The White Peril 白禍

There's a post at Right Reason about gay marriage. I know--the topic has been flogged to death already, but Steve Burton's post brings the topic back to some of the underlying social-fabric issues that can sometimes get lost as the debate gets pickier. The commenters also don't suffer fools gladly, so if you can still stand the topic, it's worth a read.

There's also a post that links to this piece about Julia Child as culinary conservative. Interesting, although if all cooks had followed known tradition and authority and been afraid to jump off a few cliffs, we might not have, say fugu in aspic. Or--generalizing beyond cooking--countries, such as ours, populated by venturesome immigrants.

The Julia Child thing reminds me of when I was growing up. We'd come home from services on Saturday evenings, and Julia Child and Company would be on PBS some time around sunset. Later, there would be Mystery!, which I loved even as a small boy. I'm not sure what it says about me that I was that keen on watching a show where people were murdered all the time, but I maintain that the draw was the restoration of the moral order at the end of every episode.

Anyway, the Mystery Channel in Japan has just launched and is part of my cable subscription, so I've encountered the odd nostalgic rerun--A Touch of Frost and the Joan Hickson Miss Marples and the like. (Not all of them are nostalgic. P.D. James couldn't plot her way out of a paper bag, so I quickly bail if I realize I'm watching a dramatization of one of her coherence-free Dalgliesh porridges.) The other day, it got me thinking about a Mystery! series--one of the many British imports--that was broadcast when I was in elementary school. Since I had the laptop here open, I decided to see whether that nice Mr. Google could tell me anything.

Man, there is nothing you can't find on the Internet now. All I'd remembered was that it was about a writer whose wife's Mini Cooper crashes, and that she's taken to a place called the Meadowbank Clinic and held there while her alkie husband tries to figure out what's happening to her. Looking for it, I came upon this page, which not only described the whole thing in impressive detail ("The Limbo Connection"--that's right!) but also reminded me of another series I'd completely forgotten.

It was called "Quiet as a Nun." In it, there's a convent being stalked by a phantom nun who blacks her face out with a fabric mask. The site has a video clip of the climactic moment when the protagonist, your typical girlie but plucky suspense-story heroine, decides to go up into one of the towers looking for the Black Nun. She finds her, all right. shivers Watching it again thrilled every fiber of my gay being.

You know how there are pop culture artifacts that jolt you so forcefully back into the past that you physically catch your breath? Last week, for what must have been the first time in at least fifteen years, I heard "Electric Blue" by Icehouse. Not the greatest song in the world, but there are worse things to rip off than late-phase Roxy Music, and I'd liked it as a high school sophomore when it was out. I was listening to it on the train last week after work, on my way to Azabu Juban to meet a guy I know. In the sense that it reminded me of adolescent ways of thinking, it turned out to be a fitting soundtrack.

A woman S. is in grad school with studies the coffee industry, of all things, and was having a party of some kind at a coffee house there; he'd asked whether I'd go. The place was full of grad students in their mid-twenties, many of them flirting in their characteristic don't-forget-I'm-brainy way. Being a non-flirting guy ten years older than many of them and still dressed for the office, I kind of stood out.

Friends greeted him. One of them duly asked S. where we'd met. It was a perfectly natural question, but the response came several very noticeable beats later. "Hmmmmm. It was a while ago. I really don't remember." A complete lie. Also an unconvincing one. He looked over at me, pretending to want me to jog his memory. I tried hard not to look amused. This happened once or twice more before the party was over, and as we were walking back toward the station, S. said, "I hate that question. Why should people ask something like that?"

It was right around that point that I let myself show some unfiltered indignation. "Where did you meet?" I pointed out a little astringently, is probably the very least intrusive question it's possible to ask when first meeting the friend of a friend. You can't introduce someone to people without providing context; society and sociability simply don't work that way.

Either you bring a gay American guy in his thirties--who very clearly has no connection whatever to any world you're known to frequent--to a gathering of your friends and expect to have to account for your acquaintance, or you navigate social life with your school friends (including the attendant secrecy) without any help from other gay guys. I cannot for the life of me understand the temerity of people who want to play both ends against the middle--drawing on gay organizations while remaining officially straight to their friends in "real life"--and then complain that they feel isolated or put on the spot.

When people say, "A long-distance relationship? I could never do that!" they usually don't mean it any more literally you would when saying, like, "Call me any time." It's an exaggeration. An exaggeration of an abstraction meant as a compliment. I take it that way and respond in kind.

Not infrequently, though, someone makes it clear that he means it literally, and that I do not get. I understand not starting a relationship with someone who lives too far away. Or if, say, your relationship has been rocky, a move away by one partner could be a convenient excuse for breaking up with no hard feelings before hard feelings break you up--I understand that, too. If it's all working, though, the whole point of a relationship is to support each other through difficulties. What would I have said? "Well, Kyushu's awfully far. And when I go out, I get a half-dozen numbers without even trying, so I'm thinking now might be a good time to explore some other possibilities"? I did enough exploring of possibilities in my twenties.

I knew how Japanese companies worked before Atsushi and I met. People are transferred frequently, and at some point, even married couples with children often find themselves living apart, with the wife in the family house in Tokyo and the husband in a little company-provided cell near a branch office in the provinces. This isn't some kind of unforeseen disruption. He's the one who's marooned in a boring city working a job that can often be dull. If he can bear it with a good grace, I don't see why I can't.

Besides, he comes home often. Last night, we ran into a couple--friends of ours since we got together--who commented, affectionately if somewhat drily, that given how often they run into Atsushi and me at our usual haunts on Saturdays, you'd never know he supposedly lives in another city. He was here yesterday and today both because he wanted to have Thanksgiving with me and because, with my conference and subsequent trip home, we won't be seeing each other for a month. Good, if brief, weekend.

If you (1) majored in poetry and (2) are a Madonna fan, life can be very cruel. It's not just that she sometimes produces lines that could have been written while she was waiting for a bus. (Imagine Madonna waiting for a bus! I'll wait for your peals of laughter to die down.) I actually don't mind the sort of time-honored placeholders that rhyme "burning fire" with "my desire" and the like. They've become conventions, and every art or craft form needs conventions.

Thing with Madge is, she's often ten times worse when she actually seems to want to say something of importance. I think my favorite thing on the new album is "Jump," which is one of her always-charming songs about navigating through life with pluck and determination. There's one on every Madonna album somewhere, and she always pours feeling into it.

This is the second verse of this year's model:

We learned our lesson from the start
My sisters and me
The only thing you can depend on
Is your family
Life's gonna drop you down
Like the limbs of a tree
It sways and it swings and it bends
until it makes you see

The top four lines are fine. Unimaginative, but sincere-sounding.

The bottom four? I just...I don't...I have this thing, okay? I can't read a poem or listen to lyrics without trying to interpret them, and I am getting a serious cognitive short circuit here. It sounds as if "life" is what's supposed to be parallel with "the limbs of a tree," but it could be "you" instead. Is she comparing you to dead limbs being dropped by the tree? Dead leaves? The latter would be nicely seasonal, but they don't have a whole lot of the life force she's obviously trying to project. Maybe she's telling her fans we're all fruits (as if we didn't already know)?

Or maybe we're supposed to be kitty cats who have climed up the tree and have to take the risk of jumping off even though the...uh...wind is blowing? That would make sense given the chorus--but what would the tree be making you see by swaying, of all things? Does swaying make trees more instructive, somehow? You'd think that would have stuck in the memory during life science class in eighth grade. And how much bending around does the poor tree have to do until you see whatever it is you're supposed to see? I guess the other possibility is that the verse is supposed to work as a whole, so it's a family tree we're dealing with. Do family trees sway? I thought she just said family was the only thing that was stable.

This song is going to be so much easier to handle in a disco while surrounded by cute boys, fueled by a vodka or two, and moving it under seizure-inducing colored lights.

What I love most about Madonna as a lyricist is her inventiveness with language, the way she's constantly stretching her idiolect to accommodate new contours in her idiosyncratic inner world.

For example, this is the chorus to "I Love New York" from the new album:

Other cities always make me mad
Other places always make me sad
No other city ever made me glad
Except New York
I love New York

It's like you're privy to her most private thoughts, huh?

Okay, enough with the deadpanning. WTF? I could have written that. In fact, I think I did write it--in first grade when Miss Cramer gave us an assignment that was, like, "Write a poem describing where you'll live after you grow up and decide you're too fabulous for the Lehigh Valley." Maybe Lourdes was helping Mommy at work that day?

Madonna's intelligence is generally, uh, of the non-verbal variety, and that's okay--she's a musician and dancer primarily. Her lyrics are almost never graceful--she likes clunky metaphors and lines that scan dicily--but when she's at her best, they're punchy and immediate. Frequently (as above), she's at both her best and her worst in the space of the same song. Of course, maddeningly enough, I love "I Love New York" to death. It's just, I swear I can feel that chorus making me dumber every time I hear it.

So I got this e-mail from my buddy Alan yesterday, asking whether I had any advice on improving reading comprehension in Japanese. It seemed odd. For one thing, his characteristic "Hiya darlin'" salutation was missing, and for another, he essentially works as a translator. If my reading comprehension is better than his--big if--it's not by much. It's certainly not by enough for him to be asking my advice about improving it.

But, having been asked, I wrote a paragraph of very earthy bitch-snark about the gross guy who'd been hitting on him when we were out a few nights ago and then a paragraph about reading fluently. Then I did what everyone who sends a lot of work-related e-mail does out of force of habit before clicking on "Send": I checked the address line. Whoops! The message had come from a different Alan, a reader with whom I've corresponded a few times who's studying Japanese in the States and who most assuredly was not sitting on the stool next to me being come on to by a falling-down-drunk guy in his 50s on Friday night. So I carefully excised the paragraph of bitch-snark and sent the rest along, thus sparing a fortunate reader a serious surprise in his inbox.

The surprise Atsushi got in his mailbox yesterday, on the other hand, was intentional. He's been worked to death lately, but he still makes time to come home at least once every third weekend, so I thought I'd get him a new business card case. You know, so even if he's meeting with trying clients, he can have a little reminder that I'm thinking about him. While I was at Seibu, it occurred to me that I forget to bring my own business cards places all the time--that constitutes a real problem in Japan, where exchanging them can be a multiple-times-a-day event--so I may as well pick one up for myself, too. The idea of his-and-his matching card cases struck me as a bit on the cute side, but...well, this is Japan. Cute rules. I absent-mindedly told the saleswoman to wrap them both as presents, and she looked at me askance. Probably thought they were Christmas presents for two girlfriends who don't know about each other.

Atsushi's officemates, on the other hand, will doubtless assume that the sudden appearance of an expensive new business card case is yet more evidence that he has a secret lady friend. A few years ago, when he brought Mozart chocolates back as his souvenir gift from our trip to Prague and Vienna, his colleagues joked that he must have gone with a chick because, as a man, he wouldn't have known about them. (Too precious, I guess? But the travel guides all tell you what the proper face-maintaining souvenirs to bring back to Japan are, and I would assume most single men just kind of get whatever's at the top of the list. I can't imagine Mozart chocolates aren't at the top of the Austria list, even if you don't do Salzburg, though I didn't really look. My own office got the Empress Elisabeth chocolates--I like the apricot and marzipan together--but they've known all about me from day one, so no eyebrows were raised. Need I mention that if we'd brought back anything but Mozart or Sissi for our gay friends, our status would never have recovered?)

I wonder whether the Dominican Republic--I've mentioned that I have a meeting there next month, yeah?--has any Japan-ready souvenir candy things. A sugar cane theme, maybe? If it's been a resort center long enough, getting them shipped back ahead of me so I don't have to carry them might be easy, but I don't think it has. Since I'm going home to the States, too, I'll probably bring back Jelly Bellys. They went over big when Atsushi and I brought them back two years ago. I have no idea why; they're just jelly beans, for crying out loud, even if you can mix them together to taste like pears poached in port with crème chantilly and slivered almonds, or whatever.

Speaking of desserts based on fall fruits, I have to think of something to make for Thanksgiving this weekend. Atsushi can't be home on Thursday, of course, but he's coming on Saturday. Our first Thanksgiving together was in 2001, so it's been obvious from the get-go that I'm not blasé about it the way I am other holidays. Maybe I'll even look into getting a turkey, though convincing Atsushi to take out a second mortgage might take some doing. And I'd have to dismember it to get it into the oven. But considering what the Pilgrims went through, the trial of shoehorning a farmed turkey into a little portable oven is hardly worth fussing over.

I hope no one has read this far expecting me to make a point. I've been a bit nettled lately by people praising Atsushi and me for maintaining a long-distance relationship and vaguely thought that might come up organically here, but we seem to have ended up on Plimouth Plantation exchanging business cards and faking Indian cornmeal pudding from three flavors of Jelly Bellys, so maybe I should save that for another post. (Yes, by the way, this is exactly what living with me is like.)

A friend says he thought I might enjoy this bit of a Houston Chronicle editorial (which is fileted by James Taranto in the 15 November Best of the Web). I assume he means "enjoy" approximately in the sense of "be driven to punch through the monitor by." This is the operative paragraph from the editorial:

Inner city black voters in Harris County, many of whom have long experience with the denial of civil rights, favored the marriage amendment by an even higher majority than the general Harris County voting population. Black discomfort with homosexual marriage is rooted less in conscious discrimination than in religious belief, but support for the amendment brought blacks into incongruous accord with members of the Ku Klux Klan, whose members rallied in Austin in support of Proposition 2.

I don't agree that the civil rights and gay rights movements are comparable all the way down--and what civil rights have black people been denied for the last three or so decades, one wonders?--but I do think that gays and other minorities are very similar in the ceaseless way our soi-disant allies manage to patronize us. As Taranto says, "If you're a person of pallor and you oppose same-sex marriage, you're guilty of 'conscious discrimination,' whereas if you're black, you're following 'religious belief' and presumably discriminating unconsciously. Oh, and does this mean people who favor same-sex marriage are religious unbelievers? Seems to us the Houston Chronicle has just managed to insult pretty much everybody."

As a homosexual unbeliever who doesn't favor same-sex marriage, I think the most insulting part is unmentioned by Taranto: the attribution of any opposition to that boneless PC animating force, "discomfort." People can't believe things are right or wrong, or constructive or destructive, anymore, apparently--the only opposition sympathetic characters are to be permitted is decorously vague unease.

At Romeo Mike's Gumption, Ross notes an example of psycho-PC-ism via the Telegraph:

"Paintings of traditional wedding scenes have been removed from a register office in case they offend gay couples, it has emerged.

The pictures at Liverpool Register Office are being replaced with landscapes ahead of the introduction of "gay weddings" later this year."

Two problems with this. If homos are supposed to be genuinely equal then we should be able to meld in with the mainstream. Ditching traditions to humour us defeats the purpose, so the removal of the pictures is actually the offensive part.

Secondly, it's also offensive that the Telegraph has to include a pic of a couple of queens kissing to illustrate gay marriage. Ordinarily, news photos of newlyweds have them smiling proudly at the camera. That photo only serves to reinforce the stereotype of minorities' 'differences' requiring 'special' treatment.

Question 1: Did the guy on the right burst into tears immediately after the photo was snapped and yell, "It's our wedding, darling--couldn't you have worn something more dignified than a turtleneck?!"

Question 2: Given the Telegraph's generally approving spin, what's up with the scare quotes around "weddings"? Does it (editorially) agree that gay ceremonies aren't genuine weddings? I'm just wondering.

Question 3: Why is the word gay so listless and dull, ending in that irresolute diphthong, while the insulting words for homosexuals can be written and spoken with such flair? Ross is presumably being sardonic in using homos and queens, but stripped of meaning associations and possible playground resonances, aren't they just cooler words? Personally, I'm very partial to faggot--I just can't help it. It's one of those words you can eject from the mouth with a little explosion, whether of playfulness or of anger. It is impossible to utter the word gay in an aesthetically pleasing manner. A real pity.

BTW, not quite on the same topic, but along those lines, an acquaintance asked me--very earnestly, which was what made it funny--a little while ago, "So, Sean, you call everyone 'honey.' And [my close friend, who's English] Alan calls everyone 'darling.' Is that, like, some kind of American-vs.-British thing?"

Yoo-hoo! Madonna? You're a native speaker of English. STOP OVER-PRONOUNCING YOUR Rs LIKE AN EXCESSIVELY EARRRRRRNEST ESL STUDENT! Okay?

I did like this part, though: "If you don't like my attitude then you can F off / Just go to Texas--isn't that where they golf?" Heh-heh. Funny.

Atsushi was here this weekend, one of his short stays--in the door at 11 a.m. on Saturday and on the train back to the airport at 5 p.m. on Sunday. But he's been stressed lately, so it was good to be able to attend to him, even if only for thirty-six hours. We went to the Meiji Shrine, where the leaves hadn't yet turned but the wooded walk was beautiful as always. Saturday night, we went out with two friends for Korean barbecue.

Actually, come to think of it, we went for drinks at a Scottish-themed pub first, so I guess we were subconciously working a peninsular-peoples-persecuted-by-their-more-aggressive-neighbors kind of thing. When I asked where the toilet was, one of the bar guys (Japanese) gave me the most frankly lascivious once-over I've gotten in quite a while--and it wasn't a gay bar, BTW. Must be the influence of that fiery Celtic spirit.

Anyway, about more literal kinds of fire: Several months back Japundit linked to this NYT article about Korean restaurants in New York, and it made me wonder anew why they haven't caught on more. That Korean food in Korea is way hotter than what most Westerners are going to want to contend with isn't a difficult problem to address, after all. And unlike the Japanese food that was made fashionable, which emphasized raw flesh and bizarre creatures of the deep, Korean barbecue and rice dishes are comparatively, comfortingly familiar-looking to Americans. Oh, and they're delicious--the stuff in Japan is toned down, but it's still spicy enough to be stimulating. Great cold-weather food. And as far as the service goes...uh, complaints about brusque service in New York? Whatever.

The one problem I can see is when the hot stone bowls and open-fire cooking hit America's skittish-schoolmarm safety obsession. On Saturday, Atsushi, our friends, and I sat around a gas-lit brazier in the middle of the table, spreading sliced beef, chicken, and vegetables over the metal grid. It was all you can drink. We drank. Well, except for Atsushi, who doesn't.

So after an hour or so, there were three tipsy fags flinging rounds of beef tongue rather sloppily over the flames. (I was reminded--frankly but not at all lasciviously--that I was the only one with hair on the backs of his hands that might get singed. A little lasciviousness might actually have been nice at this point, given that the reminder was coming from my boyfriend, but he's not big on even mild PDAs.) A lot of those last pieces of kalbi were probably just a little more well-done than they might have been under more alert supervision, but hey, it all goes to the same place. Good weekend, and Atushi gets to come home again the Saturday after Thanksgiving.

A few months ago, a soft-spoken Japanese guy in his early 20s came up to me and struck up a very tentative conversation. Later, he called and asked whether I was free for dinner on the weekend. I carefully selected a this-is-not-a-date-little-buddy outfit and met him in Shibuya. (Well, okay--a few friends I met later were all snarky and "That's your this-is-not-a-date outfit?" which I thought was kind of uncalled-for. It turned out that there was a bigger issue, though.)

After dinner, I took Teru to one of my hangouts, run by half of a couple Atsushi and I know. (The other half runs the bar where we were introduced, right down the street. They're in their early 50s, together for two decades; it's fun to to go to one bar after the other and listen to them bitch, serially, about each other's managerial and customer service skills.) It was a Sunday night, not very late, so when we arrived there were only two other guys there.

Then, just after we'd gotten our drinks, a dozen men came in. The other bar had had a bowling party or something, so they were all regulars. After they swept in, I was busy being greeted and teased and teasing and greeting back. I introduced Teru to those who were within bowing distance. Two old buddies I hadn't seen for ages asked about a third friend who'd dropped off their radar. Another long-time acquaintance related (with humor rather than rancor) how he'd tried to pick me up once after Atsushi and I got together. At some point I turned to Teru, chuckling, to explain the meaning of some in-jokey thing.

And pulled up short. He looked mildly alarmed, like an anthropologist starting his first fieldwork and realizing that it was very, very different from reading journals in the library. Since then, it's become increasingly clear that Teru kind of wants help making friends. I'm happy to do the big brother things, but...how do I put this?...no one should feel forced to affect an outgoingness that really doesn't gel with his personality, but it still isn't fair to sit around expecting fabulous friendships and piquant potential love interests to start swirling around you spontaneously. If you never display more than a polite interest in people, they'll assume you're not interested in being more than polite to them. Arrogance tends to repel people, but a demeanor that suggests you're confident you have something to offer doesn't.

Yes, I've pointed this out, in a fashion that's as little like a sermon as possible. But Teru seems to think that once you've found friends, you'll be able to act engaged and lively, rather than the other way around. To a degree, I sympathize. After you go through all the upheaval of figuring out that you're gay and reorienting yourself toward your relatives and friends and coworkers, you just want some relationship...any relationship...to be effortless. In real life, though, coming out is the beginning of the job, not the end. Now you know you're gay. Great. Next question: what kind of gay guy are you? Quiet is fine, if you don't mind that your relationships will start slowly and develop pokily; but then you can't get all mopey over having trouble getting to know people.

Dale Carpenter finished his guest-posting on same-sex marriage at the Volokh Conspiracy nearly a week ago. I tried to read everything, including the comments, but rapidly started to get the feeling I'd been hanging out a little too long at the corner of Lawyerview Boulevard and Old Libertarian Pike, if you know what I mean. I suppose I'm only posting this about it myself so that I'll have a link in my own archives if I ever want to go back and look at what was written. My own mind isn't changed. The gay marriage advocates, however articulate and sober they are, still always sound to me as if they were casting us as First Runner-up straight people, which is kind of humiliating. It just doesn't bother me that homosexuality and heterosexuality aren't the same thing and therefore may not have the same requirements or social effects.

Remember about eighteen years ago when Madonna had three number one singles off True Blue and the people complaining about her realized she wasn't a flash in the pan and were all like, "Damn! She's going to be pushing fifty and still shaking her T&A at us in music videos"? Lo, it has come to pass. Good grief, is she limber. But I kind of prefer the part where she's striding through the city...perhaps imitating Kylie striding through the city in "Giving You Up"...who was perhaps imitating Madonna striding through a cityscape/fantasy skyway surrounded by fairies* in "Love Profusion." Or the part where she's dancing in the club...sort of like Kylie in "Spinning Around"...which is sort of like Madge in "Deeper and Deeper" but much more pleasing to look at. All these circular references may be dizzying, but tracking them is much more fun than paying attention to what Madonna says these days when she stops singing and shimmying and starts talking.

* By which I refer to the presence of tiny CGI wingèd spirits, not of backup dancers.

Dear gay-friendly straight people,

You know, we love you lots. If you've never been told to your face that you're a menace to society and that your relationship with your partner should be illegal, you may not know just how much better it is to be considered witty and adorable. I don't think anyone's obliged to like gays, understand, but I appreciate it when people do.

Just, could you show your acceptance without the ooze? A lot of you already do, and if you're one of them, you don't really need to read this. "But maybe I'm oozing and don't know it, and it'd be nice to find out how I can tell," you say? Okay, here's the basic idea: When you meet a gay person, do you (1) ask the sensible, ordinary, non-intrusive questions that you would to a new acquaintance of any kind ("Are you married? Oh, anyone special then? Really? How long have you been together? Kids? Pets?")? Then you're not oozing. Alternatively, do you (2) start immediately in with the sort of catty joshing that makes it clear that it's okay for your new friend to let go and be as queeny as he does or doesn't care to? That kind of mateyness can be taken too far--we aren't all into serious down-in-it ribaldry with strangers--but it isn't ooze.

You ooze if you're the kind who can't decide between (1) and (2), so they get smushed together into an unbearable...(3) you wink and mug and smirk and keep making saucy talk that pointedly hovers around gay themes without actually addressing them, so that your interlocutor feels at once baited into and warned away from revealing that he's gay so the conversation can then move on to something--anything--more interesting. Like this:

Straight guy: "So, Sean, have you seen [glaring significantly across table] Far from Heaven?

Sean: "Uh, yeah, sure."

SG: "I'd be interested to hear what you thought."

S: "Thought? I thought it turned out really well. Genre exercises like that, there's always a temptation to look down on the originals you're aping, and I thought everyone did a good job of avoiding that."

SG: "What about [glaring more significantly] Dennis Quaid's character?"

S: "I don't know. I wasn't around in the 50s. It seemed realistic, given that the whole thing was purposefully stylized to begin with."

SG: "I mean more his [glaring very significantly] circumstances."

S: "I thought the house and office were pretty stylin'."

SG: "Of course! [laughs exaggeratedly] Oh, that's great! But by 'circumstances,' I was more talking about...well, he had choices to make, didn't he?"

See? Ooze. I've never actually snapped and replied, "ALL RIGHT, already. I'm a Madonna fan. My favorite movie is Auntie Mame. I serve Fortnum & Mason tea to my most intimate friends in Wedgwood cups. No, shocking though it may seem, I've never owned a copy of Judy at Carnegie Hall. Are we DONE now?" Felt like it, though.

At this point, there are good-hearted people who will point out that a lot of gays are touchy. Some are completely open, some are completely closeted, and some don't like to bring up the phenomenon of homosexuality itself but do socialize with their partners as a couple. Hell, you may not even know whether the person you're talking to is actually gay. It's easy to sympathize with the desire to indicate your comfort with open and honest homosexuals while giving yourself an escape hatch if, for whatever reason, it turns out not to be needed.

There's no faster way to cast doubt on your own posture of easy-going goodwill, though, than to intimate that you're especially eager to know whether you're in the company of a homo because we're freakishly interesting. Even if that is the case, I'd advise sticking to (1) above, which keeps a decent cover on it and lets people decide how much they care to tell you about themselves. If that means you have to wait until your third encounter to find out whether a new acquaintance has memorized the dialogue from What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, too bad. Life is full of trade-offs, and you managed to live this long without knowing.

Another Gay Republican links to this post by Chris Crain at the Washington Blade blog. As A.G. Republican says, it's a "justified bitch slap." As Crain says:

HRC strategists will claim in their defense that the public needs to be educated first on the issue, but how can we educate if we shirk from opportunities to talk about our lives?

Last year, when Laura Bush was pressed on whether she supported her husband's constitutional ban on gay marriage, her innocuous answer was that the issue was "something people should talk about and debate." Rather than welcome such a rare invitation, HRC's then-leader Cheryl Jacques released a letter criticizing the first lady, saying there were more important issues — like the economy! — for Americans to discuss.

When our biggest gay rights lobbying group is ducking opportunities to actually lobby for our equality, and then makes excuses for those who oppose us, is it any wonder we aren't winning?

This is, of course, a staple topic of gay conversation. The more loyal Democrats tend to frame it as "How far should gay advocacy groups go in compromising to help our DNC friends gain power so they're less politically vulnerable and can later effect the real change on our behalf that they desire with such obvious sincerity?" The rest of us tend to frame it as "Aren't these jackasses supposed to be working for us?"

Single-issue activism on the part of an individual often produces tunnel vision; but at the same time, if a group is going to exist for the express purpose of representing the interests of gays, then that's what it's supposed to do. Most of our organizations seem to veer between soft-pedaling anti-gay practices on the part of Democrats and implausibly claiming a gay stake in some favorite lefty sure thing or other (opposition to the war comes readily to mind, but so do Social Security privatization and the like).

This time around, it's Dale Carpenter guest-blogging (Here is the first post; I'd link the rest, but you can find them yourselves, and PowerBlogs sends an automatic trackback for every link.) Carpenter makes the best case I've seen--for example, he does a better job, I think, at arguing that community pressure will be brought to bear on gay marriages than Jonathan Rauch himself did in his book.

Well, Carpenter isn't perfect on that point, either:

In our culture, marriage is the way couples signal the ultimate commitment to one another; and through marriage they communicate this deep commitment to their families, to their friends and co-workers, and to their communities. That commitment is then reinforced by the web of familial and other relations, created by marriage, that they have around them. This reinforcement helps strengthen their bond, and therefore their family. It helps keep them together, especially in tough times.

Gay couples need this sort of reinforcement and suffer for the lack of it. As of now, no gay relationship can reach the cultural pinnacle signified by the words, "Will you marry me?" Telling your families and friends that you are "partnered" will not, usually, signal the same depth of commitment that marriage would. And if they doubt whether you have invested heavily in your relationship, why should your families, friends, and communities invest heavily in it?

Fine, but if people don't believe gay marriages are authentic, they're not going to invest in them heavily anyway. Some of these will be ignorant folks who don't believe there's genuine commitment within gay couples; others are the most gay-friendly types imaginable but believe the purpose of marriage is to ensure, as best we can, that children are provided for. In either case, I don't think the chicken-egg question is resolved as well as Carpenter appears to.

Be that as it may, Carpenter argues carefully, and his presentation is orderly. Of course, Britney Spears has already been mentioned in the comments, and embarrassingly, Eugene Volokh has been driven to gently pointing out the following [his emphasis]:

Folks, let me mention something that I hoped I didn't need to: If you don't like reading arguments that condemn homosexuality or homosexual relationships, don't read a debate on same-sex marriage. Conversely, if we were to exclude all arguments that you think of as "bigotry" against homosexuals, or that convey "moral disapproval" of homosexuality, it wouldn't be much of a debate, would it?

A few years ago, when Connie's site was in one of its former incarnations and Dean was still in his old World, I joined in a few discussions about gay marriage that frightened me in a big, bad way. One of them rattled me so much that I unloaded on Dean in very raw terms. (And cheese and crackers, was I PISSED that he printed some of it when I asked him not to. It was over two years ago now, so I don't really care anymore.) Several of the gay commenters that I disagreed with were people whose writing on other topics I've really enjoyed and been inspired by. I'd never liked lockstep gay leftism, but this was the first time that it was borne in on me how much question-dodging a lot of otherwise-reasonable gays were willing to do in order to get the Marriage seal of approval and have their relationships (glory be!) validated. Or they probably weren't dodging questions; they just didn't seem to understand what they were being asked, so they weren't addressing it.

Zak, who's begun commenting around here lately and has mercifully not laid into me about any of my free 'n easy translations from Japanese, has resumed his own blog and posted this today:

I’m sorry, I have no sympathy whatsoever for these people booted out of their church:

In a pair of decisions that bolstered conservatives, the highest court of the United Methodist Church defrocked an openly lesbian minister yesterday and reinstated a pastor who had been suspended for refusing to allow a gay man to become a member of his congregation.

Granted, I personally think it’s ridiculous to ban homosexuals based on the teachings of a man 2,000 years ago who apparently never said anything about gays and seems to have instead preached universal acceptance. For these homosexuals, however, I think it’s far more idiotic to want to worship that man in an organization that has confused those teachings to the point of exactly reversing them as far as you are concerned. Brings to mind the image of a woman who repeatedly begs her physically abusive husband to take her back: Who really has the bigger problem here?

My conclusion is basically the same as Zak's, though I'd get there somewhat differently. I don't think the Bible is infinitely stretchable, but there's enough give that I don't think people who are arguing for non-traditional tolerance of this or that are necessarily being disingenuous. Many of them probably do believe that the truest interpretation of whatever difficult scripture they're looking at is the one that's less obvious because of this ambiguity in Aramaic roots, or what have you.

Still, different Christian sects usually have a long-standing body of theological writing behind their doctrines, and it's not unreasonable for them to reject new understanding of scripture that they think unfounded. If you're gay or lesbian (or supportive of gays and lesbians), there are plenty of churches nowadays that will accommodate you. I suppose that switching sects to find the one that you think is most closely following Christ's intent is difficult if you've been brought up to believe, say, that the Roman Catholic Church is the only legitimate vessel for Godly spirituality; but I don't recall having been taught as a boy that the individual covenant with God was easy to navigate.

People who sincerely believe that the organizations to which they now belong are interpreting the Bible in error have what seems to me a pretty clear duty to present their arguments, but eventually someone is going to have to make a doctrinal decision, and it's not necessarily cruelty that produces one that hews to tradition.