Those of you who’ve been following this blog for a while know that I now spend a good chunk of my time with a guy I call the Manly Fireplug.  I don’t call him that to protect his identity – he’s just fine with notoriety, thank you very much – the nickname just cracks me up.

His name is Joe Gallagher, he owns Joe’s Barbershop here in the Castro neighborhood of San Francisco, and we’ve known each other a few years now. Back when he first picked up a pair of clippers, he rented a chair in my barber’s shop. I used to sit in Pasha’s chair and just stare at Joe. A few months after Joe rented the chair, Pasha up and died of a heart attack in his mid-40′s, and so I naturally used the occasion to switch barbers. (I never said I wasn’t capable of cold calculation.)

Joe had a partner at the time, so I contented myself with feeling his hands touch my head every couple of weeks. He wasn’t stingy with advice. After hearing the 22nd installment of my doomed long-distance love affair with another blogger, he spun me around in the chair, looked me in the eye, and barked, “You just need to get fucked. Really hard.”

He had a point.

I went off to grad school in NYC and Joe opened his own shop. When I moved back to San Francisco in the summer of 2006, Joe was single. We started working out together and one thing led to another. He swears I spent a lot of time bending over in front of him at the gym, putting weights away. I never said I was a fool, either.

Fast-forward a couple of years. Joe proposes to me as I lay sedated in a hospital bed with a collapsed lung. I think the experience clarified for us that we wanted to spend whatever time we had left in this world together. The sedation just made it easier to say yes. Not long afterwards, California passed Prop 8, taking a legal wedding off the table.

Like most couples we hit a rough patch, but came back together with renewed purpose and respect. “People don’t change,” the cynics say, but I have first-hand experience to the contrary. With every passing day he became more solidly the partner I’d always wanted. I had to work to do the same for him.

We’d talk about heading off to one of the other states that had legalized same-sex marriage. Joe turned 50 . “I’m not getting any younger,” he warned me. But I kept dragging my feet, wanting to wait until it was legal in California again, wanting to celebrate such a day in the place we call home, with our friends.  But there were no guarantees that Prop 8 would be overturned, and eventually I realized that we could both get what we wanted. We could get married somewhere else for real, and still come back to celebrate with friends.

Which is a very long way of saying that I’m getting married. In like five weeks.

I now understand why people take a year to plan these things. “What are your colors?” a florist asked Joe a couple of weeks ago.

“Um, colors?” he said.

Yeah, we’re not that kind of gay.

The Bay Area Reporter ran an article on some of us heading to NYC to get hitched. You can read it here. My only caveat is that I now better understand why some people feel slightly misrepresented when interviewed by the media. The whole Cher thing was sort of a joke. Also, the idea of a “traditional” wedding matters less to me than the idea of sharing the day with friends. But if that makes it traditional, then I guess I want a traditional wedding.

Two days later CBS radio interviewed us as well. It’s a nice, short piece, and you can hear it here.

Then ReyRey of ReyRey’s Photography offered to shoot some engagement pics, including the one above.

Joe and I had talked about keeping the whole thing low-key. It’s not like we can afford to throw a party for 500 people. But there is no low-key with Joe Gallagher. Frankly by now even I’m starting to find myself overexposed. But it seemed wrong not to mention it here, where I’ve chronicled ten years of my life, and where some of you have been kind enough to follow along.

Goddamn, I’m going to have a husband.

Every once in a while my compulsive nature seizes upon some new activity. After I moved back home from my little cave in New York, I spent the whole summer and fall wandering the aisles of Bay Area gardening centers, lugging home pots and plants and bags of fertile soil, for my fledging back deck garden.

A year later I bought a Playstation and wandered the streets of post-Apocalyptic D.C. with a number of impressive weapons, protecting myself from marauders, ghouls, and large green mutants.

I keep waiting for the day when my compulsive nature lines up with my professional calling, so I can get a little more writing done. Unfortunately these pursuits are almost always a distraction from writing. Like my newest compulsion, Facebook Scrabble. At first I started playing with the Manly Fireplug, and a couple of friends. Eventually I joined public games with random Facebook strangers, and at one time I counted twenty-two matches in my “Active Games” list.

It’s not really in my nature to socialize with strangers. Hell, close friends would say it’s not in my nature to socialize at all. But clearly I can set aside long-held, deeply-set personal traits solely to feed my compulsions.

Facebook Scrabble even provides a little chat window for each game, so you can make small talk with the random strangers, if so inclined. Of course I’m rarely inclined, but I was raised to be polite to everyone, even to Christian Evangelists who try to convert me through a chat window.

I suppose there were little clues. I started our game with the word, “Urine.”

“Yikes!” he typed.

“Sorry,” I replied. “That’s all I had.”  He stayed quiet after that.

But a few moves later he popped up again to chat. “Hey,” he typed. “When you get a chance, check out the website, “The Way of the Master,” and take the “Are You a Good Person? quiz.”

Like there was some big mystery as to what I would find.

Way of the Master features the tag line, “Seek and save the lost the way Jesus did.” Kirk Cameron, former star of Growing Pains, is one of its founders.

I don’t know why my Scrabble opponent targeted me. He couldn’t see, in his limited access to my profile, that I was engaged to a man. But he could see that I lived in San Francisco, and that alone might have been enough. Then again, it probably had nothing to do with me. No doubt he spends his days converting random Scrabble strangers regardless of where they live or who they sleep with.

Clicking on the “Are You a Good Person Quiz” brought up an audio clip.

“Almost everyone thinks they are a good person,” the voice said earnestly. “But the question you should be asking is, ‘Am I good enough to go to heaven?’”

Naturally the quiz is based upon your adherence to the Ten Commandments. I quit the quiz after the second.

I’d be hard-pressed to come up with an approach to life more opposite to mine than “Way of the Master.”  This need of evangelists, to spread “the word,” to stand on street corners and interrupt the lives of complete strangers, to me smacks of insecurity and desperation.

Not to mention their condescending nature: bringing their word to “the lost,” who, as we all know by now, is anyone who holds a different world view than Kirk Cameron’s. Naturally, a brief google search of “Way of the Master” and “homosexuality” offers up a variety of YouTube videos featuring Cameron lecturing us helpfully on sin.

I suppose he sleeps at night comforting himself that he is helping others through this relentless promotion, but I couldn’t help but take notice of the many forms of merchandise available to the public on “The Way of the Master,” including a thirteen-episode dvd series retailing for $99. Tuition to their four-day “Training Academy” currently runs for $600. Do the math, and it’s easy to see why Cameron wants to spread the word to as many of “the lost” as possible.

But then his career path hasn’t exactly been stratospheric since “Growing Pains,” and everyone needs to pay the rent.

Even more questionable to me is this “Way of the Master” approach to life. We are raised in the West to consider ourselves masters of our lives, fearless men and women who conquer life through discipline, hard work, and pulling ourselves up by the proverbial bootstraps.

But this is a fallacy. There is little in this life that we have control over, especially when it comes to other people. We can’t get through life very far without their help, and all too often we are at their mercy.

Two days ago the Fireplug and I had a fight, an unremarkable one, ignited by impatience and missed signals on both of our sides. Still, the intensity of my anger surprised even me, but it wasn’t hard to catch the timing; all morning we’d been hearing bad news from the California Supreme Court.

With each passing month, my anger over Prop 8 only seems to intensify. I can barely handle reading an op-ed in our favor, let alone one against us. I stopped reading the comments on blogs and the LA Times and the Huffington Post a long time ago, as they just made me insane with rage.

Consider the damning pronouncements of ministers and politicians and Catholics and Mormons, none of whom have walked a single inch in our shoes, telling us who we are and what we deserve. People who stand on street corners and wave signs telling us the so-called truth of homosexuality, a truth they’ve garnered only from their their churches and Sarah Palin. People who, from the looks of them on the nightly news, roll their fat asses off the couch for only three things: the refrigerator, church, and protesting our rights. These are the people deciding what we do and do not deserve.

These are the people, these are the religions, who use us as scapegoats, so they can avoid examining their own lives.

They use a handful of quotes from the Bible to defend their views, conveniently cherry-picking their way past advice on slave handling and the dangers of shellfish.

I read in the papers columnists reprimanding us for using the capitalist tool of boycotting, the same tool our opponents threatened to use against Apple and other companies who donated to the No on 8 Campaign. We are kicked like a dog and then shamed when we dare bite back.

I listen to people tell tell me that I don’t deserve to use the term “civil rights.” I’m told that marriage is not a right by the same people who take this right for granted, by people who would kick and scream and throw a tantrum if this right were ever taken from them.

I watch politicians who know better, politicians who have the capacity and the resources to lead, instead follow the biases of their constituents. What’s wrong with civil unions? they ask, as if separate but equal was some hot new idea.

And I read the headlines, that our state Supreme Court will no doubt vote to hold up the legality of Prop 8, while also voting to keep intact the thousands of marriages which took place before the election. Two decisions which I suppose make sense, when you dissect the language of law, but which make absolutely no sense when seen from a distance, when one looks at the consequence of these decisions in the big picture: only some gay people get to marry.

So I am angry, and my anger shoves me into insanity, but I suspect that I am not the only one. That every gay person in the country isn’t stalking local Wal-Marts with an AK-47 seems to me a miracle, but then we as a group have rarely tended towards violence, for better or worse.

We are at their mercy, but at least we sometimes have each other. That night the Fireplug and I made up. “We’re on the same team,” he said.

I closed the “Way of the Master” window, and returned to the Scrabble game. And there my fingers hovered over the keyboard, as I fought over the emotions churning within me. I wanted a fight. I wanted to tear him to shreds so badly that I tasted venom.

“I took the ‘Are You a Good Person Quiz,”‘ I typed, “and I failed.” I looked at those words waiting for me to hit “send.”

But in the end I swallowed my anger, no easy task, and I typed a single word:

“Thanks.”

I can’t say I did this out of tolerance, or the goodness of my heart, or any other quality one might find in a “good person.” I was polite to him for my own selfish motives. I may not be good enough to go to heaven, but I’m good enough at something. I was beating him at Scrabble, and I wanted to finish him off.

He said nothing further, but stay in the game he did, and I went on to kick his ass, by 111 points.

Obama. Buddy. Remember me, the gay guy who voted for you in the California primary? The guy who donated money to your presidential campaign? Yeah, yeah, THAT Michael McAllister.

Really? Of all of the ministers you could have chosen to do the invocation at your inauguration, you had to choose Rick Warren? The guy who urged his followers to vote Yes on Prop 8? The guy who equated gay marriage with incest, pedophilia, and polygamy?

Really?

You couldn’t have chosen a politically moderate  or even right-of-center minister who took a neutral position on Prop 8? I’m not even asking for someone who took our side, all I’m asking is for someone who took no position whatsoever.

Could any minister oppose marriage between African Americans and whites, for example, or between Chinese, and still be chosen by your transition team to handle the invocation? Isn’t it time for gays to lose our bottom-of-the-political heap status? Isn’t it time for you to actually stand up, strongly, against this ongoing discrimination?

Will you listen to all of us who send messages through Equality California, asking you to reconsider your choice, and the message that it sends on your first day in office? You know, pick a new minister, someone who could stand on stage at your inauguration next to Aretha Franklin, the diva who first sang R-E-S-P-E-C-T, without irony?

[begin cranky rant]

Gays have been getting criticized for organizing boycotts since the passage of Prop 8, with a lot of self-righteous finger-pointing our way. The editorial board of the LA Times, among others, shake their heads and cry, “Blacklist!

This argument falls flat with me. We as group had a basic civil right, with its attendant benefits, stripped away. A couple of them lost their jobs. Cry me a river.

The opposition does the same thing; they just whine when the spotlight gets turned back their way. I’d have more respect for them if they just manned up and admitted it.

[/end cranky rant]

from SF Gate:

An outspoken and polarizing voice in conservative Christian politics resigned effective Thursday from the National Association of Evangelicals after a radio interview in which he voiced support for same-sex civil unions and said he is “shifting” on gay marriage.

The Rev. Richard Cizik’s comments — made on a Dec. 2 “Fresh Air” broadcast on National Public Radio — triggered an uproar that led to his stepping down as NAE vice president of governmental affairs.

A fixture in Washington for nearly three decades, Cizik has played a key role in bringing evangelical Christian concerns to the political table. But in recent years, he earned enemies in the movement for pushing to broaden the evangelical agenda. His strongest focus was on “creation care,” arguing that evangelicals have a biblical responsibility to the environment that includes combatting global warming.

The Rev. Leith Anderson, a Minneapolis-area pastor who serves as NAE president, said Thursday the group is not backing away from its environmental stances. Cizik’s resignation was necessary, he said, because some of his answers in the radio interview did not reflect NAE values and convictions…

If I had to offer a terse summary of the Town Hall meeting last night here in San Francisco, I’d call it an information-gathering session, with a couple hundred folks throwing out ideas left and right.

The meeting broke into smaller groups, so that everyone’s ideas could be heard, a move that brought out my flee-for-the-hills instinct. Writers like to sit on the side and judge observe. But I stuck it out for the greater good. Here are a few notes, though I don’t do shorthand, so, you know, I missed a couple of things.

First off, Marriage Equality, last night’s most visible host, is using these town hall meetings all over California to gather up the collected wisdom as they figure out what steps to take next. To that end they’ve created an online survey which anyone can fill out with suggestions. After taking everything into consideration they will announce the next major steps in January.

Marriage rights as an issue has galvanized The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence like nothing before. One sister commented that they see the lack of gay people represented in the No on 8 ads and commercials as a failure, and are committed to raising awareness of gays and their stories, especially in the communities that voted yes on 8. Field trips to Fresno and Orange County, for example. No word yet if they will do so in full habit.

The comment, that gays were not well represented in the No on 8 ads, was a common refrain throughout the meeting.

On that note, and inspired by Harvey Milk, everyone is urged to come out, come out wherever you are. Use the holidays to start a conversation with someone whose views you may not share. Start A Conversation is a website with tips on how to do just that.

Another idea that was brought up often, and inspired a lot of nodding and clapping, was the building of coalitions among all communities that face discrimination. We can’t take our allies for granted, nor can we expect their support if we’re not willing to show up for their causes as well.

Upcoming Events:

If you haven’t already, or even if you have, go see MILK this weekend. Show our numbers and support through ticket sales. Avoid Cinemark theaters if you can.

Day Without a Gay: December 10, 2008

Tech Meeting: A gathering of techies and their friends to discuss the creation of a central website to disseminate all of the countless pages of information and events regarding the Marriage Equality movement on the web. A cursory Google search will show you the reason why this kind of site is needed. Perhaps modeled after Obama’s website, the central hub for all of the various local communities that organized for, and continue to support, his campaign. Sat, December 13, 2008, 2 pm, Citizen Space in San Francisco. I’ll update this listing when I get more info.

Nationwide Food Drive for Equality: reaching out to both our supporters and to organizations and individuals that opposed us by donating to faith-based food pantries. Underway now until Light Up the Night

Light up the Night: December 20, 2008: a nationwide series of peaceful candlelight vigils in shopping districts to bring attention to the cause

Equality Camp: modeled after BarCamps (An ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees) to “bring together the Netroots, Grassroots, web 2.0 experts and technologies and all stakeholders to create an information system to achieve marriage and equality for all.” This event defies easy summary, or rather defies my skills to summarize it. Check their website for more details. January 3, 2009.

A March from San Francisco to Sacramento. Just a casual walk over five days or so in March of 2009. Nothing strenuous. Really.

At this point there is no Main Organization, no Fearless and Charismatic Leader to follow into battle. In other words, as our hostess suggested, “if you have a good idea, fucking do it.”  Find the group or the actions that best fit your style and interests. This battle will need to be fought on many different fronts, and there’s room for everyone.

From the Sisters:
Thursday 4 December 2008
Equal Rights For All Town Hall Meeting

As people have taken to the streets in response to the passage of Proposition 8, we must seize this opportunity to bring our community together. Let’s heal together and determine where we go from here in order to advance our movement for equal rights within California and nationwide. Just imagine if we can convert the frustration and anger resulting from the passage of Prop 8 into a positive force to build support for equal rights and to press our national leaders and President Elect Obama to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act.

We only have a limited number of spaces available for this meeting. To reserve your space, click here. If there are no more spaces available, or if you cannot make this time and date, send us an email to be added to our list for future meetings: noh8 at thesisters dot org

We’ve also started a mailing list to share news and information around this movement: click here to sign up. Once you’ve signed up, you’ll be asked to confirm your subscription and then the list moderator will approve your subscription.

Meeting sponsored by Marriage Equality USA, Bayard Rustin Coalition, ACLU-NC and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

Milton Marks Auditorium
455 Golden Gate Avenue (map »)
7-9 pm

“…But the issue goes well beyond gay rights. Allowing Proposition 8 to stand would greatly limit the court’s ability to uphold the basic rights of all Californians and preclude the Legislature from performing its constitutional duty to weigh such monumental changes before they go to voters.

“Treating Proposition 8 as a mere amendment would set a precedent that could allow the rights of any minority group to be diminished by a small majority.”

The New York Times editorial board gets it.

Also:

 California to Investigate Mormon Aid to Prop 8
“California officials will investigate whether the Mormon church accurately described its role in a campaign to ban gay marriage in the state.

The California Fair Political Practices Commission said Monday that a complaint by a gay rights group merits further inquiry.

Executive director Roman Porter says the decision does not mean any wrongdoing has been determined.

Fred Karger, founder of Californians Against Hate, accuses the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints of failing to report the value of work it did to support Proposition 8.

A representative from the Salt Lake City-based church could not be reached for comment.”

Blogs are strange animals with voracious appetites. The constant need for new content, etc etc, blah, blah. I’ve always had a love-hate relationship to mine, since by nature it calls for rougher drafts and less reflection than a good book requires. And my more facile assumptions and least artful sentences hang there to dry as the weeks and months pass, preserved for all eternity in my archives, should anyone bother.

I used to have this policy, that once published to the web, I would never revise a post, since invariably the more vulnerable I made myself in writing, the sooner I wanted to hit “delete.” Which felt like a dishonest reaction. But recently I changed my mind.

Last week I wrote an essay here about the Christian preachers chased out of the Castro, an essay that brought me some traffic and a few dozen comments. I wrote it in about three hours, which is pretty average for a longer post. But some of the comments by some of the readers made me reflect more on what I was trying to say, and I realized that I hadn’t actually captured the full spectrum of my emotions around the event, which made the essay less than honest.

Since first hitting the “publish” button on that essay, I’ve been thinking a lot. Mostly about anger and violence, the role they played that night in the Castro, the role they’ve played in the history of civil rights, and the fact that so many of the initial readers thought that I was giving a wholehearted thumbs-up to violence, when what I really wanted to encourage was anger.

But I felt conflicted and doubtful about both, and I realized that I needed to introduce this doubt into the post. And the more I thought about anger and violence, and the role they’ve played in gay people’s fight for civil rights, the more I wanted to refresh my memory about Stonewall, which meant that I did a little reading. And that reading cleared away some of my more facile assumptions, like Judy Garland’s death being the match to Stonewall’s gas tank, an assumption that can’t be reliably supported by the evidence. So I had to change the title of the essay as well, and leave out Judy, who, like, had a tough enough life as it was without getting dragged around Stonewall.

Which is a very long way to say that I revised the damn thing, because it felt irresponsible to leave it up in its rougher stage. It’s just a matter of a few short paragraphs, and I don’t know if anyone else but me cares about such a thing, and I’m still trying to figure out how I feel about that night in the Castro, and about anger and violence in general, which means that the issue, for me, stays unresolved. Which means that I will keep reading what other people have to say, and studying our history, hoping that eventually the clearest path to our goals will be revealed. Which ain’t so likely, since only hindsight is 20/20.

From SFGate:

Prop 8 Backers Splinter as Court Fight Resumes

“The group that persuaded California voters this month to pass Proposition 8, which bans same-sex marriage, now is fighting its friends as well as its foes.

Other conservative groups that loudly backed Prop. 8 are being targeted as too extreme and off-putting by ProtectMarriage.com, which put the constitutional amendment on the Nov. 4 ballot and hopes to help persuade the state Supreme Court to uphold the measure.

“We represent the people who got things done, who got Prop. 8 passed,” said Andrew Pugno, general counsel for the Yes on Prop. 8 campaign. “An important part of defending Prop. 8 is eliminating arguments not helpful to our concerns.”

Pugno, for example, persuaded the Supreme Court last week to bar the Campaign for California Families from intervening in the court case over the validity of Prop. 8 and the same-sex marriage ban.

“That organization represents the extreme fringe and is not representative of the coalition that got it passed,” Pugno said. “They didn’t even support Prop. 8 until sometime in the summer…”

Also, via The Washington Post:

Mormons’ Uneasy Victory

“Michael Otterson, a church spokesman, recently told the Associated Press that he was “puzzled” by the protesters’ targeting of Mormons. “This was a very broad-based coalition that defended traditional marriage in a free and democratic election,” he said. “It’s a little disturbing to see these protesters singling out the Mormon Church.”

There are Mormons who fought hard against the measure, drawing attention to the extent of Mormon involvement by outing fellow members on donor lists. There are Mormons so upset they’re thinking of renouncing their church membership as well as Mormons who wholeheartedly supported the initiative. And then there are those who gave money out of obedience to their leaders, without much thought to the policy it was being used to support. Regardless of where they fall on this spectrum, many probably feel a bit like Otterson: uneasy with all the attention…”

Are our opponents falling apart? I’d camp out for front row tickets.

I’m Not One of Those ‘Love Thy Neighbor’ Christians

from The Onion, via Jennie

“I’m a normal Midwestern housewife. I believe in the basic teachings of the Bible and the church. Divorce is forbidden. A woman is to be an obedient subordinate to the male head of the household. If a man lieth down with another man, they shall be taken out and killed. Things everybody can agree on, like the miracle of glossolalia that occurred during Pentecost, when the Apostles were visited by the Holy Spirit, who took the form of cloven tongues of fire hovering just above their heads. You know, basic common sense stuff.

But that doesn’t mean I think people should, like, forgive the sins of those who trespass against them or anything weird like that.

We’re not all “Jesus Freaks” who run around screaming about how everyone should “Judge not lest ye be judged,” whine “Blessed are the meek” all the time, or drone on and on about how we’re all equal in the eyes of God! Some of us are just trying to be good, honest folks who believe the unbaptized will roam the Earth for ages without the comfort of God’s love when Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior returns on Judgment Day to whisk the righteous off to heaven…”