The Region Between

From the Kyler Fey Tumbl (link below); he evidently has the books on the brain judging from his new dream journal entry. M-Brane Press is releasing his Commander Jace and the Strange Case of the Tattooed Twink possibly as soon as tomorrow. Though Intersex Boys of Venus is already out, this new one is properly the first episode of his series, so we might offer it as a free book for a little while in some venues.

https://kylerfey.tumblr.com/post/158307728609/old-paperbacks-show-up-in-horny-dream

That post has a couple examples of cool cover art from that ancient
genre. Here's a couple more that I just happen to have sitting around for some reason.

After a few years of not releasing anything new, my little M-Brane Press is starting to be back in business a little bit. This year's first project is a gay erotica science fantasy serial by Kyler Fey. The "official" announcmentof it with links to the ebook sites is on the M-Brane Press site. Its first installment is a 35000-word novella titled The Intersex Boys of Venus. It's available in print, back to back in "double" format with One Hundred Times, Kyler's memoir about an intense hook-up with a young man who inspired a lot of the details about a main character in his serial. Both books are out separately in electronic form on Amazon, iBooksand Kobo.

The author, who likes to write a lot more than he likes to self-promote, has been encouraged (rather forcefully) to use more social media, and has chosen Tumblr as a venue. He has managed a couple/few posts about the book, including a little excerpt from the next installment. I am not immediately starting a lot of aggressive promo of the thing in the guise of M-Brane Press quite yet because I would like there to be at least one more installment of the serial published so that we can act more like it's a real series than a one-off. The total project has twenty-one installments. About half of them appear to have the major work of their writig complete, but they are all still missing some content. A few more of them exist only as a titles and synopses, but I am assured that they will manifest as complete works soon enough. I have been promised that I might have a new complete installment in hand as soon as tomorrow.

Originally, I was looking for a project whereby M-Brane Press could get in on the erotic ebook thing with a long series of little "quickies"--a lot of those Kindle books are really just short stories. The plan was to roll out a lot of them, or maybe even all of them, all at once and then put together one of those ebook "box sets" of them and also a print omnibus edition. But if they are all going to end up being novella-length like Intersex Boys, then the single giant print book
might be impractical. But I am still planning some sort of print format for the series--because I like making print books--but I haven't decided if they are all going to be doubles like this first book. It will probably depend on final page-count of some of these episodes. 

Here is the final piece of my Justin Bieber fan fiction trilogy (which I have just now this moment declared a trilogy because I have a third item). The first was "Your Justin Bieber" (2011) in which a second-person narrator has an unexpected romance with the pop star, but it's indicated that maybe the whole thing might be more about the archetypal figure that JB might suggest than about JB himself. The second item is "The Exorcist Playset" (2012) in which JB appears only as a literal prop in a secondary role in what is otherwise a piece of Exorcist fan fiction. In this story, he is literally an action figure, a sort of animatronic doll that stars in a kid's weird play-time fantasy and who perhaps helps this kid work his way out of what may or may not be a real demonic possession. In the writing of the following story, I have brought the subject matter closer to home and let myself be embarrassed. And for this occasion, the story seems like it should have a long and ponderous title like…

You Will Find That Heart/Smiley-Thing Deep in Here, XOXO JB
by Christopher Fletcher

Woven into the texts of Nemesis—where the unknown author famously makes an extraordinary observation about a universe where “dark planets rolls without aim, where they roll in their horror unheeded, without knowledge or luster or name”—is a concept with which I utterly disagree. I can say now, as the world unwinds around us, that there really is an aim after all. It’s just one with which humans will have nothing to do.
            —Justin Bieber, PhD, from The Diary of Fthaggua

When he presented you, at the Xmas Eve party a couple years ago, with the next year’s Justin Bieber calendar, you were both amused and acutely embarrassed. Because it was a light-hearted gesture, honoring with well-intended humor the fact that you had unabashedly declared yourself a JB fan some time ago and were willing to admit it to anyone and stand up for its legitimacy against any opponent. And because you know that it’s likely an ongoing source of derision that you are too old, too serious, too old, too smart, too old, too professionally accomplished, too old, too cerebral and brainy, and mostly just plain too goddamned fucking old to be a belieber. It was like being handed a piece of pornography, by someone who knows exactly what kind of porn you’re into, in front of a whole bunch of other people who don’t now and won’t ever get your weird kink.
            Your favorite months are June and September, especially September where he wears Wayfarer sunglasses like yours.
            Because you are very busy with work and life—and because you are not a consumer of the kind of media where the foibles and failures of celebs are celebrated—you miss for a few days the news of JB’s arrest in Florida for drunken driving and resisting arrest. People close to you are amused that it falls to them to fill you, of all people, in on the latest of a series of ridiculous calamities surrounding this young man. You have to tell them that despite what they’d assumed was a deep and abiding fandom on your part, you just plain hadn’t heard about it yet. But when you get a few free moments away from anyone else’s gaze, you google the fuck out of the situation and find his mugshots. Though you’d not admit it to anyone else, you are relieved and delighted that he looks—even under the duress of drunken incarceration—not like a bleary-eyed loser like most people do under those conditions, but kind of pretty and sweet and crowned with mostly intact hair. He smiled for the cop cam.
         
This was about the last you’d hear of JB for a while. The incident supposedly motivated him to change his life, and part of that change was receding from pop celebrity. He cancelled his remaining performing and recording schedule. He declined media appearances and interviews. You remember hearing that he had decided to devote himself to matters of “faith and philosophy,” which you’d naturally assumed was some kind of meaningless fake-ass nonsense well in line with his previous professions of a sort of cheesy pop star Christianity.
            You remember liking a lot that full-page pic of him in his book Just Getting Started where he is on stage and he looks wet, sweat-slicked, very earnest, and yet behind him is a big lit-up sign that says PRAY. In its caption, he tells you that he is living proof that dreams come true. You cringe at this naïve cliché and you are embarrassed both for him (for saying it) and for yourself (for reading it and owning a copy of the book). He tells you to believe and to pray, and you cringe, believe and pray and pray and all  your childish dreams will come true, but he’s so fucking beautiful anyway, so you ignore this patent moronic nonsense and you decide, once again, once again, one more time, one final time, to like him anyway because he has, at least, a gorgeous voice even if he’s dumb as a bag of hammers. You occasionally still enjoy “As Long as You Love Me”  and “Boyfriend” when they recur on your playlist, but you assume that the next time you’ll see any sight of JB is when he is eventually dredged up as an F-list celeb alongside a hundred-year-old Joan Collins, a cyborg Kirstie Alley, a fat and drunk Marilyn Manson and one or another stupid Kardashian for a season of Celebrity Cook-Off hosted by an ever-more-raspy Guy Fieri.
            And of course some hot new kid quickly emerges to fill the Bieber niche, that pop-cultural hole that must always have a lithe young male occupant, and after a year or so of no new news of him at all, everyone quits caring about or even looking for the whereabouts of Justin Bieber, former pop star.

You come home from work late on Friday night—after cooking an Ancient Roman wine dinner or some such pretentious nonsense—and J says: “Can’t wait to tell you this shit: Your Boy has moved in behind us, in the house across the alley!” You honestly don’t know to which one of “Your” “Boys” he may be referring since that is the language he uses for any dude that he thinks that you might possibly think is cute. It could mean any of several thousands of dudes. It could be anyone. But seeing your exhausted confusion, he clarifies: “The Biebs. Fuckin’ JB. Here in Argos-Bellona, here in our back yard! Just moved in today.” And you again feel way behind on current events because this was supposedly widely reported on Channel 5. Stunned, you look out the back door, across the alley. Through a window in the house across the way you see a silhouette in motion that you can imagine matches JB’s.

You locate online and start reading daily the copious blog posts of the new Justin Bieber, the former pop celeb who now lives across the alley from you, whose backyard is in full view of your second-floor balcony. One day he writes,
            “The Outer God Nokkthathuas, typically represented as a blood-tinged cyclone or a shroud of blowing red dust possibly concealing some sort of unseen, unconscious creature, is perhaps a more appropriate entity for consideration nowadays—as the Dust once again threatens to enshroud the planet—than great Cthulhu itself, but the fanatics of the Cult Cthulhu will not give up their adolescent fantasy that they are finally getting noticed by the gods. They bear a mutant baby and they think it means love from the Void.”
            And, yeah, nearly all of it is just as impenetrable as that passage.
            One afternoon you sit on your balcony and gaze across the way. Behind his own house, JB sits at a table in his backyard. He wears nothing but board shorts and sunglasses, as if he might be ready for a swim, but you suspect (to your despair) that he is never going to get wet in that in-ground swimming next to his table. Because when he sits at that table he does nothing but type and click on a laptop computer. Sometimes he does this long into the evening.  Sometimes, after he has stopped for the day, you check his blog and see that he has just added another long and abstruse post about Cthulhist theology. On Twitter he might say something like, “Some people still want some kind of heart or smile from me. It’s fuckin’ comin’.”

You go to a local bookshop where you have an appointment to read aloud passages from your novel The Days of the Dust and the Diane Rehm Show and hopefully sign copies of the book, purchased by  readers from the merchant who invited you there. Hardly anyone to date has bought it yet so you hope for a small breakthrough here.
            The bookstore manager has arranged several rows of chairs in front of a table that you sit upon cross-legged and read to the guests. The passage you choose involves a dangerous, revelatory encounter between two young men aboard an airship cast in the form of a dream about alternate-history ancient Greeks who are uncovering an ancient horror on an asteroid that rolls in the dark between the Earth and the Moon.
            In the front row sits JB. He is somewhat disguised, a Cardinals baseball cap pulled low on his forehead, Wayfarer sunglasses, but it’s plainly him. You attempt to avoid glancing at him too many times, deciding to observe his obvious desire for anonymity since no one else seems to have realized who he is. He listens to you read, occasionally taps on an iPad resting on his lap. During the question/answer period, he doesn’t ask any questions. Afterward, he buys a copy of the book but he does not get in line to have you sign it.
            After he leaves, the bookstore manager says, “That dude who was sitting in the front, the one with the Cards cap, looked exactly like Justin Bieber.”
            “I guess it could have been him,” you say, and the guy just laughs. Maybe he doesn't know that JB actually lives in the city now. Or maybe he just can’t picture JB coming into his store for any reason.
         
Later that night, you take a look at the blog and read this headline:
            “Nokkthathuas and the Zeppelin: A-R Kanayda Shrouds a Deep Truth Inside a Family Drama.”
            His first paragraph: “This evening I listened to the author read from the book at a local bookstore. Even though I’d already read it, I kind of wanted to see the person who wrote it in person, speaking aloud some of its weird words, hearing his actual human voice saying these things.”
            Below this paragraph, inset within the post, is a picture of you from that night’s reading copied from a fresh post on your own website. You feel, for just a moment, quite nearly almost as embarrassed as you felt about the calendar because you understand that you are actually thrilled and flattered to appear on JB’s blog. On the new JB’s fuckin’ blog, which makes not a lick of sense. You’re a fucking fanboy so you do not care that what follows—his nine thousand word review/analysis of just one short segment of your novel—is nearly incomprehensible. And you love the fuck out of it when he cross-posts his new entry—about your story—to Twitter with the comment: “There’s a weird smiley/heart thing deep in here.” You could just die. Die.

One night you have a lengthy dream in which JB intermittently appears in various roles and guises: college friend, co-worker, boss, lover, brother, son. At one point, shortly before you awaken, he is leaning into you as if to hug you, and you permit this hug and you also permit him to kiss you in an awkward hesitant manner until you both eventually agree to this intimacy fully and kiss wetly with fully open mouths. The streaming spit between you becomes somehow thick and sticky and stringy like strands of rubber cement or semen. It thickens until your faces are bound together in a gluey mass from which you try half-heartedly to escape.

About a week later, you daydream that maybe you could really someday quit your day-job and take up the novelist life because JB’s endorsement has somehow caused Days of the Dust to rise into Amazon’s Top 100 in both Literature and Science Fiction and it looks like you might actually get a decent royalty payment for the first time ever in your life. But then a week or so later, it falls down into the top 30,000 and then down into the top 100,000 and then continues to plummet from there into the millions. But you have another one ready to publish and you can just go ahead and use JB’s endorsement of the first one as a cover blurb on the second one, and so it goes.
         
You go to the grocery store after work, very late and in a hurry for a shortcut for the pasta dish that H wants tonight. You peer at jars of various pestos and pickles and olives and other cured and marinated things at the Italian kiosk where a store chef has prepared samples of porcini mushroom/chicken risotto for the customers. You wonder if there is a container of something flavorful and piquant and oily that you can just dump into a pan with whole-wheat rotini and parm and be done with it.
            JB says, “This looks really good, but I have no idea how to make it.”
            You look up, turn around, and see him. He looks exactly like he did at the bookstore reading, sunglasses, Cards cap, t-shirt, board shorts. And he is looking at you. And his comment about not knowing how to make something was, in fact, actually spoken to you. Then you realize that you did not change clothes before you left work and that you are wearing a dirty green chef coat and black pants with pictures of fish printed on them. Of course, upon interacting with JB in person for the first time, Fucking Of Course! you’d look like this. And, Of course: he certainly thinks that you are the store chef who is handing out the risotto samples because that dude is not at his station at that moment.
            “It’s not that hard,” you say, checking quickly to make sure that you even know for sure what “it” is. The display surrounding the risotto samples has all the stuff that the store wants you to buy to make porcini/chicken risotto. But you disapprove of how it’s really just a bag of some kind of fake-ass risotto product to which you add chicken and the store-brand cheese. You disapprove of the lack of fresh mushrooms, white wine, freshly grated cheese, fresh parsley. “It’s not that hard,” you say again. “But this isn't the way to do it.”
            Though you resist the act of literally taking his hand in yours, the effect is similar as you lead him around the store and drop items into his hand basket: Arborio rice, shallots, garlic, assorted earthy shrooms, flat-leaf parsley, a box of chicken stock, a bottle of pinot grigio, a tub of grated parmesan. “It’s easy,” you adhere, “as long as you remember that you need about three times as much stock or other liquid as rice. What kind of kitchen equipment do you have?”
            “I have everything,” he says. “I’m just not good at using it.”
            “Just remember,” you say, “to not skimp on the heat when you start the initial sauté.  Heat is your friend. And don’t lose patience with the rice. It will be correct at about twenty-two minutes. Google some directions or a YouTube vid if you don't remember exactly what I have told you.”
            Fuck no, he says, you need to come to my place and show me.
            Stopped, as they say, “dead in your tracks,” you say this next thing, feeling like a totally stupid tool: “Um. I don’t know about that. But maybe. Do you live in the neighborhood?”
            You, he says, know goddamned well where I live.

When you finally return home that evening, H has already eaten dinner. You are amazed that his mood is good and that not a word is spoken about how late you are. He does not ask what kept you, does not disparage the fact that the groceries that you brought home are too late for tonight’s obsolete  plan. He does not inquire as to where you were, and so you do not have to tell him right now the truth that you followed JB to his home behind yours and that you were at once excited and creeped out when JB changed clothes in front of you (which consisted only of removing his shirt and swapping one pair of shorts for another) and that you were delighted to guide his hands, your long monkey arms wrapped around him from behind, as you taught him how to properly chop an onion and smash a garlic head, and how proud you were that you actually did not get a hard-on and knock it against the small of his back while you were doing this. Because no one would have believed you about that.
            And how, when you said goodnight just before you drove your car around the corner to your own house, you did not, emphatically not, accept his offer of a kiss goodnight, your kiss-spit remaining just a gluey rubber cement dream.

J and I returned Monday from four days in Curacao, an island of the former Netherlands Antilles (now an independent country within the Kingdom of the Netherlands). It's been eleven years since he and I vacationed anywhere very far away together. I want to make a few notes on what we saw and did there.

ARRIVAL, AIRPORT, TAXI: Airports stress me out generally, but as airports go, I like these small ones that are typical in the Caribbean and some places in Mexico. We'd hoped to exit the plane by stairs as we did many years ago in Mexico, but here they did have that exit tunnel thing like at most American airports. But the exit tunnel and the arrival/immigration/customs area was open to the air, not air-conditioned, kind of sultry because it was hot that day. We liked this, being immediately exposed to the climate.( Read lots more... )

I realized yesterday that I'll soon be confronted with what will probably feel like a strong need to see the Star Trek Into Darkness film when it releases this spring. Which involves the extremely rare action for me of actually going to the cinema. But so formative to my geekiness was original-era Trek, that I tend to still pay attention when a new product comes out, even a weak TV series like Enterprise or a total disappointment of a film like Nemesis. The most recent movie-going that Jeff and I did was in 2009 when we went twice, for the Abrams Star Trek movie (because it was the new Trek movie) and for Avatar (because we were curious about 3D, which I did not end up liking that much).


I haven't even seen a lot of home video in recent years, but I have occasionally made a point of catching up on a few things now that I have streaming capacity on the TV (love ya, Apple TV!). For example, I recently saw the latest of the Nolan Batman films. It was too dark, by which I mean that most scenes were literally not adequately lit; too noisy, by which I mean that the sound design was bloody awful; and it barely made a lick of sense. This week Jeff and I watched Scott's Prometheus, the Alien-universe prequel-type film from last year. I find that I might just not be able to suspend disbelief and open my imagination widely enough to apprehend the preposterousness of this film. Is there going to be a good story ever again in SF film, or will it henceforth never be anything but visuals and noise? Last really good SF story in movie form I saw: Boyle's Sunshine which I happened to watch on DVD the same day in 2009 I saw the Star Trek movie. Then just yesterday morning (yeah, I have been lolling about ill with a nasty cold, wasting vacation days from work to recover), I watched Steve Miner's 2008 film Day of the Dead, which is a direct-to-video abomination billed as a "remake" of Romero's 1985 film. I happen to adore Romero's film, and while I know it's not everyone's cup-a-tea, when compared side-by-side with Miner's version, it is the deepest, richest, most nuanced thing ever. Holy fuck, was that remake bad! It has frak-all to do with the Romero film other than rehashing some character names, and is just generally horrible. But now, as I write this, I wonder how much worse it really is than Prometheus: it is a very low-ambition failure with no apparent effort exerted to make it good, while it looks like they actually tried really hard with Prometheus. I sometimes think I'd rather watch an undisguised piece-of-crap movie than an overwrought and pretentious one that makes no sense.

I wonder which one of those Star Trek Into Darkness will be? Because I bet it won't be great. The teaser trailer kind of tells me that already, and probably tells me everything I really need to know about it: random baddie endangers whole Earth for a probably totally-out-of-proportion reason/Kirk and crew narrowly save the day somehow after lots of exploding. I can probably just skip it and miss nothing important by doing so. But I know I won't because I still house a small ember love for that universe even though it's wronged me again and again and again. And, if nothing else, the current Trek cast is chockablock with cute dudes. So there's that at least: it will be a visual delight. One possibly better suited for homeviewing. Alone.



I was thinking about the prospect of this film last night while watching an episode of original Trek--the third season entry "That Which Survives." Ever since George Takei came out as gay, and I rewatch episodes of Trek with him in them, I have a quick sequence of thoughts kind of like this: He was totally gay when they were shooting this scene in 1967; that's so awesome; that so fuckin' sucks that he couldn't be out back then!; George Takei is awesome! and so on. While it's fantastic that he is out now--and very vocal in the rights cause--how awesome would it have been for a young kid (such as myself at the age that I fell in love with original series Trek) to have known that back then? To have even have been able to have considered it as a real possibility? Because I am a Trekker from way back, I have carried an ever-embiggening chip on my broad shoulder about the fact that this utopian sf concept, in its many hundreds of hours of TV and film, has never one goddamned time managed to get a gay character worked into the canon universe or even speak of the subject matter in a way that is in the slightest bit grown-up. I was stewing over that last night when I had this brilliant brainstorm: they should make new-Sulu in the new movies gay. It would settle my longstanding complaint and might be kind of a cool homage to original-Sulu actor Takei. Uh, but then this morning I found this recent article online by Dan Wohl where he makes much the same case that I was going to make here, but markedly less bitchily so. So go read his item and come back. Probably skip the reader comments, though, as a slight majority are beside the point or hung-up on some kind of weird geek hairsplitting about whether the Abrams universe is a full-on concept reboot (it is) or if it is an "alternate" or "alternative" timeline created from the "original" universe at the occasion of Kirk's birth (it is not; and I'll be happy to argue it in an extremely pedantic fashion some other time).

The handful of attempts previously in the Trek canon of even approaching the topic of non-heterosexuality, as summarized in the linked article, were few, thin, disappointing and even offensive, and left behind not one single real LGBT character of any type. The TNG episode "The Outcast"--which was celebrated at the time as Trek finally addressing gayness--offends with its built-in assumption that gay people must certainly seek to live in a heteronormative roles in order to be happy. I feel about this the same I way I did several years ago when I was asked by an acquaintance to assess whether it is Jeff or me who is the "woman" in our relationship: extremely annoyed. Also, it goes a wholly unnecessary step further and includes in the "science" of the show a cure-the-gay therapy that takes care of the whole problem and gets those pesky gender non-conformists back in line. Then there was the Enterprise episode where the Vulcan mindmeld was somehow a stigmatized stand-in for either AIDS and/or non-conformist sexuality, but it was so light-handed and timid a tale that I wonder if anyone noticed. (You know how Enterprise could have tackled this rough beast of an issue? Put a fuckin' gay dude in the main cast of characters. Done.) Then there was the lame lesbian kiss episode of DS9, the TNG tedium where Crusher gets kinda squicked out when her Trill friend switched bods from male to female, and the good old evil bisexual chicks of DS9's "Mirror" universe. Egads. And that's about it. So timid has Trek been that even in the supposedly daring "The Outcast" every single member of the genderless race was, in fact, plainly and unambiguously female. I bet they could have mixed that up a bit, cast some small-boned boys among the women, maybe even had one of them be Riker's love interest. That would have been risky and cool at the time. Hell, it would be now! That was over twenty years ago! Jeeezus! No wonder I am so annoyed! There's been zero progress in twenty years!

I want Trek to start having a gay dude in the main canonical cast. Period. I will abandon further following of the franchise if it doesn't get one pretty soon because this future world that has every kind of humanoid-with-weird-forehead creature in it, but yet somehow does not have a single gay person, speaks to me less and less every time a new show or movie appears. And while I'd be delighted with any sort of LGBT person or genderqueer character or any relief at all from the hetero-conformism that is all we have been given so far, I am actually being very specific here in my wish that this character, when he appears, be specifically a gay male. Why? Because I like to think about it grossing the shit out of the ugly, typical fanboys of my generation. While some of them were/are lovely people, so many of them were also grotesquely immature sexually, creepily sexist, rabidly homophobic--and all of that from a cohort of people who should have counted their stars had anyone--female or male--ever wanted to kiss them. Ever. It is these people in particular, the yucky fanboys of old (who often made me feel like an outcast among the most outcasted of outcasts) who I want to see flock like dorky, aging sheep to a new Star Trek film and be presented with the blunt fact of a gay dude in the main cast. But, no, that's not all I want. I want this, too: that main-cast gay dude, in one scene, full-on makes out with his lover in such an in-your-face way that you see their tongues enter each other's mouths and you just know for a fact that they are both boned hard in their Starfleet uniform pants. That would get me back into Trek for sure.

I've really missed babbling in my Live Journal. I've neglected it for months. What brings me back is the news that Washington state is evidently about to legalize samesex marriage (though it seems it must pass through a ridiculous repeal-by-popular-vote ordeal this November). My pleasure at this news has been stifled all day by NPR's reporting on the opposition to this reform, featuring comments from the moronic National Organization for Marriage. Before I get too far into it, let me point you to a much better post about the topic of marriage equality which you should probably read instead of mine: this one from my friend, author Brandon Bell.

In case you came back here after reading Brandon's really terrific and intelligent essay, I'll continue. The National Organization for Marriage is a huge piece of crap. To wit:



That douchebag is Brian S. Brown. According to the NOM website he "serves as President of the National Organization for Marriage. Prior to coming to NOM in 2007, Brian was the executive director of the Family Institute of Connecticut. During the five years he was with the Family Institute, he developed it into one of the largest statewide pro-family organizations in the Northeast....Brian and his wife Susan have seven young children."  So it sounds like Brian S. Brown has enjoyed aplenty the alleged benefits of "traditional" marriage. That's fine with me, but what's not fine with me is that he and his organization somehow think that it's any of their fucking business if someone else--someone NOT like him and his wife--also want to enjoy those traditional values. And that NOM is an out-and-out hate group (almost forgot about that). 

Which brings me, gradually, to my main point and the meaning of the title of this post. A few days ago when I first caught the news on the radio about the action in Washington, NPR ran a segment featuring an openly gay WA state legislator, addressing his colleagues, and very graciously framing the debate in terms something like this paraphrase: "This is an issue about which reasonable people may disagree, and the opponents of samesex marriage are NOT bigots. They're just reasonable people that we're having a reasonable disagreement with." That's not at all a direct quote, but it's the sense of it. 

And I couldn't disagree more. Too often, in the interest of being more "reasonable" than the people on the other side, progressives overreach in assuming that the other side is actually composed of reasonable people reasonably disagreeing with us. NOM belies all of this. There is no rational reason for opposing samesex marriage other than the simple fact that the opponents think that gay people are gross and disgusting and would like us to return to the closet (NOT going to happen),  and they think it's "reasonable" to have the public vote on our individual rights when, generally, it's pretty much unheard of otherwise for basic rights to be subjected to a popular vote. It is entirely founded on bigotry and that fact doesn't change no matter how many flotillas of Bibles to which they set sail in an effort to say it has a "reasonable" basis. These are the ideological descendants of the same people who clung screaming to the past when women got the right to vote a century ago. And just think if women could NOT vote now. Maybe there would have been no political activist career for this lovely:



According to NOM's website, this charmer is Maggie Gallagher "co-founder of the National Organization for Marriage, which the Washington Post has called the "preeminent" national organization fighting to protect marriage as the union of husband and wife. NOM's formal mission is "protecting marriage and the faith communities that sustain it," but as Maggie likes to put it, "we fight gay marriage—and win." 

But what she is, in fact, is a giant bigot. She is not a reasonable person having a reasonable disagreement with me. The entire premise of their attack--that samesex marriage somehow destroys "real" marriage--is a total canard. It is a lie, a fraud, a cover for the plain and simple and totally obvious fact that these people just plain think that people like me and my partner of 12 years are gross and disgusting and they just don't like us. Well, bitch, the feeling is mutual, because...DAMN! So, in summary, I reject the reasonable-people-reasonably-disagreeing position and instead take the rather more hardline stance that it is none of the fucking business of NOM and their ilk how my partner and I live our lives and that they can take their "traditional" values and fuck right the hell off.  (And that's why I invited all y'all to read Brandon's much more   intellectually rigorous article instead of mine.)