September 16, 2009

I Am Thy Creature; I Ought to be Thy Adam (Translation: It’s Over. I’m Done. I Quit.)

“Remember, thou hast made me more powerful than thyself…

“Remember, that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.”

“What if there’s no beast? What if it’s just us?”

How odd I should post this the day Jennifer Roback Morse — she who is so mean, so cruel, so twisted with hatred that she made a party game of ruining our lives — decides to follow me on Twitter.

Well, here’s something for you to tweet, “Doctor” Mengele Morse. In fact, I think you should toss aside that Harlequin bodice-ripper when you snuggle into your beddy-bye tonight, and instead treat yourself to a big bowl of nice, warm Hate-O-Meal, and read this all the way through before going nigh-nigh. I promise, it will give you plenty of satisfaction and lovely dreams. And tomorrow, you can awake fresh and rejuvenated and thinking about how you can claim your next victim.

So…

So, last Sunday, Rick Cole of Capital Christian Center in Sacramento took the podium and “apologized to anyone who had been hurt by the church, acknowledging pain that church leaders may have caused individuals and the community,” specifically Christina Silvas, whom, in 2001, “church officials asked … to withdraw her daughter from the church-run school because Silvas was working as a stripper,” and “Ben Sharpe, who had been banned from his eighth-grade graduation in 1995 after getting a buzz cut … because his haircut violated school policy.”

Continues the SacBee:

In recent months, other church leaders have apologized and made efforts to reach out to people who may feel hurt or betrayed by religion and have left the church.

At Impact Community Church in Elk Grove, congregants made gift baskets and dropped them off at gay civil-rights organizations and strip clubs with attached notes apologizing for the words and actions of some religious leaders. On Good Friday, Flood, Restoration Life and Vineyard Christian Fellowship posted apologies at downtown kiosks. Under a picture of Pat Robertson someone had written, “He doesn’t speak for me.”

Gift baskets? Farking gift baskets? Yeah, that really makes everything all better, doesn’t it?

Whatever the form, it’s too late for apologies.

The Vatican apologized for enabling the Nazis. The Episcopalians apologized for slavery. And now a couple of churches in California have apologized on behalf of Christianity in general.

Does an apology ever change anything?

An apology does not resurrect six million dead Jews (or five million Romas, homosexuals, and other assorted “undesirables”), nor erase their suffering, nor that of their families.

An apology does not turn back the calendar and eliminate slavery, nor its residual effects that continue to split this nation centuries later.

An apology does not erase the damage done to gay and lesbian families, nor heal our hearts ground like so much hamburger into asphalt, nor dry the tears you do not see.

Nor does a damned gift basket.

Talk about adding insult to injury. Literally.

Amazing, innit, that such apologies — and gift baskets! — come after they’ve gotten what they wanted, be it dead Jews, enslaved blacks, or crushed queers.

Talk is cheap. In most cases, it’s worthless, even when backed by action. What did all the post-Civil Rights Act speeches by Martin Luther King ever accomplish? What did all the pacificism of Gandhi ever do? The words of JFK and RFK still bring me to tears, but what did that get anyone?

What did Harvey get for all his trouble?

A bullet through the brain, that’s what. Just as he predicted. Just like every martyr who preceded him.

I don’t know whatever possessed me to believe that anything I could ever say or do would change anything. Even if I’d had a fraction of the charisma, or the following, of even the most lowly street preacher, I would have been crazy to believe that one person could make a difference.

Hell, I must have been crazy to believe that Margaret Mead was right:

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

It’s an inspiring thought, but it’s wrong: When there are more of them than there are of us, it doesn’t matter how thoughtful or committed we are; the emphasis is on the word “small.”

Can you tell I’m about to quit writing? But not, however, before I get a few things off my chest.

My writing has gotten sporadic to the point of complete irrelevance. I haven’t touched upon half the things I should (did you know Jerry Nadler is planning to introduce a DOMA repeal in the House?), in part because the tiny slivers of hope are so dwarfed by all the bad news (marriage bans are on the ballot in Maine and Washington; our enemies in the former are using the same damned lies to scare voters used in California — and why not? the same damned haters are behind both campaigns! — while in the latter, a judge refuses to release the names of signatories to the petition, allowing the haters to continue hiding under their white hoods), and mostly because I can no longer bear to foster and cling to a modicum of hope, only to see that hope crushed again.

I’ve been told many times that I sound bitter. No kidding. Is my bitterness such a mystery? We lose. We always lose. There is Massachusetts, to be sure, and Iowa, and a smattering of job and housing and hate-crimes protections here and there, but these victories are small and meaningless against the vast map of marriage bans and adoption bans — and against a do-nothing Congress full of spineless, cowardly “Democrats,” and against a president I warned you was going to sell us out at the first opportunity. The only thing I was wrong about was that Obama didn’t just sell us out at the first opportunity; he’s been selling us out continually, nonstop.

Barack Obama makes pretty speeches. And that’s all he does. His talk is the cheapest of all.

At this point, you’re probably ready to call me a defeatist who can’t see “how far we’ve come” despite all the losses along the way. I can understand why you might say that, but I’ll disagree with you — and remind you that while I was only a child during the Stonewall riots, I am older than (and often twice the age of) most LGBT activists I meet today. Much like the Obama Teenbeaters (albeit without quite so much hostility), a great many essentially tell me to get out of the way and hand off the torch — a thing I am loath to do until these know-it-alls show me they have a workable, reasonable plan, and are not simply exercising the usual, don’t-trust-anyone-over-30 rebellion of youth. I suffered from that myself, you know — we all do until we dry out behind the ears — and the payback for our youthful rashness and recklessness and extremely irritating know-it-all-ism is to grow up and be confronted by a new generation of kids, who blame you for screwing up their world, and treat you as badly as you treated the generation before yours.

Karma really is a bitch.

Anyway, about this “how far we’ve come” business… Every stage of life has its blessings and its curses. The nice thing about being my age — as I write this, I am two days away from my 48th birthday — is that I do indeed see “how far we’ve come” since my own heady coming-out days in the late 1970s.

I remember Harvey, what a true revolutionary he was — and how he was the only role model I had, the only one who gave me strength as I struggled to come to terms with who I was, and to learn how not to turn to mush (and throw up all over my shoes) the morning I came to school and found the word LEZ etched into my lover’s locker, when we thought nobody knew.

I was cutting school the morning Harvey and George were assassinated. I was sitting in the kitchen with the 12-inch black-and-white on, when the program in progress — what was it? a “Flying Nun” rerun? — was interrupted by the news.

In a daze, I returned to school for my next class. Meeting up with my lover (we were both 17, incidentally), I told her what I had just learned, speaking from somewhere outside myself, as if floating through a bad dream that would end at any minute, with me waking in a cold sweat, thanking the god I then believed in that it was over.

Only when her face went white as chalk did I snap back to reality, and realize the gravity of the news I was delivering. “Tell Mr. —,” she said, and, automaton-like, I walked to the front of the classroom and repeated to the teacher what I knew. He took it from there.

Between Harvey’s rise and demise, I saw Briggs go down to defeat. I attended the first “official” San Francisco Pride parade and festival, and, in 1980, the first Women’s Music and Cultural Festival in Yosemite.

In between (and in between those first delirious days of dating other women), I managed to go to ERA rallies and Take Back the Night marches — and, somehow, I managed to choke down a lot of brown rice while pretending to enjoy the most inane, self-important “women’s music,” and attend the most dreadful lesbian poetry readings (one of which left my date and I — it was our first date, marking the beginning of a turbulent, unforgettable six-month relationship I sometimes regret, but then don’t, as I realize I would not be who I am today were it not for all that craziness — stifling nearly uncontrollable laughter at the phrase, delivered in the deadliest deadpan: “vulva visions” — a phrase that still never fails to elicit an out-loud laugh from me some 25 years later).

We didn’t have much in the way of rights — hardly any at all, really — but those were glorious days. I’m aware that my memories are colored by nostalgia; we all remember our youth as more idyllic than it really was. But I’m also aware that what few gains we did make stood out as milestones, practically miracles, because we had so little to begin with.

Fast-forward to 2003: When the United States Supreme Court struck down Lawrence v. Texas, I was so stunned by the news, and so mesmerised by the sight of a spontaneous celebration in the Castro, I cried until I thought my chest would explode.

They couldn’t break down our doors and arrest us anymore. It couldn’t get any better than that.

Then came marriage — or, rather, the spectre of marriage, a made-up bogeyman from the depths of the evil mind of Karl Rove, a genius who knew how to work the religious masses into a frenzy and scare them into the voting booth.

As I’ve written many times — below, in May of 2008, quoting myself from 2006 (!):

We queers did not turn same-sex marriage into the divisive issue it is today — the Republicans (specifically, evil genius Karl Rove) did.

As I wrote to someone who questioned “the big [marriage] movement at that particular point in time” in 2006, which served only to strip gay and lesbian Americans of rights we never had in the first place:

You have to understand something.

There was no “big movement” from the LGBT side; we were quite aware that full equality was a process of baby steps. The “big movement” was a [right-wing] attack tactic, and once they dropped it in our laps, what were we supposed to say? “Thanks, but no, we don’t want to get married” - ?

I feel quite confident in stating that most of us would have been quite happy with “just” equal rights in housing, employment, hospital visitation, inheritance, and (my personal issue) immigration, et al., and then, ultimately, civil unions. To be honest, I never thought we’d get full-fledged marriage in the U.S. (and now, I know we never will, at least not in my lifetime), and I for one wasn’t pushing for it when the whole anti-marriage movement came crashing down on our heads.

It wasn’t strange timing at all. It was perfectly timed, by the anti-gay brigades.

I stand by that, and I’ve repeated it countless times: There was no concerted effort on the gay side to win marriage equality; we were just trying to make inroads in the areas of basic protections, when the Rove Machine came up with the bright idea of making marriage the issue to whip the radical religionists into a frenzy. And now that the marriage war has been foisted upon us, we can’t very well sit back and not fight. …

In 2004, the Radical Right managed to get same-sex marriage bans written into the constitutions of twelve states (Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Ohio, Oregon, and Utah). In 2006, another seven states (Colorado, Idaho, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia, and Wisconsin) jumped on the bigotry bandwagon. (As of today, a total of 25 states have constitutional marriage bans. Twelve prohibit recognition of any form of same-sex unions, and 20 more have statutory DOMAs. Put them all together, and 37 states have some form of prohibition on marriage equality; that’s just one less state [than] would be needed to ratify a federal constitutional ban.)

In other words, the Rove machine came up with a “solution” to which there was no problem, and pre-empted the possibility of marriage equality where there had been no organized fight for it, before there could be an organized fight.

Meanwhile, there was Massachusetts, which has somehow managed to hang on to its landmark marriage equality ruling (and not break off into the Atlantic Ocean) for more than five years. After that — and post-Proposition 8 — our right to marriage was suddenly recognized throughout the majority of New England states, and in, of all places, Iowa.

I see how far we’ve come. Don’t think for a minute I don’t.

The problem is this: Where once I broke down and cried simply because it was no longer illegal for me to make love anywhere in the country, I’ve since tasted the whole pie: I was (and am) married in my own home state. Once you’ve experienced that much freedom — real equality and not just a “we won’t arrest you for screwing now” gimme — and you see the possibilities that lay before you, you can never give any of it back.

Since first having loved and lost, I have always disagreed, vehemently, with Alfred Lord Tennyson:

I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

Beautifully said, but rubbish. I’m more inclined toward: You can’t miss what you never had.

Or, as Arthur Schopenhauer put it:

“A man never feels the want of what it never occurs to him to ask for.”

But, once you’ve had it…

“I have tasted freedom. I will not give up that which I have tasted. I have a lot more to drink.”

The last time I felt joy and hope (aside from my wedding day, which truly was the happiest day of my life, and our week-long honeymoon, completely unplugged from the world at large) was the day the California Supreme Court recognized the constitutionality of same-sex marriage (or, if you like, recognized the un-constitutionality of the state’s same-sex marriage ban). But even that was short-lived — and I don’t mean my joy and hope came crashing down the day the bigots voted to take it all away again; I mean within minutes of hearing this unbelievable news, I knew they were going to take it all away again.

There were moments, even days, during the summer of 2008 — our own brief “Summer of Love” — when it looked like we could really get a handle on this, that we could really beat back the bigots.

But we couldn’t. And we didn’t.

“We.” *sigh*

“We” brings me to the issue of my own so-called “community.” Decades of apathy were shattered by the passage of Proposition 8; suddenly, countless grassroots organizations sprang up overnight…

And where are we now? The fuel that fired the protests of last fall has all but evaporated; the activists left as self-appointed leaders on our behalf can’t agree on what to have for lunch, let alone when a repeal should go on the ballot — never mind whether there should be another ballot initiative at all!

“Make no mistake,” wrote Susan Belinda Christian and Charles Sheehan of the Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic Club in late August: “We will repeal Proposition 8, but the current situation is untenable. Both factions—” Equality California and the Courage Campaign “—are working with one hand tied behind their backs. The 2010 proponents are moving ahead with an undeveloped, piecemeal strategy with very little fundraising support or infrastructure. While we commend their energy and commitment, this is an overly risky way of running a campaign when so much is at stake.”

The Toklas Club’s solution is decidedly Democratic — Democratic with a big D — and that is to form a new top-down structure.

Coming up with any solution to the mish-mash of disorganization that is the current state of the LGBT “community” is in itself a fine thing, but the approach is typical Big-D Democratic; i.e., an attempt to herd cats.

The Toklas Club has also appeared to narrow its own focus to a 2010-or-2012 ballot initiative — which, I admit, is probably the one thing that provokes me to reject their plan for a new-and-improved restructuring. My head (as opposed to my heart) says that’s not fair of me — the whole movement does need to be scratched and rebuilt from the ground up — but as one who now trusts anyone or anything (short of Anna Eshoo, Barbara Boxer, Dennis Kucinich, or Jerry Nadler) labeled “Democrat” about as much as I trust anyone or anything labeled “Republican,” I can only shake my head and wonder why they think the same approach that isn’t working for the Democratic Party itself can possibly work for the LGBT “community.”

Now might be the time you ask: if I’m so down on this and every other approach proffered, what’s my solution?

As I’ve said many times when challenged with the same question regarding my opposition to Barack Obama: I gave you my solution. I gave you all my solutions. The solution I had for avoiding all the mess the Obama administration has created (already!), I spent half a year telling you: Don’t give this man the Democratic nomination.

Now that he’s in the White House, I don’t have any solutions, other than to hope somebody better challenges him for the Dem nod in 2012, like Howard Dean — and then hope Dean doesn’t pull a Ted Kennedy 1980 and bow out of the race, leaving it to Jimmy Carter to lose… which he did.

Is that a sure road to defeat for the Democrats? Maybe, and maybe not. And if (as all you Obama Teenbeaters fall back on) we do end up with a Republican in the White House in 2012, then, to paraphrase everyone from Aristotle to Joseph Marie de Maistre: “Every country gets the government it deserves.”

As for our currently “untenable situation,” I spent all last summer offering myriad solutions, or at least different avenues, the No On 8 campaign could have taken, and nobody cared. At least, nobody in a position to do anything cared, not even enough to tell me to shut up and go away. As long as I kept the money rolling in — money I didn’t have to spend — and put up my signs, and attended functions, and begged people to sign petitions and donate money they couldn’t afford to part with, and passed out their literature, and said the words they wanted me to say, I was a good little German, and that’s all they wanted.

So, I gave you — I gave them — my solutions. Now I’m all out of solutions.

I can tell you what the immediate problem is. Maybe if I do, somebody else can find the elusive solution. (I won’t hold my breath, but you never know where the next Harvey will come from, or what blogs he reads.)

“The current situation is,” indeed, “untenable” — but the problem is hardly limited to the two big guns, Equality California and the Courage Campaign. To be sure, the immediate problem stems from the my-pee-pee-is-bigger pissing contest between the two: Forging ahead without taking us little people into account has resulted in the formation of dozens of smaller grassroots organizations, each bucking for pole position, yet none with a workable plan that I can see. I can’t tell you what any of them stands for, or why they are working separately, because there are just so damned many of them (I can’t even remember the names of half of them!), they’re drowning one another out.

(I may be of no importance in the course of the cosmos, but don’t you think I am exactly the person they should be paying attention to? They want my money and my labor, don’t they?)

To wit: Covering the August 29, 2009, “summit meeting” (to which you were not invited, nor was I, and from which the LGBT press was ejected, or at least prohibited from so much as taking notes), SocialistWorker.org inadvertently spells out the problem of these countless cooks in the kitchen in its opening three paragraphs:

MORE THAN 75 activists representing dozens of organizations gathered August 29 to plan for a struggle to repeal Proposition 8—the same-sex marriage ban passed in California last November — in 2010. The event, titled “Working Together for Equality,” was a step forward for the movement to achieve equal rights in California.

Attending organizations included Yes on Equality!, chapters of Marriage Equality USA (MEUSA), Love Honor Cherish (LHC), GSAFE: Gay-Straight Alliance for Equality, San Diego Alliance for Marriage Equality (SAME), One Struggle One Fight (OSOF), various Democratic Clubs from throughout California, Equality Network, International Socialist Organization (ISO), RENWL, and the Courage Campaign.

Also present were representatives of various religious communities, unaffiliated people who have been organizing around LGBT issues for decades — including some who worked against the Briggs Initiative, a 1978 ballot measure that would have prevented gays and lesbians from working in public schools — as well as younger activists from around the Bay Area.

On one hand, it’s great that so many diverse groups were represented. On the other, they all remain separate groups, each with its own agenda.

SW does highlight the accomplishment of a “necessary coordination of forces”:

[A]n 11-member Interim Advisory Group (IAG) was elected. A diverse group of 2010 supporters including grassroots activists from communities of color, straight allies, seasoned LGBT organizers, and legal and financial professionals, the IAG will serve for about six weeks, until an official statewide signature-gathering leadership team can be voted in. …

The IAG is charged with fundraising and launching a Political Action Committee, or PAC, which California law requires to start an electoral campaign.

In other words, the elites have made their decision, and elected themselves to push forward with a ballot initiative.

“Elites”? Well, I wasn’t there. You weren’t there. Did you even know this “summit” was going to take place? Probably not, unless you were sleeping with one of the people who was invited.

And, notes SW, this “IAG” group is composed of “nine representatives from Southern California and only two from the Bay Area.” This prompted “attendees and delegates at the meeting” to encourage “the newly elected IAG to expand and include more Northern California activists” — which prompted me to slap a hand over my face to keep my eyeballs from rolling right out of their sockets. There they go again, focusing solely on the SoCal yuppies, with a charitable nod to NorCal, and altogether forgetting the Central Valley and the extreme north — which, in every Prop 8 post-mortem, has been singled out as one of the biggest reasons we lost: There was no outreach to these and other crucial, non-urban areas!

They’re going to repeat the same mistake again!

Meanwhile, where’s the outreach to LGBTs of color? There’s another gaping chasm that looks like it isn’t going to be spackled, much less filled, anytime soon:

IAG candidate Zakiya Khabir also noted the need for more representation of communities of color. “Racism creates divisions in society that are real and that will take real work to overcome,” she said. “LGBT people are people of color and vice versa. We need to link our struggle with struggles for immigrant rights and health care and against police brutality if we want to build trust and bring more voices to the table.”

Khabir’s right, of course — but she also brings up another thorny issue no one has the answer to: How do we “link our struggle with struggles for immigrant rights and health care and against police brutality” when we’ve got alleged “queers” like Yasmin Nair (and her legions of unwitting, easily-led followers) deliberately driving a wedge between the LGBT immigrant struggle and proponents of comprehensive immigration reform (one of which has precious little to do with the other, but both of which could benefit one another immeasurably, were it not for the likes of Nair and Co.)?

And I don’t even know where one might begin forming alliances with people whose primary issues are healthcare (say “gay” and “healthcare” to most on the outside, and they think “AIDS,” and “promiscuous behavior”) or police brutality. (You think anyone besides us, our moms, and our best friends knows about, let alone gives a fart in a jar about all the bar raids as of late? If you do, wake the hell up, and think again.)

And I really, really don’t know how to begin closing the black-gay divide. Yeah, yeah, I know — not all African-Americans hate gays. The problem is the church. But I’m not going to touch that sticky wicket here, except to say I don’t know what the hell to do about it.

In any case, it seems to me that all the same mistakes are being made again — beginning with the elites making their little plans in secret without consulting us commoners, the very people they are going to be phoning again for money.

Almost every week, I field a phone call from Equality California, or the Courage Campaign, or, occasionally, some group I’d never heard of before (such as the “Repeal 8 Campaign” of the San Francisco Democratic Party). They’re always begging for money; along with money, EQCA always begs me to canvass door-to-door as well.

These phone calls are always the same (I make sure of that): I politely interrupt the caller at the start, and explain 1) I have no more money to give (which is the truth); 2) I will not be canvassing, or phonebanking (been there, done that, don’t work); and, most importantly, 3) I am thoroughly opposed to putting a repeal initiative on the ballot at any time, because A) we should never be voting on civil rights in the first place; B) if the issue is not decided in the courts, the losing side will go back to the ballot every two years for the rest of our lives (or until California revisits the insanity that is our “citizens’ initiative” process); and C) if we must go back to the ballot, we should at least wait until after the Olson-Boies lawsuit plays out. (If we win Olson-Boies, great. If we lose, we won’t be any worse off than we are now — the suit applies only to California, you know — and then we would still have the option of going back to the ballot.)

We usually have a long, interesting discussion about each of these points, the caller and I, which eventually leads to the heart of my dissatisfaction and anger with our self-appointed “leadership”: They have forgotten the very people on whose behalf they are supposed to be working — people like me — and they forge ahead like blind bulls with plans crafted in secret by “experts” with precious little, and sometimes no, record of success.

The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!

Ultimately, and now rhetorically, I finally ask the caller (if she is calling on behalf on EQCA — and, for some reason, the callers have been exclusively women): Why did no one from EQCA answer even one phone call or one email last summer? Even a “screw you, your ideas are crap” would have sufficed as mere acknowledgement that I had been heard, but there was not even acknowledgement — only more calls begging for money.

By the time I get to the question, Why was there no voter-registration drive? the caller has gone well off-script, and hastens to agree with me, often assuring me, as did SF Democrats, that voter registration is among the “top priorities” of the new campaign. (It’s always a “new” campaign, no matter how much it resembles the old, failed campaign.)

Do we ever hear of this “top priority” again?

I haven’t — have you?

Now we’re nearing the twenty- or thirty- or maybe even the forty-minute mark on our phone call, by which time the caller has attempted to redeem her organization, albeit halfheartedly (my points are spot-on, she admits, sometimes reluctantly, but more often willingly), with the promise that the “leaders” have learned from their mistakes, and things are going to be different from now on (and sometimes she adds, “…I hope”).

This, of course, leads me into my anger with LGBTs at large — and with our self-professed allies — the “commoners” who are quite sincere in their regret for not “doing more” during the Prop 8 fight, how they took it for granted that we would win, how they poured all their time and energy and money into the Obama campaign (when California was the last place where he needed help), and how “nice” it is that they finally get it — but how their mea culpas are utterly worthless now. All the regret, all the guilt, all the “coulda, woulda, shoulda”s in the world cannot undo what’s been done.

I want to apologize. When California voted YES on 8 - out of fear & superstition, they spit on you. They told your children “you do not deserve to have married parents.” They told you that despite service, despite years of paying taxes, despite community involvement: “you do not deserve this right.”

The majority showed that they are swayed by selfishness: maybe they believe that if you have this right, their own marriages will be worth less. I am sorry for that pathetic fear. I hope you can forgive them.

But not just them. The rest of us didn’t fight hard enough. We stopped at yard signs, or standing up for our friends. We should have phone banked, walked precincts, put up more signs, and talked to more conservative voters - every day. We didn’t, and because we have allowed those who could not defend themselves to be stripped of their rights, we don’t deserve those rights either.

My apology is not for those who voted yes, but for myself, for not doing enough. I’m sorry: I wouldn’t blame you for not being able to forgive me, because it’s way too little, way too late.

Yours

Moe Hong
Sacramento, California

Oh, I forgive you, Moe. But you’re right: It’s way too little, way too late.

By the time the call from EQCA — or the Courage Campaign, or SF Democrats, or whoever it is this week — is finished, it seems as if we’ve had a good, productive conversation, and that I have been heard.

And then I never hear another thing again — until another caller, fresh out of training and completely clueless, phones me the next week, begging for money.

And then there are the emails from the grassroots organization which I will not name until all this is over (if it is ever over). Originally, this rag-tag group wanted input, wanted help, wanted action, from the people who had been ignored by the “professional” No On 8 campaign. They were quite sincere, because the group was composed of people who had been ignored by the “professional” No On 8 campaign, and they were as sick to death of the blind bulls as I was.

I thought.

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

“Action groups” were formed, and a forum was set up to trade ideas. One such “action group” — for which I was solicited — was a “research group.” Simply put, they wanted information on our opponents. That, friends, is what I do, and do best: research. I jumped at the chance, and offered all my resources, including server space I was willing to donate, absolutely free of charge.

Do you know how many times I have offered to donate my time, my programming, my Web skills, my server space, my bandwidth? I don’t, because I’ve bloody well lost count.

Another of my standard questions to the EQCA/etc. callers is: Why was there never a central repository set up where bloggers could grab current information and republish it? Why weren’t there press-release blasts? Why weren’t there press releases in the first place? Why didn’t EQCA give us willing volunteers jobs we were good at — tasks to fit our skills?

What I do is write, and what I could have done best for No On 8 was disseminate information. Actually, that’s exactly what I did, but without a speck of help from EQCA; I dug up news about the campaign by myself, and I disseminated a hell of a lot more current and relevant information than that sorry excuse for a No On 8 Web site ever did.

I am always volunteering to help maintain Web sites that already exist for these organizations, or create Web sites, gratis, for those that don’t. Last time I made that offer, it was met with great enthusiasm and appreciation — and the caveat “…but you know how politics works: the job will probably go to a friend of a friend, or somebody’s kid taking a Web design class.” I knew. I know.

And I know that friend-of-a-friend (or somebody’s kid) will get paid for doing it, too — as surely as EQCA pays professional canvassers to cover “friendly” neighborhoods, leaving the hostile, bigot-heavy territories to clueless but willing unpaid volunteers.

If I had money to donate to EQCA now (which I don’t), they still wouldn’t get it, because I don’t like the way they’re spending it.

Anyway, back to the Grassroots Organization Which Will Not Be Named:

A representative of the organization and I began a lengthy email correspondence, in which I laid out the idea I’d had for a database of Proposition 8 donors. He responded enthusiastically, and agreed that such an undertaking would be most useful — and would need help (at least in terms of input and publicity) from the organization if it were to get off the ground.

He had to go out of town for three weeks, and so we left it at my setting up the Web site, with the plan to pick things up when he returned.

I don’t know if he ever returned. I have never heard from him again. He never answered any of my subsequent emails. He could have been abducted by aliens for all I know.

In the meantime, I frequented the organization’s forums, explaining the plan he and I had devised — and was promptly shot down by the person who had taken charge of things. “Research” was out; being given “action items” — and being told what to do, when to do it, and how to do it, without question and without input — was now the order of the day.

When I contacted the new head of the organization privately (copying in my now-vanished contact in the vain hope he still existed), I was told that all efforts were now focused on a repeal initiative, and that the new head was “super hopeful” about the direction the organization was taking.

“Super hopeful.” I kid you not.

What was this person, twelve?

(”Super-hopeful” has become a running, if very bitter, joke in our home, every time we come up against yet another “expert” suddenly flush with newfound, if only perceived, power — and arrogance.)

Meanwhile, the cocktail-party set — the Human Rights Campaign, primarily — continues to… have cocktail parties. Once in a while, Joe Solmonese lets loose with a little anger, but that’s quickly corked back in the bottle — wouldn’t want to risk alienating all those rich Obama Teenbeaters, would we?

And the Democrats? What a joke. Don’t even get me started.

And Obama? What can I say about Mr. Right Winger in Sheep’s Clothing that I haven’t said before? I’m surprised I haven’t worn out the keys needed to form the sentence “I told you so” yet.

Meanwhile, gay and lesbian and bisexual and transgender people, and straight people mistaken for gay, lesbian, bi, or trans, are still beaten and murdered (especially transgender people, and especially transgender people of color, but no one outside the LGBT world acknowledges that because, well, they don’t look like Matthew Shepard, do they?), and in some places — primarily the Middle East, the most backward enclaves of Eastern Europe and the former USSR, and throughout Africa — they are imprisoned and tortured and executed with practically monotonous regularity, simply because of who they are — and because of some twisted superstition called religion.

Our president turns a blind eye. Our fellow citizens don’t care (it’s over there, not over here, and anyway, those damned homosexuals deserve it, and we secretly wish we could do the same thing here, but as long as we can’t, we’ll just keep telling the homos to stop their whining, because it’s not like they face any real danger here, you know…).

And there isn’t a damned thing those of us who do care can do to stop it.

Here at home, we still have no hate-crimes protection. We don’t even have ENDA — and if we ever do, capitulators like Barney Frank will make sure transgender people aren’t covered. As for DADT, where’s that “fierce advocate” who promised to start the repeal the very first day he took office? As for DOMA… I don’t expect to see DOMA overturned in my lifetime.

And I’m supposed to nod and agree and repeat, “But look how far we’ve come”?

I stumbled across a 1996 Washington Post article recently: “Perfect Enemies: The Religious Right, the Gay Movement, and the Politics of the 1990s.” It’s decent reading (although I naturally find it far too sympathetic toward our oppressors); I’d recommend it as an introductory crash course for anyone who didn’t live through the formative years of gay liberation (yes, we really did call it that), even though it contains a few factual errors, such as stating that the Mattachine Society “served primarily as a self-help group for gays and lesbians coming to terms with their sexual identity.” Wrong; the Mattachine Society was restricted exclusively to gay men (for lesbians, there was the Daughters of Bilitis), nor was Mattachine a mere “self-help group” by any means.

The sentence that leapt off the page at me was this:

“After suffering a string of [Anita] Bryant-inspired losses at the ballot box, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force announced in a 1979 report on the state of gay politics that ‘failure could be seen as a form of victory in terms of overall movement development.’”

Change only the date, and that sentence could have been written today.

In January, 2009, NGLTF executive director Rea Carey issued a new State of the Movement address, which included this:

“At the outset, let me say that I tend to be a glass-half-full person, so I can’t help but see this year’s anti-marriage and anti-family ballot measures as deeply painful but temporary defeats that demonstrated just how far we’ve come. But, it isn’t just my gut feeling that this is temporary, it is based on the concrete progress we have made.”

As much as I respect and admire Rea Carey, I’m tempted to ask why she didn’t just reissue the 1979 statement, with a bit about Proposition 8 tacked on.

Come to think of it, that’s pretty much what she did.

To be fair, Carey did express much grief over the defeats in California, Arizona, Florida and Arkansas. But really, what’s the difference between “failure could be seen as a form of victory in terms of overall movement development” and “I can’t help but see this year’s anti-marriage and anti-family ballot measures as deeply painful but temporary defeats that demonstrated just how far we’ve come”?

You know why I hate being called a pessimist? Because there’s no such thing as pessimism; pessimism is the word used by Pollyannas who can’t come to terms with reality.

Mark Twain said it better than I could:

“Pessimism is only the name that men of weak nerve give to wisdom.”

Not that I think myself all that “wise” — just a little wiser with each passing year, with each passing day I see the same mistakes being made, over and over. (And you know what Freud said about doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results every time, right?)

In the end — which I think I’ve written here, and if not, I know I’ve said it thousands of times in real life — whatever’s going to happen is going to happen, with or without me.

The Powers That Be, be they the monstrous money machines of the Radical Right, or the smaller, less powerful, but equally tunnel-visioned LGBT “community” (that says it needs me, but in reality only wants my money), or the Democratic Party (which is not my father’s Democratic Party, the party of FDR, nor my Great-Aunt Annie’s Democratic Party, the party of JFK and RFK, whose faces adorned her entire home on commemorative plates and coins and a handworked tapestry that dominated one wall of her sitting room) are bigger than I am, and stronger than I am, and they have defeated me.

That should give you something to tweet about, Jennifer. Have a grand ol’ time. Issue a damned press release about it: “WILL OF GOD BRINGS DOWN ANOTHER RADICAL MILITANT HOMOSEXUAL!” Then stuff it up your… nose. Sideways.

. . .

I’ve been writing this post off and on over the course of two days. Today, I stumbled across a piece (posted today, the 16th of September) at Pam’s, “On Surviving Equality Campaigns Together,” that made me, literally, cluck my tongue and remark to my lovely wife: “I could have written this, right now.” Well, I could have written a lot of it — at least this much:

I’m a Prop 8 survivor. Our marriage was one of those on the line during the campaign. Like others I’ve seen post here, my husband and I donated more than we could reasonably afford to a campaign that should have had a reasonable clue of what was coming their way.

Somehow, like so many campaigns before them, they were clueless. It’s been virtually the same playbook everytime [sic] since literally before I was born, and it’s being used yet again in Maine.

There are those on this site who seem surprised at the…fervor…of a number of the folks who are asking how the No On 1/Protect Maine Equality strategy differs from past campaigns which have met defeat at the hands of the high-dollar hate machine.

I would like to remind everyone of a few things as these conversations continue.

First, for the uninitiated, for a number of anti-gay campaign survivors, especially those who have survived multiple campaigns, there are studies that indicate that a significant proportion of survivors suffer what is basically post-traumatic stress disorder. And it’s no wonder. When you and people like you are constantly, repeatedly, viciously vilified and demeaned at every turn — sometimes for months but often repeatedly at intervals for much longer — the prospect of a new campaign offers two possibilities.

First, a win. A win offers redemption and healing and the prospect of real progress. It promises that the endless public abuse you suffer may possibly be finite. It hints at a light at the end of a lifelong tunnel of intermittent Hell. For me, the marriage equality win in Vermont was probably the sweetest of drugs. That’s what it felt like. The promise, however minimal it may be, causes many to invest emotionally in an outcome that doesn’t affect one’s own geographic location, but even the sheer hint of hope is a powerful attractant. Look at the Obama campaign as an example.

Or…a loss. Yet another loss. Another painful, predictable, infuriating, completely mind- and heart-shattering public repudiation of………you.

But only after you’ve been lured in by the hope that this time could be different, and that things will finally turn a corner, and we’ll start to win, and we might begin to convalesce from this soul-wringing lifelong nightmare. And we NEED to believe that — or we don’t donate time, money, and energy to the effort to finally WIN.

Keep this perspective in mind. Those of you who don’t experience this, or can somehow keep it completely suppressed, I applaud your steel souls. I don’t have it, and neither do many of your fellow posters.

And we survivors — especially those of us who have been on the inside of these campaigns multiple times — have an important perspective. Many of us have asked questions repeatedly through a variety of channels to get some kind of idea how this time will be different, to no avail. …

I’ll be honest. I’d consider myself a fairly experienced political observer and have seen other posters vice experience far longer than mine. Our questions and suggestions have been fairly roundly dismissed or invalidated. Things I’ve seen work in other ballot initiative campaigns that just. plain. work…and that I’ve never seen in a losing pro-equality campaign…I’m told and retold that, well, we just can’t or shouldn’t do that. …

ElsieElsie goes on to tick off the ways in which the No On 1 campaign is indeed different from the No On 8 campaign; i.e., the former has a “ground game” going on, is using actual gay people in its ads, and is getting a lot of media attention.

I’m not sure how the last of these is supposed to be “different”; ElsieElsie says: “Local newspapers are carrying a lot of commentary on the issue, and the pro forces are doing an [sic] what looks like a pretty good job of countering and exposing the bigot brigade in print. That carries some weight, especially wiht [sic] older folks, who read newspapers more than the whippersnappers.”

Prop 8 absolutely dominated the headlines here for the entire five-month battle, with the media itself, in most cases, doing a very good job “of countering and exposing the bigot brigade in print.” I hate to pee all over ElsieElsie’s parade, but if there’s one thing I learned from Prop 8, it’s that no amount of positive media attention nor repudiation of lies will change the minds of those dead-set on voting to keep us second- or third-class citizens.

Nevertheless, I concur, and more than empathize, with ElsieElsie’s frustration over our questions being “roundly dismissed or invalidated” — and I am grateful she mentioned that campaign “survivors suffer what is basically post-traumatic stress disorder.”

So far, I’ve managed to avoid using the word “burnout” here, partly because “burnout” is so easily dismissed by too many people (the same sort of people who respond to the statement “I’m depressed” with “Oh, snap out of it! I think you like being depressed!”) as a mere weakness. Burnout — complete and utter emotional exhaustion — is very real, but I don’t think it will be taken very seriously until, say, it’s recognized in the DSM.

Mostly, ‘though, I’ve avoided the word “burnout” because even I associate “burnout” with less soul-sapping situations — work, for instance. You can always quit your job (or go on disability) if it’s disrupting your life and making you miserable, but you can’t quit your life (well, you can, but I wouldn’t recommend it as a viable solution) when “you and people like you are constantly, repeatedly, viciously vilified and demeaned at every turn,” when there appears to be no end to the “endless public abuse,” to the “painful, predictable, infuriating, completely mind- and heart-shattering public repudiation of… you.”

So what can you do? You can’t make it stop. You can force the haters to fall in line through legislation (think: 1964 Civil Rights Act), but only if you have the backing.

We don’t have the backing.

Earlier, I wrote: “When there are more of them than there are of us, it doesn’t matter how thoughtful or committed we are; the emphasis is on the word ’small.’”

That’s not really accurate. Actually, there are fewer of “them” — those insanely dedicated to forcing us down, preventing our equality, and stripping us of the hard-won rights we have left. They are actually in the minority. But — by virtue of their… insanity? mindless hatred? — while they may be fewer in number, their rabid determination dwarfs us.

“There are,” wrote Dale Carpenter this past June, “many more people who passionately oppose gay marriage than who passionately support it, even in California. This was crystal clear last November, when supporters of Prop 8 simply out-muscled us on the ground in every part of the state except a few neighborhoods in a few cities. There are areas where our side was completely unrepresented. I spoke to an organizer supporting Prop 8 who told me, ‘We didn’t even see you guys out there.’ Some things can be done to reduce the gap, but the brute math is still there…”

That makes them… more. More of them than there are of us. And until we (at least) match or (dream on) beat their single-minded determination, we are beaten, before we even start.

Friends, we are beaten.

Non-friends — i.e., all you gay-haters (oh, you know you hate us, and you are homophobes, genuinely, truly afraid of us, no matter how much you deny that; you just couch it in Jeee-buzz lurrrrrrrrrve for the comfort of your brainwashed cult-sheep): You win.

You win.

What you have “won,” I don’t know. If you’re right about anything, you may be right about Hell — and if you’re right about that, then believe this ol’ lapsed Catholic (and it’s we who know this stuff better than you late-comer Protestants) when I tell you: That’s where you’re going, babies. Even your corrupted, perverted, aborted version of Jesus agrees with me on that.

Someday you’re going to realize that you’ve been playing games with people’s lives. Someday you’re going to realize that you’ve ruined lives, that you have tortured and crushed our souls as surely as if you’d waterboarded us. (Maybe that’s not a good analogy; most of you think waterboarding is A-OK, as long as it’s done to the Evil Muslims and not the Good Christian Warriors of the U.S.A.)

And for what? For the purpose of lulling yourselves into a false sense of security that YOU will go to Heaven, sit at the right hand of God, reign over the dominion of your own eternal Celestial Kingdom, get your 72 virgins…?

It’s all the same, you dumb bunnies. Why don’t you get that? Why don’t you understand that every “major” religion promises the same thing: you do what we tell you Gawwwd wants, and you will be rewarded in Teh Afterlife with earthly, worldly riches you’re forbidden from coveting in this life?

They’re all the same, people. All the promises, all the demands, all the churches, all the faiths — they demand all the same things, and promise all the same rewards, and they’re all lying to you.

And yet you buy into every word, like some braindead late-night-TV watcher, credit card at the ready, dying to believe YOU TOO can be RICH OVERNIGHT just by buying FORECLOSED HOMES with NO MONEY DOWN! Here’s all you have to do…

You are so sadly desperate—

“Desperate.” Do you know the origin of that word? It comes from the word despair.

As I wrote on April 8, 2008:

From [Umberto] Eco’s starting point, [Chris Hedges, in American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America] explores the origins of religious fascism — in short, the sum is greater than its parts; diversity within the group is trumped by the common unifying theme of disillusion and despair and a desperate need for hope (it’s not lost on us that the mantra of the Obama campaign is “hope”) and certitude of deliverance — and anything that threatens the illusion of the force greater than the individual must be destroyed.

Noting (on page 32) that such movements by their very nature inevitably lead to a “collective suicide,” Hedges writes (pp. 35-36):

The pain, the dislocation, alienation, suffering and despair that led millions of Americans into the movement are real. Many Americans are striking back at a culture they blame for the debacle of their lives. … They speak of numbness, an inability to feel pain or joy or love, a vast emptiness, a frightening loneliness and loss of control. …

They have replaced the world that has failed them with a new, glorious world filled with prophets and mystical signs. They believe in a creator who performs miracles for them, speaks directly to them and guides their lives, as well as the destiny of America. They are utopians who have found rigid, clearly defined moral edicts, rights and wrongs, to guide them in life and in politics. And they are terrified of losing this new, mystical world of signs, wonders and moral certitude, of returning to the old world of despair. They see criticism of their belief system … as vicious attempts by Satan to lure them back into the morass. The split in America, rather than simply economic, is between those who embrace reason, who function in the real world of cause and effect, and those who, numbed by isolation and despair, now seek meaning in a mythical world of intuition, a world that is no longer reality-based, a world of magic.

Those in the movement now fight, fueled by the rage of the dispossessed, to crush and silence the reality-based world.

And there it is: the Radical Religious Right has lost itself (”themselves”? no, because each individual member has willingly subsumed him- or herself into the Borg) in the fantasy of Christ-Warrior Versus the Evil Monolith; i.e., Teh Gheyz. They have created us, through their own diseased collective imagination, as a monster out to eat them, their wives, their children, alive.

We are no threat. We never were.

Hear this, you opponents of equality, you “love the sinner, hate the sin” hypocrites, you gay-hating bashers:

You created the monster that we are not. You created the beast out of your diseased imagination. You dreamt up this thing that we are not, as surely as did Jack and Roger and the rest of the savages, out of your unfathomable need for a bloodthirsty god that never existed, and to sacrifice an enemy that never posed any threat to you or to your utopian “Leave It to Beaver” vision of a life that has never existed.

How sick and sad and pathetic that you need your bogeyman so badly in order to justify your existence, to give you purpose.

Your god is nothing more than a Lord of the Flies, to which you offer up the head of a sow — a gentle, harmless sow the little savages created out of some primeval need for a insatiably bloodthirsty gawwwd. And as an offering to this beast, you sacrificed us, you ganged up as a mob, and beat, and stabbed, and destroyed…

Simon. You destroyed Simon, while convincing yourselves you were destroying The Beast — when the only beast is the one of your making: your “god.”

And that is what you have done, haters. That is exactly what you have done.

“What if there’s no beast? What if it’s just us?”

Would that we were half as powerful as you make us in your imagination.

…I suddenly beheld the figure of a man, at some distance, advancing towards me with superhuman speed. He bounded over the crevices in the ice, among which I had walked with caution; his stature, also, as he approached, seemed to exceed that of man. I was troubled: a mist came over my eyes, and I felt a faintness seize me; but I was quickly restored by the cold gale of the mountains. I perceived, as the shape came nearer (sight tremendous and abhorred!) that it was the wretch whom I had created. I trembled with rage and horror, resolving to wait his approach, and then close with him in mortal combat. He approached; his countenance bespoke bitter anguish, combined with disdain and malignity, while its unearthly ugliness rendered it almost too horrible for human eyes. But I scarcely observed this; rage and hatred had at first deprived me of utterance, and I recovered only to overwhelm him with words expressive of furious detestation and contempt.

“Devil,” I exclaimed, “do you dare approach me? and do not you fear the fierce vengeance of my arm wreaked on your miserable head? Begone, vile insect! or rather, stay, that I may trample you to dust! and, oh! that I could, with the extinction of your miserable existence, restore those victims whom you have so diabolically murdered!”

“I expected this reception,” said the daemon. “All men hate the wretched; how, then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us. You purpose to kill me. How dare you sport thus with life? Do your duty towards me, and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind. If you will comply with my conditions, I will leave them and you at peace; but if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends.”

“Abhorred monster! fiend that thou art! the tortures of hell are too mild a vengeance for thy crimes. Wretched devil! you reproach me with your creation; come on, then, that I may extinguish the spark which I so negligently bestowed.” My rage was without bounds; I sprang on him, impelled by all the feelings which can arm one being against the existence of another.

He easily eluded me, and said—

“Be calm! I entreat you to hear me, before you give vent to your hatred on my devoted head. Have I not suffered enough that you seek to increase my misery? Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it. Remember, thou hast made me more powerful than thyself; my height is superior to thine; my joints more supple. But I will not be tempted to set myself in opposition to thee. I am thy creature, and I will be even mild and docile to my natural lord and king, if thou wilt also perform thy part, the which thou owest me. Oh, Frankenstein, be not equitable to every other, and trample upon me alone, to whom thy justice, and even thy clemency and affection, is most due. Remember, that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.”

“Begone! I will not hear you. There can be no community between you and me; we are enemies. Begone, or let us try our strength in a fight, in which one must fall.”

“How can I move thee? Will no entreaties cause thee to turn a favourable eye upon thy creature, who implores thy goodness and compassion? Believe me, Frankenstein: I was benevolent; my soul glowed with love and humanity: but am I not alone, miserably alone? You, my creator, abhor me; what hope can I gather from your fellow-creatures, who owe me nothing? they spurn and hate me. The desert mountains and dreary glaciers are my refuge. I have wandered here many days; the caves of ice, which I only do not fear, are a dwelling to me, and the only one which man does not grudge. These bleak skies I hail, for they are kinder to me than your fellow-beings. If the multitude of mankind knew of my existence, they would do as you do, and arm themselves for my destruction. Shall I not then hate them who abhor me? I will keep no terms with my enemies. I am miserable, and they shall share my wretchedness. Yet it is in your power to recompense me, and deliver them from an evil which it only remains for you to make so great that not only you and your family, but thousands of others, shall be swallowed up in the whirlwinds of its rage. Let your compassion be moved, and do not disdain me. Listen to my tale: when you have heard that, abandon or commiserate me, as you shall judge that I deserve. But hear me. The guilty are allowed, by human laws, bloody as they are, to speak in their own defence before they are condemned. Listen to me, Frankenstein. You accuse me of murder; and yet you would, with a satisfied conscience, destroy your own creature. Oh, praise the eternal justice of man! Yet I ask you not to spare me: listen to me; and then, if you can, and if you will, destroy the work of your hands.”

“Why do you call to my remembrance,” I rejoined, “circumstances, of which I shudder to reflect, that I have been the miserable origin and author? Cursed be the day, abhorred devil, in which you first saw light! Cursed (although I curse myself) be the hands that formed you! You have made me wretched beyond expression. You have left me no power to consider whether I am just to you or not. Begone! relieve me from the sight of your detested form.”

“Thus I relieve thee, my creator,” he said, and placed his hated hands before my eyes, which I flung from me with violence; “thus I take from thee a sight which you abhor. Still thou canst listen to me, and grant me thy compassion. By the virtues that I once possessed, I demand this from you. Hear my tale; it is long and strange, and the temperature of this place is not fitting to your fine sensations; come to the hut upon the mountain. The sun is yet high in the heavens; before it descends to hide itself behind yon snowy precipices, and illuminate another world, you will have heard my story, and can decide. On you it rests whether I quit for ever the neighbourhood of man, and lead a hapless life, or become the scourge of your fellow-creatures, and the author of your own speedy ruin.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus

“Remember, thou hast made me more powerful than thyself…

“What if there’s no beast? What if it’s just us?”

So, what’s next? For you, I don’t know. For me… I have other things to do, other projects completely unrelated to the cesspool of religious bigotry and its unholy marriage to politics.

Call me a quitter if you like; I’m beyond caring what anyone thinks. Fact is, if I cared what anyone thought, I wouldn’t have begun writing in the first place.

I used to be scared, you know — I used to blog as anonymously as I could, because I was scared Bush’s thugs were going to break down my door. Now I see how silly it was to worry about BushCo, when the greater threat has always been his mindless followers, who would gladly put a bullet through my brain.

But I don’t even worry about that anymore. I’ve said it before: I’ve pretty much resigned myself to the idea that my demise will, indeed, be at the hands of someone driven by the hatred of the Maggie Gallaghers, the Peter LaBarberas, the Glenn Becks…

I hope not, but I expect it.

Yet the wait is a slow, cruel death in itself. It’s killing me. No, I mean it’s really killing me.

I can’t spend what precious few years I have left allowing them to occupy me, allowing them to murder me, one thought, one hour, one day at a time.

That’s what they want, you know. It was never about marriage. It was never about gay people. It has always been about power — to find someone lesser than they, to murder that someone, as slowly and as painfully as possible, and to pretend it was all for some noble cause in the name of Jesus. (The Inquisitors believed — or at least professed — the same thing.)

No matter how I’ve tried to make sense of it, I don’t understand any of it at all, but I expect it fills a void in their sad little lives — temporarily, that is, and falsely, much as food or drink or drug fills the void of loneliness (which is to say, it doesn’t).

I expect, too, that spending all their time persecuting us takes their minds off themselves. I imagine people like Maggie Gallagher and Peter LaBarbera and all the rest are epic failures in their personal lives, and focusing all their energies on imagined enemies not only gives them some illusion of nobility, but allows them to avoid any self-examination.

Maybe that’s all that really drives them: the opportunity to remove themselves from their own miserable lives by injecting their sickness into the lives of others.

What must their worst nightmare be? Not a world in which everyone is allowed to live in peace and freedom, but finding themselves alone on a desert island, forever, with nothing between them and their god, and nothing to distract them from themselves.

So, you can call me a quitter if you like. And they can claim victory over another victim if they like.

But they will never win. I will never stop being who I am. I will never stop loving my wife. I will never return to the closet. And even if they put a bullet through my brain, nothing will ever fulfill their soul-sapping mission of hate. They will go to their Hell as tormented as they are today. And they will never have changed a thing — especially not me.

As for the Newswire, I can’t see blogging regularly again for a long, long time. I’ll continue to post the occasional press release, or cite the occasional major development, but I can’t see writing about LGBT issues, particularly poiltics, in the foreseeable future.

I thought about doing an occasional roundup of headlines, without any real, substantive comment (that formula has worked awfully well for Towleroad — no offense intended, Andy), but that would mean I’d have to continue paying attention to ongoing developments — or, rather, ongoing defeats — in the war on gays, and that’s exactly what’s sucking the very life out of me.

That’s what going to be the most difficult: to stop paying attention to what’s going on. But I’m going to try.

I’ve said everything there is to say… and it changes nothing. At this point, I could re-post stuff I wrote four, five, six years ago, and as long as I changed a few names, nobody’d know the difference.

I will finish Base8 (no matter how long it takes, and no matter if another soul ever lifts a finger to help me with it), and I will continue producing Conservative Babylon, until the day there are no more hypocritical right-wing perverts in the world — which means: I will never stop working on ConBab.

(I don’t know if ConBab does any good anymore. I do know it amuses me, and provides me no end of Schadenfreude, which is all I have left: Schadenfreude, and simple revenge.)

And I will do some life for a change.

I know that, thirty seconds after I post this, I will remember half a dozen more things I wanted to say. If I do, I may edit this post after the fact and add them — but if I haven’t thought of them by now, I guess they weren’t important enough to begin with.

Still, there’s something nagging at me… I just don’t know what it is.

Meh… There’s always something nagging at me. Usually, it’s: “I should have done more.”

And maybe I should have done more — here, there, everywhere.

But at least I don’t feel I have to apologize for anything.

And even if I did, it’s too late for apologies.

Talk is cheap. In most cases, it’s worthless.

I know mine is.

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