Posts Tagged ‘Boystown
Governor Sarah Palin stands up for GOProud’s right to be at CPAC…what else can we say to refute attacks against her that call her anti-gay?
Here in Boystown, there’s a concerted effort underway to paint Governor Sarah Palin as the second coming of Anita Bryant.
Even though few in Boystown remember much about Bryant, other than that she was Harvey Milk’s nemesis in the 2008 film “Milk”.
And most of them only saw that because they heard from a friend James Franco is fleetingly naked here and there throughout the movie.
The largest and most popular bar here in Boystown is Sidetrack, which is owned by two gay men who hate Governor Palin with a passion. So much so that on the “Thursday Comedy Night” immediately after the Gabrielle Giffords shooting in January, Sidetrack ran a 20-minute hatefest against Governor Palin, showing clips from SNL mocking her, and culminating with a weird and violent parody of “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” where Kate Gosselin and her children pick up assault rifles and begin a Hatfield & McCoy gun battle with Governor Palin and her brood.
I’m proud to say that so many people thought it was disgusting and in poor taste, immediately after the Tucson shootings, that they got up and left the bar.
Today, BreitbartTV has a bit about Governor Palin standing up for gay conservatives who want to participate in CPAC, but are being shunned by idiots in the Cocktail Party.
Governor Palin consistently stands up for gay rights, in much the same way Dick Cheney, Laura Bush, and most recently, Barbara Bush, have done.
And yet, places like Sidetrack continue to promote their agenda of villainizing Governor Palin into an Anita Bryant-esque nemesis, out to get gays and harm us…like Cruella de Vil tooling the country after dalmations.
This is the meme the gay community wants to run against Palin, tapping into a reservoir of anti-woman and anti-conservative sentiment in places like Boystown, where low-information voters parrot what the media and people like Anderson Cooper, Tina Fey, Kathy Griffin, Margaret Cho, and Dan Savage tell them.
For those of you who don’t care what the gay community says or does, think about how the Left uses gays to shape popular culture. Each of the Democrat constituency identity blocs is used for a specific purpose. None of these blocs are particularly liked by the Left, but they are tolerated because they are useful to the Left’s cause. Jews are kept on the Democrat reservation because they can raise money the Left needs to fuel its agenda. Blacks are kept on the reservation so they are forever able to scream RAAACISM! to shutdown debate and intimidate conservatives, who are terrified of being called racists. Gays are used for creative, pop culture, and humor attacks on conservatives…since what happens in Boystown doesn’t ever stay in Boystown, but eventually trickles down to YOUR TOWN in the form of whatever new fad gays have concocted that penetrated the mainstream.
An effective use of our time this week is to compile the standard attacks the gay community most often makes against Governor Palin…and refudiate all of them, point by point, in debate team style form.
If we work together to assemble this, and we note the times Governor Palin has stood up for the gay community, we can create debate cards that we’ll have ready on an ongoing basis as people across the country prepare to surrogate speak for the Governor in the 2012 election.
The new HillBuzz.org site that’s coming in a week or so will have a special page devoted to this sort of debate prep…so that when entities like Sidetrack here in Boystown engage in 20-minute hates against the Governor (driving their own customers away, because they go so far to villainize her), people will have an easy way to refudiate them. Our hope is to make the Debate Prep page so easy to use you could just pull it up on your phone if ever you are in a situation where you would need to.
It’s going to be a lot of hard work researching all of this and putting together an easy-to-use resource that will help people become confident and capable surrogate speakers for not only the Governor, but for conservatism in general. Having the facts at ready access, and being practiced in debate, will enable you to shut a lot of haters down…since they don’t know the facts, only what they heard Anderson Cooper or Kathy Griffin say “on the TV”.
Either chime in on the thread below with good examples of attacks you’ve heard the gay community make on Governor Palin, or other standard attacks made against her, along with concrete facts that refudiate them.
Or, you can email us your research at HillBuzz@gmail.com
Let’s set a goal of having this resource completed by Friday, as our gift to Governor Palin and her supporters at large during “All-Palin-February”.
Snowpocalypse 2011 — the blizzard that really came
Chicago is literally buried under tons of Global Warming today.
Last night, Boystown looked like a ghost town, with most of the bars and restaurants closed, including places that don’t even close on Christmas or Thanksgiving. Here and there, a few people could be spotted trying to make their way down the streets — they were bent and nearly broken by the cold and weight of the snow, pushed left and right by the wind as they struggled to make their way forward. They looked like zombies in a horror movie shambling about.
What’s most interesting to me today is how no one I knew believed all of this snow was really coming.
That’s because no one I know trusts the Media, especially the sensationalist local news, and the weatherologists thereof, that repeatedly cry BLIZZARD OF THE CENTURY! in advance of approaching storms that normally leave about as deep a dusting as Ally Sheedy’s dandruff in The Breakfast Club.
Because the local news is so terrible, and needs to ring as much panic and doomsday scenario over every story it produces (SQUIRREL INVASION IN GRANT PARK! CRIME SPREE CRIPPLES LAKEVIEW! LOCAL STUDENTS TRAPPED IN FAILING SCHOOL!), people seem to apply an 80/20 rule to whatever the local newscasters say, especially regarding the weather, which is reported on as a sort of masochistic meteorological porn.
I often think of Kathleen Turner reading the phone book and somehow making it sound dirty whenever I catch the local Chicago stations reporting on tomorrow’s weather, because something that should be dry and factual gets punctuated with nonstop exclamation marks in the Media’s effort to captivate viewers…but 80% of the time those dire warnings and doomsday predictions don’t come true.
So, when the SNOWPOCALYPSE really does hit a city like Chicago, we’re actually taken by surprise, because the Media’s cried BLIZZARD! so often in the past that people disregard whatever they say completely. I can’t even count the number of emails and texts I got from friends saying “I didn’t think it would snow this bad” or “I know they said it would be a blizzard, but I didn’t believe them”.
I 100% didn’t believe them either. When I woke up this morning my boyfriend Justin was standing by the window with his mouth agape, stunned by the snow that had fallen all night. Huge dunes of white have buried whole cars. The wind’s swirling and pushing the accumulation across the street like the whole neighborhood was plucked up in the middle of the night and deposited in Antarctica. If you aren’t a penguin or some sort of Yeti-esqque Himalayan abominable something or another, you just shouldn’t leave your home for a few days.
Seriously.
Do you feel this way about your own local news wherever you live?
Are they as sensational, and do they try to make every broadcast as exciting and MUST-SEE! as possible by crying BLIZZARD! when there is none, so that when a blizzard actually comes the net effect is that people ignored the warnings as if there hadn’t been a news broadcast at all…since trust in what the local media says is just so low?
Have you, too, ever been caught off guard by something that really ended up happening because you just thought the media was exaggerating again?
The Party of Stupid is at it again: GOP pushing for gay marriage ban in DC
The Party of Stupid is pushing for a gay marriage ban in DC.
Oddly, this reminds me of something my boyfriend Justin does every time he comes to Buzzquarters and sees all the Hillary 2008 campaign memorabilia we have everywhere on the walls. He can’t spend five minutes in my room without blurting out something about Hillary “killing that man, Vince”, though he never remembers his last name. We’ve been dating since before Thanksgiving and this happens EVERY TIME he’s here. I can actually see the thoughts bubbling up inside him, like water boiling in a tea kettle, until he finally blurts this stuff out, Tourette’s style, because at home in Arkansas, growing up in a conservative household that hated the Clintons, this is what his parents talked about at the dinner table all the time. ”That man Hillary Clinton murdered”. And, I add, they talked about it as if she in fact murdered him with her own two hands, while dressed in a black ninja suit, cackling the whole time.
No matter how many times Justin comes here, or how often we talk about how non-murderous Hillary Clinton is, he just can’t stop doing this because he can’t unlearn everything he was taught…no matter how crazy it is.
This is the same thing with the Republican Party and gay issues. They are so programmed to handle these things in the worst way possible that they make themselves look like the Party of Evil as much as they act like the Party of Stupid.
Justin and I are both gay, but neither of us believe in “gay marriage”…any more than we believe in “gay baptism”, “gay communion”, “gay confirmation”, or “gay confession”. ”Marriage” is a religious ceremony and it is a religious word.
Unfortunately, the state has stolen this word and repurposed it for a civil contract.
The state should not have the ability to marry anyone. Period.
The state should have the ability to join two willing, consenting adults in a contract that forms a civil union between those two people. That is the right job for the state.
Churches can decide to marry whomever they choose, based on their religious traditions, which the state should be separated from in all things.
If Republicans were smart, they’d change gears and throw Democrats off by putting an end to the senseless attacks on gays that relate to this crusade against “gay marriage”. The GOP has never been able to hire a decent PR and branding firm, for whatever reason, and keeps making the same stupid mistakes because that’s just what they’ve always done and it’s programmed into them for some bizarre reason.
If they wised up, they’d instead launch a crusade against the term “gay marriage” itself, and they’d find a way to call the Left intolerant for trying to jam the church and state together. That’s a very interesting and winning angle, making the Left the bad guy that wants to force religion into civil matters.
Republicans should clearly affirm as loudly as possible that “marriage” is a religious term and that the state should not be using that language ANYWHERE, for ANYONE. All actions the state performs are civil in nature, by definition of that word. The joining of two people in a legal contract is a union. Therefore, the state’s joining of two people is a civil union. That is what should happen at a court house, where a “civil union license” is issued…NOT a “marriage license”.
Marriages should only happen in churches, just like baptisms, confirmations, first communions, and other ceremonies that churches have but the state does not.
This is how the Party of Stupid could smarten up and take away from the Left one of the key wedge issues that prevents gays from voting in their own economic best interests, which would mean they’d vote conservative.
The reason gays DON’T vote conservative is because the Party of Stupid keeps falling into the Left’s trap by appearing evil and single-mindedly bigoted against gays, when in reality the uproar about this issue is related to the usurpation of a religious word for a civil function, which was wrong to begin with and needs to be corrected across the board.
What think you?
Have a safe and fun night out – see you on the other side of 2011
Before I head to New Year’s Eve adventures here in Boystown I wanted to thank everyone for being a part of things here on HB in 2010. You were collectively the best part of a brutal year.
Tonight, if you are headed out on adventures of your own, please drink responsibly and plan ahead. If you know you can’t say no when the free shots and champagne start flowing, give a bar manager your car keys so there is no chance in Hell you can drive home.
There is no shame in cabbing it and admitting you lost control and are now too buzzed to drive.
I don’t want to turn this into an after school special, but I have lost friends to drunk drivers, so on a night like tonight, just please remember how your actions can impact yourselves and others.
Have fun. Be excellent to all you meet tonight. Live to see tomorrow. You are loved and needed in the fight come 2011.
Use the best trick in my book if you know you will be pressured to drink a lot tonight: order a Guinness in a bottle. It’s opaque. No one can see how much is in it. If you want to have just one, you can totally pretend it is still full all night and no one can tell. It is a great way to stay sober without seeming like a wet blanket.
Look out for those around you tonight. If you see someone driving erratically, call 911 and report it. Better safe than sorry…you might save a life.
Let’s all do our part to start the New Year right, and alive, with all our limbs, and nothing we regret tomorrow.
I get to spend the New Year with an awesome guy I love, some really great friends, and all the many characters in Boystown that make me smile…or cringe, as the case may be. The decorations are all gold and gaudy. There’s glitter everywhere. I’ve seen Chers representing almost every Cher look and decade, save “serious actress” and “infomercial sellout”.
Wouldn’t have it any other way.
See you in 2011!
Your favorite rendition of Auld Lang Syne?
Do you have a favorite version of Auld Lang Syne you would like to share?
Here in Boystown, the bars play very upbeat, high-energy renditions that are mixed by in-house VJs. I’m trying to find examples of the best ones, but these VJs are very protective of their mixes and never put them on YouTube (which I think is very stupid, actually, because they could turn these clips into self-promotion engines, for themselves and for their bars, considering all the free advertising those clips would generate).
Do you have any specific “Auld Lang Synes” that you ALWAYS listen to every New Year?
What are your New Year’s Eve plans and do you have any special foods or activities you do on New Year’s Day you could share with us?
It seems to be a tradition here in the Midwest to have Chinese food on New Year’s Eve, and pork roast on New Year’s Day…and forgiveness is also a big part of New Year’s tradition. It’s one of two days here in Boystown when everyone seems to encourage each other to let go of whatever petty things they hold against others…with the other day being Pride Sunday in June. ”Oh, stop going on about that, it’s Pride! Let it go” is as common in June as hearing “It’s a new year. Let it go. Who cares if Mikos stole your boyfriend. Tomorrow’s 2011. Steal his”.
Does the straight world have a similar take on this, with or without the boyfriend stealing?
What version of Auld Lang Syne will you be playing, even if it’s just in your head, as the New Year breaks tomorrow night?
“I Don’t Care, I Want to Go to Sidetrack’s”.
“Hey Buddy, what do you want to do tonight?”.
“Sidetrack’s. I want to go to Sidetrack’s. Let’s go to Sidetrack’s”.
“Really? We seem to go there all the time”.
“I don’t care. I want to go to Sidetrack’s”.
“But, there is a line there and the other bars do not have lines to get in”.
“I don’t care”.
“But, we were there yesterday”.
“I don’t care”.
“Actually, we have gone there every night this past week”.
“I don’t care”.
“But, there are over 20 gay bars in Chicago to choose from”.
“I don’t care”.
“But we can stay home and drink for free at my place and watch a movie”.
“I don’t care. Sidetrack’s. I want to go to Sidetrack’s”.
“But, the music is not that good there”.
“I don’t care”.
“There is a special party at another bar that we could check out”.
“I don’t care”.
“But, we go there so often they only need to look at us and they know what drinks to pour”.
“I don’t care. I want to go to Sidetrack’s”.
“I have spent so much money there I am sure I own 3% of the bar”.
“I don’t care”.
“But, honestly, we have slept with half the people in that bar”.
“I don’t care. I want to go to Sidetrack’s”.
“But, we cannot dance there”.
“I don’t care”.
“The boys are not very cute there”.
“I don’t care”.
“I just got a text message from a friend who is there. He said it is so crowded it took him ten minutes to get to the bathroom and twenty minutes to get a drink”.
“I don’t care”.
“But, all we do there is just stand around. At other bars we can do things. Like play darts”.
“I don’t care. I love Sidetrack’s. Let’s go to Sidetrack’s”.
“But, I can get us free drinks at Roscoe’s”.
“I don’t care”.
“Maybe we could do a bar crawl and just stop there along our way”.
“No. Sidetrack’s. I just want to go to Sidetrack’s”.
“Fine. But it is actually called Sidetrack. There is no ‘s”.
“I don’t care”.
[Pause]
“Let’s checkin there on Four Square. Do you have an iPhone? Iphone 4? I need an Iphone 4.”
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NOTE: This video was made by a former employee of Sidetrack’s…and is a pretty accurate take on the Brendens who gravitate there (for the uninitiated, “Brendens” is a generic term for the vapid, usually young(ish), looks and material goods obsessed flakes who usually hang out in little cliques in Boystown…they can also be called “Mean Girls”).
When you are the biggest gay bar around and one of the most popular in the world, you need to have a sense of humor about yourself, but strangely Sidetrack won’t play this video on Comedy Night Thursday there. It’s a very image-conscious bar, and they are incredibly protective of their branding…and it feels like they are scared of insulting customers who talk like the sketch above. These Brendens are the ones that give Sidetrack the reputation of a “Stand and Model” bar, where that certain kind of guy goes there on a Friday or Saturday just to stand around, try to look cute, and judge others while believing he’s not being judged.
It never gets really bad, though, because the worst offenders at this kind of thing go to MiniBar, which is what MiniBar is for. If you are a d-bag really into the pretension, that’s where you go. Absent MiniBar, they would be at Sidetrack though.
The jab at them about the music isn’t always fair though. Some VJs there are better than others, and some nights are better than others for music. It’s a crapshoot because there are excellent VJs, and then there’s the two duds they have in the mix. One of them is a co-owner who plays moldy black and white vaudevillian videos on Showtunes night that are so old and obscure the picture and sound quality is warped to the point where people think their eyesight and hearing have failed them. The other VJ just plays games — like not running any of the requests he gets on “80s Video Request Night Tuesdays” and instead just plays whatever songs he wants to play (people call him Otho, and he looks down from the VJ booth at the crowd, keeping track of who is talking to who and generally being the spider queen of gossip in Boystown).
The whole bit about “it’s just Sidetrack, there’s no ‘s” is because 80% of the people in Boystown call the bar “Sidetrack’s”, with an “s” tacked on. There’s a bar across the street called Roscoe’s, with a possessive “s”. There’s also “Little Jim’s”, “Charlie’s”, “Bobby Love’s”, “Halsted’s”, and “Buck’s” on the strip. Other bars like Spin, Cocktail, MiniBar, Lucky Horseshoe, Hydrate, Kit Kat, Circuit, and Northend don’t get the possessive-s treatment. I’ve never figured out why people add an imaginary “s” to Sidetrack, but not to the other bars without that “s” in their actual names.
It’s just a weird quirk of Boystown.
If you live in Chicago and go out a lot, you probably call it “Sidetrack’s”. If you are from out of town and aren’t in Boystown a lot, you’d say “Sidetrack” because that’s what you read on their website or the concierge at your hotel told you to look for.
The video program used to create this very well-done skewer of the Boystown scene is called www.XtraNormal.com. You can use the preloaded animated characters, like the bears above, and type in text for the characters to speak. Geico has been running a series of commercials on TV employing this. They always talk in that slightly sing-song, robot voice.
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UPDATE: January 1st, 2011
I was pleasantly surprised to see this video played in Sidetrack last night, on New Year’s Eve, as part of the Best-of mix for 2010. I’ve yet to see it make it into the Comedy Night rotation, but Sidetrack(s) does have a sense of humor about itself and put the video up on the big screens.
Customers laughed at all the right parts, knowingly.
The bit where the first little bear says “But the boys are not very cute there” got an “Awwwwww” and a few “Burn!” comments. In a smiling, realizing it is often true but not admitting it way.
Sidetrack cut the video off before it got into the 4G phone stuff, which was a good call.
I don’t know what made them come around on this because I heard from several people who know management well that the bar hated this video when they first heard about it…but they’ve now embraced it.
Because it is funny.
One quiet, Christmas moment in Boystown…
Since I cover politics, and spend most days writing about things like Voter Fraud, the Pigford Scam, or terrible things the Left is doing, it’s almost alien for me to write about anything sweet, quiet, and smile-inducing. Even if I try to make whatever awful thing Democrats are doing that day more palatable by ridiculing it and using satire to help get readers through the day, as much as possible, covering politics means not writing about too many feel-good things. Being a vocal critic of the Left means I also, unfortunately, don’t get to have many feel-good moments in my own life, because of the massive retribution I get from the Left for speaking out against them (though, other conservative writers repeatedly tell me I am not doing my job if I don’t have at least a half dozen hate sites dedicated obsessively to me).
Two months ago I started dating a really great guy named Justin, just after Halloween.
I love the guy, and think it’s going to turn into something.
He’s my “unicorn”…the mythical, gay, conservative Republican in Boystown who not only knows who I am and is fine with my politics and profile, but actually cheers me on to hit the Left harder and take everything up to a whole new level in 2011. Justin’s a big fan of Governor Palin’s, too, and has been going to Tea Party events since the beginning. He actually heard me speak at the first Tax Day Tea Party here in Chicago, without knowing who I was at the time, and his mom’s been reading my essays for over a year, also never thinking she or her son would ever meet me.
I’ve been brutalized by the Left for being a gay conservative, especially since I’m a former Democrat who left the party in 2008 when the party I knew deliberately veered irreparably to the Left, booting conservatives like me out for good. Gay Leftists, in particular, focus their ire on me because they don’t want other gays to step off the reservation as well, and start questioning the value of blindly voting Democrat over and over again. So, for that, I must be destroyed in the Left’s mind, and they’ve set about on an Alinsky Methods campaign to alienate me from my community here in Boystown, and larger gay circles nationwide.
I never expected to meet a guy like Justin…someone who clearly sees what the Left is doing, is personally aware of the Left’s bullying of me for being a gay conservative, and is totally unafraid of being with me considering all of this. He loves that I stand up to these bullies, and I love him for that support.
A few days ago, I woke up before Justin and wrestled with whether or not to ask him what he was going to do for Christmas, not knowing whether or not we’d been dating long enough to spend a major holiday together. Male relationships are strange in this regard. The joke with lesbians is that they meet, have a date, and then move in together…so of course they’d spend the holidays together. Straight couples seem to do this as well, if they aren’t going to family events where a boyfriend or girlfriend would be grilled in the “When are you going to get married?” department.
But, with two guys together, it’s awkward and strange when it comes to holidays. Most guys don’t want to be in a relationship, and are just tomcats at heart…so they often deliberately sabotage something before it becomes too serious and holidays bring unwanted expectations to the surface. It’s easier for a guy to break up with someone and move on to the next boy than for him to admit he really likes the guy he’s seeing and confront the possibility that they could share a holiday together…because that would mean something…and meaning something gets more complicated than meeting someone new at Roscoe’s and never bothering to catch his last name.
So, running out of time before Christmas, I wondered if I should ask what Justin was up to that day, since I knew his family’s all in Arkansas, where his mom and dad have a small veterinary practice and his sister teaches kindergarten. His parents love him, but don’t accept that he’s gay, and every time he comes home for anything, they “surprise him” with some friend of theirs who has a daughter who magically shows up unannounced at dinner time to join them…and meet Justin. I didn’t know if he’d be going back to Eureka Springs to spend Christmas with them, or if he’d end up at an “orphans’ Christmas” here in Boystown, with some of his coworkers and their friends, like he did at Thanksgiving.
“Orphans’ Christmas” is what a lot of gay guys here in Chicago do, when either their families don’t want them home for the holidays because they are gay, or when they can’t make it home for Thanksgiving or Christmas, for whatever reason.
After Justin woke up and I gave him enough time to transition out of dream time and into reality, I asked him where he was going to be on Christmas Day and he looked at me, sleepy-eyed, the covers still pulled up almost over his head, and said, “I’m going to be wherever you are, doing whatever crazy thing you are up to that day, most likely hearing about voter fraud from you, or probably Pigford some more”.
He pulled in closer, held me tighter, and added, “And I’m going to make sure you have fun on Christmas, and don’t spend the whole day trying to save the world or washing pots on the Southside, like you did on Thanksgiving, or driving around town up to your usual antics. You’re going to have a real Christmas too, for at least part of the day. And then you can talk about voter fraud all you want on the radio somewhere on Sunday”.
So, Justin’s going to come with me to make a half dozen stops Christmas morning to deliver presents and foods to the homebound AIDS-afflicted with me, through a ministry I volunteer with, and then we’re going to have our own little Christmas back at Buzzquarters where I’m going to put on a Christmas movie I like, and he’s going to put on one of his favorites, and we’ll have dinner and drink a nice bottle of wine and end up listening to music in my room, with the computer screen tuned out of HillBuzz and voter fraud and Pigford…and instead glowing with an electronic yule log, like it should be Christmas Day.
Just me and my unicorn.
I’m his unicorn, too, by the way. He even used the same word I do…because he didn’t think he’d meet another conservative guy in Boystown, after having dated an unbroken string of Lefties and blind-voting Democrats, who didn’t know why they were even “Democrats” except that Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow told them they had to be. His coworkers told him not to talk to me because I was “that conservative writer” and “evil celebrity”, or “that guy from TV we hate”, which ironically enough made Justin more, not less, interested in meeting me.
“It’s going to be hard for my mom and dad to hate you when they meet you,” Justin said later in the morning, after we’d been talking about Christmas. ”They’ll want to hate you, because you’re gay and we’re together, but it’s going to be hard because my mom reads you and my dad agrees with everything you say, except the liking guys stuff. It’s going to be funny. I can’t wait to see the smoke come out of their ears as they try to figure you out. My sister will probably just make noises. She won’t know what to say. She does that sometimes”.
That, right there, was an early Christmas present for me, too…because rarer than a unicorn is a gay man who wants his boyfriend to meet his parents…especially when he’s never brought anyone down to Eureka Springs to meet his parents before.
That’s definitely not happening this year…and next Christmas I’ll be in Iowa campaigning for Governor Palin in advance of the 2012 primary…but Christmas in Arkansas might just be in the cards for me come 2012.
It really is a wonderful life, full of all sorts of oddball twists and turns.
Whatever you are doing today and tomorrow, I hope you have something quietly magical in your own lives on par with what I’ve found in Justin.
I hope you all have love in your hearts, and all around you, this Christmas…and if you do, I surely hope you know and appreciate it.
Knowing you are blessed, and thanking God for every minute of it, celebrating and savoring it, is rarer than any Christmas unicorn.
