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(Blogger appears to be working again...finally...)

Sadly, that only describes the night's entertainment and not its activities.

SHORTBUS was every bit as thought-provoking as I expected. I'm still digesting, mulling and processing. There's a lot to sift through. I'm in a process of self-rediscovery right now, and John Cameron Mitchell always seems to have a movie ready for me in those moments. Really, lots of relevance that I have to sort through. If you've ever wondered about love, sex and the meaning of life, go see this movie.

Following the movie, Hillary and I went to the Surley Wench to see the Black Cherry Burlesque show. Hence the title of this post, a phrase Hillary coined and I'm happy to provide her with the credit.

Driving home, I checked in with myself. I'm happier now than I've been in years, maybe ever. Part of it has to do with the meditation, I'm sure. But I'm also experiencing something that hasn't really been familiar to me since college (or so). I have hope. Optimism. I know, it's weird on me. But the grey skies are clearing up and I have on a happy face.

It feels good to feel good.

And no, I didn't have a drop of alcohol.

I'm going to meditate and go to bed. Mom and Dad are taking a day trip down tomorrow and I have to feed Chad's cats in the morning before they get here. The magnificent bastard is on his way to Maui for a weeklong yoga retreat. All my friends seem to have been going to Hawaii lately. I can't really complain, since I've been fortunate enough to have been three times.

Imagine that - me not complaining!

I know there's just a little over a week to the election and I should be focusing all my energy and blog space to helping elect progressives. And I'll talk about the races this week too, I'm sure.

But for now, I'm going to enjoy my joy and meditate on how I can, to borrow from Joseph Campbell, follow my bliss.

Yeah, you know I'm going through massive inner evolution when I start citing Joseph Campbell.

Leave your comments. Share the love. I'll try and get another vlog up tomorrow.

Mr. T in AZ hijacked the comment thread of my SHORTBUS post from yesterday to let me know about the new AZ Blogosphere ActBlue page.

Candidates on the page so far are Jim Pederson (AZ-Sen), Ellen Simon (AZ-1), Harry Mitchell (AZ-5) and Gabrielle Giffords (AZ-8). Good way for you to eke out those last few pennies and give to several strong candidates who will help us take America back.

In case you missed it, click here. Go there. Give. Get empowered.

My friend Miriam had an extra ticket to the Borderlands Theatre production of ¡Gaytino! Never one to pass up a free theatre ticket, we walked the 500 blocks or so from her house to the Leo Rich (and got a little lost once at the TCC).

Overall, it's a fun, if mildly cliche, one man show. I'm not really in a place to criticize that though, since I did my own much shorter one man show in college that was just one run-on cliche. There were several technical glitches that were annoying, but Dan Guerrero, the playwright and actor, rolled with them with grace. One got the impression that these tech glitches happen fairly often.

I'm a fan of autobiographical one-person shows. I love the history. It was an embarrassment of riches when both Bea Arthur and Elaine Stritch (don't forget: I want tickets to see her perform in Scottsdale for my birthday) both had one woman shows on Broadway at the same time a few years ago. I do wish Guerrero would have done some more singing. He was channeling Merman better than most chanteusses I've heard.

I was also impressed with how he was able to keep the show moving at a relatively decent pace - with few lulls - using very sparse elements: one costume, very basic light plot, a stool and a projection screen. He was a little "actory", but our seats were close up, so his performance probably played mroe realistically to the back of the house.

Slightly off-topic: I also want to just touch on a comment an anonymous poster left in my thread about LTW's "The Baltimore Waltz" last week. I gave an honest and fair critique of the show, which I am still happy to discuss with whomever posted the comment. The comment itself was pretty snide and seemed to come from somebody connected with the production who didn't like that I critiqued the show. If you can't take criticism, you shouldn't be in theatre. That's the first thing.

The other thing is to grow a pair and not post anonymously on somebody else's blog attacking them for not totally loving your show. Like I said in the original post last week, the show exceded expectations and it was an enjoyable way for me to start my weekend. But it was far from perfect (as is so much of the theatre I've seen - and participated in myself - over my past four years in Tucson). How you get that I have "little to no respect" for LTW from that is beyond me. Grow up and maybe then we can have an honest conversation about the theatre scene in Tucson.

SHORTBUS opens today at the Loft Cinema in Tucson. I'm going to see it tomorrow night, the 7:15 showing.

Here's a synopsis:

Synopsis:
Hedwig and the Angry Inch director John Cameron Mitchell returns to the big screen with the controversial and celebrated SHORTBUS, a scandalous hit at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, touted as "the most sexually graphic American narrative feature ever made outside the realm of the porn industry" (Variety). The film explores the lives of several characters living in present-day New York as they navigate the intersections between sex and love. Male and female, gay and straight, the characters find each other - and eventually, find themselves - when they converge at a weekly underground salon called Shortbus, a crazed nexus of art, music, politics and polysexual carnality.

Mmmmmm...politics and polysexual carnality...

So I'm a fan of Aaron Sorkin's writing, and I've been watching Studio 60 since it went on the air last month. And cheers to NBC for streaming full episodes on their website.

I was highly skeptical of some of the cast when the show premiered, chief among them Amanda Peet. But I have to say I am downright smitten with her. The woman has real talent and nearly pitch-perfect comic timing. I mean, she's no Allison Janney, but like I said, smitten.

And coming from a big ole 'mo, that's quite a feat indeed!

Those are the mangled-English words on a t-shirt worn by a mutt (named Sammy Davis, Jr., Jr.) in the movie Everything Is Illuminated, which I watched tonight with my friend Chad after he cooked dinner for us.

The movie was based on a book by Jonathan Safran Foer, who fictionalized an account of his trip to the Ukraine in search of the woman who saved his grandfather shortly before the Nazis invaded and destroyed the village. Elijah Wood plays Foer with understated brilliance. Eugene Hutz plays his cinematic counterpart Alex, the Ukrainian tour guide and translator who has a dim mastery of the English language and an even dimmer mastery of American culture.

I really appreciated one of the final sentiments, which Alex relates to "Jonfen" in a letter:

I have reflected many times upon our rigid search. It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us, on the inside, looking out. Like you say, inside out.

That's a lot more profound and meaningful than this other quote, which was also a favorite:

Many girls want to be carnal with me... because I'm such a premium dancer!

Good movie, great food, terrific company. It was a premium night.

I've been noticing that my posts seem to be running the gamut lately. Some are very silly and others more ranting and (I hope) substantive. I think the diversity is a good thing, not just to maintain the interest of those who visit, but also because it's healthy for me.

In other words, I take what I do very seriously, but I'm trying harder than ever not to take myself too seriously. 'Cause really, when you're built like I am, it's hard not to laugh at yourself.

Congratulations to the Wingspan Anti-Violence Project for 10 years of service to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (and straight) victims of violence in southern Arizona. What was started by a lesbian domestic violence victim in 1993 eventually became the Domestic Violence Project, became a Wingspan program in 1996, and eventually expanded its scope and changed its name in 2003. What was once an all-volunteer program has grown into one with three professional staff members, two interns and a whole corps of well-trained advocates. The sort of specialized services provided by the AVP aren't available anywhere else in Arizona.

It's an honor to have been involved with the AVP almost since I arrived in Tucson 4 years ago. I've co-facilitated their support group for LGBT survivors of violence for the past three and a half years. And I'm a founding member of the AVP advisory committee. It was another honor to be asked to emcee tonight's 10-year anniversary celebration, Unmasking Violence. The speakers - including two survivors - were fantastic and the drag performers put on a fab show after the intermission. Thanks to Trader Joe's for donating the delicious apple cider. It was a smallish but engaged crowd, and briefly included, among others, Tucson City Councilwoman Nina Trasoff. Thanks for coming, Nina!

And thanks to everyone else who came out (no pun intended) on a Sunday night to help celebrate ten years of making a difference in the lives of LGBT-identified people in southern Arizona.

From Blogthings - What Kind of Kisser Are You?:

You're an Expert Kisser

You're a kissing pro, but it's all about quality and not quantity. You've perfected your kissing technique and can knock anyone's socks off. And you're adaptable, giving each partner what they crave. When it comes down to it, your kisses are truly unforgettable.

The latest Bizzaro development in the race for the U.S. Senate in Arizona, the Arizona Daily Star today endorsed Jon Kyl for re-election.

Their reasoning? Kyl's been in Washington for 20 years, so therefore he clearly knows what's best for Arizona. The editorial claims Kyl has delivered for Arizona, without providing many specifics. Of course, Jon Kyl is the same politician who bragged about NOT bringing home the bacon for Arizona.

I suspect this endorsement is the result of a lazy editorial board who just took the candidates at their word without doing any digging to find out if what they were told had any basis in truth. It also makes one wonder how much of an influence the Star's new hack political reporter, Daniel Scarpinato (a former very vocal college Republican at the UA), had in the endorsement process. The other possibility here is that Jim Pederson gave a piss-poor performance during his sitdown with the ed. board.

Pederson may be a weak candidate, but he'd be one hell of a great Senator, and much better than the sniveling, conniving liar we have right now.

I was supposed to go to the Tucson Roller Derby with my friend Hillary tonight, but she had to back out. Instead, we went to play poker at another friend's house. It was fun, but I was home by a little after 11 PM.

I totally want to do something else since it's so early yet, but there's not a whole lot of nightlife on my side of town. I was going to go see "Pi" at the Loft, but it started at 10. And I have no interest in seeing crappy shadow cast "Rocky Horror" at midnight.

I guess I'll just meditate and go to bed early. Tomorrow is the Wingspan Anti-Violence Project 10 Year Anniversary Celebration, "Unmasking Violence". For those out-of-towners, Wingspan is southern Arizona's LGBT community center. I sit on the AVP advisory board, so I'll be there for the whole time. Drop by and say hi. There'll be a costume contest! No word though on whether or not there will be bobbing for apples...

I just got in from seeing Live Theatre Workshop's production of Paula Vogel's "The Baltimore Waltz". I have mixed feelings about Vogel's work (she also wrote "How I Learned to Drive") because it's kind of masturbatory and pretentious. Overall, the production was decent and worth the $10 admission price.

Aside from some odd lighting shifts and one irritating costume SNAFU (why would you put a caucasian actor in an all-white costume and let him wear black chonis?), the technical aspects of the show were well put together. The directing was a little heavy-handed in spots and confusing in others. LTW is a pretty intimate space, which to me is an actor's dream because it allows for more subtlety. There were definitely places where I had to hold myself back from shouting back at the actors to tone it down. Still, there was certainly more nuance than I expected, and Vogel has an ear for comedy, so it was easily overlooked.

The story is a sort of "what if?" premise. Vogel wrote the play shortly after her brother died on AIDS-related illness in 1988. Two years earlier, he had invited her to tour Europe with him without telling her he was HIV positive. She didn't take the trip with him and was devastated when he died not long after. "The Baltimore Waltz" is Paula Vogel's ode to her deceased brother, and is a semi-autobiographical rewriting of the playwright's own personal history. It's definitely a bittersweet story but they thankfully avoided treking into the realm of the maudlin (for the most part). Defintitely made me think of my relationship with my sister and how close we used to be. And I suppose that's one of the strengths of live theatre: being reminded of how we're connected and human.

It was good to go to the theatre. I haven't been in a long time. I should do it more often. That degree in Drama that I earned ought to be good for something besides decoration on my wall. I'm also glad that I went out on a Friday night.

All in all, a satisfying way to start my weekend.

I attended (and was a sponsor of) the Open Inn Anniversary Luncheon at the Historic Manning House this afternoon. They provide services throughout Arizona to homeless and houseless youth throughout the state. Click the link above, learn more about 'em, and give 'em some love. They help young people transform their lives and reclaim their voices in Arizona communities from Flagstaff to Sierra Vista.

I get all kinds of interesting e-mail in my inbox these days from folks who want to spread the word about their candidate or issue. I guess people really do read blogs, even tiny, irregularly published local ones.

Anyway, I received an e-mail a couple of weeks ago and one again this morning about a new project by the AFL-CIO and ACORN called "Seven Days At Minimum Wage". It's a video blog (sound familiar?) starting Monday featuring seven people living (or trying to) on the minimum wage, which is $5.15/hour and hasn't been increased in ten years.

From the release:

ACORN and AFL-CIO originally launched the "7 Days" video blog in support of minimum wage ballot initiatives in Arizona, Colorado, Montana, Missouri, Nevada and Ohio. But we learned quickly that the lives of Americans living at legally permissible poverty wages have a hard-hitting, universal meaning for anyone, anywhere who believes in fairness and justice.

Roseanne Barr, a great supporter of community organizing, will host a new video each day from her Hollywood production facility, Full High Tide Studios. (Why Roseanne Barr? She's an ACORN member who mobilized voters in Ohio in 2004 and worked with members in New Orleans to rebuild neighborhoods--she's also a proud member of two labor unions, the Screen Actors Guild/SAG and the American Federation of Radio and Television Artists/AFTRA).

That's right, THE Roseanne. And apparently she's a blonde now.

Watching these videos is especially important for those of us who vote in Arizona, since Proposition 202 is on the ballot this year and would establish the state's first ever minimum wage seperate from the federal minimum. A yes vote for Prop 202 would make the state minimum wage $6.75/hour and index it to inflation annually, just as federal lawmakers' salaries are. $6.75/hour is still not a living wage, but it's a huge step in the right direction.

And contrary to the pants-wetting of the business community over this proposed raise for working families, businesses with an annual gross income of less than $500,000 a year would be exempt from paying their employees the more reasonable, higher minimum. Good luck competing for quality staff though when you're offering $1.60 less an hour! Walmart won't go out of business because of Prop 202 (damn!) but neither will the Mom and Pop store on the corner.

My favorite author, non-fiction short story writer David Sedaris, will be live at the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts on Wednesday. Unfortunately, his appearance is apparently sold out, and I'm not driving all the way up to Scottsdale if I'm just on a waiting list.

But all is not lost. In March, SCPA is bringing Elaine Stritch: At Liberty to Arizona. I REALLY want to see that. In fact, tickets to see ole Stritchie are all I want for my birthday AND Chanukah this year. The woman is an American treasure.

I posted about this last week or the week before, but John Cameron Mitchell's new film, SHORTBUS, opens in Tucson at The Loft Cinema on Friday, October 27 (a week from tomorrow). I'm planning to go see it on Saturday the 28th with some friends. You should join us.

Besides (or perhaps in spite of) the titilating subject matter, I really just love Mitchell's aesthetic and his talent for telling a story, especially stories that nobody else has the balls to tell. His process, while borrowing from several influences, is totally unique and revolutionary. He workshopped the entire movie, including the sex, using amateur and professional actors. That sentence does not do the process justice. You really should click the link above and read up on the movie.

And then join us on October 28th at The Loft (as long as you're 18 or older, so sayeth The Loft).

This is earth-shattering: Jeffrey just won Project Runway Season 3. It totally harshed my buzz. The guy's a prick and I have a visceral hatred of him. I'll shake my fists in the air at the humanity of it all.

A Northern Arizona University poll was released today showing Pederson down by 16 among 403 likely voters. That's an abysmally small sample in a state of more than six million residents. The margin of error for the NAU poll was +/- 5%.

Also today, SurveyUSA released its own poll of the race. Today's SUSA poll results show identical numbers from the poll they conducted a month ago, 48% to 43%. The sample size was only slightly larger than the NAU poll, with 474 likely voters surveyed and a margin of error of +/- 4/6%. Last month when these numbers came out, I posted about the confusing and counter-intuitive crosstabs that showed Kyl far outperforming Pederson in Tucson and Pederson slightly ahead in the Phoenix Metro area, among other areas of topsy-turvy-ness.

This month's crosstabs make much more sense. Pederson is now up by 5 in Tucson & South AZ (Cochise, Pima, Santa Cruz and Yuma Counties) and down by 5 in Phoenix Metro (Maricopa and Pinal Counties). He's down by 18 in the rest of the state, so that's clearly where some more work needs to be done. "Rest of AZ" is also the only region in which Kyl is above 50%.

Also interesting in this month's crosstabs is a "Generation" breakdown. I apparently still qualify as "Gen X". Who knew? Anyway, Kyl is ahead among "Gen Y", "Jones", and "Mature", with Pederson ahead among "Boomers" and virtually tied among "Gen X". I'm surprised that Kyl is doing so well among the younger voters. But what I'm most concerned about is Pederson's deficit among the "Mature" generation. Older voters ALWAYS vote, and Pederson has his largest deficit among them, where he's down by 16%, at 39% to Kyl's 55%. Jim's campaign needs to steal some thunder from that age cohort, and he can do it by going after Kyl's atrocious record on the Medicare prescription drug benefit and his support of privatizing social security.

There are clear openings for the Pederson campaign (he leads by a commanding 28% among "Hispanic" voters - 58% to 30%). I'm disappointed that SUSA did not include the abortion question in this month's crosstabs as they have in the past, now that Pederson opened up that issue with his very powerful and compelling ad (which has prompted me to donate to the campaign).

It does seem at this point that Jim's best chance will come on the ground both with early voting and on election day. And that makes me very nervous, given the GOP track record on GOTV and the AZ Democratic Party's so far very secretive "coordinated ground campaign".

I made a change to yet another setting and now I'm fairly confident that the vlog entries will be viewable by everyone. Thanks for the heads-up, Michele!

Comments welcome.

My friend Miriam just gave me a great idea. She was telling me about a colleague who e-mailed pictures of herself voting to her list. I thought it was a great way to show voter pride, especially since so many people are voting by mail this year.

So if you e-mail me a picture of yourself voting, I'll post it here on the blog. Just send your civic-minded photos to michael - at - m2powered - dot - com.

I'll make you a STAR, baby! But it won't happen unless you vote!

I just got in from Pride in the Desert, formerly OUToberFest, Tucson's version of a queer pride festival. I guess they decided to change the name this year because of all the other *-toberfests that seem to happen this month.

The major sponsor of pride this year, as it is in many other places, was a beer company. That's really problematic, as I think I mentioned in the last post. There were a lot of drunks at pride. I made a conscious decision not to drink just to feel moral superiority. That, and to avoid looking like an idiot. I did that last night. Also, Bud Light tastes like dirty ass. You don't want to know how I know that.

Seriously though, it was a decent-sized crowd and most everyone seemed to be having a good time. One of the featured performers, Kevin Aviance, is a recent hate crime survivor and he talked about his experience. I really appreciated that he talked about it and made the crowd think about hate violence against the LGBT community. It was refreshing after spending the last few years hearing about nothing but gay marriage. Marriage is not an issue that effects every member of the LGBT community; vulnerability to violence is. Some drunk lesbian tried to ambush Aviance for some reason, and he ended up having to stop his performance and address the disruption. It would be interesting to hear what her beef was.

Ultimately, I had to leave in part because it was getting too cold and in part because as I looked out over the crowd, I couldn't help myself from wondering how many sexual assaults were in store for the merry masses tonight. It's sick that that's all I couldn't shake that thought process.

I will have been in my field for six years in March. I think it's fair to say I'm ready for a change. Besides being burnt out, I've used the field as a crutch for avoiding personal growth for far too long.

So...know anybody who's hiring? (I've actually been applying at a fairly regular pace, but it doesn't hurt to put it out there)

I had a great time tonight at the Boys R Us Show at Club Congress to raise money for their upcoming trip to Austin, TX for the (I think) National Drag Competition. These Kings are consummate performers, and tonight's show was only enhanced by the participation of Ms. Ajia Simone and Ms. Janee Star, two of Tucson's most talented and entertaining drag queens.

The show was 80's-themed, which rarely misses the mark. I was supposed to go with some friends, several of whom realized later they had prior commitments. I went by myself but knew plenty of people there and enjoyed catching up with a few I hadn't seen in a while.

The song that brought the show out of intermission was a group rendition of "Footloose". I was sad that Michele and Sam weren't there. Sam's Kevin Bacon dance would have put those Kings to shame.

The show also made me nostalgic; not for the 80's (I would kill myself if I had to repeat that decade, which ironically is what I spent most of the end of it trying to do) but for a time in my life when I really thought critically about gender and studied it and explored it. I used to look at sex and gender in a much more radical way. I guess I still look at it in a radical way, but it seems so much more abstract now.

Somehow the daily focus on sexual violence has taken the passion out of sexuality.

Wow. Talk about your loaded statements. I'll let you mull that one over and deconstruct it while I go to bed and hopefully sleep away the possibly impending hangover.

The advice I received a couple of months ago has proven remarkably durable and transportable. I've been in a really great mood lately but it's been dampened a little the past few days by a relationship not quite working out the way I had hoped.

But instead of getting all depressed and bitter, I'm following that advice. "Just be" has become my mantra and it works. (I should give myself a little more credit - the Matthew Shepard anniversary is always very emotionally charged for me and I'm usually more than a little down around this time.)

So I'm going to meditate on my mantra and share it with the world.

Just be.

Just be.

Just be.

Just be.

Just be.

Today is the eigth anniversary of Matthew Shepard's death.

As you may recall, Matthew Shepard was the 21-year-old college student who was brutally beaten and tied to a fence on the Wyoming prairie by a pair of tweaking homophobes. Matthew's death was tragic, but it was also transformative.

Nothing before had captured the national consciousness and focused it on the profound violence forced upon the LGBT community every day. Matthew's murder merited a Rose Garden press conference by the President of the United States (just two years after he signed the Defense of Marriage Act and six years after he created the Don't Ask Don't Tell rule).

Now it's true that this story was so riveting in part because Matthew was an attractive, well to do young man who had a bright future ahead of him and Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, his murderers, were from the proverbial wrong side of the tracks. There are issues of racism and classism and sexism at play that made this case more visible than any of the anti-LGBT hate crimes that happen every day against people of color, poor people, lesbians and so on.

Matthew Shepard's murder wasn't just a transformative moment for the nation, it was personally transformative for me. I was a junior in college, had been identifying as bi for a couple of years, and was engaged to a limited degree in the LGBT community on campus and in the city of Ithaca.

When news of the horror of Matthew's beating came down, and later his death, I took a good hard look at my own life. I realized how vulnerable I was. Matthew was only a couple years older than me. We had a lot in common. He was much better looking and had a lot more resources. There were surely differences, but I did feel an incredibly deep affinity with this person I'd never met.

I realized how much hate is actually out there. I was angry. I was hurt. I was scared. But I was also empowered for the first time to be true to myself. Matthew Shepard's murder not only gave me the strength and courage to fully come out as gay (or queer, as I now identify), but it transformed me from a bystander to an activist.

Within weeks, I spoke in front of a campus-wide rally about Matthew and what his murder meant to us. Thousands of students, staff and faculty members (on a campus of roughly 5,000 undergrads) were galvanized to attend that vigil and rally.

Within a year, I was organizing the campus effort to establish a LGBT Resource Center on campus. I'm very proud to say that last week the Ithaca College Center for LGBT Education, Outreach and Services celebrated its fifth year of service.

During my sophomore year at Ithaca College, the Department of Theatre Arts put on a production of the musical Quilt, about the stories of the people behind the panels on the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. One of the vignettes features a mother singing (of course) about the hate crime murder of her gay son (he wasn't HIV positive, but the murderers assumed he was because he was with his boyfriend). The refrain of the song goes, "out of something terrible can come something beautiful." That's always stuck with me. And so it was with Matthew's murder.

Speaking of theatre, you should get your hands on a copy of Moises Kaufman's "The Laramie Project", an HBO film adapted from Kaufman's Tectonic Theatre Company creation of the same name about the way Matthew's murder affected the town in which it was committed.

Matthew's parents, Dennis and Judy Shepard, created the Matthew Shepard Foundation with a mission "to support diversity programs in education and to help youth organizations establish environments where young people can feel safe and be themselves." According to the Foundation website, "the Foundation focuses on three primary areas: Erasing Hate in our society, putting GLBT Youth First and ensuring Equality for all GLBT Americans."

If you ever get an opportunity to hear Judy Shepard speak, take advantage of it. She is powerful, moving and enlightening. Today she sent out a request to the Foundations supporters, on the eighth anniversary of her son's murder. Below is the start of that e-mail:

October 12, 2006

Dear Friend,

8 years ago today, hate in its most vicious form stole the life of my son Matthew. Sometimes it seems like only yesterday, but then I reflect on all of the progress that has been made since 1998 to erase hate in our society - progress made in part because of what happened to Matthew. That is why on this day each year, the Matthew Shepard Foundation seeks to do something proactive to keep the tide of positive change moving forward.

Today we are launching our National Get Out The Vote Campaign to encourage everyone in the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender (GLBT) and allied community to let their voice be heard and vote on November 7th. If Matthew were alive today, I know he would tell you:

REGISTER! LEARN! PASS IT ON! VOTE!!! STAY INVOLVED!

(snip)

Out of something terrible, we can all help make the world a little more beautiful on November 7. Go to the Foundation website and pledge to vote in Matthew's place, since he can't.

And then, of course, go out and vote on November 7.

From an article in today's Daily Star:

Drake said the poll showed him within six points, but [his pollster Margaret] Kenski said that description is inaccurate.

"The race was substantially farther apart than that," she said.

The gist is that when Drake paints Grijalva as a liberal, "the race would tighten up" according to Kenski. With a little more than five grand on hand, it'll be difficult for Drake to paint any large liberal murals across the wall that is the Grijalva juggernaut.

That's not stopping Drake, though. I have it on good authority that he's setting up meetings with Latino religious leaders and talking abortion with them. It sounded to me as though he's trying to enlist a small army of conservative Catholics who otherwise are part of Raul's sizeable base. The Grijalva camp is aware of this and I believe is acting accordingly.

Smart political move by Drake, but ultimately futile. He's a one-trick pony and clearly not ready for primetime. And all his touting of the growth of Avondale while he's been mayor? Isn't the half that's actually in CD7 actually less developed than the half that's not? Sound and fury signifying nothing indeed.

Today is National Coming Out Day. Coming out of the closet is a powerful personal and political act. I highly recommend it.

Later this year, I will celebrate ten years of being out (and, I suppose I'm obligated to add, fabulous). I'll tell that saga on my coming out anniversary.

I'll say this, though: my current Congressman, Jim Kolbe, and I both came out in the same year. He of course was forced out while I had the opportunity to come to have that revelation on my own. He was well into middle age and a powerful elected official representing southeastern Arizona. I was a naive, lonely college Freshman in upstate New York. He was a self-proclaimed "moderate" in a Republican party that was drifting far to the right. I was a registered Democrat with an intuitive but subliminal appreciation for progressive politics who grew up in a pretty conservative slice of New Jersey farm country.

I point all this out for no other reason than to establish that LGBT people come from every walk of life. We come out for many different reasons. But every time we come out (and it's not just once, it's a lifelong process), we make a powerful statement that we won't live in fear, that we will be true to ourselves, and that we are everywhere. Many of us who have been out for awhile forget this. Our sexual orientations and gender identities are just small pieces of our many-faceted lives.

In other words, I'm here, I'm queer, I'm over it. But at least I'm out.

The Star today published an updated story that includes the full text of Kolbe's statement from yesterday.

He is now contradicting some of what The Washington Post reported on Sunday. Very interesting.

Brief blurb in the Daily Star. No time to hunt down more info now. More later.

I downloaded a free conversion program and was able to resample the vlog avi's into an mp4 format with appropriate video frame rate to match the audio track. In other words, the vlog is now workable.

Here's the last entry, now fixed:

The Washington Post is reporting that Jim Kolbe (R-AZ8) was shown explicit e-mails from Mark Foley to a former page back in 2000. The article also says that Kolbe offered his house to former pages when he was out of town (I don't know if this is unusual or even untoward, but it is interesting). You really need to go read the Post article. The threads are slowly starting to unravel. The reporters for the Post and ABC News need to keep digging. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Expect even more explosive revelations in the days and weeks to come.

Hat tip to diarist pontificator at DailyKos.

For some reason, YouTube is truncating the vlog entries when I upload them. They're half the length on YouTube that they are when I record them. I'm working on it, but for right now you're only getting the first half of my clever wit and brilliant insight.

I think I screwed up a bit on the post below by confusing parts of prop 201 with prop 203. But the underlying point remains: do not use sexual violence (in this case the sex offender registry) to advocate for ballot propositions that have nothing to do with sexual violence. Punks.

Just caught a commercial for the tobacco company-backed effort to defeat proposition 201. Proposition 201, which is supported by the American Cancer Society, the American Lung Association and the American Heart Association, would ban smoking in all public places and raise taxes on cigarettes. That tax revenue would then be spent on early childhood education. In contrast, prop 206, which is backed by those tobacco companies, would be less restrictive and do nothing to reduce the smoking rate in the state.

So imagine my irritation at a couple of commercials that just urged a no vote on 201. The claim was that the tax on packs of cigarettes was a "ridiculous waste of taxes" for enforcing a smoking ban. This is misleading on its face. The tax is not for enforcement. The tax is to make it less economically feasible for people to be able to afford to smoke. It's an economic solution to a public health problem. We could debate the merits of this approach because it disproportionately effects people of lower economic means, and that debate would be fine and valid. But the way this was presented was totally misleading.

The ads also assert that the tax money could be better spent on school supplies for children or that the tax revenue is more than Arizona spends to track sex offenders. First of all, the tax revenue would be used for early childhood education, so that's the first lie. The other claim may be truthful, but don't you dare use the sex offender registry - or anything else related to sexual violence for that matter - to justify voting against a smoking ban that would improve public health. Oh hell no. No fucking way. That ad has just spurred me into action to make sure everyone I know votes FOR 201 and AGAINST 206. They just fucked with the wrong anti-violence advocate.

I am so excited about the release of John Cameron Mitchell's new movie I could just piddle myself. It hits the Loft Cinema here in Tucson on October 27.

This is the no-brainer prop to establish a state minimum wage of $6.75/hour. Current minimum wage in Arizona is the federal rate of $5.15/hour. $6.75 is hardly a living wage, but it's a start. From the press release:

CENTRAL TUCSON RALLY
WHO: CAMPAIGN CHAIR REP. STEVE GALLARDO
REP. DAVID LUJAN, LD-15
CAMPAIGN TREASURER ALICIA RUSSELL
COUNCILWOMAN KARIN UHLICH
AND MANY OTHERS
WHEN: SATURDAY, OCTOBER 7TH – 11:30AM
WHERE: MCCORMICK PARK
2950 N. COLUMBUS BLVD. RAMADA #3

SOUTH TUCSON RALLY
WHO: CONGRESSMAN RAÚL GRIJALVA
CAMPAIGN CHAIR REP. STEVE GALLARDO
REP. DAVID LUJAN, LD-15
CAMPAIGN TREASURER ALICIA RUSSELL
COUNCILMAN STEVE LEAL
AND MANY OTHERS
WHEN: SATURDAY, OCTOBER 7TH – 2:30PM
WHERE: SANTA ROSA CENTER
1080 S. 10TH AVE.

There are also rallies in Sierra Vista, Bisbee and Yuma on Sunday.

I'm working out the technical details, but I think I may soon have the capacity to embed video versions of posts in this here blog. Just think, soon you'll get my rants in full living color. You lucky devils. I know you're keeping your fingers crossed that I figure it out.

The old tried and true strategy of scapegoating gays when Republicans get into trouble is coming into play yet again. This time it's because Mark Foley came out after being outed as a pedophile. Some on the radical right almost seem gleeful in their pronouncements that all gays are perverts (and not the good kind). Among the reality-based community, we know that gross generalization is demonstrably false. This includes the American Academy of Pediatrics, which found:

The children in the group studied were unlikely to have been molested by identifiably gay or lesbian people.

Does it happen? Of course. But at the same rates as heterosexuals, who make up between 90% and 98% of the population.

As the radical right offensively and incorrectly tries to paint LGBT people and pedophiles with the same brush, there are a handful of individuals who have more of a moral responsibility than others to challenge them.

I was unable to find any statement on the Log Cabin Republicans homepage about the gross mischaracterizations about what former Congressman Foley did. They don't even need to comment on Foley or his actions. All I'm asking for is for them to stand up to the radical right and say emphatically that the language being used now by some in the conservative movement is false, offensive and dangerous.

(To be "fair", the National Stonewall Democrats website doesn't make any mention of this either, but they do prominently display a photo of their co-chairs with DNC chair Howard Dean. There is definitely no picture of Ken Mehlman with the chair of the LCR. That said, I've seen no Democrat trying to equate sexual orientation with child abuse. This is really a moral obligation of the LCR.)

Also conspicuously silent is Congress' only out gay Republican, our very own Congressman Jim Kolbe. There is nothing on his website urging more civil dialogue. Like the LCR, he needn't get into the Foley scandal itself. But he is in a position and has the moral authority to dispel the myths so gleefully being hurled by the right at the LGBT community. His lack of leadership on this issue leads one to ask, why the silence Congressman?

Taegan Goddard at Political Wire is reporting that ABC News' Brian Ross may be breaking stories soon on other members of Congress who "engaged in inappropriate behavior towards" pages. Where there's smoke, there's fire. Or more appropriately, where there's fire, there are other fires. Or something.

A few days ago, in my first post about the Foley mess, I wrote:

Though I am tempted to repeat rumor and innuendo, I will refrain from naming names here because I have no hard evidence to justify the claims I could very reasonably make based on the sources I have. I will say this: there needs to be some more digging throughout the House and Senate. I do not believe this is an isolated incident. Pedophiles generally cluster and find each other one way or another. And knowing now how the Republican leadership either ignored this or tried to cover it up, it does beg the question, who else might they be covering for? Sexual predation has no place in the United States Congress or anywhere else for that matter.

There is definitely something very rotten in the state of Denmark...

In watching some of the constant news coverage of the Foley affair (pun intended) and the House Republican leadership obvious cover-up, I remembered that Speaker Hastert's day job before he was first elected to Congress was as a teacher and wrestling coach.

Not for nothing, but coaches aren't exactly well-known for taking sexual violence seriously. Allow me to relate a tale from my high school days about one of my gym teachers:

In a health class (which were taught by the P.E. teachers), in what must have been the sex ed component, the teacher stated that he once came upon a group of his classmates in college raping a young woman.

Shocked, we asked, "what did you do?"

"I held down her legs," said he.

I'm ashamed to say I laughed back then, partially out of embarrassment, partially in shock, and yes, partially because I thought it was funny. I've learned a lot in the more than ten years since.

But my point is, that gym teacher was actually one of the more open male gym teachers at the school. His male colleagues were true neanderthals, as near as I can remember. My impression is that they were all more or less indicitive of their profession.

And so I have no reason to doubt that Speaker Hastert holds many of the same disaterous beliefs about the impact of sexual violence that my high school gym teachers did. Couple that with the uncompromising sense of entitlement that comes with holding the kind of power he holds, and it's no wonder he dismissed Foley's violence so handily.

Now for the record, I'm not saying all coaches are so clueless. But Hastert's history as a coach helps put his actions - and lack thereof - in some kind of context.

You absolutely must click on over and read the post at Booman Tribune by scribe called 'The Good Ol' Boys Club'. Here's a small sample:

These kinds of men know that "boys will be boys" and "men who will be men". They regard their right to exert their power over others as their due: a birthright bestowed to them along with their gonads.

Just go read the whole thing yourself. It's really good.

Hat tip to Man Eegee.