Once again my neighborhood is being transformed into a plastic queer mecca for four days. Since Thursday, theReel Pride movie festival has threatened to plug up all the streets with middle-aged fag couples and bleach-blonde dykes walking arm-in-arm.

Each year for almost a decade now, the Tower Theatre has been home once each fall to this Gay & Lesbian Film Festival. I’m so incredibly sick of it I don’t really think I can lucidly describe in what ways it is so offensive. The fare available is all of dubious merit, whether artistically or commercially - a conglomeration of otherwise unrelated ‘gay coming of age’ stories, featuring thirty-something boy actors who look twenty but play teenagers, or twenty-something dyke actors who look forty but also play teenagers.

Once again an event portrays an idealized and glossy version of queerdom which has no viable connection to reality, and all of the attendees of this particular event in no way resemble the characters, nor have they had even remotely similar experiences themselves in their past.

Nonetheless, the fags come out of the woodwork for this event… more fags than you would dare to assume could possibly exist. The heteros and unlaminated homos have to go into hiding in order to avoid being trammeled on, and if you aren’t dressed in refelctive lycra or pink polyester blends, and walking hand-in-hand with an equally offenisive freak, you will be completely invisible.

No wonder at all that I have no interest in venturing into my own neighborhood for an entire weekend. I, who LIVE here, versus all the clones who live their cozy domesticated lives 360 other days out of the year out in North Fresno. The fact that they chose to appropriate this part of town for their sickening festivals and disgusting parades I equate to the hideous gentrification of every other neighborhood of merit. Rather than confine their destruction to their own parts of town, they have to declare Tower District the “gay section” just because a few classy and vocal gay couples bought up a bunch of the commercial buildings a couple decades ago.

I can’t wait until Monday night when I should finally have my neighborhood back…

I have always been skeptical of communities and collectives and groups. Even as an adolescent, I was a bit of a loner, and preferred being alone to having a clique or a band of friends. Ever since high school, I’ve never even had a steady set of friends, but rather spent most of my free time alone or with one or two of the few people I actually felt like being around. I have no problems admitting that, in general, I am antisocial. I prefer myself to anyone else.

However, when I was first “coming out”, or exploring my own sexual perversions (primarily around the time I turned 21), I tried for a short time to get into the local “gay culture”. By “short time”, I mean that within a matter of months I was done with it all. I never managed to fit in with any band of homosexuals, and never really felt comfortable in their company. I have, on the whole, felt more alienated and disenfranchised by the sods I’ve met than any other identifiable group in my life.

Not least, the basis of this alienation has been based upon the fact that I don’t care anything for gay culture or gay history. People will gasp when I ask “who?” in response to their discussions of important historical gay figures. It doesn’t impress me at all that such-and-such popular litierati were gay or that so-and-so movie has gay themes. And I have often been heckled out of discussions or bars because I’m more interested in someone’s favorite drink or opinion on the Gulf War than their knowledge of Stonewall.

I have often placed my sex life as a low priority. Some people would say this means a repressed sexuality or a low libido, but I think it’s related more closely to lack of stimulation. In general, I’ve always been stirred more by a good brain than a good dick or a good body. Call it cliche, but I think this fact more than anything describes my rather prudish sexual past.

I guess I’m just trying to say that I’ve never felt comfortable or “at home” with other queers, and the fact that something is “gay” or “queer” focused means nothing to me. Many things in life bring me immense joy, and sex is only one of them. From the time I lost my virginity at 17 to half-way through my 21st year, I only had sex once (with a woman), and this is because I was less stimulated by the shallow faggot clones I saw than by things such as books or movies or music, which never disappointed me. I resent the idea that I get heckled by fags when I state clearly and simply that I don’t care about their “community” and don’t care to be a part of it. I don’t feel I owe anything to the Stonewall rioters or old 50s and 60s San Francisco fags just because they legalized queer bars. If easy sex wasn’t available to me, I’m sure I’d find other things to entertain me and satisfy me, as I did for 4 years of my very high-libido life before. I didn’t need the gay saviors then and I am not obligated to respect them now.

Ultimately, I am capable of satisfying my desires and knowing what will make me happy regardless of the time or place, and regardless of what is socially acceptable or legal. Sure the latter influence my behavior, but they have no real bearing on my ability to make myself happy. When will the queer-centric lobby realize this and stop insisting that I am morally required to dedicate my life to their greater gay cause, when all I need is within my own hands?

Many other people have been commenting on it, and I think I need to thow in my own bits as well…

I think the primary reason for the divisiveness in the gay marriage ground is the fact that so many people (including, to their detriment, most homos) consider marriage to be a religious institution. Taken objectiely, and in global perspective, marriage is one thing and only one thing: creating a single family unit out of individuals who were previously not part of the same family (unless you’re from Chowchilla).

Marriage has historically and universally been a legal formality (legal in whatever sense it means for the individual’s respective culture) which creates the bond of family between (usually) two people who are not bound as such yet. It is so incredibly essential to all human beings because of this: it allows a person their only ability in life to choose their family. It allows one to create that great bond of love, responsibility and unity with someone they choose, rather than someone they were merely born bound to.

How can we allow ourselves to be denied such a right? Those who preach the exclusivity of marriage are basically preaching the old, dictatorial view of family as slavery: that we are not allowed to choose our family; that the most important people in our lives must be delivered to us by birth, not by right or choice. “Preserving the sanctity of marriage” is the calling card of the man who recognizes no individual rights - not even his own.

One of the many pervasive forms of slavery which has existed in this world throughout history was slavery based on class and caste: where you were tied forever to the bonds you were born in. The creation of a free society of individuals who act by choice, not by directive, should result in the elimination of such involuntary bonds. Some call the breakdown of the family in industrialized nations a tragedy. I call it inevitable: it reflects the rights of man. The rights which are being destroyed from the inside out every time we give precedence to “tradition” over the evidence and proof presented to us.

A new year arrives and queers still can’t marry. The ruling gang is still screaming for a law against it - admitting to the world that they want their institution extended as a privilege to the gang, rather than as a right which a rational government should protect for all adults.

The news tells me that a pop star with too much time and money on her hands has eloped with a friend at a little Vegas chapel. The next day, they waltz into court and have the marriage annulled. It’s great to see how highly regarded the institution of marriage is held today by our culture’s elite.

I am not going to moralize on how one should never be allowed to end a marriage, or that one must make a marriage work, no matter how severe the adversity involved. I recognize the many reasons a relationship may end, and that divorce, separation and loss are common and necessary parts of life. The potential end of a relationship should not prevent any individual from marrying, and being married should not be an invincible barrier to change. However, I find it particularly infuriating that someone can so casually play with such a powerful legal and social instrument. So many people do.

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Gay Pride is, at its root, an attempt to portray a routinely oppressed population as free and capable of defending its interest. What it is in fact, is a grotesque display of insecurity and a totally soiling influence upon the quality and substantiveness of sex.

Sexual Liberation has resulted not in sex as a fact of life becoming more safe, open and understood, but in sex the act becoming cheap, easy and disconnected from those vital things it was meant, in humans, to provide: emotional satisfaction, intimate contact and personal spiritual-intellectual gratification. The result is a culture which is desensitized to sex, incapable of enjoying intimacy, and profoundly critical of meaningful contact.

I prefer a warm cuddle on a cold foggy morning to any given quantity of anonymous orifices. I want intelligent conversation, shared aesthetic tastes, and a sense of personal achievement as part of the whole package deal of snuggling and listening to another beating heart, without fear or pain or guilt. Assimilating oneself to a standardized rip-off sense of fashion, whether it’s the abercrombie drag, bear drag, biker drag, muscle drag, circuit-clone drag or dyke drag, erodes one’s sense of self. What is there to liberate if I’m no longer me?

Being one, I have nothing against homosexuals. But for an agglomeration of reasons, they piss me off a lot here in San Francisco. I previously ranted about the cheapening of sexuality which seems to have been brought on by “sexual liberation” and the culture of Pride. One thing I have also been pondering, however, is whether we’re just pandering to age-old caste systems by engrossing ourselves so frequently in our individual subcultures and ghettos.

I think about this every time I see one of the many parades and street fairs which imprison me in my home on various Sundays every few months. A peek down the street or a futile attempt to move my car exposes me to gaggles of gays in their preferred clone attire, attending an event which is advertized to portray the liberation and normalizing of their “preferred lifestyle” within their society.

I do not agree with that line of reasoning. San Francisco has very successfully marketed itself as the homo capital of the world. It is very safe to be queer here. You can peck your husband goodbye on the bus, casually pop by the bar waving the banded flag, enjoy multiple blowjobs for the cost of a movie with impunity, and once every month or so attend a fair showcasing just how undressed your peers can get in public.

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Contemplating the possibility of a future move to the Beautiful American South (land of evangelicals and baptists, birthplace of lynchings and the conformity of “rebellion”), I sometimes pause a moment to consider how my attitudes and behaviors might need to be modified in relation to my distance from the closet.

This essay, of course, refers to the closet that all us deviants and social minorities deal with in terms of allowing or promoting the exposure of our identity to the outside world. I owe significant inspiration for this work to the scratchings of and my chatter with a certain New England Nun, who has written his own plentiful volume on the matter.

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To show how “up” I am on Queer Current Events^TM, I had no idea it was the anniversary of Matthew Shepherd’s death. But I’m glad I’m not the only one who doesn’t find it all that dreadfully important a date to contemplate…

Why is is that a particular Catholic Saint was chosen as the mascot for a day so frought with hedonistic indulgence? I mean, when I think Catholicism, I think abstinence, guilt, shame. When I think Valentine I think sex, chocolate, food, fun, pleasure. But then, I also like the idea that I’m having such thoughts as a result of observing a Catholic holiday.

Not sure whether it’s supposed to be related or not, but an interesting discussion about Queer Choice on Leex’s Board:

“For instance, liberals are far more likely to accept the gay gene theory, and conservatives reject it. The main difference between both views is that conservatives see queerness as a contagious disease. The liberal argument amounts to “but it’s not contagious!” Not all liberals think this way, of course, but many of them do think of the gay gene theory as the only line of defence. Meanwhile, nobody really explores the thought that willfully engaging in same-sex relationships can be a moral position to take. It’s not only unwise to see sexuality in such a strict dichotomy, but it amounts to ceding the point to the homophobes upfront, and then going for a Phyrric victory. This doesn’t seem like a honest way of reasoning, and it’s very unlikely to convince the opposition.”

and a vignette from Chisparoja about the people us Choicers are siding with:

“What s always seeemed most incomprehensible to me about them is that they talk about being “God-fearing”, about being terrified of their creator, as if it is really something to be proud of and it doesn’t occur to them in the least that anyone wouldn’t love to live in terror. But I m not sure exactly what it is fundamentally that so terrifies them that they seem to insist on celebrating, or why they seem so enthusiastic about the prospect of a life characterized by terror.”

As for my own views on the matter, my dogged inability to dispense with my belief in free will make me a natural Choicer. I have never had a serious romantic or sexual relationship with anyone lacking a penis, but I have entertained the notion (and I have, in fact, dabbled a bit in my younger years). It doesn’t exactly offend or putrify me, as it seems to for most fags. I think of carnal pursuits are almost entirely fetishistic. My fetishes involve penises, body hair and beer bellies. I desire a certain set of sensory and emotional queues to get me going, as most people do. The fact that they tend to swing deliberately toward one particular genital and hormonal configuration is not all that important to me.

Marriage is a red-button issue in America (and maybe beyond?). Queers have spent the past year making strides and taking stock of setbacks. The majority of American voters loathe the concept of universal marriage equality. The war on contract law is taking some unsettling turns in places like Virginia, Ohio and Louisianna. Logical reasoning and rational debate regarding the issue has never been very prominent. Religious moralizing, thoughtless parrotting and empty rhetoric are the order of the day. What is marriage? Why is it important? Does contract law, in a law-based country, trump tradition? Does tradition, in an increasingly religious and dogmatic country, trump the concept of contract law? And to what degree?

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