HoYay! brought the Visigoths at the Gates

-or-
"I wanna be noted for the fall of your Civilization! At the Gay Bar, Gay Bar, Gay Bar, Woo!"**

Interesting article on the otherwise-annoying-me-quite-a-bit-recently Slate today, reviewing James Davidson's "The Greeks and Greek Love." Author Emily Wilson goes over Davidson's "fascinating, meandering, funny, and thought-provoking study of how ancient Greek men loved one another." Observing the current state of things vis a vis gay marriage and the status of same-sex relationships, Wilson calls it

"a central problem for modern Westernized societies. Many countries allow same-sex couples the right to a "civil union" but withhold from them the name of marriage. The Netherlands was the first modern nation to legalize marriage proper for gay people, in 2001. Since then, seven U.S. states have also legalized gay marriages, although one, California, has just backtracked. On May 26, Californian lawmakers upheld a ban on same-sex marriages in the state... The ban is based on the idea that there is—or should be—something fundamentally different about sexual and romantic relationships between people of the same sex and those between a man and a woman. Since history is so often invoked, either implicitly or explicitly, on both sides of the debate, now is a particularly good time to look back at the history of same-sex relationships."

She goes on to say that the book

"ought to be required reading for anybody curious about the antecedents of the current impasse. [It] is a landmark study that challenges earlier historical interpretations of the evidence. For instance, [some] scholars... have argued that the Athenians were obsessed with anal sex, which they saw as an act of domination and humiliation. Davidson brilliantly shows that this interpretation is largely a projection on the part of modern historians, who have been reluctant to imagine a world where gay relationships could be expressions of love, affection, and appreciation, rather than deeply skewed power arrangements."

Observing Davidson's arguments on the Athenians ("same-sex relationships—which seem to have generally taken place between youths in their late teens and young men in their early 20s—were an important part of a boy's journey to manhood... [and] many men continued to be interested in "boys" even after marriage; happily married poet Sophocles and unhappily married philosopher Socrates both flirted with young men at drinking parties and caused no scandal in doing so. (The amazing thing about Socrates' sex life, according to Plato's Symposium, was not that he fancied the gorgeous Alcibiades but that he resisted having sex with him, even when snuggling under the same blanket"), Cretans ("Cretan rituals were equally strange, from an Athenian perspective..."), and Spartans ("In Sparta... a curious kind of sex seems to have been the custom between well-behaved men and chaste teenage boys. Apparently the lover was supposed to relieve himself only by rubbing against the boy's cloak: The cloak had to remain on at all times, as a sort of all-body condom"), I realized that I must have missed that part of The 300.

Of course, the funniest thing to me about the article (and somewhat exemplifying Slate's more-than-occasional breathtakingly tone-deaf and dumb contrarianism) is that it reminds me of a typical Slate contrarian years ago who was all "can't we have just ONE uber-violent movie with mainly manly men battling, oiled and sweaty, without just ASSUMING homoerotic tones?" To which I thought, sure, go ahead, but if I were you, I wouldn't take my stand on HoYay's inappropriate over-application and tie up the end of my mediocre article on the (lack of real) homoerotic undertones in action movies by talking about "The 300" and fucking SPARTA, where there actually WAS homoeroticism, you know, in the form of HOMOSEXUAL SEX. Not explicitly in The 300 itself, if I recall, but in that silly thing called "real life."

This being, after all, the same real life where two of Western Civilizations's most influential cultures, Greece and Rome, had common and rather accepted forms of gay love and managed to, oh, form the rhetorical and historical basis for much of modern Western society. (Not to mention the many celebrated philosophers we so often cite in our paeans to reason or democracy who, at the very least, batted for both teams, and of course that historical war juggernaut, Alexander the Great.*) But, I'm sure Rome's eventual fall was probably due to a lack of heteronormative "family values."






*"Alexander the Great, just steaming through Persia; took out Darius the 3rd as we all know. And then he ran on... and after a while his army's going, 'Hang on. Alex, I think we lost 'em. You know, I don't know where we live any more, and we've killed most of the people we've met. So would you just like to chill out.' And Alex is going, 'Look, I'm 32, I'm gay, I'm on a roll. Let's go!' On you go."

**

Touchdown!!!!!

Big gay touchdown that is. And by touchdown, I mean Prime Minister. And by big, I mean Icelandic. And by gay, I mean gay.

Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir has, apparently, become the world's first openly gay head of government.*

Yay! It's a year -- um, or at least, a year-long period going back to last November -- of firsts.




*For pure confusionary fun, try to distinguish head of government and head of state. I keep reading the wiki entries, and the distinction keeps falling out of my head.

James Baldwin: Your Must-Learn-About for Black History Month

Listening to my backlogged Democracy Now! podcast, an excellent hour discussing James Baldwin, gay African-American novelist, writer, playwright, poet, essayist, and civil rights activist. His Wikipedia entry is here.

A boy last week—he was sixteen—told me on television—thank God we got him to talk, maybe somebody was taught to listen—he said, “I’ve got no country, I’ve got no flag.” And he’s only sixteen years old. And I couldn’t say, “You do.” I don’t have any evidence to prove that he does.

And the moment you were born, since you don’t know any better, every stick and stone and every face is white, and since you have not yet seen a mirror, you suppose that you are, too. It comes as a great shock, around the age of five or six or seven, to discover the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to discover that Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, when you were rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians were you. It comes as a great shock to discover the country, which is your birthplace and to which you owe your life and your identity, has not in its whole system of reality involved any place for you.

--James Baldwin, in Cambridge debating William Buckley, also seen in the documentary The Price of the Ticket, written and directed by Karen Thorsen.

If the people of this nation are not capable of true self-evaluation, this nation may yet become one of the most distinguished monumental failures in the history of the world. People imagining their history flatters them, as it does indeed, since they wrote it, they are impaled on that history, like a butterfly on a pin, and become incapable of seeing or changing themselves or the world. Now, this is the place in which, it seems to me, the most white Americans find themselves: impaled. The do not know how to release themselves from it and suffer enormously, see, from that resulting personal incoherence. See, they are dimly or vividly aware that the history they have fed themselves is mainly a lie, alright?

Now, the one person who released us all from that suffering—I met on that blood-red soil of Atlanta, Georgia, Dr. Martin Luther King. He told me, he says, “Jimmy, segregation is dead.” And I replied, “Yes. But just how long and how violent and how expensive of a funeral is it going to be?"

--Calvin Levels, portraying James Baldwin, on Democracy Now!, December 7, 2007.

A fantastic edition of Democracy Now!, a fantastically interesting and important person to learn about, a man with a fantastic cadence, diction, and pose. An incredible early advocate for civil rights, for blacks and homosexuals. A last quote from him that applies as well to the J Continuum:

"Look, I love America more than any country in the world, and it is exactly for that reason that I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. Anyway, that’s all I have to say about that."

Headline, January 21, 2009

I've just received this from Future J (a conceit I'm stealing from Marc Maron of the late, justly lamented Air America's "Morning Sedition").

Headline, Washington Post, Rush Edition, January 21, 2009

MARRIED, GAY IMMIGRANT TERRORISTS NUKE NEW YORK WITH BOMBS MADE OF HIDDEN STORES OF RADIOACTIVE IRAQI CIVILIANS

Ex-President Bush: "I told the American People that if they voted for Democrats, the terrorists would win."

In a stunning refutation of the yet-to-be-enunciated Democratic Agenda of the incoming Jack Johnson Administration, the warnings of his most recent predecessor have all come true in one fateful day.

The day after the inauguration of President Johnson, New York City was annhilated in a "nucular" holocaust, killing millions. The all-male crew of terrorists, who had strapped a nuclear bomb to a tanker headed into New York Harbor, were reportedly seen holding hands and kissing each other on the lips as they praised God and delivered their lethal package. Their nuclear weapon is thought to have been procured from Iran, and fashioned from radioactive Iraqi citizens.

These kissing brown men had taken the jobs, formerly held by good, hard-working white Americans, as crew on the hardy oil tanker, the SS Not Named After Condi Rice. It is rumored that matching gold bands were seen on each of the several terrorists' left fingers before it hit -- authorities think these may have been matching wedding bands. This apparently polygamous all-male married crew bears out the predictions of another recently defeated Republican: Rick Santorum, former Senator from Pennsylvania. He memorably compared gay marriage to beastiality, sodomy, incest, and polygamy, insisting one would lead to the next.

Then-Senator Santorum was quickly and thoroughly ridiculed by press outlets on the Left, including Jon Stewart's parody news show, "The Daily Show." The Daily Show sketch included signage with symbols indicating two married men, an equal sign, and a mockup of a stick-figure man copulating with a turtle to indicate "man-on-turtle action." It's not yet known if any of the gay, male, brown, Allah-worshipping terrorists had actually married or had carnal knowledge of any poikilotherms.

President Johnson insisted that the incinerated former residents of New York City would still have supported his campaign bid had they known the costs. "Freedom is messy," he said, channeling former Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld. "And I had promised them more tax cuts."

In the past few hours, staff of ex-President Bush have publicly posed the question, "Is it truly a coincidence that these horrible men, these, these, married and GAY haters of America... [were] immigrants fluent in French and Mexican, two languages that [President Johnson] also speaks?"

President Johnson has said he has "No comment," on this question.

..................

Preliminary evidence implies that the attackers entered the country illegally through Canada's Quebec province, posing as Mexican laborers and taking advantage not only of the "Immigration Reform" passed by the Democratic Congress, but also of education improvements in charter schools ushered in by "No Child Left Behind," a program with an until-now successful legacy under Mr. Bush. Although millions of children were left with no education as failing public schools closed and programs steeply slahsed at those remaining, thousands of rich children were "carried ahead" by the "Left Behind" program in what some have called a "qualified success." Several of the terrorists apparently attended an exclusive private Baptist school, one of many that sprang up with government funding during Mr. Bush's 2nd "lame-duck" term. These exclusive schools have consistently turned out excellent students, providing what many say is "complete vindication of the [NCLB Act]." But perhaps in this case, the question we must ask is rather, "Is our terrorists learning?"

President Johnson has also said this morning that he was calling for the summary and indefinite detention of all Mexicans, Arabs, and "funny looking peoples, you know with those hats, or wraps, or really dark skin". He has already signed a bill passed by Congress five minutes after the attack, allowing anything up to measures as seen in the movie "Saw III" to be used on potential terrorists for interrogation purposes. "That movie was sick," he said, "And so are the terrorists. The terrorists -- and the writers of Saw III -- will never stop trying to think of new ways to sicken, repulse, and terroriize the people of the United States. And neither will we."

President Johnson added, "We do not and will not torture. We will only 'Saw III'-ize illegal enemy combatants, which clearly falls within the Geneva Conventions as I interpret them, or at least the Cliffs Notes version I've read." Democrats on Capitol Hill widely applauded the move, admitting they had neither read the bill nor seen the movie, but pointed out that there is no specific prohibition in the Geneva Conventions about "Saw III-izing" illegal enemy combatants on Tuesdays and Thursdays of every month after 5 pm in technically sovereign countries whose land we rent for $1 a year under duress.

Meanwhile, the question of how the terrorists got hold of fissile material appears to have an unexpected answer: Iraqi nuclear stocks. Though it has become accepted conventional wisdom that the previous administration erred in its insistence that the Iraqis had a nuclear program, it appears that here again they have been vindicated. Apparently, Saddam Hussein had been collecting citizens and casualties from previous American assaults on Iraq. Many of these victims of "collateral damage" had apparently picked up enough radiation from exposure to American depleted uranium munitions to be useful as nuclear "starter kits". Reportedly, thousands of Iraqi civilians had to be processed to gather enough material for the bombs -- nonetheless putting lie to the idea that Iraq did not have nuclear capabilities.

Processing of Iraq's nuclear citiznes was carried out under the aegis of Brown & Root, through a contract Iraq had signed with Halliburton prior to the 1991 invasion, and sub-contracted to the Iranian government via the shell company "ChummyRummy and ZanyCheney's Happy People Processing Labs Initiative." President Johnson's staff has indicated that he may endorse another nuclear attack on Iran, "Just to be sure the rubble and bystanders left over from President Bush's War on Iran will never pose a threat to us. If we don't nuke them there, then we will have to nuke them over here."

***

"Every single thing my administration said, we meant," commented the former President Bush the Second. "Even the contradictory parts. But I can only hope that, maybe now, and I think they will, the Democrats will realize that the only way to win this fight is through resolve, relentless and indiscriminate killing of people in other countries, unlimited executive power, lying, lower taxes, lying, and not having to see gay men touching each other, or even think about it gay men touching each other."

"Only then," he said, "Will we truly be free."