Bil told me he has been waiting for me to respond to the court ruling legalizing marriage for gays and lesbians in California, so after a week, here I am. I certainly don’t wish my silence to be misconstrued as apathy toward the subject matter; rather, it’s difficult to articulate exactly what I’m feeling right now. But I’ll try.

Right. So about last Thursday. Half of the TVs where I work during the day are tuned to CNN, and when I saw the initial reports about gay marriage being legalized in a certain part of the world, the location was ambiguous (the sound is muted, so all I had to go on were the banners), so I assumed it was another European country that had made the ruling. In fact, I was in the middle of my usual speech about how California, while not explicitly legalizing gay marriage, has the most liberal domestic partnership laws in the nation, when it became clear that it was, in fact, my home state that had overturned the ban on gay marriage passed in 2000. But I didn’t cheer. Maybe I should have. Instead, I stood with my hand over my mouth and wondered why the hell I ever left to begin with.
(Keep reading…)

Filed by Trevor at 11:22 pm under Politics, Activism, Love
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California Supreme Court overturns gay marriage ban

The good news is piling up fast around here. Case in point: California courts declared that a ban on gay marriage is illegal. This post comes a couple days after the actual news, and I can’t really say anything poetic about it all, even though I want to, but you must understand that this makes me really happy. Super-happy. Not because I’m gay and unmarried (I am neither), but it’s kind of a point of shame for me that our country still thinks that gay folks are second-class citizens. Other countries have legalized it. We haven’t. In fact, in some of our states here in the USA, marriage between a man and a man or a woman and a woman is constitutionally forbidden. That means permanently no-no. And while I am not a member of the oppressed party, the oppression appalls me.

So, when I heard that my home state has decided that discrimination of this sort is – yes – unconstitutional, I felt a massive surge of pride run through my veins. I felt the same pride about Massachusetts, because I lived there for one year. But one year does not compare to the 23 years I spent living in California. That’s 23 times more joy and relief and hopefulness for the future that I’m getting right now. Rock on, California!

Unfortunately, I also cannot help but remain somewhat cynical. I know our country pretty well, and I think there will be some trouble down the road because of this (this being an election year and all). And there has been a rather strong response from both sides of the debate. But I’m not going to bother with all that just yet. Fuck it all for now. For now, I’m just going to enjoy it. Hooray, progress!

Filed by Bil at 8:58 pm under Social Issues, Gay Agenda, Politics, Activism, Love
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…the relevance of existing cultural activity.

These are the last six words of the mission statement of a theatre company which, like a newborn galaxy, is ready to burst into existence with a grand display of shining stars and gravitational hullabaloo. (…Except without all the stars.)

Every now and then, I think about how much art there is that I don’t see. Especially temporary art, like plays that only run for a certain amount of time and then are never produced again. Or some orange gates in Central Park. Or ice sculptures.
(Keep reading…)

Filed by Bil at 9:08 pm under Social Issues, Pop Culture, The Arts
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Last Sunday I ran the Shamrock Shuffle here in Chicago. The Shamrock Shuffle in Chicago is generally not run until well after St. Patrick’s day, but nobody cares. It’s still cold on the seventeenth of March.

The event is as big as a marathon in terms of numbers of people participating, even though it’s only an 8K run. So much money is needed to put up an event like this that Bank of America sponsors this thing. Bank of America is huge. The upside is the swag, lots and lots of swag. The downside is that all of the swag says “Bank of America” on it.
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Filed by Bil at 8:05 pm under Pop Culture
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I’m currently reading Maureen Dowd’s terrific 2005 best-seller Are Men Necessary?: When Sexes Collide.

Dowd is a gender/political columnist for the New York Times, and her book is witty, engrossing, and very well-researched. I may have a crush.

In addition to the evolutionary/biological tidbits I am picking up (some scientists believe that all men will be sterile within 125,000 years!) (within my lifetime, a lesbian couple will be able to conceive a child by implanting DNA from one egg into the other egg–no sperm needed!), Dowd has a lot to say about dating, sex, and post-feminism gender games. Fascinating stuff.

I shall here quote from Chapter Four: Why the Well-Hung Y is Wilting, Even as the X is Excelling. In this part of the chapter, Dowd confronts the oft-lamented double standard whereby men who sleep around are seen as studs, and women who do the same are labled sluts. It’s been talked to death, of course, but I particularly like this quote from Natalie Angier’s book Woman, which I guess I’ll have to pick up next (as soon as I finish reading that book I lifted from Lucas’s NYC apt without his knowledge):

“Women are said to have lower sex drives than men, yet they are universally punished if they display evidence to the contrary — if they disobey their “natural” inclination toward a stifled libido. Women supposedly have a lower sex drive than men do, yet it is not low enough. There is still just enough of a lingering female infidelity impulse that cultures everywhere have had to gird against it by articulating a rigid dichotomy with menacing implications for those who fall on the wrong side of it. There is still enough lingering female infidelity to justify infibulation, purdah, claustration. Men have the naturally higher sex drive, yet all the laws, customs, punishments, shame, strictures, mystiques and antimystiques are aimed with full hominid fury at that tepid, sleepy, hypoactive creature, the female libido. “
…
“Would a man find the prospect of a string of partners so appealing if the following rules were applied: that no matter how much he may like a particular woman and be pleased by her performance and want to sleep with her again, he will have no say in the matter and will be dependent on her mood and good graces for all future contact; that each act of casual sex will cheapen his status and make him increasingly less attractive to other women; and that society will not wink at his randiness but rather sneer at him and think him pathetic, sullied, smaller than life? Until men are subjected to the same severe standards and threat of censure as women are, and until they are given the lower hand in a so-called casual encounter from the start, it is hard to insist with such self-satisfaction that, hey, it’s natural, men like a lot of sex with a lot of people and women don’t.”

Heady stuff. Smart, too. I’ve always said there’s no such thing as “casual sex,” but these ladies say it better. You can link to Angier’s article, Men, Women, Sex, and Darwin here and you can get Dowd’s superb book here. If you’re so inclined. By which I mean female. Because, let’s face it, I don’t think many of you (hetero) guys are clamoring to see yourselves painted with her brush. Though, in one of my favorite quotes in all literature, Dowd admits, “I don’t understand men. I don’t even understand what I don’t understand about men. They’re a most inscrutable bunch, really.”

Filed by Chelsea at 11:58 am under Pop Culture, Gender Identity, The Media
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I know that money cannot buy happiness, but I’ll tell you this – I just spent twenty dollars and I am pretty darn happy for it.

On what did I spend this fortune, you ask?

A new cell phone. The cheapest phone in the store. Tough beans for the salesman who works on commission, sweet peaches for the consumer (me) who needs a phone on a budget.

I wasn’t desperate for a new phone. My old phone was still in working condition. But – to put it in perspective – the battery was held on with Scotch tape.
(Keep reading…)

Filed by Bil at 12:30 am under General
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Tonight is the night of Easter Vigil.
The Holiest Night of the Year.
While Christmas may get the most attention and inspire warm fuzzies and gift-giving frenzies all over the world, even in people who have no idea what’s actually being commemorated, Easter is actually the biggest deal in the religious world. Everybody has a birthday. Not everybody rises from the dead.

I’ve just been to a three-hour Easter Vigil mass and I feel great!
I feel enlivened.
I feel I have a clean heart.
(Keep reading…)

Filed by Chelsea at 11:21 pm under Religion, Social Issues, Catholicism
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Ten years ago today was the my first encounter — the first of several subsequent encounters — with suicide. In fact, by this time he was already dead, long since scooped up from the drainage canal behind his house where he’d taken his life with his father’s automatic. But I didn’t know it yet. That phone call would come later on the next day, a Friday, after I had driven my battered car fresh from an uninsured accident six days prior up to my best friend’s house to get the weekend started right.

Once a year I call his parents. It’s also the only way I can remember my sister’s birthday. He would be 23 today.
(Keep reading…)

Filed by Trevor at 5:05 am under Love
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, more politics crap. I know.

Listen up, though, young folks. This particular speech by presidential candidate Barack Obama may very well go down as one the great speeches in our nation’s history. Or it might be forgotten by next week, you never really know. But if you’ve got forty minutes to spare, check this video out. Even if you’re not an Obama fan, it might be good to be able to talk knowingly about this speech some day.

Filed by Bil at 12:24 pm under The Media, Politics, Racism
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As you may or may not have heard five billion times by now, New York Democratic Governor Eliot Spitzer is in some hot water because he hired a pricey hooker after a career of prosecuting powerful men who hire pricey hookers. We have all seen this before, and if there’s one thing that we as a nation should be able to agree upon by now (but for some reason aren’t), it’s that political party really has nothing to do with the fact that some politicians are just plain old douche bags.

Okay, sure, perhaps Eliot Spitzer should resign, perhaps not. Honestly, as a resident of a state that is NOT New York, I don’t think I could make a valid argument either way. I don’t know what their funny laws are. Is prostitution illegal up there? Isn’t it illegal in every state but Nevada?

NY Repbulican threaten to impeach Spitzer

Let’s just slow down a little bit though. Who said anything about impeach?
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Filed by Bil at 5:27 pm under GOP, Pop Culture, Politics
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