So every once in a while, a diary like this becomes necessary. African-American Kossacks write them with a terrible regularity, limitless as the tides (I, II, III); Jewish Kossacks as well (I, II); and now, if you don't mind, I'm going to do the same for the gays. Can't speak for the womyn gays, though; love ya, gals, with all my heart and soul, but this here is a guy thing. Totally come to the after-party, comp tickets at the door, bottle service and all, but let me get this out of the way first.
You see, a lot of us men of the fabulous persuasion receive or perform oral sex. In the vernacular, suck cock. Kinda goes with the territory of man-on-man sex and would seem to be self-explanatory. This practice makes us, English being the wonderfully idiomatic language it is, cocksuckers. One of those amazing Anglo-Saxon words that just drips with disdain.
Along with the F and P words, cocksucker is the insult of choice among troglodytes, teabaggers and trolls towards guys like me, and more generally any man these types don't particularly like. The implications are, I suppose, weakness, femininity, pretty much the same moron-shortspeak as the oft-used lack of balls.
Never happened to me, mind you, because nobody in their right mind would fucking dare, but it happens to others, gets thrown around occasionally here, and guess what?
It is not fucking acceptable.
And yeah, I suck cock myself, plus a few other fun things best left to your imagination or some spectacular videos. All this not because I'm a slut, though I am, but because it's normal, fun, sociable and became legal in 2003. My sex life isn't a source of shame; I'm a man, not atypically for my gender, I brag about it to the point of general annoyance. Honi soit qui mal y pense and all that.
What makes me proud, because I and many others fought for these simple acts to be rights, is walking down the street hand in hand with another man, fall in love with him if I damn well please, drown slowly in the pools of his eyes, listen to his peaceful breathing while he sleeps, wake up held tight in arms smooth as velvet, and then shout to the world that his smile to me shines brighter than the entire wheeling firmament of stars.
That's what a cocksucker really is. Now tell me that's not worth fighting for.
But wait, there's more.
If it were just the one hidden comment, I'd quietly seethe for a minute or two and be done with it. We all see objectionable speech with some frequency, it gets hidden, no big deal. But as it turns out, this was not a solitary occurrence. Hey338Too noticed this awkward fact long before I did, and was kind enough to compile a list. It points the way to something darker than one incident.
Make no mistake: Daily Kos is overall an incredibly gay-friendly and supportive environment. No question. The problem is that for some people here, too many I'd argue, this acceptance is a conditional value, a variable set against the fixed sum of their titanic shining rightness.
The hidden comment that launched this diary was, ironies abound, a spirited "True Progressive"™ defense of Glenn Greenwald, who last I checked is, wait for it, gay. Elite homotopia being as small as it is, he and I have acquaintances in common; maybe I can find out how he feels about some more pungent forms of language used on his behalf. Another unintended casualty of the odious Obama Wars.
It's been on my mind for a while now; the dismissive way LGBT rights, our achievements under this administration, and this administration's actions on our behalf, are discarded as so much chaff, weak-tea social issues, at best bumps on the road to the outrage du jour as determined by The People Who Know Better. As one of them said yesterday right here on Daily Kos, not Red State or Free Republic:
Today's "liberalism" has two guiding stars: (5+ / 0-)
Skin tones and erogenous zones.
No other values are allowed to matter.
Yeah, how about you fuck off?
But that's really it, isn't it? This is what we're expected to aspire to, get shouted down and belittled for if we don't. Ralph Nader's gonadal politics, still stale after all these years.
So Dr. Martin Luther King at the end of the day is reducible to matters of skin tone, something essentially superficial and cosmetic, Harvey Milk only of passing erotic interest, Bella Abzug merely concerned with the freedom to fuck. King and Milk, both murdered for distractions.
Never mind that their guiding value, the gleaming thread that binds them and so many other great Americans into our national tapestry, was their passionate demand for equality, their defiant refusal to accept anything less. I Have A Dream burns across the decades like a torch, far beyond our borders into the darkest places of the world, because it is a promise, an incandescent idea: that
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
aren't just words, American conceits we honor in the breach, they are a universal language of hope. This is the thread that runs from Concord and Gettysburg to Selma and Stonewall.
If this be American exceptionalism, make the most of it.
Equality under law isn't something some vapid homosexuals only care about because the President somehow charmed our pretty little heads away from the really way more fucking important stuff, again as determined by The People Who Know Better. Interesting that people of color are similarly devoid of agency and for the same reason. Barack Obama's talents seem to include a sinister form of hypnotism – who knew?
I also love how a diary about a historic milestone for gays worldwide immediately disintegrated into a shouting match about That Big Thing Of Paramount Importance not actually of any substantive bearing on the matter at hand. Because some people loathe Barack Obama with a heat to shame the sun itself, these people are by virtue of this loathing better than any mere diarist, and fuck you, they will be heard. Is it any wonder that comment threads these days are arid wastelands of repetitive invective?
And best of all, the jewel in the crown, the way LGBT Kossacks who find much, something, or anything at all, no matter how trivial, to admire in this President and his crew, are waved off as merely having been bought off.
The implication being that we uncharitably grasp for advantage, presumably at the expense of whatever exercises the superior-progressive-cred-having class at a given moment, are collectively too dim to realize that we're being used to sinister effect by the White House, or, most shamefully, grasp the shining rightness of our betters full well, but choose the filthy lucre of access to power instead. No wonder the gays get so much from this White House, right? Wrong.
The raw power and confidence of the LGBT Rights movement today are the fruit of decades of blood, tears and sweat expended in defiance of withering odds, an effort too vast and painful to be in the gift of any one man. It's not even insulting to suggest otherwise, merely cause for lamentation that snarling idiocy of such magnitude can exist. I'm sure some recalcritant imbeciles will disagree, because perpetual anger can easily scale the feeble ramparts of mere fact, but this is how it is. Just imagine if every other part of the Progressive coalition were as successful as we are.
So let me clarify a few things that seem to be causing confusion.
One, a lot of us over here in Camp Queer are horrified by the anti-gay legislation recently passed in Russia; it has been been credibly compared in scope, intent and effect to the Nuremberg Laws. We're talking torture, beatings, murder. Barack Obama or Edward Snowden have fuck-all to do with it. Are we clear?
Two, just how god-damned fucking dense does anyone need to be to make President Obama's denunciation of these laws just a supposed distraction from their clearly more important cause, when in actual fact, this was the first time in history a sitting President has condemned human rights violations against gays abroad? Never happened before. Ever. Your dislike of the man, or his policies, are sometimes just not fucking relevant to a given subject. This is not actually difficult.
Three, what the fuck is wrong with you when cocksucker is pointed out to you as hateful speech and you start making cutesy little jokesies about it to piss someone off you know is gay, but you just need to score meta-points against? How's that working out for you, tiger?
Four, the too-little too-late bought-off thing: Really, honey? Try living your entire life as a second-class citizen in your own country, and then make the kind of progress LGBT Americans have seen over the last few years. Do the hard work we've done, defy our odds. Then, and only then, do you or anyone get to make patronizing remarks like that. Until that day dawns, do the collective intelligence of the species a favor and shut the fuck up.
Lastly, I do understand the storms of apoplexy currently engulfing this site over the unprecedented outrage of a Democratic President acting with seeming contempt for basic Constitutional rights, apoplexy fueled in part by your complicity, and mine, in having voted for him. The heavy hand of the state has finally reached all of us, who wouldn't be outraged?
Except for one small fact: it's not unprecedented, not by a long shot. The last Democratic President did the very same thing when he signed DOMA and DADT into law; Equal Protection Clause, sweetheart. You voted for him, like I did? Great, you are complicit in violating the Constitution, I am too, and have been all along. Some people didn't notice, or perhaps even care. Until it affected them.
Now that it does, well, you read the site these days too, you do the math.
So now that we've all pissed on the Constitution, allow me to suggest how the current mess will evolve. Because I remember how despondent I was when DOMA became law, signed by a President I as an authority-worshipping neo-liberal corporatist bootlicker was about to vote for.
Well, DOMA is gone. President Obama's cavalier disregard for privacy concerns will be as well. The great virtue of our system of government is that it self-corrects, given time and once every other option has been exhausted.
So be outraged. Agitate all the livelong day and into the night. That's the American Way. It's what we do, what makes this country great. It's also what it will take to correct a clear mistake by this White House. I'm not aware of anyone actually disputing that, all the vitriolic bootlicking-shill rhetoric notwithstanding.
Just don't think this is the only issue, or that you're so god-damned fucking virtuous you get to make it so.