Tag: Gay Lesbian and Bisexual

Tanja Grunert Gallerist

Post author By Duncan Roy
Post date November 7, 2015

The rain, interminable. Cats and dogs. Great lakes puddle over the marshy back land. Ominous clouds scud over the Hudson Valley. Tom the gardener ploughs trenches down hill, unplugging the dams. Thirty years of fallen oak leaves dredged from soggy trench and damned culvert. Branches thrown over the fence into the once vacant lot by lazy neighbours, removed. A scribble of dead bramble, removed. Now, on the northern perimeter, a pile of rotting vegetation – we might have burned on November 5^th if we lived somewhere sensible.

However.

“There’ll be no bonfires in the village.” She said. The woman at the Mayor’s office. So. No wood smoke drifting over sparkling, frosty fields, no Guy Fawkes. No baked potatoes wrapped in scalding tin foil found amongst the dying embers.

I call friends in Los Angeles, they ask smugly if I’m prepared for the winter. They have no idea. Windows, insulation, boiler… thick curtains thankfully saved from other draughty, Victorian mansions. The winter months do not scare me. Come winter, come freeze the air, let the first snow fall.

How many pairs of gloves will I lose this year?

I am happy in Tivoli, so are the dogs. They chase squirrels, rabbits and deer.

The Little Dog has been skunked twice. Good God! The second time I took him to the vet, where they washed him with some magical solution. Better than being savaged by coyote or bitten by a rattlesnake… I suppose, cheaper to remedy. He’s such a brave, curious, foolhardy Little Dog.

Dude hasn’t been skunked once, he hangs back from anything mildly threatening. He learned to climb the steep stair in the new house, laboring one step at a time he finds us in bed then dances on two legs until I fetch him up.

I drive my old Mercedes into Hudson once a week. It’s a lovely town to visit but I hated living there. I hated it. Frighteningly, I can’t remember the name of the road where I lived. Let me remember. Bellview, Fairview… PROSPECT! Prospect Avenue, Hudson, NY.

So many irrelevant details scrubbed from the hard drive. I will never forget that house. That vile, ‘English Tudor’ house on the optimistically named Prospect Avenue. Overlooking the hospital; and a busy, dirty road. The worst place (by far) I ever lived. Badly designed, badly renovated, so badly insulated: incapable of keeping heat in the winter or cool in the summer.

The house was haunted, not by angry ghosts moving things around or waiting in the corner… but melancholy, lonely women, dragging themselves up and down the stairs. Most evident, the ghost of an elderly school teacher who spent twenty years peering from the sitting room window, equally scaring and delighting passing school children like a Halloween ghoul.

The house attracts lonely women.

Tanja Grunert, the current owner, is the last of a long line.

So, I dedicate this blog post to her. To lonely Tanja whose life is more treacherous than a Hudson pavement in mid January.

The night I met Tanja she was wearing a huge black and white fur coat. Like a skunk.

A short, stocky woman, she wears baggy jeans and tailored jackets. Her cropped, gray/mauve hair… cut hard around her masculine, pudgy face. A smear of red lipstick, the only evidence she might be a heterosexual woman.

The night we met (by accident over steaming bowls of Asian broth) I should have run away.

Sadly, I have never had the resolve to run from a catastrophe. As the towers came down I ran toward them. There is something immediately alluring about Tanja, something fascinating. From the moment we met I was hooked. Some people are. I’ll not be the first and I won’t be the last. She crafted a first class art world career from a scintillating first impression.

That night Tanja focused her all on me, seducing and melting… gasping and fluttering, roaring her huge laugh. After dinner she invited us to the house… that house.

Much later I understood the only time she threw back her head, roaring that infectious laugh, was used as part of a sinister, well rehearsed routine. A carefully constructed formula.

We discovered we had many people in common, Jay Jopling, Samia Saouma and Benedict Taschen.

She told me how beautiful I was. Told me I was her ‘type’. I was clear about my sexuality, “I am a gay man.” I said, as she coquettishly batted her eyelashes, grabbed hold of my hand, inviting us back to her cold, empty house. “Oh I’m so sorry.” She bows deeply into every apology. She is a committed apologist. “English is my second language.” During our cohabitation I must have heard her say a million times, “Excuse me if I don’t understand.”

It was a lie. I knew from the beginning she understood everything very well. Yet, I chose to ignore her lies. I chose to ignore, that cold winter, her lies, her homophobia, her racism, her alcoholism and her delusion.

Tanja is an alcoholic. She is the kind of binging alcoholic who convinces herself that because she doesn’t drink in the morning she doesn’t have a drinking problem…. but she drinks in the morning. She is the kind of alcoholic who convinces herself that because she doesn’t drink alone she isn’t an alcoholic… yet, she drinks alone. She is the kind of alcoholic who convinces herself that she isn’t an alcoholic because she doesn’t black out and wet the bed…

She drank wine by the bottle, chain-smoked cigarettes; listened to opera so loudly on her record player that good conversation became impossible. Drowning in Wagner, drowning not waving, into misery.

That night, my first visit to her house, she lit a fire in the huge, totally empty sitting room. Her husband was gone. He had taken flight that summer. Taking with him the money (his fathers) and the possibility. She told him: “You cannot come to the house in Hudson.” He said, “You can’t have money to furnish it.”

I said: “You have an empty house and I have furniture.” She said “Yes!” immediately.

Listen for a moment. Stand back. Re-read my offer and tell me what could possibly go wrong?

Obviously it was terrible mistake. Half measures avail us nothing. I had no right making a deal with this devil. She started texting and calling all day and all night. She would introduce me to her friends as her boyfriend or her husband. She’d tell everyone who would listen that she loved me. I was living in the East Village. We had dinner in the city. Tanja tried making me pay for her expensive wine habit… I refused.

Instead, I moved in.

So began a slow, interminably slow, head on collision. Two cold, stubborn alcoholics buckling, catastrophically into one another. I spent nearly a year at the house, firstly because I was entranced… then the doors began to slam behind me. The furniture arrived and she took what she wanted from my things. “Each thing more beautiful than the last.” She cooed.

My Gary Hume disappeared.

Because she is an unapologetic racist she made me hide my African art because black people do not interest her. They make her ‘think of slavery’. They ‘make me sad’. “I would never sleep with a black man.”

She buys five tickets for the Bjork concert but can’t find anyone to come with us. Finally she invites people who barely know her. They say, “I don’t know her at all.” At the will call she’s told very clearly that her tickets are being exchanged for better tickets. Tanja starts screaming. Screaming at everyone. Kicking the theatre. I stand back and watch her disgusting spectacle. I take the tickets, tell her to shut the fuck up, lead her into the theatre. We take our excellent seats at the front of the theatre.

Shocked by her behavior we walk in silence back to the car after the event, unable to discuss Bjork like normal people. Like the normal people around us, happy and grateful to have seen Bjork. Her tantrums, her temper, her screaming, her crying fits of righteous outrage and indignation became so regular I learned to ignore them.

The winter was long and hard and cold. Minus 23 degrees. Unheard of upstate New York. I found myself held hostage by the masculine German woman in the unfriendly house.

She refused to fill the oil tanks. The house froze. The pipes burst. The tiles fall from the bathroom walls. I fill the oil tanks myself, ferrying 10 gallon cans from a filling station five miles away.

The chaos, her unmanagability became easier when the sun began to shine.

Spring came suddenly this year. The original deal she reneged. She wanted money. Always desperate for cash. Another good idea blown into a million pieces. I handed it over.

Her grasping, fat fingers. Her solid, bruised, Teutonic arms quaffing wine, passing out, laying naked on her bed until she leaks yellow stinking piss all over herself. Naked on her bed, not sleeping but unconscious. Laying like the dead waiting for the autopsy, naked on her back. Acres of white flesh. “We are always naked.” “We always talk to ourselves.” “We only eat from Fish and Game.”

She tells everyone that an important publisher has commissioned an auto-biography. She says that the money will come.

“We only write in the kitchen.”

“We hate mood lighting.”

She spends hours under the harsh light at the kitchen table tapping on her keyboard, claiming to write a book some grand publisher might (or might not) have commissioned. She says she’s researching but she’s on the internet trying to fill the consuming void her younger husband left when he scarpered last June. Filling the gaping, suppurating wound with Internet dates on match.com, okcupid and other… less salubrious sites. She shows me a thousand pictures of penis she has been sent.

Her less sexually ambitious female friends think she is a pioneer. This old queen knows she is a lonely, sleazy woman on the cusp of suicide. In and out of Belleview. Unable to accept the truth. Popping pills. She is poor, illegal and single.

Gay men seldom share the cache of penis we’ve been sent on line. Maybe the largest or the smallest. Maybe the most beautiful. She indiscriminately shows me every one. She wants me to know she is still relevant, that her menopause hadn’t knocked her through a hoop. (Like Samia before her.) But her boast falls on deaf ears. I look at her poker faced, disguising the pity I have for her.

There’s a young art dealer in town with a cool gallery, I buy art, he delivers the art to the house. He knows who she is. Curious to see where Tanja lives, he is surprised that the house is so clean. He expects to see a mountain of empty bottles. He tells me that she owes everyone money, him included.

“There’s a joke art dealers tell each other. They laugh about how long they’ve been in the art business. They say, I’ve been selling art so long… I remember when Tanja Grunert was hot.”

I reserved the most sympathy for her children who instinctively knew how selfish, self-obsessed and self pitying she and her ex husband are. Both so eager to flee from her, like the men she meets on-line. A French man meets with her and tells me “Within a few minutes of phone conversation she offers to lick my ass.” to be his toilet. When he meets with her he says he could not fuck her because fucking her would be like “Fucking grandma.”

After meeting him she text messages twenty times an hour. She sobs, howls… when it becomes apparent that he is not interested in her. She wrings her hands and bangs her head into the wall, she blames everyone for her distress.

She meets another man and calls at 1am to ask where they can find a woman for some three way. I terminate the call.

Her teenage daughter watches as every man her mother meets on the internet lets her down. Steals what little she has left. She has learned to keep quiet. She is biding her time, waiting for the day she can turn her back on them all.

Tanja boasts that during her second pregnancy with the girl she was high on cocaine, drunk on alcohol every day for the first trimester.

Her insufferable, precocious, entitled, blue-eyed son lives with us for the summer. He leaves chaos and mountains of trash infested, after a few hot days, with maggots. He said, “You are the room mate, you must clean up after me.” I refuse.

I video the mess and send it to his mother. He is now at an expensive college in SF exploring his homosexuality, thankfully a long way from his gentle, yielding girlfriend who was often heard plaintively asking the teenager why he needed to hurt her to express his love.

The boy barely conceals his contempt for the girl. Like his mother, like his father, like his grandmother. Generational dysfunction. Violence. Violent to others, violent to herself, Tanja told me her husband would beat her in the bedroom. Not because he loved her… because he hated her. The provenance of the son’s fledgling misogyny evident for all to see.

The son drinks until he passes out. Naked on his bed. His father drinks himself into a black out… she wets the bed. I could smell the piss before I saw it.

Her son wants to stay with me at the hotel. I cling to the edge of the bed. As far as I can from his yearning adolescence. Tanja wants to know why he is so interested in me.

For all of her gay friends, she is an unapologetic homophobe. She makes sneering jokes about ‘Your side’ and ‘Your people’ she tells me that I am ‘No use’ to her. They are not jokes, they are evidence of her deep-seated homophobic resentment. For all the extraordinary gay men she surrounds herself, delighting them with her drama… she hates gay men. We are good for loans and art purchases. We loyally turn up at the hospital every time she half-heartedly overdoses.

When I brought that beautiful boy Spencer home, she asked if he was my boyfriend, then slandered me in German. My school boy German catches every word.

Gay men know this: we all know that those determined to kill themselves rarely fail. The rest, like Tanja, merely crave the attention: cosseted in hospital beds, prescribed medicine, given the benefit of the doubt.

The gays around her provide the Greek entertainment. The chorus. Picking up the pieces.

At dawn, when she finally let me sleep. Before she falls into her bed, Tanja became sexually abusive. When we are on our own, if I’m the only person in the house she focuses her sexual violence on me. Keeping me awake until dawn, drinking and smoking. Trying to touch me.

When, at the end, I mention that she is sexually harassing me and I could sue her… she smiles a smile only a torturer could have smiled and I saw very clearly into her rotten, stinking soul. She looked like the devil. I saw the devil smile. I will never forget that smile, for it was quite unlike anything I had seen before.

In the morning, by way of apology, she reminds me again that her mother had abused her. That she had hidden from the Nazis by living in a box under a mill, like a fairy-tale troll. After the war her mother had children and beat them. This was the excuse she gave for abusing me.

The same excuse. Again and again.

Excuses: excuses not to pay her artists, why the house would freeze and the pipes would burst. Excused for not having insurance when Sandy hit Manhattan and filled her Chelsea gallery with raw sewage. Excuses for not paying her taxes, for not bothering to renew her visa. Excuses why she never made a better job of killing herself. Excuses and apologies. One after another. A crocodile of dead infants snaking their way to hell.

After my painful pancreas operation, drowsy on meds she made me drive to the bank, fetch her $3000 and then punches me when I burst into tears. She apologizes immediately; she tells me that she was abused by her mother. It’s too late. The summer is coming to an end. I hate her with such vigor. I hate being near her, I hate her voice, her smell, her proximity.

We drive back to the gallery where an angry artist is waiting for cash. Arms crossed.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t understand.” She pleads with the angry artist.

At the end of August I empty the house of my possessions and I am free. 8 months of hell finally comes to an end. I move to Tivoli.

Even after I am gone she demands money. I have learned not to respond or engage. A good lesson in restraint of pen and tongue.

Tags Arts, Gay, Gay Lesbian and Bisexual, New York, Tanja Grunert, United States

Gay NYC Queer Travel

Provincetown Changes

Post author By Duncan Roy
Post date June 9, 2014

Gay men in Los Angeles told researchers that they believed a culture that focuses on one-night stands and partying, that emphasizes perfect bodies and good looks, that prizes material possessions, that sees gay men tearing each other down as they compete for attention and that pressures gay men to fit in or conform is bound to create unhappiness, stress and unhealthy behaviors.

The word on the street in gay resort/haven Provincetown? The straights are coming, they are coming thick and fast, young affluent heterosexuals buying property, renting holiday apartments and day tripping. I was reassured by a cool, 31-year-old, straight person yesterday that this was the heterosexual ‘tipping point’. Of course (if true) the reasons are obvious. The older more affluent crowd of gay men and lesbians who bought affordable homes here twenty years ago are simply not that interesting to a less ghettoized younger gay crowd who go to Fire Island or Mykonos where a good gay thumping time is assured, where they can find an affordable share for the summer… anyway, the drag is so much better the closer you get to NYC.

Young straight men and women who used to actively avoid hanging in gay ghettos… or felt uncomfortable no longer have any reservation. This, my dears is one of the more unexpected changes that comes with ‘integration’. Our gay communities, gay clubs and gay bars will dilute as we become more heteronormative.

How do the gays feel about straight people buying into the gay and lesbian ghetto dream? I hear grumblings from some, but what can they say? We can’t restrict straight people from joining the party? Before the great shift, the Obama ‘evolution’, the Blair/Mandleson equality bill I would regularly challenge straight people who came to our clubs and bars, wondering why they were there… if they understood why gays and lesbians created safe spaces for themselves… now apparently we all live in a safe space… together.

If the war is won do we abandon the notion of a safe space, a gay bar, an LGBTQ community? Is that what we were fighting for? As it turns out, gay men are still living shameful and secretive lives… safely hidden from prying eyes. No longer behind the blacked out windows of the gay bar but on the internet where we can fully reinvent ourselves as muscle-bound avatars, 10 years younger than we really are.

The gay bar, meanwhile… becomes a themed experience for enlightened neo-liberal heterosexuals. After all, gay men don’t need to meet one another in real life when we can meet on-line, reducing our interaction before a sexual encounter to the barest possible exchange of relevant facts. Hung? Looking? Party?

The same heterosexual land grab is happening in the Fire Island Pines gay community. Straight people are buying and renting homes at a faster rate than gay people. Of course… the truth is, we never really owned the lions share of Fire Island Pines… it was always owned by straight people. Three heterosexual families who control The Pines real estate market.

In San Francisco‘s iconic gay area The Castro we are facing extinction in our natural habitat, bought out/selling out to silicone valley billions. What are we left with? Our sad LGBT ‘pride’ parade: a blinded corporate-sponsored dinosaur serving only the breweries and distilleries, no longer a political defiance… no longer worth a pilgrimage by those newly out yearning to see gays en masse… the gay parade and all it seeks to celebrate merely adds to our woes, confirming the worst about who we have become.

How long will it take for Provincetown to lose its unique identity and become just another Cape Cod town? The Pines, just another beach community on Fire Island? How long will it take for our history to be lost, forgotten or ignored by apathetic gay white men who have no interest in those who came before? The heroes who fought decades of violent oppression, the ‘gay plague’, who demanded equality… how long will it be until their names are erased?

Do you know who they are? Harvey Milk… and…

The politics of invisibility.

As the quality of our lives collectively ‘improves’, as we ‘integrate’ due to the passing of progressive equality laws why are we still facing a crisis? Why do gay men continue to struggle with life-threatening health problems at alarmingly high rates compared to straight men — alcoholism, drug abuse, depression, suicide, and sexually transmitted diseases.

Gay and bisexual men are still most impacted by HIV/AIDS and syphilis, they suffer higher rates of substance abuse, they are more likely to drink heavily later into life, and they are more likely to commit suicide and suffer major depression and anxiety and bipolar disorders.

Gay men with mental health problems are more likely to use illegal drugs and commit suicide. Or regularly using drugs and alcohol can lead to risky sexual behavior, which increases the likelihood of getting infected by an STD.

Our health problems, in other words, are feeding into each other, we’re literally killing ourselves through suicide, substance abuse and HIV/AIDS at higher rates than straight men. Let’s say that again: We are killing ourselves at higher rates than straight men through suicide, substance abuse and HIV/AIDS.

Some gays are quick to point to the stresses of living as a gay man in an overwhelmingly straight world — one that passes anti-gay laws and constantly spews homophobic rhetoric — as a reason for mental health and substance abuse problems. With that argument, they are coming very close to saying that we are powerless victims who have little control over our own lives and choices, that homophobes have more power over us.

That’s a ridiculous notion — lethal and self-defeating.

Since homophobia still exists and is not going away any time soon, the victim theory, if embraced, dooms us to a life of external, homophobic stressors that forces us to drink too much, commit suicide too frequently and get depressed too often.

The quote is from the LA Weekly. You can read it HERE.

Tags Fire Island, Fire Island Pines New York, Gay bar, Gay Lesbian and Bisexual, Gay Men, Heterosexuality, LA Weekly, LGBT, Los Angeles, Massachusetts Provincetown, Mykonos, Provincetown, San Francisco, Sexually transmitted disease, straight men

Alcoholics Anonymous Gay NYC Queer

Fire Island Pines to Provincetown June 2014

Post author By Duncan Roy
Post date June 6, 2014

Go, then! Then go to the moon-you selfish dreamer!

I left Fire Island on Wednesday. Driving north with my Persian friend Iliad. The clouds were low, the air muggy and thick. We took the ferry from Orient Point to New London. There was a British aristocrat on the ferry stitching needle point. Beautiful raspberry and pistachio coloured yarn.

My intention is to return to Fire Island… maybe…. next month. The last couple of days blighted by torrential rain and chilly winds. Friends came, David visited from NYC for the day and Lorne made an appearance but mainly to fetch his forgotten/lost bag.

May proved to be chillier than I remember. Memorial Day and the biscotti queens came and went. John, the owner of the house arrived and made everything broken… work. I cooked a huge dinner and he and his friends the Scots seemed to love it. Andrew from Dover Street Market swept in wearing incredibly chic pants. John baked Halibut en cocotte.

During the week those of us who stayed were thrown together at the Canteen (I think they call it The Cultured Elephant). It’s true when they say one makes gay acquaintances in the city and gay friends on Fire Island. I got to hang with the resort staff who are genuinely the sweetest, most handsome men… see the pictures above. They have a grueling season ahead of them: working the bars, the clubs, the hotel and the restaurants. Only the most robust will survive. It’s a tough, unforgiving business serving entitled, demanding gay men. The day before I headed North one of the newbies left the island in tears, torn apart by gay unreasonableness.

I met Joey the little person who is a particularly inspiring soul. I was in awe of his ability to be the hugest man in his little body. He has a captivating story.

Everyone has a Fire Island Pines story. There are love affairs and breakups, tears on the boardwalk and fights in the elegant cedar homes. There are couples and thruples and orgies, there are undignified old men last gasping for their youth. Wide eyed first timers arrive on the ferry, amazed such a place as Fire Island Pines exists. I remember the day, the first day Joe-Baily brought me to Fire Island 25 years ago. I will never forget it.

Everyone has a story. I was told one hundred times by stick thin youths they were too fat or not pretty enough to meet the man of their dreams. They told me boys talk to them in real life like they do on Grindr. “Hung?” as an opening gambit. “Party?” “Looking?” The single word pick up. So lazy and charmless. I did not envy them, these young boys… so far from serenity. Of course, not all young gay boys are wracked with self-doubt. I met young gay men who were comfortable and confident and conquering all… whilst the vulnerable fell by the wayside or let old men blow them at the dick dock.

There’s a degree of gay anarchy on the island. Every one of the local laws are broken every day by almost everyone.

The AA meetings are vile. The recovering alcoholics looking down their nose at those who drink and take drugs. I met a dozen gay men, once sober who now drink… taken out by a beautiful boy and a meth pipe.

One story particularly moved and disturbed me. A grey eyed, erudite black boy no more than 28 years old who works for a renowned artist. We met on the beach. He described his Fire Island experience, embarrassed to tell me he had encountered a great deal of racism during his time at The Pines. There are few black people on Fire Island and now I know why.

We finally made it to P’town. I had dinner with Benoit the night I arrived, we ate fish and chips. The ex-gay story he wrote for the New York Times Magazine is now a film produced by Gus Van Sant, starring James Franco and Zachary Quinto. I’m very proud of him. Except… it’s another entirely white cast. Why? Why? Why?

Yesterday, a local fisherman brought two pounds of freshly caught lobster knuckles. We shucked for dinner.

The dogs loved Fire Island. They miss it! Dude and The Little Dog bounding up the boardwalk, chasing rabbits and deer. They are a little more restricted here even though we live directly on the beach and they are allowed to walk unleashed. Today we walked a mile or so to the West End and visited the pier shack where Tennessee Williams wrote The Glass Menagerie on a stolen type writer.

My favorite and the most obviously poignant Tennessee Williams line from The Glass Menagerie:

I didn’t go to the moon, I went much further… for time is the greatest distance between two places.

Which made me think momentarily about Jake Bauman who I kinda owe my love of both Cape Cod and the Catskills. Both of whom he introduced me. If he hadn’t mentioned them with such fondness… I wouldn’t have explored them years later. There are times when I wonder about those crazy few months with Jake. They sure seem indelible. There are brief moments when I wish I could pick up the phone and ask him how he is and what his life is like now. Then I think better of it and let the memory, the moment… the past… slip back into the black, bombazine black water of what was but could never be.

Tags Cape Cod, Dover Street Market, Fire Island, Fire Island Pines, Fire Island Pines New York, Gay Lesbian and Bisexual, Glass Menagerie, Gus Van Sant, Jake Bauman, Memorial Day, New York City, New York Times Magazine, Pines, Tennessee Williams

Queer

Our Thing: Noah Michelson and Fenton Bailey

Post author By Duncan Roy
Post date May 22, 2014
1 Comment on Our Thing: Noah Michelson and Fenton Bailey

A letter from Fire Island Pines.

More power gays maligning others today. Something they do very well. Today it’s TV producer Fenton Bailey and Noah Michelson. Both tiny gay men with Napoleon complexes…

Fenton Bailey from TV production company World of Wonder maligns Adam Corolla on Facebook for his piece in the Hollywood Reporter confirming the existence of the Gay Mafia.

The Sicilian Mafia was known as Cosa Nostra or… in English “Our Thing”

The gay mafia, like the Sicilian mafia… like any mafia… is corrupt: intellectually, culturally and aesthetically. The gay mafia is rife with cronyism, anointing the chosen few to control a largely white gay male message.

The gays are in a constant state of justified anger/indignation about anything they claim is homophobic. They hate comics who make inappropriate jokes, they hate politicians who disagree, they hate mothers who may or may not be anti gay christians… they oust people from their jobs for once being homophobic… they have TV shows cancelled and they bully those with opposing opinions into cruel submission.

This week Huff Post DON Noah Michelson spent time gushing over a ‘brilliant’ Huffington Post interview with gay man Michael Alig who murdered and dismembered another gay man but has ‘paid his debt to society’… then, without catching his breath, specifically maligned and targeted reality star Michelle Duggar for having nineteen children:

After a life-threatening bout of preeclampsia in 2010, followed by a miscarriage at 19 weeks in 2011, this has been the longest stretch of time that Michelle Duggar has been not-pregnant in 27 years. So the 47-year-old went to a high-risk pregnancy doctor to see if she’s able to have any more kids.

Jim Bob and Michelle don’t practice birth control, choosing instead to leave the size of their family “up to God.” But on tonight’s episode of the family’s TLC show, 19 Kids and Counting, the Duggars—who are now grandparents—are interested in a little bit of medical intervention to see “if there are things physically I need to know, that I need to do, health-wise just to be ready to catch a baby if God saw fit to give us one.”

I have published what is now left of the comment thread. There were many more comments (since removed) that were either misogynistic or described the vagina in a way I have only heard gay men describe them. When I suggested that a gay man’s anus multiply fucked by nameless men several times a day might be equally ragged… I was called a hater by a well-trained female fan.

Noah, you will see, rounded up some impressive female support… but mostly gay men agreed with his anti large family, anti women, anti reproductive rights stance. This comes as no great surprise. Women who count gay men amongst their friends would be appalled if they could hear the way they and their vagina are described behind their backs. The gays, when on their own, make inappropriate jokes about other gays, people of color and fat people. But their most corrosive vitriol is reserved for women and the vagina.

Gay men, like straight men… talk shit about women behind their backs. Rather than straight subjugation and objectification, gay men simply don’t see the point of women unless they are entertaining us like circus freaks.

I may very well not like Michelle Druggar and her husband for the choices they have made. My point in support of Michelle Druggar is this: she is entitled to use her body the way she sees fit. As a liberal I have to honor her decisions like I would honor her if she was having an abortion. This is at the heart of the pro-choice movement. That we do not control the reproductive rights of women.

My sister-in-law had many miscarriages, there is a history of sudden infant death syndrome in my family. As you will read, Noah suggests that one’s body is ‘telling’ you something if this is happening? Like AIDS was telling the gay community, Noah?

Noah, like so many of the neo-liberal gay men on this thread (who have no interest in women’s bodies unless they are commodifying them) lacks compassion, calls the mother of 19 an asshole… he alleges that she is a christian who hates gays, suggests that her choices will lead to child abuse, that she is making money from her baby hoarding.

You will note too that Mr. Druggar is not mentioned by either the gay men or the women in this thread.

If Michelle had been less red neck, less Christian, less fat, less of an ‘asshole’ more liberal, had claimed in a short weepy YouTube video she wanted 10% of her children to be LGBTQ Noah would have hailed her a modern hero, like those women on Ellen who adopt or foster many children but never get accused of kiddy hoarding, or the women who have endless kids for gay couples… who never get their vagina maligned by gay men or their sympathetic women friends… in public.

Here is Noah Michelson’s thread. I warn you. It gets vile… and stupid.

In reaction to the above article in italics about Michelle Druggar and her husband after Noah Michelson (public figure) published a picture of them on his Facebook page entitled #assholes.

Ivor Pine and they don’t pay taxes either!
May 20 at 6:26pm · Like · 2

Christian Gabriel #meatcurtains
May 20 at 6:28pm · Like · 6

Dan Avery her ovaries hopped out of her body and slapped her face
May 20 at 6:30pm · Like · 3

D.j. Jeschke Have they thought of collecting seashells instead? Psssh. So not fair to the kids on several levels. After how many kids should people like this be required to get psychological evaluation before having any more?
May 20 at 6:32pm · Like · 3

Michelle Knight Tague seriously?! how has her uterus not fallen out yet!!??
May 20 at 6:37pm · Like · 4

Cate Crowe Clown car vagina.
May 20 at 6:41pm · Like · 5

Duncan Roy Excuse me! My grandmother was one of 19, I am one of 12. These abusive, mind numbing comments are so fucking offensive. Just because you were probably only children or have JUST a couple of siblings.
May 20 at 6:41pm · Like · 1

Duncan Roy Yes, that’s right. There must be something wrong with people who want large families. How can those dumb cunts even remember their names? In between scrounging off the state and probably abusing them sexually. What evil people.
May 20 at 6:43pm · Like

Duncan Roy This just looks like an excuse for misogynistic gays to insult vagina. Let’s put it this way, this woman having babies from her vagina is less likely to be as ruined as gay men who get fucked in the ass by multiple partners day after day…
May 20 at 6:48pm · Like · 1

Alicia Paintner I don’t think having a big family is inherently evil but why can’t they adopt some children! Foster care? There are so many needy children out there all ready. Why so they think their genes are so superior.
May 20 at 6:49pm · Like · 5

Alicia Paintner Ok I was willing to accept you had a different perspective but as some one that has a vagina you just went way the hell over the line. Some one turn this ugly hater in please!
May 20 at 6:50pm · Like · 3

Tom Gualtieri Interestingly, Duncan, just as many women have made crass comments about her vagina as men. My point is in agreement with Alicia’s. Why not adopt? After 20 children, there are millions and millions who have no parents and need loving families. If this is an example of a good, Christian, family, why not help the needy instead of bringing more children into an overcrowded world?
May 20 at 6:50pm · Like · 3

Duncan Roy I am a gay man Alicia.
May 20 at 6:50pm · Like

Duncan Roy I used to remember when people hated the ideas of us gays having children. Now we hate straight people for having too many?
May 20 at 6:52pm · Like

Duncan Roy Alicia, let’s get one thing straight. As a gay man I know many men who
Have multiple partners every day and get fucked in the ass. I can’t imagine how their Anus is holding up. That’s not homophobic. It’s the truth you ignorant bitch
May 20 at 6:53pm · Like

Honey Nut Queerio NOT ONE OF THOSE KIDS IS ADOPTED. SPAY AND NEUTER YOUR REDNECKS, PEOPLE.
May 20 at 6:54pm · Like · 6

Duncan Roy If that was said about gays you all would be having a FIT
May 20 at 6:55pm · Like

Duncan Roy Interestingly Tom, do you know anything at all about adoption?
May 20 at 6:56pm · Like

Adrian Martel Chances are that at least two of their kids are gay…poor kids.
May 20 at 6:57pm · Like · 3

Duncan Roy Why poor kids ? They will have twenty loving siblings? Large families are amazingly supportive
May 20 at 6:59pm · Like · 2

Honey Nut Queerio A society that accepts this hoarding behavior, but makes it almost impossible for single parents and gay folks to adopt!
May 20 at 6:59pm · Like · 6

Unzipped Nready they keep having them while the siblings have to raise them….. tie ur tubes honey!
May 20 at 7:03pm · Like · 3

Duncan Roy Unzipped and ready has an opinion about fertility. Lol
May 20 at 7:05pm · Like

Unzipped Nready yep…… bend over
May 20 at 7:06pm · Like · 3

Duncan Roy Hear that Alicia?
May 20 at 7:06pm · Like

Cate Crowe Oh, how lovely to see a man explaining misogyny to a woman. And, managing to slut shame gay men at the same time. Wonders never cease.
May 20 at 7:14pm · Like · 15

Duncan Roy I can slut shame my own Cate. Just as you would shame this mother. I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d be happy if she went to jail.
May 20 at 7:21pm · Edited · Like

Cate Crowe Excellent typo, Duncan. Slur instead of slut. Well played.
May 20 at 7:22pm · Like · 2

Michael Haynes WOW lil right wingers populating the earth with brainwashed stupidity.
May 20 at 7:22pm · Like

Duncan Roy Slur and slut. It’s all the same.
May 20 at 7:23pm · Like

Duncan Roy Of course, in cates world only women get to cry misogyny. Lol
May 20 at 7:24pm · Like

Duncan Roy Most white gay men are right wingers. Not that Americans would know a left winger if it slapped them in the ruined anus.
May 20 at 7:25pm · Like

Duncan Roy Great, a British socialist with 12 siblings gets to defend a womans right to choose over those so called liberals who want to control her reproductive rights. Ironic
May 20 at 7:27pm · Like · 1

Cate Crowe You called a woman an “ignorant bitch,” Duncan. That’s “ironic.”
May 20 at 7:32pm · Like · 1

Duncan Roy I was being ironic because look what she called the mother! You people. No
Irony.
May 20 at 7:35pm · Like

Duncan Roy I know another mother in Portland who has had 18 babies. Disgusting? No, because she had them for childless couples.,, a surrogate. So, it’s ok as long as she does not keep them. I wonder if she has a ruined vagina? I’m guessing that she may have a heroes vagina to this crowd.
May 20 at 7:38pm · Like · 2

Duncan Roy Cate, let’s face it. You want to control this woman’s reproductive rights. Go on.. You do
May 20 at 7:40pm · Like

Cate Crowe Don’t get into a gun fight with a spoon in your hand, Duncan. It’s time to walk away, sweetheart.
May 20 at 7:42pm · Like · 3

Martin Sims Camardella Disgraceful
May 20 at 7:55pm · Like

Annie Van Wie Noah Noah Michelson you know I love you always, but as a person who crusades so beautifully for acceptance of your “differences” (I hate that word but lack one that is better) I am very surprised to see you judging other people for theirs. Who are any of us to judge someone else’s lifestyle choices?
May 20 at 8:00pm · Unlike · 2

Annie Van Wie And btw I still love and adore you!!!! Xo
May 20 at 8:01pm · Like · 1

Kevin Maloney #clowncar
May 20 at 8:03pm · Like · 1

Åbreu Llyod like the world needs more people
May 20 at 8:05pm · Like

Jason Merrell Do you know these people?
May 20 at 8:05pm · Like

Sharon Stephens Duncan – Cate can outclass and outplay you. Listen and learn about what she has to say.
May 20 at 8:06pm · Edited · Unlike · 1

Honey Nut Queerio Noah Michelson has the ‘right to judge’ whatever and whomever he wants. Thinking people have opinions. They also have gut instincts and passions which aren’t always rational. This is a completely appropriate venue for sharing those thoughts and feelings. It is also appropriate to call someone out for the content of their comments. But not for simply having and expressing a negative opinion.
May 20 at 8:23pm · Like · 1

Brandi Boatright They have the most well behaved, loving well mannered children I have ever seen but maybe it’s time to hang up the pregnancy apron.
May 20 at 8:26pm · Like

Duncan Roy Oh wow, we are playing the out class game . I defer to her class. Thx
May 20 at 8:26pm · Like

Duncan Roy Cate, I haven’t heard one salient point. You are a fraud. Both politically and as a feminist. Give it your best shot. I’ll be ready with my spoon
May 20 at 8:28pm · Like

Duncan Roy I’m waiting for the wise womyn of the west to tell me how wrong I am to defend this woman and her right to a large family. I am waiting for cate to justify the misogyny and and the classist comments. I’m waiting fir cate. Bring it on.
May 20 at 8:42pm · Like · 1

Katy Bourne Human puppy mill.
May 20 at 8:48pm · Like · 3

Julian Damiani This isn’t about choice. How is it fair to make children raise other children? You think they raise 20 kids alone? No. They have to force their older children to become parents. How is that fairness or personal choice/responsibility?
May 20 at 8:51pm · Like · 5

David Ninh Ugh!!!
May 20 at 8:54pm · Like · 1

Cole Robertson My prediction: next season shows her spitting out 12 clear jellyfish babies.
May 20 at 8:56pm · Like · 2

Cate Crowe You’ll be waiting a long time, Duncan.
May 20 at 9:06pm · Unlike · 1

Kieran Keller Honestly Michelle roll a stone over that cave already.
May 20 at 9:08pm · Like · 3

Noah Michelson wow. when the cat’s away the mice will play, eh?

i want to apologize for simply writing “assholes” and not explaining WHY they’re assholes.

1. i have always said that people should be able to do whatever they want to do as long as they’re not hurting anyone else or themselves. well folks, that certainly doesn’t apply here. let’s look at the last two times (that we know of) michelle duggar got pregnant:

“Michelle most recently gave birth in 2010 [it was actually december 2009], following a life-threatening bout of preeclampsia. The next year, she got pregnant again — only to suffer a miscarriage at 19 weeks.”

about her birth in 2009:

“On December 10, 2009, Michelle gave birth via emergency Caesarean section to Josie Brooklyn, three months prematurely. Michelle was rushed to the hospital for gallstones and it was there that doctors discovered she had pre-eclampsia and performed an emergency delivery. Josie weighed 1 lb, 6oz at birth.”

obviously her body does not want to be having children. not only is she putting herself in harm’s way — she’s also putting her un/born child’s life in danger.

2. these people have made thousands and thousands of dollars off of having kids. it’s a modern day freakshow and their kids’ best interests are not being put first by any means. as someone else noted, they have so many children they can’t even take care of all of them — and their other children are forced to raise and care for their brothers and sisters. i find that offensive.

3. this family is anti-gay — in fact — josh, the eldest is (or was as recently as 2013) working for the family research council, which has been designated as a hate group by the southern poverty law center.

i never said people shouldn’t be able to choose how many kids they want to have. i never said that that she’s a woman so she doesn’t know what she’s doing. i said these people are assholes — and they are — and i see very little here to celebrate.
May 20 at 9:08pm · Edited · Like · 32

Angella Guth Kelemen I can’t wait till one of their kids comes out. I hope they will be loving and supportive.
May 20 at 9:38pm · Like

Jeremy Adkison I completely agree with you Noah. This sort of behavior is disgraceful and a cultish obsession with having more children, and more children. It is, as you put it, a freak show. There are various reasons why this is so unsavory, and I think Noah hit them all fairly square.
May 20 at 10:16pm · Like · 3

Annie Van Wie For the record…I don’t like them either. Just needed to weigh in. Also…just to clarify, I had pre-eclampsia with Elsa and every Dr out there said I could have perfectly healthy pregnancies after that. .
May 20 at 11:42pm · Like · 1

Jeremy Adkison Did you have 18 kids before? lol.
Yesterday at 12:07am · Like · 3

Duncan Roy Oh sorry, I had dinner, theatre and stuff to do.
Yesterday at 1:38am · Like

Duncan Roy “I don’t like them either” pretty much sums up what stinks about this thread. If they were liberal and pro gay we might just cut her some slack. Because she is anti gay and makes money (huh? This is America ) we demonize every decision she makes,
Yesterday at 1:42am · Like

Duncan Roy Your comments about her medical complications stink. As I told you earlier my brother and his wife had multiple miscarriages . Was her body trying to tell her something ? Was the cot death of her baby trying to tell her something? Perhaps aids was trying to tell us something?
Yesterday at 1:46am · Like · 1

Jeremy Adkison Did she have a nonstop obsession with having children, endlessly, that she can’t even take care of on her own or with her husband? Let’s not compare a large family to a family with two heads of house who have a heterophilia like obsession with making babies.
Yesterday at 1:47am · Like · 2

Duncan Roy Do gay men have a non stop obsession with getting laid ?
Yesterday at 1:48am · Like

Duncan Roy I thought she made thousands of dollars from a tv show ?
Yesterday at 1:49am · Like

Duncan Roy Let’s not have compassion for this woman because she doesn’t like gays
Yesterday at 1:50am · Like

Jeremy Adkison What compassion is there? Compassion to a women with a heterophilia like obsession in fucking and making babies she can’t even raise? An obsession with having children that may kill her, and leave her husband to care for 19+ kids, or to be more truthful for her children to care for her kids? It’s selfishness. As to her anti-gay beliefs, this has nothing to do with them, but I find your obsession with defending people that demean your very dignity to be… teling.
Yesterday at 1:57am · Like · 2

Duncan Roy Telling… Hmmm. You are obviously incapable of compassion. I do not need this woman to validate me when I am already on the winning side . She does not demean me. You do. As I mentioned earlier , there are many women making many babies they can’t raise fir money. They are called surrogates and make babies for gay men. A practice outlawed all over the world.
Yesterday at 2:03am · Like

Duncan Roy You don’t care about this woman or her health or the health of her children. You care that she allegedly hates gays .
Yesterday at 2:04am · Like

Kate Blair I care that the planet’s human capacity is around 350%, too many people, to few resources….thinking China might be onto something with child limits.
Yesterday at 2:30am · Like · 2

Jacob Michelson Josia?
Yesterday at 3:07am · Like · 1

Jeremy Adkison I don’t care that she hates gays on this subject. I care that she is a deranged and dangerous women who would potentially rob her children of a mother to have more children she does. Not. Need. To. Have.
Yesterday at 3:14am · Like · 4

Eric Ball are they looking for a 20th season? Must not have been a bumper tax season for them either–bump up the dependents!
Yesterday at 3:54am · Edited · Like · 2

Noah Michelson Annie Van Wie you didn’t have 18 kids before your issues. Not the same thing. This woman does not need — and shouldn’t be — seeking more children. It’s irresponsible to say the least.
Yesterday at 6:29am · Edited · Like · 2

Duncan Roy Noah Michelson how many children should a woman have before she becomes deranged? I mean, I’ve seen whole Ellen shows devoted to women who adopt many many children. Are they hoarders or heroes? Are they deranged? Are they irresponsible? Noah, have you any idea what the miscarriage rate in this country is? Did you know that the USA has the highest infant mortality rate in the developed world? Again, you hate this women because she allegedly hates gays.
Yesterday at 6:44am · Like · 1

Noah Michelson Dude — how is someone who has had 19 kids and is seeking to physically give birth to more after needlessly putting herself and her kids in danger the same as some one who adopts?

And I never said someone who has a miscarriage is irresponsible or shouldn’t try to have kids after.

I’m talking SPECIFICALLY ABOUT MICHELLE DUGGAR. Not anyone else.

I get you obviously have a personal connection to these issues but take a step back and get a grip on what and who I’m talking about. You’re grasping at things that aren’t there and it’s getting embarrassing.
Yesterday at 6:48am · Edited · Like · 4

Duncan Roy Embarrassing? Lol. I’m not embarrassed. You should be embarrassed for needlessly attacking a mother. I mean, if she were a liberal… You would be hailing her as a hero. You suggested that a miscarriage was ‘your body trying to tell you something ‘ . Tell that to women who have them. After many many miscarriages. And yes, I do have a personal connection… Because I believe in large families. I believe women should be able to choose and control what they do with their bodies. You do not. You should be embarrassed by that.
Yesterday at 6:57am · Like · 1

Leah McElrath Has anyone read the short article? It appears they are not seeking assistance w fertility (not their issue, clearly) but rather with seeing if there is anything they can do to prevent future miscarriages or premature births. Which, given their no birth control stance and the inherent risks of pregnancy and childbirth (especially for a 47 year old woman) strikes me as an ethical use of medical care. More ethical would be for them to stop trying to conceive or to use birth control so that the mother of 19 children won’t be put at risk. But that’s their choice.
Yesterday at 7:12am · Unlike · 1

Leah McElrath And I, as a feminist and anti-misogynist, appreciate Duncan, as a gay man, taking on the nasty vagina and labia related comments. Thank you.
Yesterday at 7:15am · Like · 4

Leah McElrath Btw, I agree w Noah that they are assholes and don’t agree with their choices or religious views, but that’s another issue.
Yesterday at 7:21am · Like · 3

Duncan Roy They may very well be assholes whose choices and religiosity I disagree but this thread reveals the ease with which we condemn and malign women using old ideas about the way women use their bodies and the latent disgust some gay men have for the vagina. I would never have bothered defending these people had I not read the kind of hate speak I only usually read when I bother to read comments posted by the rabid right about abortion. Wether you choose to have twenty abortions or twenty children the same rational should apply.
Yesterday at 7:30am · Like · 2

Cate Crowe I think it’s time to do another fourth step, Duncan.
23 hours ago · Like · 2

Noah Michelson i’m not condemning women and i’m not maligning women. i’m condemning and maligning michelle duggar. just her. just her irresponsible, dangerous and immoral approach to having children. i have no problem with vaginas — i don’t particularly want to be in one anytime soon, but they’re a-ok by me.
22 hours ago · Like · 6

Duncan Roy Cate, thx. I’m actually doing one right now. I tend to revisit the steps from 1 to 10 every three years. You don’t make my inventory. Sorry.
22 hours ago · Like

Cate Crowe You’re welcome, hun.
22 hours ago · Like

Ricky Marson This Huffpo-level comment war is fucking hilarious.
22 hours ago · Like · 5

Noah Michelson welcome to my facebook page, Ricky. these kind of threads are the norm.
22 hours ago · Like · 2

Duncan Roy Yeah Ricky, Noah is so fucking controversial.
22 hours ago · Like

Noah Michelson hey duncan — if you’re not happy here, no one is making you stay. i rarely use the block button but i’m not against using it in special cases.
21 hours ago · Like · 7

Eric Ball Oh Christ..Duncan, while you’re hanging people for not having compassion or hating vaginas, the Duggars just made another 5 k off this morally corrupt social experiment.
21 hours ago · Like · 4

Michael Rogers This is funny. Noah Michelson, SURELY Duncan Roy is kidding around. No sane person would defend this woman’s decision.
21 hours ago · Like · 4

Cate Crowe Or, exhibit such rage and contempt in doing so, Michael.
21 hours ago · Like · 2

Carrie Bechill I’ve been reading this thread and I’d like to point out that while many women birthed several children several decades ago – it’s not the 1940’s anymore. We know that this world is overpopulated and have scientific proof that humans are doing grave damage to the earth and its resources. Michelle Duggar is acting irresponsibly and selfishly.
21 hours ago · Like · 1

Nathan Garrett Seems to me that working with a fertility doctor would be going against God’s Will, which I assume is a big deal w them. Sort of like birth control in reverse.
21 hours ago · Like · 1

Leah McElrath Again, if you read the article, it’s clear she is NOT seeking fertility treatment. They went to a reproductive endocrinologist to find out if there was anything to do to prevent future miscarriages or premature births. Personally, I think the most ethical choice in this situation is birth control or sterilization, so she doesn’t die and leave her other 19 children orphans. But their pursuit of this information is an ethical use of medical resources, even if I disagree with their choice.
21 hours ago · Like

Leah McElrath Never mind. I don’t know why I bother. People clearly don’t care about the facts. They just want to mock and rant. So carry on.
21 hours ago · Like

Noah Michelson the very fact that she is in a doctor’s office trying to find out how / if she can have more kids — with or without outside help — is ridiculous. it’s a parade for the reality tv cameras and it’s sick. so yah — she may not be going in to get IVF but she shouldn’t being having kids at all. (and let’s not even get started on her family’s thoughts on birth control and abstinence — or sex and sexuality in general…)
21 hours ago · Edited · Like · 3

Leah McElrath Since they do NOT use birth control as a result of her religious beliefs and since she is clearly fertile, it is NOT ridiculous to seek input on how to prevent future miscarriages or premature births. You may not agree with their choices, Noah – I do not agree with them either – but it is not ridiculous to seek information that might help her save her own life or that of another fetus if she gets pregnant again.
21 hours ago · Like · 1

Leah McElrath But again, never mind. This thread disgusts me almost as much as the Duggars do. I’m out.
21 hours ago · Like

Noah Michelson oh come on. i am not saying that it’s ridiculous that she would seek information on how to save her own life or her fetus’s life. i’m saying it’s ridiculous that she would even remotely consider THINKING about having another child. those are two very different things.
21 hours ago · Like · 2

Leah McElrath Thank you for the clarification. I agree with you on that point. For better and worse, we all have the freedom to make ridiculous choices.
21 hours ago · Like · 1

Noah Michelson yes. we do. and — happily — we all have the freedom to call out and judge those ridiculous choices.
21 hours ago · Like · 2

Kate Blair I also couldn’t give a shit about who she may or may not hate, unless she says something hateful on TV. But I sure as hell hope she’s not on any kind of public assistance.
21 hours ago · Like

Cole Robertson They are on public assistance; they don’t pay taxes.
21 hours ago · Like

Terrance Heath People shouldn’t be famous just for reproducing. It doesn’t take talent or skill, after all.
21 hours ago · Like · 3

Tom John Jackson There’s already way to many people in the world, and plenty of kids who need a home. These people are assholes.
21 hours ago · Like · 2

Shawn Shirey In this day and age it is NOT responsible to litter the world with your children. Maybe in the 50’s that was an OK thing to do, but not now. My ass is in tiptop shape, just sayin’.
21 hours ago · Like · 1

Alfonso Munoz In defense of Duncan… there are benefits to big families and religious belief aside, i sat down and watched this program. I couldn’t fathom the concept at this level but I gave them kudos for a few things… they have a system and many aspects of the upbringing are to be observed and adopted. This mother focuses on the new born and so does the rest of the kids by helping and learning responsibilities. She has an aproach that is all about showering the baby with love. Most studies indicate that giving a baby up to the age of 2 constant touching and play will make them very independent, stable adults. So these kids have their shores and it is fascinating how happy they feel to help, a very good quality to have as an adult. Human’s and others species live in large families. The modern small model of family is a very new thing. It is difficult nowadays because gone are the cousins, aunts, uncles, grandmothers that use to be a far greater presence in the growth of a child. As for adoption, my childhood ended when my parents adopted a 30 day old baby from the projects. All the love in the world does not prepare you to raise a mentally ill person. It is a commitment that does not ends with college. they are less likely to deal with this possibility.
21 hours ago · Edited · Like · 1

Jamie Casertano I give it up to Noah Michelson for being willing to read all these tedious responses. I could give birth to my 30th child in the time it takes to do that!
20 hours ago · Like · 3

Alfonso Munoz LOL
20 hours ago · Like

Nathan Garrett I can’t wait for the library full of tell-all books written by the kids that will surely come out over the next 30 years!
20 hours ago · Like · 4

Christo Max This really bothers me. Thankfully more people are choosing to have only one or two children than two fucking baseball teams worth of them.

Could you imagine if everyone were this selfish?
20 hours ago · Edited · Like · 3

Michael Rogers Sorry, Leah McElrath… This woman no longer cares about her family as much as she cares about fame.
19 hours ago · Like · 3

Kevin Maloney Let’s be clear- in many/most Western historical contexts, the size of a family was hardly a woman’s “choice.” It was usually the father’s choice and often influenced by the Church as well. My grandmother was one of ten (though her mother had 13 pregnancies). She grew up with very little, but her father kept pushing for more children, because the Catholic Church was in a population war with the Protestant Church in Quebec at the time. My grandmother loved all of her siblings, but she thinks back to the way she grew up and acknowledges it was absolutely ridiculous to have that many kids because the Church said to. The boys went to work instead of high school and the girls helped raise the little ones. Maybe this was an ok set up for some families. There’s certainly room for alternatives to the nuclear family prototype. However, in the first half of the century, these large families were often associated with poverty, and the children had very little ability themselves for upward economic mobility. I’m not saying that large families are automatically going to be in this situation – there are certainly a variety of other factors involved – but having many mouths to feed and bodies to clothe is inherently an economic stress on a family, not to mention a time sink. By all means, make your own choices in life, but also realize that there are some very valid criticisms of these choices. This is not the same thing as being intolerant.
19 hours ago · Like · 5

Michael Sharkey Noah, I spent an entire day with the whole family. Can’t believe I made it out alive! Remind me to tell you about when you come to dinner.
19 hours ago · Like · 2

Duncan Roy I note that most of the anti family haters are gay men. As for : It is not ‘responsible’ to litter the world with children. How vile of you. God you people are so prescriptive and judgmental. Just like I remember people being about us the lgbtq community. Shawn is unlikely to have children thank god
18 hours ago · Like

Christo Max False equivalency runs freeeee! Yaaaay!
17 hours ago · Like · 2

Keith Lutman If you’re seeing a fertility doctor, you are no longer “leaving it up to God.” Also, you’re addicted to being pregnant
16 hours ago · Like · 2

Terrance Heath For the record, I don’t care how many children these people have. It’s their business. I’m just tired of people becoming celebrities for reproducing. (Or making sex tapes.)
15 hours ago · Like · 1

Patrick Reynolds Coooooor! what an interesting dialogue…i haven’t read anything so good for a long time. My tuppence-worth…addictive, repetitive behaviour is at play. But I am not one to judge otherwise i would be throwing stones from inside my greenhouse.
13 hours ago · Edited · Like

Michael Rogers Duncan Roy WTF does someone’s sexual orientation have to do with this? Someone is desperate.
10 hours ago · Like

Duncan Roy Read the thread you moron
10 hours ago · Like

Nehemiah Saycsar Fleurima And the more she has kids the less likely they’ll come put strong and healthy.
7 hours ago · Like

Tags 19 Kids and Counting, Duncan Roy, Duncan Roy Noah Michelson, Facebook, Gay Lesbian and Bisexual, Gay Mafia, Huffington Post, Michael Alig, Michelle Druggar, Michelle Duggar, Noah, Noah Michelson, Roy Unzipped, Sharon Stephens Duncan, Sicilian Mafia, Van Wie Noah Noah Michelson, World of Wonder, YouTube

Queer

The Problem With Pride

Post author By Duncan Roy
Post date June 14, 2013

President Obama has third graders announce LGBTQ pride month at the White House. Whose idea was that? Even POTUS looked a little incredulous. Obviously I don’t have any problem with 3rd graders manning the barricades but… perhaps we can have kittens next time… or puppies… or fluffy yellow chicks… or a new born foal?

The gays are in Pride party overdrive. Circuit parties, sex parties, pride events, bear parties, underwear parties, mourning parties, party parties.

When Joe and I lived in The Pines on Fire Island we went, over the years, to various high-octane, drug fueled, over lubricated, semi-naked circuit parties. Yet, however many drugs I took, however great my body was… I still felt alienated. I still experienced a strange, out-of-body disconnect from those men around me. You see, I remember thinking quite clearly that they… GOT IT… and I didn’t. I thought back then… they understand something more about homosexuality than I did… than I do.

Don’t get me wrong… I wasn’t looking down my nose at them. I wasn’t feeling superior. I would love to have connected with those men. Like I used to feel connected (high on E) in my mid twenties exploring London (straight) club land. The same heaving mass that miraculously included me. Joyfully, willingly abandoning self, self consciousness terminal uniqueness and dancing as one with a thousand others.

That is what I felt then. This is what I feel now: To have ones life defined by gay circuit parties is simply revolting.

Some people prepare for weeks for Pride, in the gym, tanning, organizing parties, getting the right tickets for the right events. Making sure the drink and the drugs are pre-ordered. Leaving nothing to chance. The last ‘pride’ parade I attended I saw a drunken man defecating in the street. It was not the enduring image of LGBTQ solidarity after which I was hankering.

There is a hideous disconnect between the civil rights we demand and the public face of ‘pride’. A parade of semi naked gyrating narcissists. How can anyone take that seriously? Pride simply reinforces the difference between me and them: I do not drink or take drugs. I am not driven (compelled) by my homosexuality.

The parade terrifies me. Aesthetically. The corporate floats lack ingenuity and wit. The rent boy/sex worker float lacks class. The thongs, the swagger, revealing the lie of Pride. The near identical bodies in various hues. Searching, begging for tiny differences between each naked, muscular physique that may determine the uniqueness, the individuality of just one of these men. Of course, I am excited to see so many out men. But they are all the same. I look at them and, as much as I want to be, I am not attracted to them. I am not attracted to their essence… to their remarkable lack of ego.

The Pride parade is a celebration of sexuality. First and foremost. And I, absurdly, want to fall in love. You see, I proved it. They wanted sex… and I didn’t. I wanted to fall in love… and they didn’t.

“I want to tell you how much I love you.” I whispered.

When I have sex. I tell them to say… I love you. It turns me on. “Even if you don’t mean it.” I was useless then and I am useless now to those gay men at those gay circuit parties because I didn’t want to have sex. I wanted to fall in love. I didn’t/couldn’t/wouldn’t and they knew it. They could see by the look in my eye that their sexuality terrified me, baffled me. I wanted to fall in love.

That man I loved. After he came out… he told me about the sex he was having with many, many men. He was really good at meeting strange men and having sex with them. His priorities shifted. When we were together and he was in the closet he told me he loved me, he was emotional… the moment he came out he threw his emotional interest in men away. In favour of sex. I wanted to fall in love.

It was my fault. I had this sex genius at my disposal and couldn’t work out how to use what he was brilliant at. When we made love I felt the same disconnect. Out of body. Away.

Pride is a tough word to have appended to any celebration because it means so many different things to so many different people. That’s why I love the LGBTQ Mardi Gras in Sydney, it doesn’t have PRIDE in the title. Mardi Gras is everything you want it to be because Mardi Gras mean nothing to me. Means everything to me.

Mardi Gras implies celebration. It doesn’t pretend to be anything it isn’t. Even though it eschews the word Pride, on the several occasions I attended… I felt really proud. Proud to be just like them. Just like you. I looked for the similarities and not the differences at: The silly Mardi Gras community events, the Mardi Gras parade, the film festival, the theatre festival, the LGBTQ city art tours… even the leather cruise… something I would never usually do seemed fun and interesting.

It was a gathering of the LGBTQ clan and made no mistake by calling itself something it isn’t. The parade and the party. Mardi Gras was so different from London Pride. London Pride in the 1980’s, was a sombre affair. Men and women. Simply being seen. It was originally held during the miserable months of the British year. Overcast skies. Rain.

London Pride has evolved from a bunch of angry gays and lesbians marching through Westminster (Margaret Thatcher’s back yard) denouncing the infamously homophobic Section 28 to right now and a profoundly different landscape for the LGBTQ community. We have enthusiastically embraced the Blair (credit where credit’s due) government’s equality overhaul and the introduction of legal parity for all citizens of the UK regardless of gender.

London Pride is a deserved celebration… but it was earned. It’s not my cup of tea. But it was earned. If it isn’t your cup of tea… what is? What does this old queer want?

Well.

Somewhere between the seriousness of a civil rights march and the celebration of Mardi Gras there is a parade I want to attend. There’s a parade I want to join where all men and women are respected and nurtured regardless of age, sexuality and religion. Let me know if you find that Parade because I’ll be there… to hold your hand.

Tags Circuit party, Gay, Gay Lesbian and Bisexual, Gay pride, LGBT, LGBTQ, London, Mardi Gras, Margaret Thatcher, President of the United States, Pride parade, Pride Week, society, sydney, United States, White House

Queer

Hoarding

Holding onto the past. Cluttering up the present.

I saw athlete Jason Collins on the TV. He was being interviewed by Oprah.

As I listened to him tell his story I thought a great deal about other people I had known who lived as adults in the closet.

Collins was not involved with a woman when he came out.

He was single.

For those gay men who are married or engaged to women when they come out the trauma this causes the woman cannot be underestimated, yet somehow their trauma is ignored.

The woman from Connecticut hoards craft materials she intends to use. She never uses it. Her house is uninhabitable.

Her husband left her for another man.

A lie is revealed. The life of the lie is shared. Often those who have lived unwittingly with a liar also feel that they have lived a lie.

My important gay writer friend mocked Collins ex girlfriend Carolyn on Facebook.

He made fun of her for ‘not realizing’ Collins was gay. Not realizing that she was living with a lying sociopath?

My friend is a gay man who has had sex with women and dated women yet he can barely disguise his misogyny.

Like so many gay men he is, whether he likes it or not, a separatist.

Carolyn is an intelligent, kind and articulate woman who was duped by a liar.

I listened to Collins wondering how this man was cast as the hero?

He’s not the first athlete to come out of the closet, many women came before him and some men.

The Collins cocktail of gay, black and startlingly good-looking is somehow more intoxicating than remembering that Martina Navratilova had come out decades before.

Collins hopes that his coming out will ‘make it easier’ for others to do the same yet… it seems unlikely.

Is his coming out really a coming out at all?

He will only really know how it feels to ‘come out’ once he is back on the team.

At the moment he is cushioned by celebrity and an American media fascinated by his ‘bravery’.

Is he brave?

He is not a normal black kid from the ghetto.

He is not the normal black kid at the local church.

He is not a kid. He is not normal.

Celebrity assures him of that.

If you identify as LGBTQ then every coming out is circumstantial.

There will never be an easier time to come out because most everybody wants to fit it. To fade away. To avoid the glaring spotlight even if that spotlight is no longer hostile.

No one wants to say: I am different. Not today, not in America… where individuality is scorned.

Jason’s parents look suitably loving on the TV. They know they’re going to ‘love him no matter what’, they’re going to ‘get through it’.

I wonder sometimes what the expectation is for those new, enlightened parents who suddenly have a gay son or daughter to dote on.

Judging by those who now look sweetly at me and my partner whenever I am brave enough to hold onto my lover in the street… their reaction may have changed but the feeling I have remains the same.

They look at us… like I look at a particularly fluffy puppy. “Ah, how sweet.” They want to say. “How fucking adorable.”

I know they want to stop us and tell us how fucking adorable we are.

Those people who gawp and smile supportively are just as irritating as those who glare disapprovingly.

I don’t want you to have an opinion about us as we walk in the street.

I have no opinion about you.

Jason Collins coming out also poses questions about others who have not come out sooner.

I mean, If Jason Collins can do it… why can’t you? Why is it an issue? How could you not tell us the truth?

But Jason Collins has The President, ex President Clinton (the DOMA signer) the President’s wife Mo to congratulate him.

They are ‘proud’ to call Jason their friend.

Well, Jason Collins and those other gay people I allude to… they are adults. They came out as adults.

They can control the outcome.

They are ‘straight acting’ there was ‘no clue’, no tell-tale fabulousness, no lisp, no prepubescent flamboyance.

He was never harassed, he was never told ahead of time what he was before he knew himself.

Jason Collins comes from a ‘close and loving’ family.

Like other gay men who came out late in life… if their family was so close, so loving…why couldn’t they come out sooner?

What did they think they would lose?

The closer the family the harder the riddle.

The fantasy that one has for ones children, the perfect future… the wedding, the christening… cannot include a same-sex partner?

Well, no… not if you have invested in the lies your adult child told… again and again.

Lied to those very same people who now bathe you in their unconditional love.

Obviously, my ‘coming out’ as a teen… was very different.

Having no real option… was all at once a blessing and a curse.

I was brought up in a different age.

My coming out was an act of terrorism.

I threw it at them like boiling water and told them to get used to the burns.

Meanwhile, there’s a teenager in Northern England struggling with his decision to reveal the truth.

He saw me on TV and sought me out.

He told his family he was gay… face to face.

He told his friends on Facebook

Tonight he told everyone how miserable he feels. How dark this place is.

Jason Collins has not helped him. He does not have the President of the United State to support him on Twitter.

Feeling different, facing a new world… not as an adult but as a child.

Things don’t get better… because he now has the prospect of British parochial gay life and all that entails.

He has predatory men to deal with at the local bar, he has rampant desires that remain unfulfilled.

I think he regrets not waiting.

It’s a big deal coming out when you’re a poor kid a long way from the big city.

It always will be… however many athletes steal the limelight from boys like him.

Tags Collins, Coming out, Connecticut, Facebook, Gay, Gay Lesbian and Bisexual, Jason Collins, LGBT, Martina Navratilova, Northern England, Television, The Oprah Winfrey Show, Twitter, United State

Queer

Bradley Manning My Hero

So, I’ve been spending time on Christian Mingle.

Looking for God’s match for me. Well, I’m sorry but… it’s shit.

God (not my usual God) made it quite clear to me whilst I was scrolling obsessively through acres of men who look like pedophiliac geography teachers… he made it perfectly clear that a life of abstinent solitude was probably on the cards or (if I was really lucky) being violently murdered by a crazy sex therapist or… luckier… a hit man sent by some crazier ex.

Which brings me illogically to:

Bradley Manning. My hero. What can I say? This courageous young man has revealed not only international truths triggering the Arab Spring and a hasty retreat from Iraq by the USA… but the truth about American, white gay men.

Fuck me. What a bunch of crazy, right-wing cock suckers.

I mean… these gay white guys are voting Democrat, so they get their miserable marriage equality then… as soon as they do… they’ll jump ship and vote Republican… if they aren’t already.

Gay White Men won’t feel like they are part of any minority once they achieve parity with their straight white male colleagues.

Powerful white men famously loathe sharing the stage with immigrants, brown people, poor people, ugly people, fat people, trans… and women. Fuck them. Especially women. Their natural enemy.

‘They don’t mesh with MY lifestyle.’ he said. Yes, he really said that.

It fills me full of dread to imagine a world run by gay white men. But apparently, according to Elton John. It already is.

So Bradley, I had to draw a line in the sand.

It’s Anderson Cooper, Elton John, David Geffen, the HRC and any guests at a typical Hollywood pool party over there… and it’s me you and the brown people over here.

Bradley, in the USA the gays want to ignore you, demonize you, forget you.

The rest of the world thinks about you every day, rotting in that jail. They agree with me. They think you’re the bees knees.

Bradley, you won’t believe this but, yesterday Vivienne Westwood wore a laminated photograph of you pinned to her lilac, silk gown at the Metropolitan Fashion Ball.

Perhaps the gays might take you more seriously now?

I doubt it.

I’m really sorry that our community has let you down.

Apparently what you did… isn’t gay enough.

“What does Bradley Manning and his treason have to do with being gay?” That’s what they say Bradley.

You just ain’t the right flavor. And, of course, they (elite gay snobs) know you only joined the military in the first place to get a free education.

You ended up educating the whole world.

“You should have known better. You shouldn’t have broken the rules.”

That’s what the rich, white, gay men say.

Bradley, they were going to include you in the 2013 San Francisco Pride event. Did you hear about that? They were going to honour you.

But they lost their nerve after the rich, white gays persuaded the poor, black lesbian who runs the event that you were just a common thief.

There are well researched articles about you and what happened at San Francisco Pride. Bradley’s inclusion and outrageous exclusion.

After it happened I had to defriend over 250 affluent gay white men on Facebook. Yes, I did.

I felt like a Jew waking up out of a blackout at the Nazi Christmas party. Or a Muslim at the NRA National Convention. Or a Christian in the back room of a gay bar.

I had to make a big decision. I had to weigh up: the differences versus the similarities and… the similarities between me and the gays were negligible.

I had to redefine myself.

Bradley, for you… I am not gay.

I will have nothing more to do with them. Because of you.

Thanks for that Bradley. I owe you a club soda some time.

But, that’s only half the story. I’ve been feeling very uncomfortable in my gay skin for a very long time.

It all began with that smile he gave me in the family court waiting area 3 years ago. He was with his dad.

That arrogant grin. You see… he thought he’d won the war.

Americans always think they have to win.

It was shocking because, until that moment, I’d only ever seen his ersatz humility. I did not recognize him any more.

But, I knew the smile. I’d seen it before… on the entitled faces of rich, white gay men.

Oh God. I thought. That’s who you are. That’s what you’ve been hiding.

The pain I felt around the gays. The revulsion I felt at the gay charity events, gay AA, gay white men, gays en masse.

The smell of them began to make me nauseous.

Perhaps, I thought, it might just be self hate? Internalized homophobia?

Just like I thought my gall stones were indigestion… it was the wrong self-diagnosis.

I am surrounded by millions of gay zombies. In the perpetual search for fresh meat.

Zombies forcing other gays, gays with unnatural ideas to think like them.

Bradley, President Obama is on the TV right now… warming up his audience with a few self-deprecating quips.

The gays love him. They don’t care if they’re being used to shield what’s really going on.

Hey America! Look at this dancing gay who wants to get married… look… over here! Look over here whilst we torture these Muslims and spray the world with bee killing Round-Up.

If you ever get out of that prison… you’ll find a very different gay America. Oh yes.

But don’t expect a heroes welcome from the gays. It ain’t happening.

Don’t expect a GLAAD award.

Their ‘heroes’ are prescribed by good looking GLAAD president Herndon Graddick and his ilk. Heroes? A GLAAD ‘hero’ is anyone who comes out of the closet or a celebrity who says publicly that they like gay people.

Herndon Graddick? Consider the source.

You know what, Bradley? The last time I saw Herndon (fascist star-fucker) he was sobbing in a gay AA meeting because he can’t stop doing meth.

The time before that I saw Herndon he was at gay traitor Ken Mehlman’s drinks party with his forked tongue shoved so far up Ken’s ass what he pulled out was scarcely chewed.

Bradley, you were very brave.

Most of the gays I know in LA and NYC are the kind of men who stayed close to the teacher at school because they lived in fear.

Fear has shaped their lives.

They are scared of you. They used to be scared of radical homosexual Peter Tatchell. Before Elton brought him in from the cold.

Bradley, you didn’t come from an affluent family, you’re not a great looker. You might not even be a man… that’s what they say.

But who ever you are, you are my hero. You made me rethink, reshape my life. Redefine myself as queer rather than gay… and I thank you for that… again. Because without you… things might have remained confusing for me.

But now… they’re not.

The story of S.F. Pride versus Bradley Manning and S.F. Pride versus the activist community of San Francisco is an ugly one that illumines the maggoty underside of assimilationist politics and policies. In the quest for straight acceptance that has propelled the LGBT community headlong into the arms of two of the most historically repressive institutions, marriage and the military, dissent has become anathema. The values of ads that used to pepper the personals in queer newspapers and magazines “seeking straight-looking, straight-acting, no fats, no fems” have become internalized within the community. The controversy over Manning highlights what has happened in the juggernaut move toward equality — there’s no room for outliers. Either you are a Lisa Williams-style straight-acting, straight-looking martinet with no temper for dissent or you are like the people who signed the complaint — activists all — who recognize that our queer story is not going to be told simply through marriage equality and being able to enlist openly in the military. Marriage and military equality are important, but they aren’t our only issues. Manning took the actions he did because of his outrage over DADT, which was still in effect throughout his deployment. But he also acted like so many patriots have over our nation’s history — out of loyalty to American democracy. Manning thought the government was lying to the people. So he told them the truth.

VICTORIA A. BROWNWORTH is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist who has won the NLGJA and Society of Professional Journalists Awards for her series on LGBT issues. She is the author and editor of more than 30 books, including the award-winning Too Queer: Essays From a Radical Life. She lives in Philadelphia. Find her on Twitter at @VABOX.

Tags Arab Spring, Bradley, Bradley Manning, Daniel Ellsberg, David Geffen, Elton John, Facebook, Gay Lesbian and Bisexual, Grand Marshal, Ken Mehlman, Pride parade, San Francisco Pride, United States, Vivienne Westwood, WikiLeaks

Gay Rant

i am not gay

Nope. Not any more.

I AM NOT GAY. I am OUT.

Unambiguous?

My New Years resolution: don’t call me gay.

I am The Other. I am simply… Out.

I have resigned my gay membership. I renounce the word GAY.

The Other is different from you. He is neither superior nor inferior.

He is not alone. He is out.

Are you kidding? I still like sex with men… but I’m not interested in being gay. Do you understand what I’m saying… gays? Yes you. I’m talking to you. I’M TALKING TO YOU! Yes you, the gay in the bar, on the street, editing his Grindr profile.

Let’s face it. This separation will work out just fine for both of us.

I loathe you and you hate me.

I know, amongst other things, what galls you… you (particularly) don’t like when men in their fifties own up to having a rich and varied sexuality: I’ve been called a ‘dirty old man’ by more gays than I ever have by straights for wanting or having beautiful younger men in my bed. The gays write it anonymously. They post it all over the place, whenever they can. As If I should be ashamed?

You, you who have cornered the market in nihilism, immorality, homogeneousness, bitchery, selfishness, self-aggrandizement, self-obsession… in fact anything with the self prefix… apart from self-awareness.

I am peeling off the parade. I am letting the party wend its way elsewhere.

2. (a)

They told me at Triangle House in LA when we were making our documentary about older gay people: they say that old gay people end up going back into the closet because… it can get ugly… it can get dangerous. They say that gay men are more likely to end up homeless than in any other demographic… because they have no community.

You gays are the very worst at hating yourselves. But you reserve more venom for the elderly homosexual than any other group. It is a sickening idea to many young gays, that we (the elderly) exist. Some young gay people believe that past 50 our penises shrink appropriately into our bodies. Retract. In old age we become like wrinkly Ken dolls with smooth, pink groins.

No longer a threat to anyone.

I thought that when I became old… I would start wearing women’s clothes.

Where do young gay men learn how to be dignified old gay men? I learned from older men in AA how to be an older man. The respect that AA old timers get, applauded for their contribution to the community of AA stands in stark contract to the respect that older gay people don’t get from younger gay people. Unless, of course, they are famous… or comical freaks… or rich enough to buy the boys they used to get for free.

Young gay people don’t want to be reminded that the party comes to an end.

2 (b)

So, today…

I resign my membership. I am no longer a true believer. I’m handing back my awards, my medals, my history, my pride.

It’s yours not mine. Take it.

I renounce: gay pride, gay film festivals, gay beaches, gay basketball, gay bars, the gay ghetto, the gay plague, gay marriage, gaybies, gaydar.com, gays in the military, gay cruises, cottaging, felching, gay news, gay voice, gay face, the gay sub section in the book/video store/Huffington Post.

So help me God!

I’m praying the gay away!

The terms of this divorce:

You can keep it all. The gay plays I made, the gay films I directed, the gay art I painted/etched/sculpted.

Take everything I ever made in your honor.

If you don’t want it? Burn it.

2 (c)

When I offered our award-winning film catalogue of gay films to The Legacy Project (the gay and lesbian film preservation project) based out of UCLA… the gays turned it down. Even though AKA had won the LA Outfest audience award and opened (and closed) many gay film festivals all over the world with all of my films.

The Legacy Project said no to the free gift. They wanted me to disappear. They don’t want any evidence that I existed. As a man or an artist.

“He’s trouble.” “He’s angry.” “He’s a parasite.”

Gays! Look at what you’ve become! Examine, for just one goddamned gay second…. the mediocrity! Your righteous indignation! Your mock elegance!

Being with you is like drowning in cold tea.

I don’t drink or take drugs. Tom blew weed into my face. He put vodka into my virgin mary. That’s how the gays bully one another. Try wearing something unusual when your companions just want to be invisible.

“Who does he think he is?”

Their artificially deepened voices. The plaid shirt, the super hero tee. The cloak of invisibility.

INVISIBLE.

Tom asked incredulously, “What are you wearing?” A man who wears nothing but ugly jeans, ill-fitting t-shirts.

Tom has an ‘opinion’ about individuality: He doesn’t believe in it. These gays are terrified of being seen. Gripped by the politics of invisibility. At least that grotesque, lying freak I used to date… he and his boy friend have some sartorial audacity.

Even if it is TOTALLY misguided.

Who are these gays? These invisigays?

Like Tom, they may appear normal.

How can a gay man expect to age with dignity when nobody gay wants to age at all?

I saw it in LA… my destiny. If I chose to take it. At first, Adam looked just like any other confident gay man claiming to be 48. His gay parties are the talk of the town. Richer than most of his friends, though not very well connected … not to the real gay power in LA.

I mean, David Geffen wouldn’t be seen dead at this piss elegant, graceless house in the Hollywood Hills.

Adam invented the heart valve. At one of his parties (to his chagrin) I photographed every single one of his guests. A snap shot of LA gay life.

He has never been elegant, he has never been a great beauty. He will never be tall. He is, however, manicured, botoxed, his teeth reinvented, his flawless skin, his demeanor… (that only great wealth lends you).

It was at that last raucous party I attended (as a plus one) I saw him upset (rattled)… why?

He looked like an old, vulnerable man.

“What happened?” I asked the gays.

They told me imperiously (as if it were obvious) that the young, chiseled boy he imported from NYC just wanted him for his money. Adam looked… beaten. Crest fallen. His frail hands shook, the delicate skin around his eyes failing.

The gays stood around helplessly as their host fell apart. They stared into the plastic cups of vodka. They played with their nipples. The pimps and the whores waited silently by the sodden beer pong. He turned the music off. Finally, he threw everyone out.

They lined up on the steep drive. A hideous parade of grotesquely young boys, graded online or in public bars for their sexual prowess, their social fallibility, their youth.

The man who invented the heart valve, it seems, suffered from a broken heart.

Take the gay man who gave up his 160k surrogate child for adoption because she had a small birth defect on one of her legs.

Yes, you heard me.

When we interviewed the doctor who makes hundreds and thousands of gay dollars from the gayby industry… he told us that the gays want perfection. Nothing less will do.

Take it all… this gay culture. This gay community. Take it.

Take the video of Bryan with 25 Bel Ami boys jacking off over him. Moisturized with Czech sperm.

Or the man/boy with the huge cock who they pay to sleep with a hooker and unbeknownst to him… tape him.

This tribe of entitled, elitist gays clinging to gay marriage and their smart phones.

I had lunch today with a 30-year-old man/boy who just came out. “Why did it take you so long, ” I ask, “To tell the truth?” He said, “I didn’t… (he paused dramatically) …I mean I still don’t… I don’t want to be gay.”

“That’s ok,” I reassured him. “You can describe yourself however you want.”

When, as frightened teens, blooming… prepubescent boys… infants… when we understand that we want to fall in love and fuck and suck and slide into another man… what choices do we have? To describe ourselves?

Gay is the only way. And if you don’t know what you are. The gays will tell you exactly what you are.

The gays are so prescriptive.

He’s gay, they claim conspiratorially. They claim anyone ‘hot’ is gay. They all know someone who had sex with Tom Cruise or Hugh Jackman. “He’s fucking his ‘assistant’.” Oh Yes! He’s had sex with a man… he’s gay. He’s experimented… he’s gay.

Prescriptive.

6 (a)

Hollywood does not lend itself to morals.

CAA agent Kevin Huvane. When you first meet him, he shakes your hand and pulls you toward him. Trying to pull you off-balance. The first time he met me… it worked (I was rocked) the second and third times I was prepared and we set to a gay tug of war, an argy bargy, him attempting to pull me and me attempting to pull him.

The fourth time I let him pull me onto him. I crashed into him. His tiny frame overwhelmed by 6′ 2″ me. He landed in a heap beneath me. “Oh sorry,” I said. “You pulled me toward you. I lost my balance. Sorry… Kevin.”

He’ll put you on a ‘list’ they told me. “I’m on so many lists.” I murmured. “More lists than Cathy Griffin.”

After claiming on the Dr. Drew show that I wanted to make healthy decisions about sex. Somebody wrote to me or about me: If Duncan Roy doesn’t like gay sex… he isn’t gay. He wasn’t far from the truth. At first, I was outraged by their attempts to isolate, malign and lambaste me. They had tried for years. Without success. Every time they try… they fail. This last time… the jail. What the hell did they expect? That I would buckle?

Those who throw rocks at me are seldom innocent of that which they accuse.

The Gays, have become so… bourgeois. Do you understand what that means? Let me refresh your memory:

Marked by a concern for material interests and respectability and a tendency toward mediocrity.

When I was young… gays like you knew their place. They stayed in the closet. I mean. Coming out of the closet was brave! Now anyone can do it and become a fucking hero.

Gays… why are you killing yourselves? You kill yourself because you can’t take a joke, because you can’t hold your liquor, because you can’t say no to crystal… because you don’t want to be gay. I don’t remember young gay people killing themselves in the UK.

It gets better?

What gets better?

Better than death?

10.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled when any oppressed group gets a bit of equality… but what will the USA gays do with their equality?

I’ll tell you. They will make it even harder for the rest of us to be different. There is a hideous conformity to which these young gays feel they must adhere. Gay life in the USA. A blushing desire for ‘straight acting’ has become a tsunami of heternoramativity. The foundation on which this miserable gay monolith now stands.

Who are you?

A greek god, perfectly muscled, forever young… dressed to be ignored, as bland a personality as he can effect. He is Peter Pan, he is Hercules, his personality as glittering as the Pillsbury Dough Boy.

Do you care about anything other than marriage equality? No. He eats what his parents eat. He would vote republican if they could only find it in their neo con hearts to see that the gays are perfect conservatives.

So. We are divorced. I am no longer gay. I’m OUT. I’m out of here. I’m out but I’m not gay.

Happy New Year!

Gay Love politics

Marriage Equality and Shabbat

Post author By Duncan Roy
Post date December 23, 2012
1 Comment on Marriage Equality and Shabbat

Sunday 23rd 2012.

New Harris tweed trousers. They are so thick and keep the cold wind from whipping around my legs.

I had two very different experiences on Friday.

The first, an unfortunate spat on Facebook with a Canadian writer called Michael Rowe.

I think you know, those of you who read this regularly, that I struggle with marriage as the means by which gay and straight people find parity.

That marriage in of itself doesn’t seem to work for many of the people who sign up for it… so why do so many men and women in the LGBQ community want it so badly?

Is it just because they want the ‘benefits’?

I thought about it a great deal this week.

For those of us gay men and women who are now in our early fifties marriage was never an option. I never hankered after it, nor cared to think about it.

I read this in a British newspaper.

British MPs are planning to create an “exception” in marriage law for same-sex couples and will not alter the definition of adultery.

Either they don’t take us seriously or we don’t take us seriously?

Perhaps gay marriage is indeed separate from straight marriage because we can’t be trusted with monogamy?

Those I respect seem to value marriage equality… so I have been posting thoughts and feelings on my Facebook page.

I am perturbed by how many angry responses I get whenever I write about my marriage equality concerns.

If marriage equality was all we needed or wanted are we selling ourself short? Are we like any cultural minority that lives side by side the majority needing to be tolerated rather than nurtured? Do we need to be understood? Do they need to learn our language? Or, like Hasidic Jews do we evolve separately once we are ‘equal’. Somehow this is not attractive to me.

This question incensed Michael Rowe.

Where are you getting “all we needed or wanted” from? It’s a basic right. That’s not “tolerance,” that’s equality and strength.

The conversation continued privately.

Talking to Michael was like talking to a Zionist. Realizing that his problem with what I was saying was more about me than the conversation I decided to tread carefully. He is the sort of man who believes that any gay who comes out of the closet is an unqualified hero.

I’m not an intellectual, nor am I particularly bright… but I am willing to listen… and I am desperate to understand why I am so conflicted about marriage equality.

Because, I think, it doesn’t seem like equality at all.

So, why am I bothering to fight for something I simply don’t believe in?

It feels like another way to join another elite gang. A gang that will, if given half the chance, bully you mercilessly.

I’ve seen straight women do this. Brag about their married status to their unmarried friends. Causing those unmarried women to burst into tears when they are far enough away from their persecutor.

I asked Michael what he thought marriage would do to our gay culture. I said, I really want to understand your position.

Not sure what there is to “understand.” Until there is no foundation of complete legal equality for LGBT people, the rest of it, worrying about “our culture,” is frosting with no cake. That’s my position.

Our gay culture is very important to me. Even if it is on a separate page, in it’s own section at the book shop or the video store or on Netflix. I enjoy the separation. You see, I’m not very interested in what straight people make of me or the culture that has sprung up around me.

What will marriage equality do to the gay community?

How will these huge changes affect us and our behavior toward other gay man and women.

If a gay man tells his straight friend that he is getting married will his straight friend feel a flush of envy?

I asked if Michael felt ‘more equal’ than his American friends? He said:

Of course I do. I have approximately 300 more rights than American gay couples whose relationships are not legally recognized, rights that have financial and legal implications.

And no, I don’t feel sorry for gay couples who aren’t married by their choice, but I do feel sorry for those who don’t have that choice.

I don’t think that screaming about how proud you are not to be married carries a lot of weight when that right isn’t even on the table.

Like employment protection. Or do you also feel that a law that protects LGBT Americans from being fired also hurts “our culture?”

Oh dear, Michael was watching the NRA press conference at the time so his irritation may be excused.

He is, as you know, a very important Huffington Post blogger.

A ‘gay voice’. In the separate but equal ‘gay voice’ section of the Huff Post.

There is a great deal in this last quote that may make you wince… as I winced.

I come from England where Tony Blair gave Waheed Ali carte blanche to equalize the lives of hetero and homo sexual people.

I remember eating lunch in Malibu with Waheed who explained to me how the legislation was written.

He explained that the word Marriage may have been attractive to some but perhaps a little too divisive. They chose civil unions as the way forward.

Total equality (excluding the word marriage) was a great incremental step in the right direction and one that the majority of my gay friends in long-term relationships were happy to embrace.

Michael is not so sure.

“Civil unions” aren’t marriage, and they’re not equality.

He continued inaccurately:

They weren’t “chosen,” they were all they could get because no one would allow them to be married, with full marriage equality, including the rights of citizenship for spouses.

Just to be perfectly clear: the British do have rights for citizenship for spouses and UNMARRIED partners.

Now, that’s what I’m talking about.

After many years of legal parity, the British gays… from a position of strength are asking for the word marriage and asking a very conservative government to boot. They are certain to succeed.

Civil Union may be the best incremental baby step on offer?

What are the incremental baby steps that seem to get American gays no closer to federal recognition of same-sex marriage?

Married Michael Rowe is very proud of his life.

He has achieved what his parents probably wanted for him all through his childhood. The dream of a heteronormative existence.

The rest of the conversation disintegrated into name calling. He called me tiresome, I ended up calling him a cunt and he blocked me on FB and that was that.

If I were in my early thirties I might think that this is a golden age for gay men and lesbians. That I could enjoy a fully ‘out’ existence, meet the man of my dreams, marry him, buy some surrogate children and live happily ever after.

That is a perfectly lovely dream to have.

But I am still in two minds. Shouldn’t we all be fighting for something more than marriage, that marriage should not allow those who are to have so much more than those who are not?

This is not equality.

Some married gay men (like Michael) are already behaving like my mother and grandmother behaved toward their spinster/old maid/barren friends. Looking down their married noses.

Do I feel cheated out of different sort of gay life? If I had grown up around gay men getting married would I have thought differently about the men I dated and the future we could have had?

I have, undoubtedly, missed the man/man marriage boat. Joe and I talked about it briefly.

When I was growing up the thought of marriage (one man to another) was simply not a consideration. Like an orthodox jew would never think about eating bacon. I didn’t really think anything of not being married.

Being brought up in a small town where the majority of my straight peers had children but no marriage… marriage seemed Victorian and absurd. The people who were getting married were not… cool. They were… boring.

My straight friends who remained unmarried with many children did very well for themselves. They ran successful businesses. Their children went to great universities. They struggled and excelled equally along side those children who came from married families and broken homes.

There really was no difference between them and any other child.

The emphasis on family values seems to have gripped the gays as firmly as the straights.

What ever family means we don’t want to be left out of the explanation.

We all have a family of sorts. Some have blood relatives, others have an extended family of strangers.

Obviously, I have invested in the latter and have never been let down.

Which brings me to the final part of my blog today.

Sitting with the dogs on Franklin outside my coffee shop of choice I met a young Rabbi.

Charming, Cambridge educated and very enthusiastic.

He invited me to Shabbat the following Friday night.

I had, of course, enjoyed many a Friday night with the Cohen’s in LA. David, his wife and their 6 children. 40 people for pot luck dinner around a huge table on the lawn then talking about world events with a talking stick. It was perfect.

This Shabbat was very different.

There were several rabbinical students. I arrived mid prayer. For an hour we prayed.

The most exquisite boy with the most beautiful voice (and a baby) sang something on his own before the others joined in. When he started singing I began to cry.

They prayed and sang (they sang in Hebrew) and faced East, my rabbi friend was particularly enthusiastic. I sat beside him and he kept apologizing for everything, as if it were a trial for me to be there… when in fact it was beautiful.

I sat there thinking about the gays. After my run in with Michael.

I wondered if they would have confused my thoughts about how beautiful the singer was with wanting to fuck him. That most of my gay friends wouldn’t have just enjoyed him, they would have wanted to fuck him. “He’s hot…”

We ate a huge dinner. We washed our hands ritually. After the dinner and conversations with truly wonderful people (I avoided talking Palestine) we sat together for more prayers and a fascinating chat about the Torah.

The young rabbinical students and scholars discussed in a really modern and interesting way what I had been taught was the Old Testament.

Jacob, Joseph and the blessing of the Pharaoh:

My years have been few and difficult.

They talked about other things.

A young man with thick, raven black hair told us he had just visited Sandy Hook. To offer ‘solace’.

At first I was irritated by the apparent intrusion, it seemed so arrogant.

I was wrong.

He explained that the town was packed with people from all over the world. That he had witnessed a funeral of one of the murdered children and the parents of the dead child were holding up signs in the car that said, very simply: “THANK YOU.”

I found him after dinner and thanked him for reminding me that it’s easy to let other people do the difficult tasks.

If Sandy Hook had been an isolated incident then I might have felt differently but Sandy Hook is part of a macabre American theme and we must all, collectively… own it.

It is our responsibility.

That young Jewish man and his five friends had taken responsibility and travelled to Sandy Hook.

By doing so, they had a spiritual awakening. They were thanked by the parents of dead infants.

They understood (unlike those of us who did not go) something more about America, about bravery, about priority, about consequence.

The two parts of my day could not have been more different. The childish spat with an entitled gay man and the spiritual warmth of new family offered me by a group of heterosexual strangers.

Inclusion versus exclusion.

Last night Lady Rizo and I had dinner with Winston Churchill’s granddaughter. I was not the only gay at the dinner for 50. I avoided the other gays.

I have nothing to say to any of them.

Tags Civil union, Friday, Gay Lesbian and Bisexual, Homosexuality, Huffington Post, Lady Rizo, LGBT, LGBT Americans, Marriage, Michael, Michael Rowe, Same-sex marriage, Tony Blair, United States

Gay Love Rant

The Gays

The gays. Oh God. It’s enough to make you homophobic.

I don’t mean you dear. Not you.

This post is all about children, real or imagined.

Since Obama’s toothless benediction, the gays have become emboldened.

However, this spurt of new confidence has not translated into any sort of useful direct action or changed the argument in any important way.

All that has happened?

The gays decided to take on the owner of Chick-Fil-E because he doesn’t agree with marriage equality.

Good God. All they managed to do was make that guy a whole heap wealthier. Thanks gays.

I hadn’t heard of Chick-Fil-E before the fuss now all I want to do is sample their factory farmed chicken sandwiches.

Damn you gays!

That’s not true. I’m not going there any time soon to eat anything.

Meanwhile, Elton is on vacation with David and his kid… and David and Neil and the twins… all wearing matching white cruise wear. Each surrogate kid costing $160k. A fleet of nannies back on the boat.

Elton laments that his kid will never know his mother. He’s quite right. Erasing mothers from the picture… is just wrong.

Amongst the gays I notice a new theme emerging, something that used to be hinted at, implicit… but recently… in polite circles… made explicit… there is amongst a broad swathe of the gays I meet… an appalling misogyny.

“I don’t hate women, some of my best friends are women.” they say (without irony) when challenged.

Those who have surrogate kids grumble that the women who sold their eggs or carried the child might want something more than the money. They might want to ‘see’ the child. They might want a relationship with the child.

They would prefer that the baby not see the mother at all, that the baby be delivered from vagina to the hands that paid for the baby, like a UPS parcel.

Apparently it’s now possible to take the DNA from two men and create a child without any genetic material from a woman. I was told this frightening news triumphantly by a gay man the other day.

“You would still need a womb.” he told me sadly. “But it’s only a matter of time before that (a womb) can be replaced too.”

I was uncharacteristically speechless.

Is erasing the mother from the picture just wrong or am I being old-fashioned?

I met gay Ian, a young CAA agent manque.

“I suppose that’s the benefit of being gay… no women.”

A perfect world for Ian: married, baby, no women.

He, ‘Didn’t see the point..” of women. “Women are our natural enemy.” He giggled.

“Are you single?” I asked him. He looked appalled. My question implied that I might want more than a conversation.

I reassured him that I tended to fuck people my own height.

His modern, bourgeoise anxieties included: he would never be able to afford a surrogate child.

That he would never meet a perfect man and marry him.

His friend Zach chimed in helpfully, “Surrogate kids are only 8 grand in India.” No problems with permits he assured us and the women can’t find you.

The gayby industry is being outsourced.

The vitriol spewed over me (as usual) in the Data Lounge is worth noting.

Writhing with xenophobic zeal these queens who hate me seem to hate me for all the things us gays are meant to aspire: beautiful men, money and uniqueness. Ill informed opinions about my house etc. can be ignored.

I feel sorry for the young gay guy who wanted to celebrate me then ended up apologizing for all the nastiness.

Those resentful old poofs who hate me? Well, you’ll have to try little bit harder. As you simper at home writing anonymous shit about me… I’m out and about having a great time.

Thank you very much.

Remember, after ten years a resentment has more to do with the person harbouring it than the intended recipient. Get over yourselves.

Of course, some resentments are fresh and well deserved.

My ex has every reason to loathe me and I wouldn’t expect anything else. I made his life hell after we split up and increasingly, every day in fact, I wish I could put that genie back in the bottle.

P.S. Do I think I’m better than most people? Nope. Do I look down at you from a lofty place judging you? Would I want anyone else’s life? Nope. I don’t envy anyone… ever. I really love my life… good and bad.

And finally, something more to celebrate.

As I’ve written before, I saw those amazing pics of the ex bf with his current beau. They looked great.

They are unashamedly gay.

I applaud his apotheosis.

It is time for us all to jettison the mantle of straight acting, embrace our gayness in what ever form that takes.

That ex of mine has come a very long way since I first met him, from the artificially deep voice, the bad clothes and heterosexual relationship (he even berated my occasional gay flourishes) to dating a man who skips around his closet in 6 inch heels.

Some of my friends who viewed the style u like vid wondered how a man like that could call himself a jock… well my dears, he can call himself anything he likes.

When you have really loved someone and they fuck you over… however long it takes, the aim must always be to forgive and forget.

Loving him gave me a great deal of pleasure and pain but it was something.

We sure had something. And, when they ask me what that something was I can look them in the eye and say, with all honesty, that it was nothing they would want… but it suited me just fine.

However an impossible fantasy it was.

He was like an imprisoned child back then, in desperate need of parole. Boxed in by lies and deception. He became my child, my gay child.

Like every daddy I wanted the best for him.

When I didn’t know where he was, I worried about him… like a child.

Now I know that he is happy… I am happy.

Wasn’t that always my intention? To make him happy, however he wanted it?

What transpired was completely at odds with what I first wanted… Because I fell in love.

I tried not to… but I couldn’t help it.

I let myself fall like an olympic diver into a magnificent pool of crystal clear love.

Sadly, I hit the bottom of the pool and bashed my brains out.

Tags Chick-Fil, David, DNA, Gay Lesbian and Bisexual, India, Obama, Same-sex marriage

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