The White Peril 白禍

One of these days, I'm going to come up with a rule. Well, I've already sort of come up with it, I just haven't gotten it into perfected, catchy form yet. The basic idea is:

job as vaguely-defined counselor/consultant/therapist + list of multiple degrees prominently showcased after one's name = RUN AWAY!

For the latest proof, look at 365Gay's Ask Angelo. (I don't know whether his columns are archived; I'm pretty sure this one just appeared today.)

Yes, before you say it, I'm in a pissy frame of mind and huffing and puffing over something trivial. My boyfriend has been making me feel his faraway wonderfulness all the more piercingly this week by going out of his way to e-mail me get-well messages over lunch, even though he has to make some excuse to absent himself from his colleagues and knows that he'll be talking to me between 11 and midnight as always, anyway. I'm ill and feeling crappy. The tribulations of guys who can't keep it in their pants even with their boyfriends in the same city are not high on my list of things to sympathize with at the moment.

More on that later. First, here's letter 1:

Dear Angelo,

After three years of a most fulfilling relationship with my bf, I was unceremoniously dumped. How do you accept someone you love telling you that they're out of love with you?

Signed, Shocked 



Dear Shocked,
I do not know if you'll ever really accept that he is not in love with you anymore per se. I mean you may not believe it or be OK with it for a long while. It was not something you expected, chose or wanted. Loving someone romantically involves our deepest experience of oneness. When we are in love we are as close as we can be physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually to anyone. Surprising insensitive rejection from a love is a terribly painful feeling. A gut wrenching unbearable pain. If we are lonely, emotionally wounded or need more love in our life, this pain can be excruciating.

You may ask, "how can this be?" You may think: I feel the love between us. I still see the look in his eyes. [You may say to yourself: this is not my beautiful stapler! *Ahem* Sorry.--SRK] Maybe he's afraid. Maybe he's in a funk. Maybe he's on drugs. Maybe he's gone crazy. And the list goes on.

Yeah, I bet it does. I wonder whether the list includes, "Maybe I've spent the last three years being a selfish little bitch. Maybe he's been sending me big, flashing warning signs that things were going awry. Maybe I ignored them because I was getting what I wanted. Maybe he finally decided the only thing that would get it through my thick skull was to ditch my ass."

I mean, sorry. Of all the long-term relationships I've seen go sour (including my own pre-Atsushi versions), invariably, when the dumpee has said, "This is so sudden!" his entire complement of friends and acquaintances has risen with one voice to say, "WHAT?! How could you NOT SEE THAT COMING?" Are there people who genuinely and innocently get stuck with jerks who don't reveal themselves as such until late in the game? Probably. I'm afraid probability isn't on the side of that one, though.

...

Grieving is an active process that you have to move towards. Blocking it makes it worse. It is by allowing yourself to be sad, to scream, to cry, to "fall apart" that you heal. Lean into the pain and let it all out. Inviting in this kind of deep agonizing pain will take some effort on your part. Feeling your feelings is the key to getting better. The only way out is through. This intense pain will not last forever even though it seems like it will. The pain will lessen. Get support including counseling....

Yeah, there's nothing in life more difficult than convincing a fag who's just been dumped to get self-indulgently mopey about it. Like killing the freaking Hydra, is what it is.

My degree isn't in psychology, but I venture to say that the problem most guys I've seen have isn't that they're incapable of owning their grief. It's that they can't put a lid on it and fake being even-keeled until their heart catches up with their façade, not even after a decent amount of down time.

And nowhere in Angelo's reply do I see anything at all about the possible need for self-criticism on the part of the letter-writer--either to figure out what he himself might have done to contribute to the undoing of the relationship or to learn what to look for so he doesn't get taken again.

Letter 2 is even, uh, better:

Dear Angelo, 

I am happily partnered in a monogamous relationship for 4� months now. My boyfriend and I have a great sex life and I feel complete. However I can't stop looking at porn, going to book stores, playing with strangers, and I can't stop myself from cruising the locker room at the gym either.

Signed, Prowler 

Playing with strangers, honey? Since your relationship is monogamous, I assume you're referring to canasta?

Angelo's answer to this one starts off promisingly:

Dear Prowler, 

Newsflash! If you're honest with yourself, you know you're not in a monogamous relationship if you're playing with strangers behind his back. This is cheating. You are being dishonest with your partner and yourself. You are also putting your partner at risk if you're not playing safe. Your behavior does not match your statement that you're happy, great and complete in your relationship. If this is so, for what reason do you cheat? If you truly feel happy, great and complete with him, your behavior suggests you may have a sexual addiction that helps
you feel good about yourself. You would want to seek counseling to control it. 



Like many men, perhaps you don't know how to, or are afraid of getting emotionally close to another man. Your sexual behavior could be an exit for you to feel safe. Many men equate relationship with engulfment and may cheat to feel more independent.

Interesting, the way this guy recommends coun$eling for everything.

More importantly, we have an inquiry from a guy who wants to screw around all the time. And what explanations are we offered? Maybe he's afraid of intimacy. Maybe he's greasing an exit. Maybe he has an addiction.

Here's a thought: maybe he's like the rest of us--a horny gay man who needs to learn that it's possible to go for 18 consecutive hours without doing it, even if you spend part of that time at the gym and in Christopher Street bookstores. Why is it that plain old lack of discipline is the last explanation people reach for to explain bad behavior? An old complaint, I know, but give me a break. If this character's willing to game some guy into providing him the safe feeling of a monogamous relationship while cheating on him, I'm not sure that telling him an open arrangement might suit his needs better addresses the real problem.

A Typical Joe commented to my most recent effusion on gay marriage with this:

I don't agree with the argument (from Sean at The White Peril via Dean's World)
but it is not anti-gay.

That's a more civil response than one often gets on this topic; for that I thank him. [Uh, either I just got dizzier or there was just an earthquake...lessee, 22:00...have to check NHK.] I feel at a distinct disadvantage disagreeing with someone who looks so adorable with his partner (I think there's some kind of law: only one smiler per gay couple), but I'm going to do my best, at least on one important point.

I know, or at least am willing to believe, that for a lot of rank-and-file gays, the fundamental issue isn't psychological affirmation. But, you know, as long as overachieving, careerist urban guys are the ones making the public arguments, status is going to sneak into them somehow. Believe me, I am not casting stones here--I am perfectly capable, in my weaker moments, of detestable thinking along the lines of, Dammit, I was the obedient show-child growing up. I have the summa cum laude Ivy League degree and the management job. I don't do drugs or hang out at sex clubs. I donate to charity and pay my taxes and NO POSSIBILITIES SHOULD BE CLOSED TO ME.

You cannot just look at Andrew Sullivan's and Jonathan Rauch's and Dale Carpenter's CV's and have a comprehensive map to their psychology. But you also can't tell me that the milieux they move in don't color what they think should be theirs for the asking. Again, I'm talking about men I much admire, despite Sullivan's recent shakiness. And it's pretty much a truism that those who get the public microphone are going to be those who (1) want it and (2) have resources to compete for it.

I just wish that people with a different point of view (just so it's clear, I'm not ascribing this thinking to Joe, just using his post as a lead-in to it) would take more opportunities to stand up and say, "Look, we'll take care of being respectable in our day-to-day interactions with our family and neighbors--leave that out of it. It's not that we're not as smart as you are, or that our expectations are blinkered, or our horizons are shrunken, or anything. We don't want to be prom queen for a day. We don't want attention. We just want the government to make it possible for us to count on being able to provide for each other and then get out of our lives." I can certainly understand why they don't, though.

Added on 24 February: In the comments, Michael refers to his latest post on marriage. It's here.

I've started and jettisoned this post about a dozen times over the last week or so; actually, I think I've been stopping and starting it for the past year, but Michael may have given me an in to the point I want to address.

I can understand why conservative Christian parents and elders would not want to bankroll or otherwise support a life they regard as sinful. The Bible says what it says, and I don't think there's any getting around that it doesn't approve of sexual relationships outside marriage--that's not what I mean. What I find bewildering is when children come out to their parents and are told that they're inevitably headed for addiction, a string of abusive relationships or worse, and an early demise. I mean, the flat declaration that there's nothing whatever affirmative or affectionate about homosexual relationships at all.

You would think that sheer pragmatism would prevent parents from talking this way. After all, isn't the idea to bring the child back to the fold and convince him to be chaste, or what have you? I doubt that I'm alone in that the major thing that made me feel ready to come out to my parents was the knowledge that I wasn't just going to spend the rest of my life looking to score--who the hell is going to start a potential family feud to deliver that message?--I wanted a relationship, and whether they approved of its nature or not, I wanted them not to have to feel I wasn't being taken care of. In that context, I think a lot of kids, hearing their parents decry homosexuality as inherently selfish and exploitative, conclude that they have no idea what they're talking about and stop listening to them all together. I'm not trying to help the conservative Christians win back gays; I know my homosexuality isn't going anywhere, and I think that's the case for most of us.

On the other hand, there are people who are plain screwed up in the head, and if some of the gay ones can't handle their sexuality, using religion to give their lives a purpose beyond finding ever-more-imaginative ways to destroy themselves sounds to me like a good plan. When parents prophesy the worst for such children and push them away, it seems to me that there's a pretty high risk they won't figure that out before they reach the point of no return. You'd think it'd be obvious that staying warmly involved with the rest of their lives, perhaps avoiding discussions of homosexuality because they're obviously not going to go anywhere, would be the better strategy.

If the push for gay marriage does not express people's longing for self-esteem-boosting through government policy, why is it that I read something like this at least once every few weeks?

The second argument against civil unions as an intermediate step to marriage is that civil unions send the unacceptable message that gays are second-class citizens. Civil unions, says Stanback, are "a firm message that we are less deserving of dignity, respect, and rights than other citizens and taxpayers." Marriage, by contrast, "is a universally respected cultural, legal, and social institution," she notes. "Very, very few opposite-sex couples would trade their marriage for something called a civil union."

All of that is true and counsels against being satisfied, in the end, with anything short of marriage.

You know, I've read this stuff very carefully. I've reread it. I've hung myself like a bat from the side of my bed and looked at it upside-down to make sure I'm seeing all the angles. I still come back to a point Eric Scheie made at Classical Values some months ago:

Homosexuality is not heterosexuality. There are many differences between gay and straight relationships. The laws and social mores designed for the heterosexual scheme of things reflect these differences. I see no reason why homosexuals should feel the need to ape heterosexuals, and even less reason why they should be forced to do so. This is my biggest objection to same sex marriage.

One of the things that frustrate me about this is the way gay activism constantly hoovers up the stalest, least wholesome feminist crumbs. For decades, political-action feminism argued that women and men are the same (there were certainly Mary Daly-type nutcases arguing to other academics that women were different in a superior way, but they didn't affect social policy any more than Michael Warner does), and that anyone who defended social and legal distinctions of any kind between them was a tool of the Evil Dominant Culture. You may have noticed that none of this changed the fact that women have children and men do not, that we have different hormonal systems and biological strengths and weaknesses.

I'm talking about general patterns, obviously--only a troglodyte wants to go back to the days when a woman with a bent for theoretical physics rather than mothering was coerced into choosing an unsuitable vocation just to make everyone else happy. Parenthood is the single most important job in civilization; but that doesn't mean that everyone has to be a parent to live a worthwhile life. We wouldn't be a civilization without creating and maintaining lots of systems and artifacts that are quite unnatural, in the sense that they wouldn't occur if we left the world to its own brute devices. The problem was that feminism didn't stop at making the point that she should be allowed to choose or to strike such balances as were feasible. It said that society should make the choice painless and that women who left the lab for the nursery were thereby expressing lack of self-respect.

So let's see...what's gay activism up to right about now? Society should make gay relationships eligible for marriage so we know we're respected, and if you supported President Bush for reelection or you don't support gay marriage, you're not self-respecting.

[Gets self another Scotch so he can bear to continue. Okay. Back. Mmmm...peat.]

The thing is--or one thing is--these arguments about respect always end up arriving at assertions that we love our partners, we take care of our partners, and we're not all promiscuous. These are all good things to affirm. But when you use them as underpinnings for social policy (illustrated by Andrew Sullivan's moist-eyed NYT article "Integration day" with statements such as "Gay couples will be married in Massachusetts � their love and commitment and responsibility fully cherished for the first time by the society they belong to"), it seems to me that you're essentially saying, "Approve of my sex life, please." Can't imagine why that would fail to convince anyone that we're not deserving of dignity.

After all, if it's "love and commitment" we're worried about, why shouldn't two friends (we all have friends we adore to pieces and would take a bullet for) who've decided to form a household, because neither has plans to marry and they're content with each other, be able to take responsibility for each other that includes health insurance and hospital visitation? Or be able to have one vouch for the other's application for permanent residency as a non-citizen? Okay, that second one would need careful consideration, but I don't think it's risible on its face.

When I read articles by gays built around gloopy declarations of how much they love their partners, designed to show our worthiness for marriage, I find it frankly humiliating. Such writing probably does sometimes convince a few straight people that we actually do fall in love and care for each other. I think it also serves an important function in letting gays who are in the very fragile first stages of coming out know that there's something worth shooting for beyond easily-obtainable sex and drug kicks. Where I draw the line--where I cannot imagine not drawing the line--is at some point before we start talking about the power of government to confer dignity.

You know this from fifty other people already: Senator Arlen Specter has Hodgkin's Disease. Best to him and his family. He's been one of our senators pretty much since we Pennsylvanians in our early thirties can remember; I can't pretend to be crazy about all his triangulations, but he's gotten my vote since I've been of age.

Uh, incidentally, this might be a nice time for the HRC (not Hillary--she'll do the politically advantageous thing intuitively; the Human Rights Campaign will not) to say that, despite their differences in the last election cycle, it's grateful for his record of gay-friendliness and robustly wishes him well. Of course, in order not to come off as (and be) cynically opportunistic, the HRC would have to have done some reflection. What chance is there of that?

Speaking of Jonathan Rauch, he's started a website, linked to by IGF. Cool (even if the design does give me distracting cravings for the Neapolitan ice cream of my childhood). The links to his articles appear to pull together what you'd get from looking him up on IGF and Reason, which is a good thing. His book on gay marriage is disappointing, but not much of his other writing is. I've been a fan since Kindly Inquisitors.

And he doesn't know what a trackback is, which gives me comfort. I thought I was just a moron, but maybe it's a fag thing. (Homos who always knew what trackbacks were because they helped invent them, or whatever, will kindly refrain from disillusioning me.)

Right Side of the Rainbow says everything I've ever wanted to say about defenses of traditional marriage against gays here. If I read his tone correctly, he's dead serious but also being arch. I particularly like this point:

Strip marriage of the rules that make it unappealing to gay men but keep all the nice perks that come with it — what, you think we don't want our partners to have health insurance? — and you get the inevitable. You get a political campaign driven by middle class gay men, possessed as all middle class Americans are of a suffocating sense of entitlement, that will not relent until it succeeds.

People talk about gay activists as if their sense of entitlement were some kind of evidence of special gay selfishness. But entitlements are the way modern civic life works--remember Jonathan Rauch's chapters on lobbyists in Demosclerosis? I'm happy to deplore this, and to join in any principled objection to the excesses of leftist gay advocacy. It's a target-rich environment, to be sure; however, I get very uneasy when it's treated as some sort of freakish aberration in American politics, rather than the wack-job end of a continuum that runs all the way through it.

Added on 17 February: Eric at Classical Values has mentioned common-law marriage in connection to gays, and I was sure that, somewhere, he'd pointed out that some gay-marriage advocates might not be so hot on the prospect of being considered a de facto married couple after cohabiting for seven years. Can't seem to find the post I'm thinking of, but the point was a good one.

Oh, and one more thing: childrearing is the single most important thing most people do in life, and the amount of sacrifice it requires is considerable. The view one hears nowadays that childrearing = selflessness and altruism, however, is coarse and misleading. Everywhere outside the developed world, people recognize very matter-of-factly that they're having children not just to let happy new life loose in the world but to provide work for the household, including elder care when the parents themselves are old and incapacitated.

The same mechanism operates here in the First World, of course; it's just that our money economy means that people are less likely to need their children's financial support and that the literal care they need can come from other people's children in the form of strong, young nurses and deliverymen. The investment of energy in child-rearing feels obvious and real. The payback from the pool of workers who keep the economy going feels diffuse and is easy to gloss over (in that one often hears people talk about parenting as an investment in the future, as if the effort went in a single altruistic direction only).

One must also consider that, in a world in which many of us don't do physical labor, and those who do are rarely involved in the farming of life's essentials, sex and the production of children is one of the few experiences left that serve primal, animal urges--which civilization teaches us to subsume but doesn't actually banish.

I am not arguing here that parenthood is on balance a selfish project. What I do think is that it paints a false picture to posit child-bearing straightness in an unqualified way as saintly and self-abnegating, which I think is the effect (however unintended) of quite a bit of the current discourse on marriage and parenting.

Joanne Jacobs gives us this wonderful little bon-bon:

Center for American Progress, a Washington think tank, is funding liberal newspapers on already liberal college campuses. "Isn't that a bit like pumping sand into the Mojave Desert?" the Washington Post asks.

"We're not winning the battle of ideas on campus," says David Halperin, who is running the project for the Center for American Progress. Conservatives "have this insurgency mentality, even though they run the world."

"We're being outhustled," says Halperin's colleague Ben Hubbard. "We want to cultivate the media stars, much like the right has done with Ann Coulter and Dinesh D'Souza."

Toward that end, the center will give $750,000 to nine liberal campus publications at such places as Princeton, Dartmouth and the University of Wisconsin, and help launch four at the universities of Michigan, Chicago, Kentucky and Ohio State. This is dwarfed by the more than $30 million a year that they estimate conservative campus organizations receive from such groups as the Young America's Foundation and Leadership Institute.

The web site, CampusProgress.org, has a cartoon showing a blonde female cheerleader, dressed in blue, kicking off the head of a red devil-monster, revealing the cowering male within.

I don't know about his colleague, but Halperin himself had a brush with media stardom of his own. In fact, I doubt that I'm the only person for whom he's been positively immortalized. Halperin, you see, was one of the subjects of Camille Paglia's climactic essay "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders," which fourteen years ago helped push her through to fame from buzz. Most people didn't see its original Arion printing but rather its climactic inclusion in her second book, Sex, Art, and American Culture. Here's a paragraph from near the beginning of the (very long) essay:

One Hundred Years of Homosexuality is a short collection of essays that seems to have only one coherent aim: the nomination and promotion of David Halperin as a major theorist of sex. But Halperin, like most of the American academics who have wandered into sex studies, lacks the most elementary understanding of the basic disciplines of history, anthropology, and psychology necessary for such work. The exposition of these essays is tortured, bloated, meandering, pretentious, confused. Halperin's first book, Before Pastoral: Theocritus and the Ancient History of Bucolic Poetry (1983), is quite different. Whether its precision and clarity of argument--not to mention skill in simple paragraphing--are due to the editors of Yale University Press or to a helpful dissertation director, it is evident that in One Hundred Years we are getting Halperin lui-même.

That's one of the more mild passages. It gets much sharper and funnier and basically doesn't let up until the end. At least the author of the other book under review was spared by death from seeing his idiocies ruthlessly enumerated and refuted. The whole essay is recommended most highly to anyone of generally kind-hearted disposition who nevertheless has an eensy mean streak that does not suffer fools gladly. It was a source of tremendous comfort to me when I was coming out, indicating as it did that the spoiled, upwardly-mobile LGBA types at college and the lugubriously noble AIDS sufferers of pop culture were not the only possible model for homosexual life.

This recent quotation from Halperin (in the article Joanne cites) is interesting because he appears not to understand its implications in the most meaningful sense. I mean, the "insurgency mentality" part. Conservatism includes a lot of people, and obviously there's a lot I find to disagree with when examining the ideas of some of them; but I do think that as a generalization, it's fair to say that conservatives have "hustle" because they see their ideas working and are thus energized and want to find new ways to implement them.

The left insists on retaining the why-aren't-they-flocking-to-us-when-we-know-what's-good-for-them? attitude that people REALLY DISLIKE in a free society. Tossing coins at a bunch of liberal campus newspapers seems to me unlikely to do much about that because it doesn't involve reexamining their own motivations and hold on reality.

Michael Demmons has decided to tell us what he really thinks about gay marriage:

It�s not like being polite is going to make some backward a**hole change his mind. So why should I try? People tell us to stop calling people bigots and homophobic because they don�t want us speaking the truth. They think �baby steps.� Well, sorry folks. We�ve been taking baby steps since the 60�s and long before.

Why should you be polite to people who are determined to behave horribly? Well, for one thing, there's the old-fashioned injunction against sinking to their level. Sometimes taking the high road convinces a**holes to act more civilized, but even when it doesn't, it has its benefits. For one thing, non-a**holes are often listening to these exchanges, and it's not a good idea to turn them off. For another, there's no faster way to turn yourself bitter than to get involved in games of combat-vituperation.

Besides, not everyone who has "a different opinion on the matter" is anti-gay. I hate to sound like a broken record, but our interests are not helped when strategy is conceived in hippy-dippy terms like "Marriage is love." Give me a break. I care whether my boyfriend recognizes my love for him. I care whether my parents do. I care whether my friends do.

I don't care whether the state does, which is one of the reasons I have such a hard time figuring out what "equality" gay marriage advocates are looking for. Power of attorney and transfer of benefits, I get. The ability to get residency for a partner who's a foreign national is obviously something I'm deeply interested in. I just grow very suspicious at the way arguments for gay marriage veer quickly into the territory of what would make us happy or unhappy. We cannot fall into the trap of offering the government that kind of power if we want our relationships to be integrated into society in a way that's best for everyone, and if we want to put men and women who come out in the future in the best position to live happy and productive lives. If we do, we will lose, and so will they. I would be more than...well, happy...to see gay advocacy proceed in strides larger than baby steps if I thought the foundations of its arguments were more solid. As it is, we're still in the middle of debates over first principles, such as what constitutes a "right" and what makes someone a "second-class citizen." In that context, I don't think you need to be a patsy in order to espouse caution and slow, deep-rooted, organic change.

I had gratefully forgotten his existence, but Living in Pink links (or was just displaying a link on one of its newsfeeds) to this Queer Day link to this Inquirer article about James McGreevey, who is settling into life as a Recovering Governor. Be sure to read the last sentence of Baker's statement--pricelessly dry. And though it's only February, I think Sabato has clinched the award for Drollest Use of a Participial Modifier, 2005:

Ross K. Baker, a Rutgers University political science professor, said the former governor did a masterly job of erasing memories of much of his scandal-riddled 2 1/2 years in office with his "I am a gay American" speech.

"I think he probably pulled off one of the most extraordinary acts of self-labeling in modern history by reducing the entire episode of Golan Cipel to 'I am a gay American,'" Baker said. "He defined the reason for his resignation as his sexual orientation and not other things that were less attractive about the McGreevey administration--like corruption."

Larry Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, agreed that McGreevey's portrayal of himself has made him more marketable--"assuming he isn't indicted."

Agenda Bender writes about seeing Stella Dallas on TCM. Less fortunately for him, he also remembers La Toya.

***

Mark the wickens quotes one of his countrywomen and--though I don't think this was exactly his intention--demonstrates a truism: there's no one more obnoxious than an atheist whose favorite subject is his own atheism. At least the pharisaical religious types tend to be entertainingly campy.

***

Marc the Amritas never sends trackback pings, which is not a problem but means that people don't necessarily see when he riffs socio-linguistically off someone else, the way this post expands on my comment about a recent insanity plea yesterday. Marc helpfully offers a wide selection of quick-and-dirty mental disorders that opportunistic minorities can draw on when facing the all-important task of evading adult responsibility. There's probably one you can use. Check 'em out!

You gotta love those temporary insanity pleas. This story is one that's been kicking around the gay news sites for at least the last week or two, and I'm glad that the latest news is that the jury thought it was baloney (though perhaps not in any way sympathetic to the murder victim):

But Boyle told the jury that Hirte was tormented about his sexuality and confused about what was going on inside of him.

According to Boyle, Hirte had "homosexual urges" that intensified after he drank alcohol [We wouldn't know anything about those.--SRK], as he did the night of the murder.

Boyle claimed that Hirte was overcome with anger and "self loathing" and that he should be found insane. A psychiatrist testifying for the defense told the court that "gay rage" is a valid medical condition. George Palermo said that after examining Hirte he determined that the man had killed in a "micro-psychotic" episode. Palermo said that the "episode" was brought on by the "shame of realizing he had sex with another man."

Real modern convenience items, those mini-psychotic episodes that start just before a crime and end just after it. Hirte's strikes me as kind of funny, since after my first time with a man, I was pretty screwed up with shame and self-loathing myself. I spent the next day throwing up. I think I took about six showers, and I know I sat in my room and cried a lot. Might've punched the wall a few times. Oddly, I never once had the urge to get a shotgun and knife and go back and kill my soon-to-be first boyfriend.

CNN has redeemed itself for every minute of air time given to that gasbag Brent Sadler: Design 360, its weightless show about contempo aesthetics, just did a segment on the new Kylie Minogue costume exhibit. Did I have a gaygasm or what? In fact, I'm pretty sure I died. Right here. The entity typing this is Sean Kinsell's specter.

I mean, we had the hot pants from "Better the Devil You Know" and the hot pants from "Spinning Around." We had the loopy-swatch dress and the hooded what-is-that-supposed-to-be? from "Can't Get You out of My Head." There was stuff from her parents' attic that she'd incorporated into her act--because, you know, she's just-folks, like us in the audience! And, of course, Kylie herself was there, petitely bouncing through the racks and talking about wanting the people in her hometown to see everything first, because that's the kind of humble girl she is. She remembers her Melbourne Melbn roots, she does.

Of course, if I were curating this collection, I'd include all the guys from the "Slow" video. You know, as accessories. This is called "proper context." And I'd make sure those horrid sheaths from "Hand on Your Heart" were kept way in the back of the storage closet. Some things are not worth remembering.

For possibly the first time in my entire life, I have risen at 8:30 on a Sunday morning to make myself a proper breakfast of eggs, toast, corned beef (the can didn't have a key attached; some improvising with pliers and two nails was called for), juice, and tea. This is not a move toward self-improvement on my part, heaven forfend; I just have to go into the office today.

Since I've been bustling around the kitchen to Outlandos d'Amour, I figure this is a good time to note the recent New York same-sex marriage ruling. Michael has his thoughts and a link to the PDF file of the original decision. The gay marriage debate merry-go-round started to bore me long ago, not because the issues aren't important but because participants have a tendency to talk past each other repetitiously and VERY LOUDLY about small points without first finding common ground on the basics.

I'm happy that our relationships have support from a lot of straight people, though I disagree that this is the way to channel it. On the other hand, however sincerely people may idealize marriage as sacred, it's hard to fault those who argue that it's evolved into essentially a loving relationship between two people who happen to want to be in it at the time. That is the way it's actually been practiced for the last few decades, after all. (Blech, and speaking of Baby Boomer solipsism and self-indulgence, we've arrived at "Born in the 50's"...no, not me, do it to Julia! JULIA!...where's that remote?) Perhaps if people who object to gay marriage were willing to work as publicly and strenuously to reform divorce and custody laws, it would be harder to dismiss them as just prejudiced against queers.

If Andrew Sullivan is so over and no one reads him anymore, how is it that everyone knew about his hiatus the moment it was posted and is now speculating who's going to become the new Daily Dish for non-leftist gays? People are very odd.

Added at 21:11: Wow. This commenter at Tim Blair's appears to have read my mind. The comment is so good I wish I'd written it myself, though my version would have had five paragraphs and way more em-dashes, as we all know. Anyway, here it is:

The problem was not that Sullivan wrote too often about gay issues, it�s that as soon as Bush came out in (mild) support of the FMA, Sully shifted in about a day from defending Bush to excorciating him on every aspect of his presidency. Since then (and his unacknowledged shift from pro-war in Iraq to anti has also highlighted this), Sullivan comes across as driven by emotional urges, rather than analytic thought. I have no use for that in a writer.

The other problem with Sullivan is that he is a Beltway insider. His call for increased gas taxes (because he doesn�t need to drive anywhere) was typical. In the Beltway, it�s all about who you know and how much power you have. That�s why Sully never feels the need to cite other bloggers and doesn�t feel obligated to tell his readers how much of their donation money is still sitting around. When he does leave D.C., he goes to Provincetown, which is about as East Coast as you can get without falling into the Atlantic ocean.

Virginia Postrel wrote, with her usual devastating clarity, about that latter part a few years ago. (It's the post titled "Facts of Life," from 21 May. I love the way when you click on a permalink from one of her archived posts to another, you get a curt get-it-straight-lamo! screen that tells you to update your links!) As she said, politicking is politicking; as she didn't say, probably both because it's an obvious point and because it was not yet applicable to Sullivan in 2002, too much of that maneuvering makes you forget how to consult the thinking of non-insiders for a reality check.

I find both the people who dismiss Sullivan of having gone irredeemably insane and the people who defend him as just being a principled non-conformist equally hard to agree with. I find it hard to disagree with those who are saying that he's not treating his contributors very well.