know in that neighborhood could make a fortune in real estate.
Maybe they didn’t cop to that last part, but it was there, hanging in the air silently, like one of Oprah’s own ripest zingers.
TENTH?
“Well, of course, that’s just RAAACISM!,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton when reached for comment outside yet another restaurant chain he’s trying to shakedown for donations to his diversity consulting firm. “Oprah should have won just as sure as Beyonce should have won and as sure as there should be Black Castle restaurants, and that’s why I’m here tonight, and that’s why Kanye should have one an Ignoble Prize too! Damn, dirty RAAACISTS everywhere!”
Rumor has it the Congressional Black Caucus is already meeting to declare Oprah the real winner of the celebrity flatulence listing…which would, sadly, be the most logical and worthwhile thing the CBC has done in a great while.
What will be the top Halloween costumes of 2009?
We’ve been asking people here in Chicago what they are going to dress up as for Halloween this year. The holiday falls on a Saturday, which means anyone going out drinking that night will have to wear a costume (as opposed to other years, when Halloween’s on a non-party night, so people who don’t like to dress up could avoid it altogether).
Some interesting things are going on with costume sales.
We talked to people like Brian Bowers at Halloween Hallway (3421 N. Southport, right by the Brown EL stop), who have been running costume shops for years to see how the economy’s been reflected in sales. Bowers says it feels like a lot of people are waiting until last minute to buy costumes, either hoping for clearance sales or still not being able to decide whether they want to spend the money to go out. In years past, Bowers says people were willing to dish out the cash to get the best costumes early before they were all gone. Not this year. It’s already two weeks into October and the shelves are full of great packaged stuff.
In Boystown, the Halloween Parade on Halsted will be Alice in Wonderland themed, with Miss Foozie (unofficial Mayor of Boystown and our own gay version of Mickey Mouse) the one and only Queen of Hearts. So, people are being ecouraged to wear Wonderland-themed costumes. We expect a lot of white rabbits (how RAAACIST), mad hatters, playing cards, flamingoes, and Alices of every gender to be in the parade. Other storybook characters would be fitting too.
What we really wonder is if any tall, buff guys will dare to be Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen, in all his smurf-blue Playgirl centerfold glory. Legally, a guy couldn’t just paint his hot naked self celurean and call it a costume, but he could put on a blue bodysuit, shave his head, paint the exposed flesh, and add a blue dong to the front and go as Dr. Manhattan. Don’t worry. None of us here are tall enough to get away with that (it’s definitely a 6’4″ or so costume for the full impact of the requisite towering blue atomic-powered nakeness).
An interracial lesbian couple we know is going as Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton. We’re trying to talk their other friends into going as Jackie Kennedy, Betty Ford (designated driver), and Mary Todd Lincoln or Grace Coolidge or some more obscure First Lady. That way, it’s more of a group theme instead of just Michelle and Hillary out for an adventure in BizarroWorld.
Themed costumes are always the most fun. We’re doing a theme ourselves here at Buzzquarters: Greek Mythology. It’s popular every year for women to reinterpret male costume for themselves, and make them sexier: like Captain Hook turned into a sexy pirate lady chasing around a female Peter Pan that’s more Katie Morgan than Mary Martin. The most bizarre examples of women sexifying male costumes are the Sexy Jason and Sexy Freddy Kreuger costumes out for women this year. It sounds like something we would just make up around here, but we swear these are real. Basically, they’re just shirt dresses inspired by the serial killers in those movies, one hockey themed and the other something that looks like you’d wear to sexily clean the basement. This whole women appropriating men’s costumes gave us the idea to take classic female characters from mythology and masculinize them. So, we’ll have a male Medusa (a Medudesa), a man-harpy, a male siren, a merman, etc.
We’ve always made our own costumes, which is something we encourage everyone to do. For the Medudesa, we just bought a whole bunch of plastic snakes and are crafting them into an Elvis pompadour style wig, paired with a tee shirt and jeans with snake elements, as well as rocking snake skin boots we got at the thrift store. The whole thing will be under $40, easy.
We thought the economy would inspire other people to make their own costumes, too, but Bowers at Halloween Hallway says that’s not the case at all. Instead of people trying to save money by buying supplies and making their own things at home, Bowers thinks people are going to just buy the cheapest off the rack costumes after procrastinating as long as possible to spend that money. So, in fact, if people are indeed putting off thinking about spending that money, then there will be even LESS homemade costume this year, since there won’t be enough time to make anything for Halloween if they put off the process for much longer. That Medudesay wig alone is taking hours to make, with a couple of structural problems we need to fix (as none of us our wigmakers, but, like with journalism, that’s never stopped us before).
Besides the Halsted Alice in Wonderland theme, different bars around Chicago have their own themes. These are clubs we never go to as we have to admit none of us are ever really comfortable or ever have a good time in straight bars (where guys get drunk and pick fights…as opposed to gay bars where guys get drunk and makeout). One bar, The Crimson Lounge (333 N. Dearborn) is doing a Roaring Twenties Theme, another, The Underground (56 W Illinois) is doing Vampires, and the W Hotel’s throwing a haunted hotel ball, where apparently people will be dressing up as hotels (or people who work in hotels, maybe, as we’re not sure about this one).
LaSalle Power Company’s Deadman’s Ball (500 N LaSalle) is going to be the most interesting, we think, because the theme is “timely, headline-inspired, controversial costumes”.
We’ve been wondering what “of the moment’ inspirations people are having. Last night, we asked people at Sidetracks what they were going as and one daytrader jackass said he thinks people will be going as Beyonce’s Single Ladies dancers, like Justin Timberlake did in that SNL video. Someday we’ll tell you the story of why that guy’s a jackass, but he did have an interesting costume idea that a lot of frat guys might run with. Bowers at Halloween Hallway says women like to dress sexy on Halloween while men like to go for laughs and be funny: the Single Ladies thing really strikes the right chord with that.
It’s hard thinking about what else people might be because we live in Boystown and our world doesn’t involve a lot of straight guys. We have no idea what they would think is funny.
We think there will be drag Farrah Fawcetts out there and know some of the black guys we know are doing Michael Jackson tributes. A group of girls we know is having a bachelorette party on Halloween, with the bride dressed up like Madonna from the Like A Virgin days, and her bridesmaids going as Cyndi Lauper, Tina Turner, Joan Jett, and other female rock and pop stars from the 80s…hoping to bump into different versions of Michael through the night. All summer, we saw people out in Boystown with tribute tee shirts to MJ, so we can’t imagine he won’t be represented in the Halloween parade…maybe even in Thriller form (which, surprisingly enough, someone actually used as a Halloween-inspired fashion show this month, at www.LePassage.com). We also think people should dress as the surviving brunette Angels and carry around an old school telephone as Charlie, looking for the Farrahs that will be out.
Or, someone could be funny and dress up like part Egyptian, part plumber and go as “Pharoah Faucet”, which is a tribute wrapped in puns by way of what we’d think is funny here in Boystown for guys.
Some people say there will be Jon and Kate Plus 8 stuff, but we don’t even have a good idea of who those people are. There could be David Letterman masks with guys chasing any girl they’d see. There will probably be a lot of people dressed as either True Blood or Twilight vamps, maybe even holding bottles of True Blood (V8 juice cans?).
But, what else is really ripped from the headlines? How can the now meaningless Nobel Peace Prize be worked in? Will people in Chicago goof on the Olympics debacle? What are people doing for Halloween costumes near you?
It might be fun to continue to brainstorm on this so all of you out there can get some ideas of your own…with plenty of time to save money by crafting things yourselves.
The great race to de-Olympics Chicago
Olympics themed signs still littered around town
All around town, countless millions of dollars were wasted putting Olympics signage and decoration up wherever it could be emblazoned. Meanwhile, Chicago Public Schools have ceiling tiles falling on students and water dripping from roofs open to the elements.
Since disastrously coming in fourth place in the IOC vote, Chicago’s now racing to replace the Olympics signage everywhere with, essentially, what it had before. In many cases, however, fools were so confident in Mrs. Utopia’s claim that she “would bring home the Olympics no matter what” that they chucked the old signs and now have to remake them, as the Olympics signs are laughable today.
It will be interesting to see how long the Olympics bid legacy remains in Chicago. There are still storefronts around town that have Blagojevich 2006! signs up in the windows, coated in dust, littered with dead spiders and the like. How long will the Olympics haunt us like that?
The LGBTQ Community should stop backing the Human Rights Campaign immediately
Andrew Sullivan is what would happen if someone magically anthromorphized an ass and gave it a typewriter — not an ass like a donkey or a mule, but the other kind. Then, instead of spewing things directly into the toilet, Sullivan would whirl crap off into print. Which is what he does at The Atlantic.
Here’s a piece he just did on the big LGBTQ event Dr. Utopia attended hosted by the Human Rights Campaign (which we stopped abbreviating as HRC, because that’s what we abbreviate Hillary Rodham Clinton as…and these days we certainly do not want the two confused, as the latter’s someone we’d go to Hell and back for, gladly, eight days a week while the former’s an organization we have as much respect for now as we do the Nobel Peace Prize.).
Sullivan acts surprised Dr. Utopia is not really doing, or planning to do, anything for the LGBTQ community. As if anyone who’s been paying attention couldn’t see that. We’ve been telling everyone this for almost two years now. The anecdote we think most clearly brings this into focus is that Dr. Utopia, on June 29th 2008, refused to march in the Chicago Gay Pride Parade, the largest in the Midwest, because he wanted to get his haircut and play basketball that day instead. Just a month later, he chose to march in the black Bud Billiken Day Parade, because that was more important than a haircut and shooting some b-ball down by the East Bank Club.
Hillary Clinton marches in Pride parades. Senator Roland Burris marched in the 2009 Chicago Gay Pride Parade. Every major politician in Illinois (save for closet cases like Aaron Schock) march in Pride parades.
But never, not once in his charmed life, has Dr. Utopia.
Why is that?
Because he doesn’t give one damn about the LGBTQ community, knowing it will support the Democrat by default in every election without question.
We used to support the Human Rights Campaign without question, too. Back in 1996, one of us here was in New York City for his first Pride Parade. He hadn’t even come out yet, and hadn’t even been to a gay bar yet, and was in New York on unrelated business and just happened to literally stumble upon the rainbows, music, and sparkles as he walked up 49th to Fifth Avenue. That’s a sight he will never forget, being surrounded by so many other gay people that he was part of the majority out and about that day, not the secret minority.
One of the first people to come up and talk to him at the parade was a Human Rights Campaign volunteer, wearing a blue tank top and short 70s-style yellow silk shorts. He had a blue and yellow Human Rights Campaign headband on, and a curly mop of cherubic blond hair like Ryan Phillipe in “54″. Whoever sent him out to gather donations picked him perfectly from central casting, as he was moving in the delivery of his spiel and got $200 off one of us by way of that form on the street.
Collectively, all of us have more or less supporting the Human Rights Campaign every year since then, giving as much as we could every June for Pride.
That stopped in 2008 and we will never again give this organization a single dime.
Why?
Because Joe Solomonese made the executive decision to give all Human Rights Campaign donations from June through November in 2008 to Dr. Utopia’s presidential campaign. All the money given to the organization by people who wanted to see it make actual progress for the LGBTQ community was handed over to a narcissicist who we know full well has no intention whatsoever of doing anything for gays.
That money might as well have been funneled to the Rev. Fred Phelps. Dr. Utopia and Phelps are both Democrats who have done the same amount of positive things for the LGBTQ community — though Phelps has actually attended Pride parades (albeit screaming and yelling about how much God hates fags, while adoring crazed, dirty, zealots apparently).
Whenever the Human Rights Campaign sends its well-cast handsome, hipster donation collectors out at LGBTQ events in Chicago (and they’ll certainly be out for Halloween), we tell them, when we’re approached, that we stopped giving to the Human Rights Campaign in 2008 and will never give again — and we explain why. The reaction we get is always the same: rolled eyes and politeness while they stand and pretend to listen, but we can tell they’re just playing music in their heads (the way we do whenever anyone talks to us about something we don’t care the least about). As soon as they realize they won’t be getting a donation from us, they start scanning the crowd for approaching faces who might be the next $50 or $100 pledge on their lists.
But, still we make our point.
At whatever LGBQ event we go to in Chicago, if there’s a Human Rights Campaign table or presence, we also bring up Solomonese’ decision to fork over all that money to Dr. Utopia. Without fail, most people in the room don’t even realize he did that. Then they claim the organization always does that for Democrats…which is not true, since they didn’t do that for Kerry. That’s odd because the LGBTQ community claims George W. Bush was some sort of devil, and everything possible had to be done to defeat him and all his evil in 2004. And, yet, the Human Rights Campaign was not “all-in” for Kerry the way it bent over backwards for Dr. Utopia. We could get graphic and extend the Andrew Sullivan metaphor for what Solomonese really did for Dr. Utopia in terms of prostituting the Human Rights Campaign, but you get the idea (and, if not, then you’ve obviously never been to Steamworks).
And George W. Bush did more for HIV/AIDS funding than any president before him, including the Clintons, which is BEYOND IMPRESSIVE. A Republican president who knew he’d never win even the smallest fraction of the gay vote goes out of his way to do good for the LGBTQ community…and is still villified cartoonishly by bitter fops who have no idea what they’re talking about, only parroting what they hear played in comedy bits at Sidetracks on Thursday nights. ”Bush is a dumb chimp!”, “Bush is evil!”, “Bush is so stupid he can’t do anything right!”.
And Dr. Utopia, in contrast, is an enchanted Lightbringer who solves all the world’s problems, attains word peace two weeks into the job, lowers the oceans and brings equality and justice for all gay men, women, and transgenders.
According to the asses at the Human Rights Campaign, at least.
Monday Open Thread: October 12th, 2009
What’s on your mind this Monday?
What things will Dr. Utopia win today? The right to be on Mount Rushmore? A pyramid in the center of the National Mall? The Wooly Bear Festival’s Honorary Grand Marshall crown?
There’s a world full of awards out there to cheapen and bestow upon someone who did nothing to deserve them. What do you think the elite committees of the world will give Dr. Utopia next?
Why even have an Academy Awards next February…Dr. Utopia has already won them all, including Best Picture. He’s even won the special Animation Oscar — another historic first.
Truly, we behold The One and Only Lightbringer indeed.
*****
Unrelated to anything, but here’s a totally awesome remix of the new Whitney single — Million Dollar Bill. We are rooting for this wonderful woman to have the comeback of our lifetimes. With so much wrong in the world, and so many terrible things being done to this country by those in Washington, Hera knows we need a Whitney in top form sining and dancing and being fabulous, now more than ever. At least here in Boystown. When this plays in clubs, it gets everyone on the dance floor…and is kind of fun to groove to on a dreary Monday here in Chicago.
Where the Hell’s Whitney Houston’s Nobel Peace Prize for that?
RAACISM Alert! Pope Benedict names five new saints…but Obama is not one of them. Quick, light the Bat-sh** Crazy Signal and Alert Henry Gates and Al Sharpton!
In the immortal words of both Jesse “not an actual member of the Jackson Five” Jackson and Al “screams his head off and rolls around on the floor wailing and diaper-fudging” Sharpton, “this is an unimaginable travesty…an act of clear and present RAAACISM!”.
Pope Benedict (and/or possibly Emperor Palpatine) just elevated five people to sainthood, canonizing them.
In his playpen, between wails, Henry Gates attributed this to RAAACISM!, like everything else that happens to him, including rain and that itch he often gets when he forgets to put enough Happy Diaper Baby powder in his Good-Nites.
“Of course the Pope, a white man, CANONIZED those saints. And what color are canons? Black. What color is Diane Cannon? White. What color are Cannon cameras? Black. See, the things that are OWNED and bought by white people are BLACK, and the people who buy these cannons and cameras are all WHITE. WAAAAAAAAAH! I am going to write a very erudite and scholarly book on this subject and teach a graduate level course on it at Harvard. Just as soon as I have my cheesey-cracker snack and drink half of my Capri Sun juicy-box. I can’t drink but half or I will have another ‘accident’, and then I will blame that on RAAACISM too,” said the wailing embarrassment liberals keep insisting is a “distinguished professor of grievance propagation and imagination at Harvard.
Sharpton, Jackson, and Gates were joined by Spike Lee and Eric Holder, grievance squad reinforcements, who insisted Dr. Utopia was passed over for sainthood because “he’s the wrong color and that old man in a dress with the candles, WHITE candles, is RAAACIST!”.
One of the five people who actually worked hard and dedicated decades of their lives to real accomplishment before they won the ultimate of all awards is the new St. Damien, who worked in Hawaii with leprosy patients.
“Leopards? Oh no you didn’t say Leopards…you didn’t say LEOPARDS. Like in the jungle, leopards, so what you’re saying is that because the president is half black he should be associated with the jungle, and there are leopards in Indonesia, which is really the president’s home, not Chicago, so you are being RAAACIST and calling him a jungle-dweller who is just as bad as leopards so you need some new white saint to save the world from the partially black president. Damn dirty RAAACISTS, all of you,” Spike Lee wailed, rolling around on the floor next to Eric Holder, who immediately went into apoplectic fits upon hearing the Pope wants to reopen the Coliseum to feed black people to leopards, as reported by Maureen Dowd (who filled in all the missing Madlibs the Pope didn’t actually say, because she knows what he REALLY meant and can scry concealed RAAACISM from the ether like white smoke over the Vatican).
Sharpton, Jackson, Gates, Lee, and Holder were quickly joined by James Clyburne and John Lewis, who all demanded Dr. Utopia immediately be made Pope.
“It is the only way to heal this vicious, vicious wound we created by rolling on the floor to great media fanfare inventing nonsense even we don’t believe, but use exclusively to shake down the rich and corporations for “consulting fees” to prevent boycotts. Our president enjoys being revered and worshipped, and Rahm Emanuel and Charlie Crist keep telling him how much fun it is to wear dresses, so he’s willing to give being Pope a try until he gets tired of it and wants to run for Jesus. And anyone who tries to stop him is a, wait for it, wait for it, wait for it, RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACIST! Obama in Heaven, I just fudged my dydees! Again. RAAACIST!”, caterwauled Clyburne, with Lewis at his side shouting “Yah!” every other word for dramatic impact.
“Too bad my good friend Johnny Cochraine is dead, which is RAAACIST too because why does the Reaper have to wear black but angels get to be all lily-white? If he was here, he’d say, “If the Pope’s on the ropes, it’s time to get the straight dope, for that guy who says HOPE. Bee-bee-bee-bope!”, Sharpton word-farted in the general direction of 100 assembled MSM cameras.
When told by a reporter from the Mineral City Pennysaver that “bee-bee-bee-bope” is not a real, cromulent word, Sharpton et al raised a great chorus of RAAACISM! accusations at the young woman with the Dictionary and ran screaming from the room, informing all the interview was over…but the boycott had just begun!
BREAKING NEWS: Winner of Chicago LaSalle Bank Marathon Declared: it's lazy guy reading paper in Caribou who isn't even wearing running shoes
We’re perched in Caribou Coffee on Broadway and Aldine (aka Care-for-bois), watching the Chicago LaSalle Bank Marathon pass by.
All the really hot shirtless guys in 1970s obscene onion skin running shorts ran by, super fast, HOURS ago.
We hate to see him go, but love to watch him run away.
Now it’s just the ordinary Joes wearing every piece of sweat-clothing they own under winter parkas, bringing up the rear. If it wasn’t for a hottie in a brown leather coat (with a butt we could write poetry about) standing on a park bench just outside the window, practically pressed up against the glass, there’d be nothing left of any interest for us to look at — save for the random people in costumes, dressed up like the Grim Reaper or various sandwiches and french fries from McDonalds, who do indeed bring a certain brand of magic to the proceedings, we admit. ZOOM! Someone dressed as either Pope Benedict or Emperor Palpatine just jogged by, flaming in red (forgive us if we still can’t physically tell the two of them apart, even if we are pretty sure they’re two different people).
But, we were THRILLED to hear the LaSalle Bank Marathon Committee has announced the winner: the entire coffee house is going wild because the winner of the race is an old man wearing a Christmas sweater, in October, who’s been sitting on his ass reading the paper while all the runners were working hard, competing, doing something they love with tremendous dedication and heart, and generally setting a great example for the rest of us to follow.
“Well, you know,” the race officials explained, “that man with the newspaper is very inspiring. He talked alot about how he hoped the marathon would be good this year, and how he thought there would be many hot guys in the race, and that they would run really fast. That was very inspirational and something no one in the city had ever thought of before. Using the word “hope” and then thinking about things, in the future, things that have not happened yet, was very inspirational. That man also had TWO beverages in front of him during the race: one he was drinking, which was a pumpkin latte from the notes we have in front of us, and the other was scalding hot black coffee, held in reserve, for when the latte was finished. That was strategic because then he would not have to wait in a long line later when he wanted a refill. Foresight like that needs to be rewarded, so we have decided that man with the paper sitting on his butt in Caribou is the 2009 Winner of the LaSalle Bank Marathon!”.
The Chicago Tribune is calling the Committee’s decision “the most brilliant thing we have heard since last Friday”.
Oprah Winfrey, one of Chicago’s most famous monsters residents, said, “where the Hell’s my damn cake? Don’t I have white people to fetch me stuff? Bring me my cake…and while you’re at it, bring me your cake too. All cake belongs to Oprah.”
Rank and file Chicagoans are just scratching their heads saying, “Huh?”.
UPDATE: The Marathon Committee’s decision to make the lazy man reading the paper the official winner of the race HAS BEEN REVOKED, on the grounds it was RAAACIST. The President of the United States, Dr. Utopia, has instead been declared the winner of the 2009 Chicago LaSalle Bank Marathon.
Michael Jackson actually deserved the Nobel Peace Prize more than the current recipient
Here’s something that occured to us today as we keep reading, over and over again, how many truly dedicated, hardworking, and world-changing people, such as GANDHI, were never awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, despite DECADES of spectacular, soul-invigorating work…some of whom even risked or lost their lives in their quests.
Like GANDHI.
As weird as Michael Jackson seemed, and as criminally stupid (at the very least) as he was for his inappropriate relationships with minor boys, MJ — of all people — actually deserves the Nobel Peace Prize more than Dr. Utopia does.
Jackson used to go on and on ad nauseum about “making the world a better place” and “inspiring people”. Like this:
He filled stadiums with crying idiots who thought he was sent from Heaven to lead them, to guide them, and to give them meaning and purpose. Like this:
He got people from all sorts of different countries together, onto sound stages, and had them dance around in their gaudy ethnic stereotype costumes…all to promote “global understanding”. Like this:
Great Merciful Zeus, MICHAEL JACKSON COULD SING. He didn’t just dispense his platitudes and nebulous good wishes in spoken word; the man would mount the stage and sing and dance about world peace, ending war, eliminating weapons, and doing all the other things the Nobel Committee believed Dr. Utopia did in his first two weeks in office that made him worthy of what was once such a high honor. And Jackson spent most of his entire life doing this. Not just two weeks. ALMOST THE ENTIRETY OF HIS LIFE.
Remember “We Are the World”?
Michael Jackson WROTE THAT. Like to hear it? Here it go!
Jackson diplomatically got all sorts of people who hated each other into the same room, inspired by his “example of international cooperation”, to raise money to feed the starving in Africa. Diana Ross was there, and she hates just about everyone. Hall and Oates were there. Cyndi Lauper. George Michael wasn’t there but we always think he was (the good, great butt packed into tight jeans non-bathroom hiding Whamtastic George, back when he was pretending to be straight and only stupid people couldn’t figure the real deal out (hear that, Congressman Schock?)). Bruce Springstein. A guy with a beard. A blonde woman. Santa. Whitney Houston’s aunt. Two of the Pointer Sisters. Randy, Marlon, Tito, Jacki, (possibly) Jesse, and LaToya Jackson.
L-A-T-O-Y-A.
Michael Jackson actually got his sister LaToya to show up, dress relatively normal (for her), behave herself, keep her clothes on, and do almost everything she was supposed to do.
LATOYA JACKSON.
“We Are the World” was, thus, a miracle, and feat of great talent and skill in so many, many ways.
In fact, “We Are the World” inspired many similar efforts, of bands coming together for some cause, that helped millions and millions more people than just that one original song alone.
Jackson really got the ball rolling on something (which is good, since he, in fact, wanted to be starting something…he wanted to be starting something, yah yah)…and everywhere he went, he did indeed draw media attention to children suffering (even if those children were, technically, suffering because he was dangling them from balconies or giving them Jesus-Juice on airplanes…the point isn’t who or what caused the suffering (it was Jackson), but that Jackson drew attention to it (after he caused it)).
Where’s Michael Jackson’s Nobel Peace Prize?
Where’s our Peace Prize, too: last night, walking home, we broke up a bar fight and convinced the two guys to hug it out instead of smacking each other around over whatever they were ticked off about. This being Boystown, getting two guys to hug it out isn’t as hard as it might first seem, granted, but we still made more peace in the world than Dr. Utopia has.
Where’s our damn prize, too?
*****
UPDATE: Here are just a few of the articles this Sunday lampooning the Nobel Peace Prize. What’s funny is that we keep thinking about something an unidentified Kennedy vassal said after NY Governor David Paterson humiliated HRH Princess Caroline of Kennedy and denied her the Senate seat she declared she wanted (“Just ’cause. You know. And my dad was President.”). That person said, “Caroline has destroyed everything that made her special. Everything that was unique about her is gone and stripped away. It’s all gone. Gone”.
That’s pretty much how we feel about Dr. Utopia receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for doing absolutely nothing. If Gandhi — GANDHI — never won it…and it took Mother Theresa 30 years to win it…and a stronger case could be made for Michael Jackson to have won it, then something’s definitely rotten in the state of Norway.
Nobel Peace Prize Feeds Into Parodies
He Should Have Never Accepted This Tainted Prize
National Coming Out Day: October 11th, 2009 Open Thread
National Coming Out Day 2009
Today we specifically urge Illinois Congressman Aaron Schock, Florida Governor Charlie Crist, and White House Chief of Staph Staff and former male ballerina Congressman Rammed Manhole Rahm Emanuel to come out of the closet on National Coming Out Day.
These are three men who could make a world of difference by being open and honest with their constituents, or all Americans, as the case may be (since Emanuel doesn’t really have any constituents anymore, since leaving Congress, not that he cared much about any of them when he had them).
Schock, in particular, could have a spectacular (and dare we say fabulous) career in politics for many years if he would just come out: if he thinks he’s a media darling now, as the youngest member of Congress, just imagine what a rock star he would be if he was the face of gay Republicans instead of the bumbling, often bizarre, Log Cabin crowd.
A young, smart, great looking, buff, honest and open Schock would rock the covers of People and US Weekly and TIME, as well as the Advocate/Genre/Instinct/Windy City Times circuit. He’d instantly be an impressive (and, once again, fabulous) challenger to gray, incompetent slug Senator Dick Durbin in 2014.
A young gay Republican might lose some votes downstate (to idiots on the conservative side who would never vote for Durbin, but who would instead just “sit the election out”, as conservatives are apt to do in their most asinine and self-destructive of strategies), but he would make up for them in rainbow spades in Cook County.
How on Earth could Democrats smash down a young gay man trying to become the first openly gay US Senator?
Schock may very well shock everyone and carry Boystown, even if the LGBTQ community STILL refuses to vote anything but Democrat by and large (we sure as Hell would campaign our hearts for the guy).
If Republicans get just an extra 4% in Cook County, they win the state. At the very least, there would be many, many gays who would “sit it out” and not vote for Durbin — even if they couldn’t bring themselves to pull the Republican lever for the first time in their lives — just because they couldn’t in good conscience cast a ballot against a fellow gay man (who just so happens to be 8-pack hot).
So, it could very easily be Senator Schock in 2014…but that’s not going to happen if he keeps posing for those outrageously fake and unbelievable photos with busty bikini-clad women he so very clearly has no more interest in than Oprah’s got for a leafy green salad bar.
And, yes, those bodacious booby photos, and the deception his staff engaged in promoting the same, DOES INDEED MATTER.
It matters because he’s tacitly lying to his constituents.
It matters because Schock’s using sex and his bringing-sexy-back-physique to build his brand and grab adoring media attention.
He is the only member of Congress we are aware of who poses poolside in a bathing suit for photos (thank Great Merciful Zeus Nancy Pelosi’s not tried this stunt herself) he knows are going to be distributed nationally. Schock put his sexuality into play with those photos…and the full court press to garner as much media drooling from them as possible.
And that makes Schock’s antics in Boystown while in Chicago perpetually relevant (where the joke after any Schock public appearance, after his departure from the stage always is, “Q: Where’d Schock go? A: Uh, about three blocks east, to Halsted, in a hurry. It’s Showtunes night at Sidetracks.”).
And THAT relevance makes Democrats look for Schock in Boystown whenever he’s in Chicago giving any kind of speech or attending any sort of event. It is only a matter of time before pics will be snapped of Schock at Sidetracks (where Chicago Public Schools chief Ron Huberman used to hide in plain site), MiniBar, Scarlet or some other dark bar on Halsted doing Liberace knows what.
If we or someone we know ever snaps those pics (and almost everyone has a camera phone these days), we will give them to Schock himself so he has the chance to come out before he’s outed. We have sworn to a dear friend we will give him that chance. We would never publish photos of Schock in a gay bar without giving him the chance to come out first. We swear.
But, Democrat operatives we know in Chicago have their own teams working…and they are forever on the lookout for Schock.
That, right there, is primarly why we started talking about all of this here…we want Schock to get ahead of this and maximize the benefits to himself, Neil Patrick Harris style, instead of getting derailed and pigeon-holed a la Chad Allen. If you didn’t grow up a gay boy in the Midwest circa the mid-1980s, with crushes on blonde TV Tiger Beat hearthrobs on ridiculous primetime shows, you might have no idea whatsoever who we are talking about — so the Cliff’s Notes are that NPH came out gracefully and forcefully, standing up with pride and commanding his rightful place on television and in his acting career (way to go Doogie!)…while Allen was outed by Globe Magazine, in speedo-clad all-boy pool party photos that would have blanched Rock Hudson (which is fitting, since that’s most-def the Golden Girl old man about town Hudson would be). That happened while Allen starred as Cowboy Sherrif McHottie on CBS’ Dr. Quinn Doctor Lady (the Western yawner with the Jane Seymour who has really long hair, paints crummy pictures and makes bad jewelry, and was in one of the extra-terrible James Bond movies in the 70s/early 80s (when they pretty much just stopped trying) — not to be confused with the historical Jane Seymour, who was, tragically, the first “died” in the old “divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived” Tudor rhyme).
We want Schock to survive and thrive.
We want Schock to run for the Senate and defeat that loathsome, dimwitted pig Dick Durbin in 2014…becoming the first openly gay US Senator.
We want Schock to grow as a man and elected official and master the Senate protocols so that he could be considered to become the first openly gay Vice President of the United States before the 2020s are over.
Could you just imagine how a Palin-Schock ticket could make heads explode at some point? The loons on the Left wouldn’t know where to hit. The religious nuts on the Right wouldn’t know what to do. It would be glorious. 2024, baby.
Maybe he could be our first openly gay president someday.
And it could all start by coming out today, Congressman. Come out, be who you are, and see that the people of Peoria still support you. The people of Illinois will support you. Boystown will support you. Large swaths of Democrat-controlled Cook County would support you. And, most importantly of all, somewhere, Neil Patrick Harris would support you…and isn’t that all that really matters. The Doogie vote wins out every time.
As for Crist and Emanuel, coming out really does nothing for either of them, but it would end the Paul Lynde-grade redunkulousness of their charades.
Crist is so orange and creepy that even if he came out as an Ooompa Loompa and admitted he works for Wonka Chocolates no one outside Florida would find him the least bit more appealing. And anyone who takes one look at him sees instant gay-face. His wife is heiress to a novelty company that makes fake BEARDS, for crying out loud. It’s well documented he used to appear at The Green Iguana gay bar in Tampa, Florida, where he was apparently known as Charlotte Ray (of sunshine), in full-blown Mrs. Garrett drag (forever looking for his Mr. Drummond…and those elusive diff’rent strokes). The man couldn’t be more obviously closeted if he was drawn by Matt Groening, worked for a spindly plutocrat at a nuclear power plant, collected Malibu Stacey dolls…and was Waylon “Friend of Dorothy” Smithers.
And Emanuel’s a former Julliard ballet dancer, who had an awful lot of fun at Studio 54 in its heyday, can break into showtunes at the drop of Liza Minnelli’s sparkle-encrusted hat, and has mysterious outings with unnamed male Secret Service agents around Washington, DC, sharing popcorn and delighting in the latest Sandra Bullock rom-com, apparently.
The first openly gay Governor of Florida and White House Chief of Staff would indeed be big steps for these two to take, and as creepy and strange and goblin-like as they both are, to various degrees, we think they’d do a lot of good for the LGBTQ communities…as well as themselves.
It sure as Hell would be better for the collective cause than Larry Craig getting caught tap dancing in Minnesota bathrooms.
Schock, Crist, and Emanuel have to come out someday. In the end, everyone does…or has it done for them (Rock Hudson and Liberace were barely cold before the lies crumbled — and they had staffs of people proclaiming their heterosexuality from the mountains (of BS) for YEARS…but in the end, you know damn well what their obits were headlined with).
It would be glorious if Shock in particular would come out when he’s young and vibrant and a rising star, when it can do the most good (for him and others), and could inspire so many to come out, come out wherever they are too.
Some new thoughts on sexuality and gender that surprised us
Here’s an article we’re somewhat reluctant to write because we don’t want to police the comments it will garner…and the flames it will fuel in the cultural wars that sometimes overwhelm things we report just because we find them interesting. Any time we talk about LGBTQ issues, we get the most hateful remarks in the spam filters…and not from the far-Right as you would think. It’s the Left that brings the hate every time, Alinsky-style, in spades.
One of the strangest attacks we personally get is from people who act like we’re claiming to be experts on something. Never in the history of our posts have we ever claimed to be experts. We’re a pack of amateurs around here and have always said so: we’re just guys who live in Boystown who came together during Hillary Clinton’s primary campaign and became friends as a result, and this site began as a way of sharing articles amongst ourselves and our friends to bypass the time it would take to email everyone each article on its own.
We have no idea how all the rest of you found us over time, and started reading what we post here, but we still largely write the content here the same we way did back in February 2008: to post interesting things we think our friends would like to read or hear about, all centered on our anecdotal experience in Boystown here in Chicago.
The key word is anecdotal.
As in, things that happen to us.
Things we think about.
Things we hear in the course of our day.
Things we can report because we were there and witnessed them ourselves.
Well, this past week we had two encounters that truly got us all thinking and talking as a group…and we still don’t know what to make about either of them, but will say they dramatically changed the way we think about sexuality and gender. The only thing that comes close to the shaking our beliefs had is the day we, individually, all learned there was no Santa Claus. Our little grade school brains tried to process that, knowing our beliefs in the holidays would never be the same, wondering how we ever managed to think the things we did before, grasping for explanations and racing to catchup with the new reality of things.
Sugar plum confused in the egg noggins, to randomly carry the holiday theme.
The first encounter happened while carrying out our friend Lionel’s volunteering duties. Lionel Baxter is a dear friend who passed on this summer, who volunteered the majority of his free time helping mainly the AIDS afflicted with household chores and the like. But, one friend of Lionel’s is a blind HIV- lesbian named Carole who gave us permission to talk about her here (because we’d never have done it otherwise).
Lionel used to take Carole shopping so that she would not be ripped off at the less reputable stores around town (which happened to have the better prices…if she was able to bargain and barter like everyone else, and not be taken advantage of). He was her “Seeing-Eye Lionel”, as Carole called him, and would inspect merchandise, tell her what color things were (so they would match), and deal with all the salespeople when they stepped out of line and looked like they’d try to pull a fast one (and, we hate to say this, but that seems to happen A LOT, evenin 2009, in a great city like Chicago).
Carole’s been blind since birth. ”Green”, “blue”, “red”, and the rest of the color spectrum have no meaning to her, though she long ago learned the abstracts of color theory, what goes together and what does not, and how she should dress to not get any unwanted stares or attention from “the sighted”.
Carole actually associates colors with foods…so “green” is the crispness of green peppers and other veggies…blue is cool and deep like a lake or breezy sky…red is hot and jarring like fire. So, Lionel would describe the emotional pull and visceral sense of things, like telling Carole a vase has “all sorts of shapes painted on it that clash with other shapes and has a volatile energy to it like fire” whereas another piece of art “is soothing and tranquil like a stream and goes with other things harmoniously”.
All very zen, all very feeling based with no visuals.
As we tried to be Carole’s poor subsitutes for Lionel, a true life angel undercover if ever there was one, we showed her various pieces of clothing, shoes, and kitchen ware as she picked out different things she needed and tried to get an idea of things using only her senses of smell, touch, hearing, and taste.
While going over some vases, Carole described one as being like the breasts of a beautiful woman, and then talked a little about an old girlfriend that reminded her of.
We told Carole we had never thought about people being blind since birth…and being gay.
Admit it, it’s a thought you’ve probably never had too…because “the sighted”, like us, take our vision for granted. We certainly can’t speak for everyone and aren’t experts on blindness or sexuality (hence that anecdotal emphasis again), but when we look at a man we are drawn to the boxiness of his features and shape…to the square of his jaw and the broadness of his shoulders…the sleeker, the more chiseled and boxy, the more visually appealing to guys who aren’t attracted to curves (or the women who round them).
Sight is our primary sexual sense, we realized. A guy’s looks aren’t the most important thing about him by far, but it’s that initial bit that makes us attracted to him…and that, in general, engages our sexuality.
For Carole, who is blind, her sexuality has never in her life been triggered by what someone looks like. She’s not gay because she enjoys looking at women more than men. She’s not gay because women stimulate the visual part of her brain and draw her to them.
Not being physiologists, neurologists, or the like, we can’t be as articulate here as we’d like, but we find this fascinating. Someone who is blind, like Carole, can indeed be gay without ever knowing what a man or woman really looks like, so all that cultural conditioning we all get visually never takes hold in her. She’s not driven by the body image on magazines because she can’t see them. She’s not motivated by the current definitions of beauty or gender because she’s not aware of them.
And she still chooses women over men.
For other reasons…how they smell, how they feel, how they sound, how they relate to her. Hundreds of more differences that, to us, seem to exist in realms far removed from choice. We can see a red apple and a green apple and choose the red apple because we find it more appealing. Carole could hold both apples and not be able to tell the difference visually, but still choose the one she wants for other reasons far different than our immediate first choice (of sight).
We’ve never read any articles on the sexuality of the lifelong blind but would love to explore this further if anyone out there has any great sources and links for us.
The other interesting encounter we had this week involved gender and sexuality themselves, when we ran into our good friend Jim at Sidetracks this last Thursday during comedy night. Right after they finished playing the HILARIOUS “Literal Version of Total Eclipse of the Heart” (…it started out as Hogwarts now it’s Lord of the Flies), Jim came up to us and asked if we’d gotten the invites to “his party”. We’ve been working so hard and have been so broke the last few months that we’ve not gone out much, so we told him we had no idea what party he was throwing…so Jim went to the bar and brought back some fliers.
We’d actually seen the fliers around town at various LGBTQ shops and the Center on Halsted but had no idea whatsoever the event was for THAT Jim or what the event even was, because it was so cryptic to us. The party Jim was talking about was advertised as “Masculinity: A Fundraiser to Complete Jim’s Transition”…and had a very well-designed graphic of a rugged, cowboy type with text superimposed talking about helping to raise funds to help complete Jim’s transition and get him the last surgery he needed, with all sorts of great local acts headlining for the cause.
We kept thinking it was a man transitioning into a woman with a sex change…because, like many in the LGBTQ community, we’ve never given much thought to the “T” (or, to be honest, the “Q” or the “B” or even the “L” in that, focusing only on our own realm in the Boystown “G”), and aside from Hedwig and TransAmerica had few encounters with the transgendered culturally, let alone in our own community.
There are Drag Kings who perform at various clubs around town, but they don’t get as much attention as the Miss Foozies or Cyon Flares or Taj Mahals of Boystown…fabulous and attention-getting man-to-woman drag performers all. But the Drag Kings work just as hard in their own art, but with much less recognition (and respect). We’ll be the first to admit our guilt on that, too.
We can’t honestly say we’ve ever seen an interview with a female-to-male transgendered person or given any thought at all to what they go through.
So maybe it’s no wonder we didn’t have a clue in Hell into what the “Masculinity” flier was about.
And we had even less of a clue that our friend Jim, who we’ve know for two years, was born a woman and has been living as a gay man for the last few years. Never, ever in our lives would we have guessed that.
Jim has so much guts for coming out and revealing all of this…and it was a big step for him that he agonized over for a year. Since everyone knew him as a man, he had a lot to lose by saying he’d been born a woman and still needed the surgery to remove his breasts and ease a lot of the pain he had from taking the male hormones while still having female anatomy. He also had to find the extreme courage to weather all the questions that bubble and burble in and from people when they find out he’s female-to-male transgendered, all centered on replacing the vagina with a penis, and how that’s done.
Jim was really upfront with us and said the surgeries are all so expensive that he’s not going to go there, but that he just wants to have his breasts removed for various health reasons. Hence the November 3rd Masculinity fundraiser at Sidetracks, where Jim’s hosting an event to raise what he needs to get his procedures done.
That all in itself is a lot for most people to take in and process, but it gets even more confusing when it dawns on people that Jim was born female and has never been attracted to women. Jim, at a young age, was a tomboy who knew he was a boy in a girl’s body. Later, he realized he was attracted to gay, not straight men, and that he wanted to date men but not be in a heterosexual relationship — instead wanting to be a male sexually attracted and involved with other males.
We’ve told about a dozen straight friends about Jim’s fundraiser asking them to help support the event, and every last one of them had smoke coming out of their ears trying to process what Jim’s doing.
“So, she never liked girls and always liked boys. So she’s not gay. But she wants to be a man, but still keep dating men, and that would make her gay. But she’ll still have a vagina and not a penis, so when she has sex with a man she’ll still be in a woman’s body having sex with a penis, which is the definition of heterosexual sex. So, what the heck is going on here?”.
Honestly, we’re in uncharted waters here in our understanding of the differences between sexuality and gender identity and how they interlink and complement one another. Jim is gender-male, genitals-female, sexuality-gay. There’s no black and white, no chocolate and vanilla, two-clearcut choices here…there’s a pink area, strawberry scoop, Neapolitan mix in play that none of us have ever considered. Jim’s body is female. His brain is wired male…and his inner identity sees itself as male. His sexuality is male-male attraction, even if his body retains its female genitals (which cost and current technological limits interfere with in terms of remedy).
This is an article from us that abruptly ends right about now because we’re still processing the concepts Jim’s experience introduced to us. We’re getting everyone we know to attend Jim’s event to support him, while deciding amongst ourselves we really need to educate ourselves on Trans-issues more. To be honest, it’s kind of like learning Mandarin Chinese…nothing looks familiar and we don’t know the right terms or tools to have a decent discussion. We’re totally lost, and a little embarrassed we never knew something so important about a guy we really like, respect, and love hanging out with.
Jim’s one of our Sidetracks buddies who we run into typically only on Showtunes or Comedy nights, when we need to sing and act stupid and laugh to get away a bit. And here he was, struggling with something, and we never caught on or saw anything that could have given us a clue.
Sexuality and gender are areas that we need to read up more on, to get a better picture of the human condition across all spectrums. It feels a lot like spending most of our time in Boystown forgetting Chinatown, Wicker Park, the Loop, Greektown, and all the other distinct areas of Chicago exist too. There is much, much more out there than what we in our limited anecdotal experiences encounter every day.
And we welcome any further light any of you out there can shed on any of this.
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Because you asked…here’s that “Literal Version Total Eclipse of the Heart”, too. Hilarious.
