So much for no-drama Obama. This holiday season we got an early gift stuffed in our fishnet stocking. Clinton at least waited until after his inauguration to throw us under the Straight Talk Express bus with Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
As you have no doubt heard, Barack Obama invited Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration. Warren is the new breed of kinder gentler mega-pastor, who, and it pains him to say this, opposes women’s choice and homosexuals. Other Talibangelicals* are furious at Warren for accepting the invitation. Or envious. Which is a sin.
In an explanation of laughably transparent disproportion Obama said, “Look, he invited me to speak at his church a few years ago. So I’m inviting him to speak at my inauguration.” Why not just have a hoops play date instead?
Warren had sermonized from his Southern California pulpit in favor of Prop Hate using the standard child abuse, bestiality and pedophilia lies. When gay protestors picketed his house after the election, he told a heart-warming story about how he had gone out to them and offered them coffee and doughnuts. Call me ungrateful, but I’d rather have my civil rights than a French cruller.
We, the 70% of the gay vote for Obama are told it’s no big deal. It’s not a cabinet appointment; it’s just a prayer. And p.s. we didn’t get a gay cabinet appointment. We are told to wake up and smell the political coffee. This is what it means to reach out to the other side. We are told to grow up.
And we gay people keep saying we’re just like straight people. We are not. We are much more tolerant. We have been putting up with their tiresome phobia for long enough. What are they afraid of? Why must they drag out Bible stories to justify their fears? Quit drinking. Stop watching online porn for a minute. Go to therapy. Quit taking it out on us.
Let’s have some real gay balls after this inauguration. The gay movement is too big to fail. That’s exactly what they are afraid of.
*Thank you Jim David

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Apparently Chicago was getting a little too big for its britches about their favorite son and it got a big old biotch slap. First Oprah announced that she literally had gotten too big for her britches. She admitted – and what tacky person asked? – that she has hit the double centenary pound mark. I’m sorry you feel so bad about it, Oprah, and for health’s sake you probably should try to shed a few pounds, but heck you are one big beautiful black woman, so don’t get all shamey, do what you can and look gorgeous in the meantime. It might be karma for that wheel barrel of fat you had carted out on stage a while back.
Then Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, with the very slim resume, got carted off for allegedly trying to sell Barrack Obama’s=2 0vacant Senate seat. It’s not like it’s never been done before, but you have to admire this guy’s level of transparency. Rod married Chicago alderman Dick Mell’s potty-mouthed daughter and rose to governor on a reform plank. Like the reform-minded guv from Alaska he got bored with the job and sought a national platform. There are no transcripts of Palin trying to sell Sen. Ted Steven’s old seat. Yet. Though we face huge state deficits, I hope my NY Governor Patterson doesn’t try to sell off Hillary Clinton’s senate seat. And who knew being governor was such a giant yawn?
The “expletive laced” transcripts made young Rod sound like he was off his meds. The subpoenaed Team of Rovals linked the scandal to Barack Obama, Tony Rezko and maybe Boss Tweed. With audacity of hype FOX news denounced the pay-to-play demands of the governor and wanted off with his bleeping bushy head. Meantime the slobbying, mendacious GOP sees “ethics” as their mantra for the next election. Gag me with a forklift.
It is sad that selling vacant senate seats is seen as a viable revenue stream in this economy. Desperate times. While America shopped, our unregulated capital markets turned into ponzi scum and high stakes poker parlors. Desperate measures. The damage continues to trickle down and very good, decent, hardworking people, who shower before and after work, are being hammered.
Ironically gay and straight are equal in the great leveling juggernaut of this recession. The LGBT community is reeling. Individual memberships, donations and corporate funding have dried up and LGBT groups are cutting staff or going under. The Day Without Gay is real and it’s here and threatens to turn into weeks and months.
Now more than ever it’s time fo r our own version of pay-to-play. In whatever year-end giving we can afford we need to support our LGBT centers and organizations, local, state, national and international. We also need to support straight organizations run by courageous out LGBT leaders. We need to lean on our straight allies to pay up with us.
It’s time for some Pay-to-Gay.

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While the American family and our extended international family were whooping it up for the historic Obama victory, I banged pans and wept for joy with the best of them. But I also had that dissociated, not-quite-part-of-feeling I had at family gatherings when I was young. Actually, I have never felt gayer.
Make no mistake. Election night 2008 was an amazing reparative night, a triumphant trifecta signaling the end of Nixon’s southern strategy, the Reagan Revolution and the Bush Regime. If Bush could have considered his first presidential selection and his second slim election as mandates, then we can certainly call the Obama victory a landslide.
It was a landside and it crushed us, as California, Arizona, Florida and Arkansas passed anti-gay ballot initiatives. It was a bittersweet night.
We learned three lessons.
First, progressive straight people do not, will not, see the moral equality of gay people. Except for the efforts of the ACLU, the rights of gay people are rarely championed by progressives. The moral sanctity of their marriage is inexplicably undermined by gay marriage. In the forty years since Stonewall we have achieved only a hollow, virtual equality. Like Sarah Palin, we too can be thrown under the bus.
Second, religion is the opposite of the people. While Black Churches certainly helped pass Prop Hate, the White Churches can not get off Dred Scott free. In an image-burnishing move, multi-wived Mormons poured millions into Prop Hate. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, with its zero experience of marriage, contributed thousands. Democracy and religion are a bad mix.
Third, gay people cannot win if our own people do not care. If gay people remain partially or fully closeted, and do not openly support gay organizations which train those much maligned but highly effective “community organizers”, we will never win full equality. It has been forty years since the Stonewall Riots and we still do not think, yes, we can.
So excuse me, if I seem an ungracious party-pooper, quickly becoming more bitter than sweet. If gay people are not full American citizens, let’s stop paying taxes and re-invest in ourselves. It is past time for pro-active strategies, for our own ballot initiative to make divorce illegal and all divorced people disenfranchised felons. It is time for a general strike or a rainbow flu. Until further notice, all gay people should go rogue.

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Despite much good-natured pressure, my partner of twenty years and I have not gotten married. If we ever do marry, I know I will want an old fashioned wedding. Really old fashioned. When I get married, I want a country.
I am the Mr. Big of gay marriage. That said, I completely support the freedom to marry for all gay people. I believe my friends when they tell me how surprised they are at the transformational power of declaring their love before family and friends. I love hearing their stories.
I hate hearing their stories of the on-the-ground, hand-to-hand combat against anti-gay ballot initiatives in Florida, Arizona [again], and California. In California, two newly wed lesbian friends called me as they drove to yet another “No on 8” rally through a thicket of “Yes on 8” yard signs. The friend who was driving was distraught because her usually serene partner who was having a homicidal, screaming jag triggered by all the Yes signage. She asked me to talk her down. I suggested she drive on the lawns and take out some signs.
In this financial climate, in California alone, sixty million dollars is being spent for and against the basic human rights of gay people. You would think the attitude would be, “Oh for heaven’s sake, it’s almost the end of the world, let the gay people get married.”
If we defeat Prop Hate, I say we sue our adversaries for anti-gay harassment and to recoup our money. We can use the money to continue to provide for homeless LGBT youth, HIV AIDS support, and care for our elder gays.
If we do not defeat Prop Hate, I say November 5th we call for a general gay work slowdown. Decorators will do deliberately bad, possibly dangerous feng shui. Hairdressers will mistakenly lay hot curling irons down on ears. Social workers will give bad advice, “Your father sounds like a great guy. Show him some love.” Salespeople will ooze, “Oh, that looks great on you.” Waiters will serve cold food and suggest the wrong wine. Flight attendants will put ‘out of service’ signs on bathrooms midway through long-distance flights. Some nameless malaise will dim Broadway.
If gay people are not to be full citizens of this country, we should stop paying taxes. To make up for the lost funds, as an alternate revenue stream, it is time to tax churches that have encouraged anti-gay hatred through their bullying pulpits. The FBI recently released hate-crime statistics that showed a 1% decrease in hate crimes over all, but a 6% increase in anti-gay hate crimes.
When and if I get married, I want my country. Call me old-fashioned.

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Homeland Security
Though I have not looked, I bet you twenty dollars my 401K looks like the Y2K. Actually, make that five dollars. I have been treating my 01K as I treat any new weird sound in my old Jeep. I just turn up the radio. In the morning as my galpal mutters and shakes her head reading the Wall Street Urinal, I try to focus on the Style Section of the newly consolidated New York Times.
Were you aware of the pitfalls lurking in the latest trend of men’s fashion – tucking one’s pant leg into one’s boot? If men are not attuned to the proportionality of pant to boot, or if they are not able to carry off the maneuver with nonchalance, tuckers could be accused of – and you might want to sit down before you read this – “trying too hard.” And still, the only thing left of my bank is the free pen.
California, the nation state that has for so long been the object of our sunny projections – the weather, the education system, the roads, and the glamour – is in a credit crunch that is shutting the state down tighter than Harriet Mier’s lips under subpoena. Gov. Schwarzenegger recently announced that he might not have to bop the Fed over the head for the money. The Gov, whose hair seems to darken with the state’s condition, said he was optimistic about other revenue sources.
Schwarzenegger must be going to hit up the Mormons. For bizarrely, as CA struggles to meet payroll, millions of dollars are flowing into the state either to support or defeat a November ballot initiative on gay marriage. The Mormons, and that’s with two m’s, have reportedly dumped $12 million into the anti-gay Proposition 8 war chest. So far.
Isn’t that rich? The Mormons, who never convincingly denounce polygamous, rapacious pedophilia, are trying to portray themselves as full-on supporters of marriage, defined as a union between one man and one woman. Forget about all those old white guys cranked up on Viagra with the multiple underage girl wives up the valley in the Yearning for Zion Ranch.
The CA anti-gay forces gained four points in the polls the day after the veep debate. Joe Biden, who can not answer questions in many, many words, had been uncharacteristically succinct when he answered that neither he nor Barack Obama supported gay marriage. Thanks a bunch. Also on the day after the veep debate, Sarah Palin quickly clarified that she did not mean to give the impression that she even tolerated gay people.
With that settled, she resumed her mean girl cheerleader role of stoking red state, red meat crowds with middle school, scurrilous gossipy lines about Barack Obama, or ‘that one’ as he is known to the Senior Moment from Arizona. Some in Palin and McCain crowds yell ‘terrorist’ or ‘kill him’ at the mention of Obama’s name. The crowds cheer. She nods slightly in agreement. She is playing with fire. We are way past the blame game. You can put lipstick on a scapegoat, but it’s still a scapegoat.
At the White House, George Bush has requested that his people prepare for his orderly transition from power. Too late. His Very Lame Duckness says it is “for security reasons” and has ominously reminded his transition team that three days before the presidential election in Spain, wherever that is, there had been a terrorist bombing. Already, in Ohio, a crucial electoral swing state, the National Guard, all four of them, are on alert and prepared to impose martial law in the financial crisis. In CA they are on alert to impose marital law. Homeland Security, indeed.

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I come from a family of winkers. I swear if my family had been on the Titanic, the last thing I would have seen my Dad do as he sank beneath the cold, dark sea would have been one last wink and gone.
The wink could be quick and crisp, a nano-flick that moved few other facial muscles. It could be slow and tight, a cyclopean clench that suggested Bell’s Palsy. It had several speeds. It was intentional or automatic. It was a family facial semaphore with several meanings: ‘Good morning.’ ‘He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.’ ‘I’m just joshing you.’ ‘We’re in this together.’ It was by turns welcoming, mocking, denying, reassuring, or conspiratorial.
Like many family tics, we didn’t not notice it, until a friend visited for the weekend and asked after, “Why do you all wink at each other?” “We do?” “Are you kidding? All the time. Walking into a room. When someone else is talking. At first I thought your brother was flirting with me at dinner. He just wanted the mashed potatoes.”
Despite my long experience decoding winks, I just caught the very tail end of Sarah Palin’s v-p debate wink as one perfectly made-up eyelid rose again to the open position. “Did she just wink?” I asked. I had been momentarily distracted, not by daubing my Palin Bingo card [I did not win] but by turning to shush my galpal. As I turned back, I saw the vapor trail of what I knew was a wink. Damn!
Moderator Gwen Ifill, had been drudged all week as partisan because she’s writing a book about the new generation of black politicians. That was no reason to break her ankle. Ifill did her level best, though she did not ask one question about immigration or abortion. Could Palin have pulled another answer out of her energy package? Palin, the inexperienced Reaganette, attempted to “there-you-go-again” Biden’s experience and establish rapport not with the politicos out there on the east coast but with the mind-if-I-call-you-Joe-Six-Packs in Smallville, USA.
Like Biden, I also got choked up during the debate. Sadly the only moment of unanimity of the night was that both candidates oppose gay marriage. Apparently the B of LGBT stands for bipartisan, not bisexual. Palin practically wiped her hands and chirped tolerantly, “I’m so glad we agree on that Joe.” After all our LGBT support and hard work for the Obama-Biden ticket, it was sickening. Mind if I call you chicken, Joe?
What I find staggering is that, in the midst of wars and financial collapse, we are talking seriously and at all about McCain’s Folly. Sarah Palin is a folksy, well-trained, Wikipedia-deep, by-George-she’s-got-it, bush-to-nowhere. Fine for governor up there in Alaska, but not for vice-president down here on planet earth. She is way over her head. She will wink just before we all sink.

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My head feels like the terrorists have won.
Last Friday, we went to a friend’s house for dinner and the debate. My galpal was quickly driven out of the TV room by McCain’s smarmy opening gambit about Ted Kennedy’s hospitalization. Unable to sit still, she nervously cleaned our friend’s kitchen to a gleam it had not seen in years. Her Mrs. Clean efforts did not preclude periodic screams from the kitchen: “Do not agree with John McCain!” “Nail him now with the Savings and Loan scandal.” “Interrupt grandpa now!”
I tivoed the debate plan to play it when it’s time for a thorough cleaning of our own kitchen.
I had thought of sending Obama a case of Red Bull for the next presidential debate. His preternatural calm is highlighted by the desperate tics of John McCain, or as we call him in our house, “God Forbid.” Obama’s calm in the eye of the storm is his nature and as much as I would like him to squash McCain like a bug, it really is not the change he has called for. Despite my own post-debate despair, in many analyses Obama was judged the winner.
Next up is the vice-presidential debate. While Rove and Limbaugh, the diaxis of evil, have their old crank-yanker with the dicey health records hooked up to adrenalized life-support, they have their v-p candidate hooked up to the info-injection machine. She’ll be ready when they pull McCain’s plug, but for now you can just pull her neck string: “Putin rears his head, flies over, in the airspace, where does he go, Alaska.” Their Manchurian Candidate is deemed being-there brilliant. Just as eight years ago when the bar was set low for Bush, if Sarah Palin does not burst into flames, she will be proclaimed the winner.
We are staying home for the v-p debate. I am hoping to get a couple closets cleaned out. Speaking of closets, I predict gay marriage will stand in CA. The zeitgeist will be: Oh for god’s sake, it’s the end of the world, let the gay people get married.

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A while back, I was talking with my sister on the phone and told her the news that our niece was moving back east, and she practically hissed, “Fierce!” Then, to my confused silence, she explained, “That’s Christian Siriano from Project Runway.”
Though my sister is a rabid anti-TV person, she is a passionate seamstress. Her guilty pleasure is Project Runway. She is now a Christian Sirianist. Of all the things I have done in my darling career, she was most impressed when I sent her a picture of the kind-hearted taskmaster of the show, Tim Gunn, and me at a fundraiser. Desmond Tutu could not have gotten a bigger reaction.
Until this summer, I had never seen Project Runway. At a lovely wedding dinner for two couples that had exchanged vows earlier that day, suddenly everyone was up and exiting before the cake was even rolled out to be cut. I asked the preternaturally hip fourteen-year old son of one of the couples what the heck was going on. He gave me a look that made me feel even older than I did getting a texted v-p announcement from Barack Obama and said, as he quickly left, “Tonight is the drag queen challenge on Project Runway.”
Except for a few dazed straight people wandering the streets like some post-nuclear family survivors, the streets of Ptown were deserted as I rode my bike home. The town had a personal stake in this PR episode. Two of our very own drag performers, Hedda Lettuce and Varla Jean Merman were on the show.
Though I wasn’t sure of PR’s format or point system or what accent Heidi Klum was doing, I was immediately hooked.
Thus far, I have seen maybe four episodes, but from what I’ve seen, if the world doesn’t end before the next presidential election, may I suggest we model our next national contest on Project Runway? Just as I am one of the last to know about PR, or to try online banking, I’m sure someone has already pitched this idea. It’s so obvious.
Wouldn’t you prefer a PR spinoff to the format we have now – endless primary campaign season, billions spent, Republican and Democratic circuit party conventions? It would be an eight-week season. Both parties would have four weeks to pick their contender, then four weeks for them to go up against each other. They would compete in individual and team competitions. The challenges would vary week to week.
To be read with a Heidi Klum accent:
This week you must work with a US military and Iraqi civilian team to plan the withdrawal from Iraq by 2010. You will not be allowed to leave an occupying force or to send the troops home by way of Afghanistan.
This week you must design your own solution to our nation’s health care crisis. You will work with insurance companies and four people with chronic illnesses. Each can afford only $3 in co-pay.
This week you will work with the Army Corps of Engineers, the dreaded community organizers and what’s left of the infrastructure of New Orleans to draw up a plan for the restoration of the delta. You cannot rely on casino funding.
This week your assignment is to design a plan to reduce the US dependency on foreign oil by 50% in the next five years. You will be penalized for wearing fake hard hats and shrieking Drill, Baby, Drill.
Your final challenge, for the win, is to outline your plan to bring Dick Cheney and George Bush to trial before an international War Crimes Tribunal. You have two years to accomplish this. It doesn’t count if you go to jail instead of them.
You get the idea. Presidential candidates don’t have to like the challenges; they just have to do them. We’d get to see them in action as problem solvers, deciderators, managers, leaders and not just speechifying campaigners. Then we’d all vote. I believe we have the technology to do it with our TV remotes. Press select.
I’m going to try to get this on the ballot in California as an election reform initiative.
*This is a Palin-free space. After the Republican White Party, I thought we could all use a break. And I am sure this nausea will pass soon.

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Remember Del Martin
The Republicans just finished up their White Party and Friar’s Club Roast. It was like their Houston Convention, point oh hate. All they’ve got is derision and cheap shots. After eight years as Designated Bush Watcher, I am cranky, whiny. Weh weh, I can’t bear to watch. Can’t I just do knock knock jokes? Poor me. Then I remember Del Martin. She was an amazing, dare I say it, “community organizer” for our LGBT rights. For at least 60 years. How did she do it? Who cares? She just did it. In loving memory of her courage and passion, I’m quitting my whining right now and getting back to work.

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George has enough accumulated sick days to go on vacation, call the home office from the ranch and say he is not coming back. But no.
Now he has a big conflict with his old “I looked him in the eye” friend, Russia’s self-appointed premier, Vlad Putin. In my house, we had been expecting the traditional August surprise, but had been looking Iran-ward. George might just do like Putin, who looked him in the eye and saw right to the back of his head, and declare himself the U.S. Premier. I would not put it past him. That Constitution has been nothing but an inconvenience.
George is fresh from the Chinese Olympics, brought to us by our own credit card debt. With not one little toenail left on his moral footprint, still president-erect from cruising the Olympic beach volleyball babes, and hectoring China on their human rights abuses, there was our Spectator-in-Chief excoriating Russia for its preemptive strike into Georgia. You could practically hear the world snorting, or maybe it was me. One Russian general awaiting his marching orders announced, “If the US can take Baghdad, we can take Tbilisi.”
Putin’s punishing Georgian incursion and Ossetian obsession gave broadcasters a chance to brush off their use of “hegemonics” again, but it is much easier to say “oil”. This is Putin’s version of George’s off-shore drilling. Our nation’s pusher in our addiction to oil never mentions compassionate conservation. And I do not mean bailing out arrogant, short-sighted auto industry executives whose S.U.V.s are now S.V.U.s and are somehow to be congratulated for finally making fuel-semi-efficient cars. McCain, Bush’s Second Life avatar, scornfully reduced Obama’s wide-ranging list of conservation options to tire pressure. Think Carter’s cardigan.
When your situation room is the resort town of Provincetown in August, it is difficult to try to convey the seriousness of these developments to vacationers. It is also perhaps cruel. One sunbathing woman overhearing my shrill news on the beach, thought Russia had invaded the state of Georgia and said, “If they can fix the Atlanta airport, I’m all for it. Give them Florida.”
While it is Bear Week in Russia, here in Provincetown we are approaching our last big theme weekend of the summer, Carnival. This year’s carnival theme is “Wild, Wild West”. It is a great party, but I am dreading the Chaps R Us, Brokeback Mountain variations, and the inevitable, impolitic cowboy and Indian gaffes. Or maybe I am just projecting to the upcoming wilding at Denver’s Democratic convention. Meantime I am off to get together my Annie Oakley outfit.

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