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Not only have the Mariners descended to the depths of their ’80s suckiness, but during their current road trip the joint was rented out to pious hatemonger James Dobson. He held what his staff billed as a stirring crusade-service defending “traditional marriage.”
In Dobsonspeak, “traditional” (i.e., heterosexual) marriage is simultaneously the strongest, most sacred bond in human society AND something so frail as to require government-sanctioned monopoly status, via the clad-iron banning of all other possible romantic combinations.
Fortunately, many upright area citizens were more than willing to vocally disagree.
This chalk-art slogan reads, “Love Thy Neighbor.* (Some Restrictions May Apply.)”
WITH THE ARRIVAL of spring came the return, corporate galleries be damned, of the indie art walk in Occidental Park. Artists now have to buy a city license and sign a disclaimer attesting they’re selling their own stuff, but the freewheeling spirit of creation and discovery remains.
FOUND ON THE GROUND on East Pike Street: “We’re getting married tomorrow in Portland, whether you like it or not.”
THE QUINTON INSTRUMENTS building on Denny Way, formerly a warehouse for the old Frederick & Nelson department store, is coming down for one of Paul Allen’s megaprojects.
Quinton, now out in the far suburbs, makes, among other things, hi-tech treadmills. I trod on one at Providence Hospital last September. The diagnostician asked me to tell her when I was too pooped to keep running in place. Ten minutes later, after the machine’s difficulty level had been upped to six miles an hour at a fifteen percent uphill grade, I gave the word; which, of course, was “Jane, stop this crazy thing.”
ABOVE, the remains of Titlewave Books; which, as previously mentioned here, closed after nineteen years.
Below, the remains of Venus, the plus-size clothing boutique on Capitol Hill that insisted women of dimension are beautiful.
WITH MUCH LESS MEDIA HYPE this time around (thank God), Krispy Kreme opened its latest donut stand on First Avenue South last week, just in time to get the staff trained before nearby Safeco Field opens for the start of baseball season next week.
They promoted the new place by handing out boxes of the glazed circles downtown. The boxes include a full ingredient listing. Among the deliciously good things that go into those sweet Os: Vital wheat gluten, diammonium phosphate, sodium stearoyl-2-lactylate, ethoxylated mono-and-diglycerides, calcium propionate, fungal alpha amylase, pentosanase, protease, and carnuba wax.
KEXP’S PUTTING OUT POSTERS and postcards around town, aimed at helping the station’s core listeners feel proud of their indie-musical knowledge. This one, f’rinstance, is a cute joke if you know the two bands referenced by the visual clues. Since you all undoubtedly know them, I won’t have to tell the names here.
MY FORMER RESIDENCE SITE of Corvallis, OR has suspended its courageous practice of issuing same-sex marriage licenses. (Actually, it’s suspending all marriage licenses, while the courts attempt to figure all this out.) But the Heart of the Valley did make the No. 10 spot in a new survey of the best places to live in the country.
I’M MORE THAN PROUD to announce that Benton County, OR, where I spent two of the most productive years of my post-adolescent life, has become the second Oregon county to issue marriage licenses to gay couples. Or, as we Oregon State fans say, GO BEAVERS!
THE PORTLAND AREA’S been stricken lately with an economy even worse than Seattle’s, a basketball team filled with ungrateful bad boys, and lower-than-expected levels of Lewis & Clark Bicentennial tourism.
But, like the clever and hearty pioneers they are, Oregonians always find some new economic hope. This week, it’s in the form of joining the same-sex-marriage bandwagon.
Multnomah County’s officially invited girl-girl and boy-boy pairs to rush to the Rose City, pay modest license fees into the local gov’t. coffers, get their simple declarative ceremonies, and freely spend their honeymoon bucks at the region’s hotels, restaurants, shops, and entertainments.
I predict it will only be days before enterprising entrepreneurs offer weekend package tours geared for non-heteros in love. Amtrak or Horizon Air fares, accomodations at a fine downtown hostelry, a prepackaged ceremony in one of several styles, two-for-one meal coupons, maybe even a Powell’s Books gift card to start your no-sales-tax shopping spree.
And, of course, a complementary video of My Own Private Idaho for the gents, or Personal Best for the ladies.
(Actually, it turns out the Portland tourism people already had a web page, even before the gay-marriage thang started, promoting their town as a cool destination for the GLBT set.)
P.S.: Why hasn’t Wash. state joined the bandwagon? For one thing, same-gender marriages are more explicitly forbidden in Washington’s legal code than in Oregon’s. To change this would require legislative action, a ballot initiative, or a thorough court challenge.
The anti-gay-marriage Constitutional amendment.
JUST WHEN HE SEEMED to have disappeared off the face o’ the earth, Bill Maher roars back with a fervent plea for some politician somewhere to unapologetically support gay marriage: “The only thing abominable about being gay is the amount of time you have to put in at the gym.”
BACK IN THE EARLY NINETIES, drag-queen cabaret shows were all the rage. Now, they’re struggling to survive, here and elsewhere.
Who’d’ve thunk it? Noam Chomsky, academic-left theoretician and author of obscure incendiary anti-Bush tracts, has become a famous enough name, at least in this town, to become an ad slogan for a regional chain of seven bookstores.
You know you’re a word-usage freak when this sign makes you stop and think not about its message, but about whether it should say “1 in 7 is” or “1 in 7 are.”
Above and below, anonymous sidewalk chalk art found downtown.
THURSDAY I SAW Jean Chretien’s farewell speech as Canada’s prime minister. It made me want to move there even more.
Here was a guy fluent in two languages (that’s two more than our federal leader), pointing with pride to everything that’s happenned in his country during his leadership–balanced budgets, decent health care, staying the heck out of Iraq, same-sex marriages, even the careers of Shania Twain and Alanis Morrisette.
Then came the clincher: Chretien’s barbs at the opposition coalition, whatever it’s called this week:
“Canadians should beware of those on the right who put profit ahead of community . . . beware of those on the right who put the narrow bottom line ahead of everything else.”Canadians should beware of those on the right who would reduce taxes at the expense of necessary public services . . . beware of those on the right who do not care about reducing social and environmental deficits. Canadians should beware of those on the right who would weaken the national government because they do not believe in the role of government.”
You think we could ever get a guy that on-the-bean?
…about a third of the way down this linked page, that Bill Gates’s highly publicized anti-AIDS crusade’s really a prop-up for the big drug companies, and for the intellectual-property regulations that protect their monopoly (and his):
“Gates knows darn well that ‘intellectual property rights’ laws… are under attack by Nelson Mandela and front-line doctors trying to get cut-rate drugs to the 23 million Africans sick with the AIDS virus…. He’s spending an itsy-bitsy part of his monopoly profits (the $6 billion spent by Gates’s foundation is less than 2% of his net worth) to buy some drugs for a fraction of the dying. The bully billionaire’s ‘philanthropic’ organization is working paw-in-claw with the big pharmaceutical companies in support of the blockade on cheap drug shipments…”Gates says his plan is to reach one million people with medicine by the end of the decade. Another way to read it: He’s locking in a trade system that will effectively block the delivery of medicine to over 20 million.”
AS PROMISED, here are some of the pix I took but was unable to upload last month, starting with what’s commonly known for short as the “Gay Pride Parade” (the official name’s almost as long as the parade itself).
This year’s parade was to have been hardly different from any, except for the larger and more numerous surrounding beer gardens. (They’re here, they’re queer, they’re drinking beer.) But recent news events gave the paraders a couple extra things about which to feel proudly.
First, a court in Ontario ruled gay marriage legal in Canada’s most populous province. The move capped a half-year in which the Great White North, once seen as quaint and stuffy, suddenly attained a reputation as North America’s bastion of Euro-progressivism and (relative) political common sense.
Then the U.S. Supreme Court, in a rare victory for libertarian conservatives instead of authoritarian conservatives, said Texas couldn’t criminalize “sodomy” (a code-word for gay-male sex). G.W. Bush, who as Texas governor had supported the law, was uncharacteristically quiet about its overturning.
Thus, an event that, as late as a week before, might have held a mood of brash defiance, instead took on an air of only slightly-muted celebration for lesbians and gays, and for everybody who’s been yearning achingly for even the slightest hope.
Hope for a way out of the right-wing nightmare.
Hope for an America that would run on compassion and common sense, instead of greed and fear.
Hope for not just a more prosperous future, but for any future at all.
The new age people say anything we do to maintain a positive attitude will help us achieve our goals. Let’s hope this time they’re right.
…last Sunday, the 29th one in this town. This year’s was perhaps bigger and more outrageous than ever.
Certainly there’s a greater need for out-loud outness this year. Our appointed leaders have decreed that this nation must fight back against sectarian, authoritarian, intolerant murderers by becoming more sectarian, authoritarian, intolerant and murderous. Such a scenario would most certainly be unfriendly toward queer civil rights.
So out came the Outs, as forcefully outrageous as ever. There were the bar- and beer-company floats, the community-organization floats, the religious-tolerance marchers, the motorcycle lesbians, the drag-queen troupes, the performance artists, and the AIDS-awareness leafleters.
(Comparatively under-represented this year: Topless women; local politicians of any attire. Apparently absent: The tiny Gay AA delegation, which had always been vastly overwhelmed by the beer floats.)
Dan Savage used to say the Pride Parade ought to be at night, downtown, and more confrontative in nature.
But the Broadway, high-noon format is a more Seattle-style approach. It’s funky and quirky, silly and celebratory.
And yes, it’s assimilationist. It fetes the arrival of lesbians and gays as accepted and unthreatening members of the local affluent class.
Of course, it helps that the corporate-Democrat local power structure luuvvvs gay culture. More precisely, it loves a certain vision of gay culture that’s all about show tunes and interior decoration and anti-Republican political organizing, and only very understatedly about oral-genital contacts with persons of the same sex. The Pride Parade gays are sex-positive, but they know when to keep the curtains drawn.
LAST YEAR AT THIS TIME, we openly wondered in this space why nongays couldn’t have a sex-positive summer exhibition. SIlly us–we’d forgotten about the Fremont Solstice Parade, held (last year as this) just one week prior to the gay event.
Just as the gay parade isn’t exclusively gay, the Fremont parade is by no means exclusively straight. But it’s got a het aesthetic to it. Where the gay parade is about loudly and in many cases campily proclaiming one’s queerness (and one’s legal/social right to make such proclamations), the Fremont parade is about comfortably living in one’s oddness and intermixing with everyone else’s oddnesses.
The nude bicyclists, an unofficial part of the parade for over half a decade now, are only the most obvious incarnation of this aesthetic. Many, if not most, of the parade’s scheduled acts and icons involved zestful, vigorous depictions of masculine and feminine archetypes, both old (Pan, Pandora) and recent (loggers, businesswomen); sometimes in conflict with one another but all residing, however uneasily, in tghe same universe.
Heterosexuality, of course, is more likely to generate children. Such persons were in clear attendance at the gay parade, but were everywhere at the Fremont parade. They received candy, made chalk drawings, shook the hands of costume characters, were the chief audience of several floats and performers, and were the partial subject of the parade’s most intriguing float.
Based on the related topics of pregnancy and its avoidance, the float featured a traditional fertility goddess at the front, egg-and-sperm representations on the back, real-life moms-to-be, and real-life moms with their progeny (not visible in the shot). All around the float walked costume characters dressed up as assorted contraceptive devices. Possible implied meanings: Trying to get pregnant and trying not to get pregnant are merely different aspects of the whole shtick of being what gays used to call “a breeder;” sexual attraction, and the cycle of life of which it is a key part, are both to be joyously celebrated.
Self-help mogul Stephen Covey once wrote something about a “maturity continuum,” in which dependent children become independent adults, who eventually recognize their interdependence with each other. I’ll add that true heterosexuality is also about that, at least ideally–not about greedy conquests or individual preenings, but about connecting to another person (and indirectly, spiritually, to the whole of the species).
It’s also about getting over the fear, reaching beyond your own head, negotiating the stickier parts (literally and figuratively) of such interconnections. That’s certainly a skill the world needs to get better at, on all levels.
I’ve written previously that we live in “a MISC world,” filled with untold numbers of cultures, subcultures, sub-subcultures, ethinicities, religions, and sex/love proclivities. Real heterosexuality is a key, perhaps the key, toward making such a world work–learning not only to tolerate but to share enduring love with someone fundamentally different from yourself.
What some socio-philosophers call “pansexuality,” I call ultimate heterosexuality–one big motley melange of women and men, and also of gays, lesbians, bis, trannies, SM-ers, swingers, monogamists, celibates, exhibitionists, voyeurs/voyeuses, femmes, butches, fairies, studs, princesses, and folks who don’t know what the heck they are; all finding consensual mind-bending togetherness with whomever, all ssupporting one another in stumbling through this miasma known as human existence.
LET’S ALL PLAY
SEX-ROLE STEREOTYPE
MYSTERY DATE!
This proposed role-playing game will involve two separately-shuffled decks of cards.
The female player draws a card at random from the Pink Deck to determine which of the following grossly overgeneralized female character types (taken from popular images in “mainstream” and “alternative” media) she must adopt.
Then the male player does the same from the Blue Deck, containing various one-dimensional male character types. The two players then proceed to have a bitter verbal argument, in their characters.
The loser: The player who breaks character first.
The winner: There are no winners.
The point of the game: NOT to have fun, but to be as adamant and as miserable as you can be.
THE FEMALE ROLES:
Description: Says she’ll love you; will really kill or at least totally humiliate you.
Visualization: Blonde, sultry, with a come-hither expression, cleavage, and a knife held behind her back.
Description: Stuck-up high school brat
Visualization: Perfect body, perfect hair, perfect clothes, the facial expression of someone who’s just confronted horse feces on the sidewalk.
Description: Believes stereotyping people by gender is the worst crime in the world, that it’s done by no women and all men, and if you disagree you’re part of the universal male conspiracy.
Visualization: Butch in leather with a permanent scowl.
Description: The emotionally abusive, all-purpose victim of everything. Transforms in an instant from bawling to anxious to wrathful.
Visualization: Overemotive Shakespearean actress; or the couch-swooner from that Edward Gorey book cover. Might be finishing a drink carried in one hand while pouring another drink with her other hand.
Description: Completely lacking a mind or will of her own. Enslaved by TV and magazine ads that don’t want her to buy stuff, just to make her feel miserable.
Visualization: mirror in her hand, standing on a scale, rail-thin but seeing herself in the mirror as voluminously obese
Description: Victim of the Mean Teen’s putdowns for merely looking insufficiently ladylike. Because she has the skankiest reputation in school, no boy will have her–and none ever has.
Visualization: Not seductive, merely “cheap” and semi-pathetic looking. Ill-fitting denim jacket, last year’s jeans style, the wrong brand of cigarettes, too much makeup.
Description: Her mischievous giggle and batting eyes can make men give her fortunes, which she’ll waste in an instant on one really fabulous consumer purchase.
Visualization: Carefully contrived fake absentmindedness.
Description: The woman every man’s supposed to go absolutely crazy about and if you don’t what’s wrong with you?
Visualization: An almost kabuki-like absurdist characterization made from her own thoroughly-surgeried body; plus overbleached and overteased hair, big vacant eyes, surgically-thickened pouting lips, impossibly high heels, and a vinyl or gold-lame jumpsuit.
Description: Diligently works to create a society where everything’s uniformly blah and anything that could even possibly be fun would be outlawed.
Visualization: Stern emotionless behind big round glasses, blah hair, blah clothes,
Description: Your new boss, who uses conniving and treachery to get to the top (whereas your old male boss simply used bluster and bullying).
Visualization: Nordstrom-suited adult version of the Mean Teen. Shoulder pads capable of playing football in.
Description: doesn’t want to kill you, just enslave you.
Visualization: Perect demure smile, bridal gown, holding handcuffs or a lasso, perhaps dreaming a “thought balloon” of screeching children and a minivan.
Description: In high school she was the Mean Teen. In adulthood she will be the Dresser for Success. But now in college, she’s sowing more oats than Quaker–and will voraciously defend her right to do so.
Visualization: Standing up in the back seat of a convertible, either flashing or simply thrusting her bosom forward. Expression of out-of-control glee.
THE MALE ROLES:
Description: Ape-ish, vulgar, boorish, yet boistrously unaware.
Visualization: Abercrombie & Hilfiger designer slop, backward baseball cap, puking while holding a bottle of Goldschlager.
Description: Can’t read, speak, or think. Can barely stand. Yet fantasizes about being a drug-running, woman-beating street tough.
Visualization: Baggy butt-cleavage jeans, blank permanent-stoner expression, skateboard, lanky and hunched over.
Description: Believes in Breaking All The Rules, especially rules that prevent him from doing anything he wants to anything (or anyone) he wants.
Visualization: Loud “GQ” attire, Ray-Bans, smug smirk, cocky strut, posing in front of a huge-ass vehicle with anti-environmental and/or just plain rude bumper stickers.
Description: Wishes for the chance to create, from violence and chaos, a new world of total purity. Doesn’t yet realize such a world would immediately declare him not pure enough.
Visualization: Crew cut, huge-ass gun, stern stare, KKK robe showing beneath his fatigues.
Description: Watches TV and doesn’t read “alternative” newspapers; and hence is personally responsible for everything wrong in the whole world.
Visualization: The vacuous ’50s daddy figure from the cartoon This Modern World.
Description: Exists only to oppress women; dreams of a world where men are men and women stay barefoot & pregnant.
Visualization: Malicious-looking brute with slick hair and a slick thin moustache, in a disco suit with gold chains and a thick mound of fake chest hair.
Description: From man-bashing TV commercials, the clueless househusband who can’t even open a can of beans without a woman to help.
Visualization: Clumsy oaf in the middle of a pratfall.
Description: Believes the only way a male can have a soul is to renounce his body. Eats a special macrobiotic diet devised by Chinese monks to completely suppress the sex drive. Women frequently tell him of their platonic respect for him, in between relationships with Patriarchists.
Visualization: Ponytail down to here; paisley pajama-esque clothes, open-toed Earth Shoes.
Description: The school principal, college professor, company president, court judge, government official, parole officer, doctor, cop, father, banker, or other authority figure whose only joy in life is keeping you down.
Visualization: A sadistic yet somehow blasé expression, a more or less wrinkly face, and a more or less formal business suit.
Description: The perfectly trained mate. Ready and eager to perform any chore (from cunnilingus to grouting) without notice. Will be cheated on within a year and divorced within two.
Visualization: Sweater, tastefully poofy curly blond hair, the expression of a puppy dog eager to please. Perhaps cooking, gardening, or mending socks.
Description: White women see him as a potential stealer of purses. White men see him as a potential stealer of jobs.
Visualization: Thin; dressed in an overly-anxious-to-fit-in looking formal suit. Face is silhouetted (the particular ethnicity of this man, whatever it is, isn’t the point).
Description: Perfect BECAUSE he’s gay and therefore safely unavailable; the object/recipient of female fantasies involving every possible virtue.
Visualization: Perfectly dressed, perfectly groomed, boyish looking (but not queen-y).
…in the “Creative Age,” according to one commentator: Singles, gays, ethnic minorities, performance spaces, walkable neighborhoods, and rock bands! What doesn’t work: Subsidized sports arenas.
