Cultural ex-gayism

Anyone who knows me knows that when I hear queer people describe themselves or their desired mate/fuck buddy as "straight-acting", it's like nails on a chalkboard. I cringe, because there's too much internalized homophobia and self-contempt packed into that one phrase. And it's hard not to take it as a personal insult towards me, because what's wrong with acting gay? I'm not saying that gay men and lesbians should act like walking stereotypes, but that we should all be free to be ourselves, and, in that way, we can create our own identities and collude to construct archetypes of queerness that are diverse, inclusive, and constantly falling apart.

In other words, we should be who we are and love ourselves for it.

So when I found out about this, I just wanted to throw up. It's a site for gay men who describe themselves as straight-acting. Not much of it is up right now, although they do have a cool site intro, which makes me wonder how much work people have put into this. But you can take their Guy Quiz, think hard about the inane details that normal people don't obsess over, and, like I did, get told:

Hardly anyone would be able to pick you as a homo boy. All your actions are carefully crafted in a way that they never appear to be considered too fem. Only a fellow level 2 -- buddy might suspect you with the proper gaydar and it's just the way you like it.

After that, stroll into the message boards and read tens of thousands of posts about how everyone's just "relaxed" and "just being me". Funny how for gay men the act of not caring about your gender performance is itself a gender performance that one has to carefully maintain (c'mon, we all know what "chill" means in a gay.com personal). I wonder if that's developed the same way in lesbian culture?

Anyway, I'd have to say that this site actually affected me more when I first found it than Fred Phelps' page. Not because it made me angry, and it didn't make me sad either, it just made me rethink a lot about gay male culture. I knew that we definitely have an issue with trying to be like straight people. I just didn't think that people would make a snazzy webpage out of that sort of internalized homophobia. All that effort, and do these people really think that homophobes are going to accept them because of it?

Oh, and their T-shirt model doesn't wear pants. WEIRD!

Haggard Update

When I saw this last night about Ted Haggard wanting to become an psychologist online, I laughed and decided to save it for TWIP this weekend. But then I saw this on the Denver Post, and couldn't wait. According to one of his "overseers":

"He is completely heterosexual," Ralph said. "That is something he discovered. It was the acting-out situations where things took place. It wasn't a constant thing."

Uh, yeah, whatever. If anyone needs an explanation as to why a guy who hires a male prostitute for three years is not completely heterosexual, check out this post at Good As You.

There's just so much to this, I don't know what to say. Here we have a 50-year-old gay man, who by any account from anyone credible, is stuck in an unsatisfying relationship with his wife and, until recently, completely cut off from the outside world (why does this sound like a cult?), a (presumably) straight woman who's married to this guy, who has remained silent on this issue and will remain married to him, at least in the near future, and four kids who have to move around a whole lot now because no one will acknowledge the truth about this whole thing. There are other characters, like the team of fundamentalists who are trying to manage this "crisis" and push their politics at the same time so they can keep pushing the "gays can change" narrative, his congregation who lost their pastor but support him and hope he ex-gays himself for his own sake, the GLBT community and allies, who, while we make fun of this whole drama, would really like for him to come out and live his life honestly for both his sake and because of the personal political stakes, and the heterosexual population at large who's just shaking their heads wondering what's happened or just waiting for the next juicy piece of gossip but otherwise don't care about how this works itself out.

Isn't this a crazy drama?

When exposed, Mark Foley came out through his attorney while in rehab, Jim West denied it until he died, and James McGreevey embraced the GLBT community. Haggard, an anti-gay authority figure who was also outed through scandal, has "ex-gayed" and decided to stay in the closet and not speak about his sexuality publicly, only through spokesmen. While those of us not in positions of authority have developed a set of coming out rituals, these people, so far removed from out-n-proud GLBT people, through their own choice, cannot respectably come out.

As much as his "overseers" want to claim him for the anti-gay community, he is one of the most publicly visible queer people in the country. For better or worse, he is, in a small, nuanced way, representing us.

Justin Lookadoo, here's looking at you!

After seeing that the New Life Church's leadership proves that Protestant clergy is just as gay as Catholic, we find out that gayness among Evangelicals gets even funnier. Ex-Gay Watch warns us about some nefarious plan for Exodus International to recruit Christian kids for gay bashing, and upon following the link, we find a montage of face pics more gay than any we've seen on DList. Check it out here.

We're interested in this Justin Lookadoo, motivational speaker and author of like 100 books about teen dating. Do visit his page. We learned a lot of things there, like:

• He's from El Paso, and he considers living in Mexico his "coolest experience"
  
  
• He has "closet friends", either friends who are in the closet or from when he was in the closet
  
  
• Two of his favorite singers are totally gay
  
  
• He has make-up tips for girls, and calls Cristina Aguilera "trasky"... Cat fight!
  
  
• He faces the day ass-first
  
  
• He has a "he male strut which works on the women", he wants to be one of the Village People, he's riding an imaginary bull and slapping it's ass.... God, we can't point out the gay subtext and make it funny when it's a gay super-text. Come out already!
  

Pastor Ted's rehab will be unbearably annoying

From the Agape Press

:In the new church or ministry environment, Wickman explains, a pastor is provided with service opportunities, accountability and other "things that he's used to," in a setting "where he can agonize in front of people that are sympathetic and understanding."

Riiiiiight.... Because he's so used to accountability.

We're still hoping for something that we're more familiar with when it comes to rehab, like freakouts, eating without sharp objects, and weekend romance. As is par for course with Agape Press, the article reluctantly provides a little bit of truth:

"And to be called of God and to have no place to go is agonizing," Wickman adds. And this is true "particularly for his wife," he notes, "whom we have found always takes longer to recover than the husband."

What? Mrs. Pastor Ted isn't going to have fun ex-gaying her husband and then spending the rest of her life with a closeted nelly with an affinity for the crystal meth?

Legitimate news source: Hot bottom off the market

Damn, they're kicking themselves in the pants right now. The kids at Q-Bomb were too slow on the uptake to grab the meal ticket while the getting was good. Ted Haggard has said gone into rehab, according to the CO Springs Gazette. It's not the good kind that treats people who compulsively waste crystal meth, but the bad kind that tries to make men out of nancy-boys.

So it seems like the the only guy who will get to tap that evangelical ass is Mike Post.