Bryan Harrison's Open Salon Blog

Ask the Übergeek

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 19:03:42 -0400

Go ahead! Ask!

As a retired geek, I go on providing computer support the way certain sufferers of OCD go after the NYT crossword puzzle. I try not to twitch, shake, or drool, but having worked with Macs, Unix, and web technologies for most of the my life, I just can't help myself.

I'm thinking perhaps y'all here on Open Salon might like to take advantage of this. (Exploit me, baby.)

Ask the Übergeek is a completely noncommercial e-mail support list for users of Mac OS X and just about anything related to it. People seem to find it useful.
There's no charge, no advertising at all, no abuse of email addresses, no viruses or other malware, and no spam whatsoever. Ever. The list is run solely by moi, and is exactly what it says it is and nothing more.
There really is no catch. I just like to cast my crumbs upon the water, sure that tasty croissants will wash up somewhere, somehow. It's my hobby, my daily practice of charity, and a chance to show off how offensively smart I am.
The list is small and personal. It seldom exceeds 10 messages in a week. It never produces overwhelming floods of anything at all. We try to keep it entertaining as well as informative.
Subscription is automatic, as is unsubscription. Come as you are and go when you like. Simple instructions are automatically provided with the initial welcome message.
Questions about anything tech related are welcome, but I don't do Windows other than to help people escape its nefarious clutches. Questions about how best to use Open Salon are of course welcome, though of course I have no control over OS.
It's an exceedingly congenial group, and as Grand Poobah, I reserve the right to do whatever's necessary to keep it that way.

Subscription is a no brainer.

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Regards,

The Princess Bride

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 06:03:35 -0400

Here

There's a club a few blocks from my home here on Seattle's Capitol Hill. This being Capitol Hill, it's a mostly queer club, but this being Seattle, everybody's welcome. My partner Michael, the tattooed skinhead chef, sometimes goes there on Thursdays (which are his Fridays) for “Rock Lobster.” He dances and blows off steam accumulated during consecutive 10-hour days spent cooking. I think the retro music reminds him of his time as a teenage DJ in the 80's. Once in a great while I go along. The retro music reminds me of really fun dead people.

The crowd, however, is not much like my good old days of being bad. Most notably, there are a lot of straight women. I'm used to straight women in gay dance bars, but these aren't some guy's office chums, tired of their usual hangout. They aren't someone's friends who like to dance someplace where nobody harasses them no matter how hard they shake it. They aren't college girls on the cutting edge of cool. These are insular packs of straight girls, and they behave like they're on a school field trip to the zoo.

These women tend to be in their twenties and of the hard-as-nails Tanya Harding variety for which Seattle's benighted suburbs are justly famed. They clearly regard the whole place as a show being put on for their benefit, and their sole goal is to upstage it. I'm no stranger to dissipation, but they consume quantities of alcohol that would put me not merely under the table but onto a hospital gurney. They carry shoulder bags and drinks on to the dance floor, liberally slamming and sloshing everyone in their vicinity. They get progressively more belligerent as the night goes on, screaming, shoving, and groping like shitfaced soccer fans. They're louder than the music, which is saying a lot. Presumably because of the rate at which they buy drinks, the management won't eighty-six them for anything short of vomiting and passing out, which can take them hours to achieve. Worse, they sometimes bring their sullen, Levi Johnston style boyfriends, who retreat to the alley outside to do crystal meth and call drag queens “faggot” as though they've discovered something novel.

These girls think Kate Perry has given them the right to tongue kiss random lesbians. They think it's cool to grope queer men, since they've heard we're free with each other and unlikely to rape their semiconscious bodies in a bathroom stall. One night, one of them decides it's fine to stagger up to Michael and me and breath rancid Sterno fumes into our faces.

“You guys are just so hot,” she slurs. ”It's just such a fuckin' waste. Sfucking' waste!”

Her face has become its own Shroud of Turin, with a smeared, ingratiating smirk that says she thinks she's complimenting us. At first I think she's holding on to me to maintain her balance, then I realize she's pawing the crotch of my jeans. I note peripherally that she's expecting a zipper and that her elaborate French manicure is bewildered by the buttons she's found instead.

Michael is a regular here, and has long since mastered a gaze into the middle distance that says, “You'll regret it if I notice you.”

He turns and says conspicuously to me, “Gas them all unconscious with the fog machine and I'll tie their tubes while they're out.”

I can't resist addressing her directly in my best James-Earl-Jones-is-not-amused voice, “The only thing wasted here is you.” Fortunately, her neurochemistry isn't up to repartee, and once I remove her hand from my fly she staggers off, snarling obscenities.

After years of living with Michael, I don't have to shout “What the fuck?” over the music. I can do it with eyebrows alone.

He responds with the lipless smile he normally reserves for customers who criticize his use of saffron. “That would be tonight's bachelorette number one!”

My eyebrows still don't get it.

Michael sighs, directly into my ear. “The one wearing the crotchless panties outside her jeans is getting married. The one with the scary bleach job is her maid of honor. There are three separate herds of them here tonight, and by Sunday every one of them is gonna be ten pounds of shit in a five pound dress.”

Michael's actually kind of sweet, but having been raised by New Orleans drag queens, he's not in the habit of showing it.

I'm bemused. “She really thinks she's the belle of the ball.”

Michael is not. “She's a fucking troll.”

There

Having lived on the left coast for more than a decade, you'd think I'd be able to recognize a trend without needing the Chicago Tribune to point it out to me. But when Dawn Turner Trice begins, “They've become a familiar sight in gay bars: women holding bachelorette parties,” I can only mumble in shock, “Oh God - it's metastasized.”

Trice describes how some Chicago gay bars no longer welcome women who don't want to celebrate their impending nuptials with the same sort of men they're marrying. While the sociology of this is a depressing swamp, the economics are clear. Bar owners would prefer to have everybody's money, but gay patrons have predictably moved from a weary “Why can't they puke in their own bars?” tolerance to a stance of “Go flaunt your clueless entitlement somewhere else, bitch.” Bars are being forced to take sides.

What's really striking is Trice's assumptions about where the tension is coming from. It's starts with the headline, “Gay rights battle puts strain on parties.” One wants to ask Trice, an African American woman, “Did the struggle for racial equality strain segregated communities in Connecticut? Gosh, those poor sleepless white folks!” Certainly knocking someone down because he has his boot on your neck puts a strain on him, but is that really an honest description of what's going on? When the white lady in the front of the bus fans herself with her hanky and exclaims “Lah! I'm sure glad to sit up here where it's cool, and not stand back there packed in like sweaty black sardines,” is the strain coming from the civil rights aspirations of the blacks in the back, or the brutal self satisfaction of the smug sadist riding up front? The oppressor class always accuses the oppressed of having picked the fight by getting uppity. That Trice, as a black woman, a journalist, and an American in the 21st century can't recognize this doesn't speak well of her.

Trice tells us, “The women come to celebrate without having to worry about straight men pawing them.” Leaving aside the question of when gay men invited such women to dump their war between the sexes on us, my personal experience is that they also come to paw gay men, and are therefore not only pigs but hypocrites. In their minds, their presumptive status as the victims of their own culture apparently justifies their treating someone else's as a zoo that exists solely for their entertainment. They're so unaware of there's a whole other party going on that they can enter it and never suspect they're not the guest of honor. It's not surprising they assume that everyone else's sexual expression must be about them and act accordingly: in this, they're identical to the men they complain about.

Trice then tries for a nicely symmetrical irony, since “The gay men are there because, well, they don't want to be around a lot of women.” Of course we all know gay men despise women because, well, they secretly want to be women, just like we also know about Mandingo's dark designs on the pallid flowers of the South. That Trice tries to pass off this ancient stereotype as anything other than her own ego and ignorance is as offensive as it is instructive. In fact, gay men associate for reasons that arguably have less to do with women than any other human activity. As a gym rat boyfriend once replied when a passing woman remarked to her companion, “I really don't like men who are too muscular,” “Honey, I didn't do it for you.”

Most women have no problem with any of this, but Trice's failure to get it means she misses everything. Straight women often behave so badly in gay bars precisely because no one is pawing them. There's a certain freedom in flashing your tits in an environment where nobody much cares, but also an enormous frustration. The guys cheer, but only briefly until something more important happens, like the DJ playing a decent song. Like two-year-olds whose antics render all adult conversation impossible, the bachelorettes act out the moment they sense they aren't the center of attention. Unlike two year olds, the bachelorettes have the option of taking their problem back to its alleged source: the straight guys in whose company they can't safely be themselves. Instead, they dump in LGBTQ environments and then go home to marry half their problem.

This has been going on since Jesus invented gay bars; what's changed is not the behavior, but its cultural context and therefore its meaning.

Everywhere

Individuals of all stripes have always been mostly-welcomed in LGBTQ environments. We are, after all, a people so various that we need a five letter acronym that even we can't pronounce just to name ourselves. Interracial hetero couples, straight cross dressers, and outcasts of all stripes have traditionally found not just tolerance, but celebration on the dance floors of gay bars (along with the best music). Similarly, straight visitors may show up in their native costumes, rub blue mud in their navels, and otherwise carry out their mating rituals with style and be regarded as fabulous, or at least entertaining.

But there's a difference between “visitor” and “tourist.” Visitors travel to experience something new by being a part of it; tourists regard the world as a culture zoo and everyone else as an exhibit. Visitors cover their heads when the natives do; tourists say, “You know the real God doesn't care about my bald spot.” Visitors say “please” and “thank you” in the language of their hosts, no matter how challenging the atonal vowels; tourists complain the natives' English sucks. When visitors can't stomach the local speciality, they smile and protest they're full; tourists vomit on the Japanese Prime Minister. The apotheosis of tourism is Disney World, which exists only to conform to and confirm the tourist's preconceived notions, and therefore, like the inside of one's own skull, is impossible to visit without mind altering drugs. Unfortunately, those whose vocation is tourism think the universe is Disney World, and that their only obligation is to clap when Mickey and Goofy get down and dirty with each other.

Trice's article ends the way it began, by resoundingly missing the point.

I asked reveler Blythe Thomas whether, in general, she believed holding bachelorette parties in gay bars was “heterosexist,” or insensitive.

“I never would have thought about it like that,” Thomas said, watching a curtain like screen rise on four soon-to-be-nearly-naked dancers. “I could see how this could be frustrating to gay men. Maybe it's something I'll think about next time.”

Thomas' “Maybe… I'll think” is as unlikely as it is irrelevant, because the question itself veers so far from the real issue. If I, as a white guy, exercise any right denied to blacks, I'm complicitly racist whether or not any blacks are present. Similarly, blithe Blythe is a homophobe, regardless of where she holds her prenuptial bacchanal. She's a tourist: she's thrilled with herself for spending an evening at the Cotton Club, but it never crosses her mind to go home and fight to integrate her neighborhood. It's not her choice of party venue that makes her a clueless bigot, anymore than it's her and her drunken friends' revelry that's offensive. (After all, gay men have long since turned bad taste into an art form.)

Let's face it. It's her impending marriage itself that makes her both a bigot and objectionable. She can hold her party at the local Chippendales, where plenty of gay boys are paid to dance for straight girls and therefore “heterosexism” isn't an issue, but she'll still be wrong. That she's rubbing others' faces in her privilege is merely tasteless; the ethical problem is that she's exercising a right not available to all.

Hetero conservatives are free to deal with this by assorted circular variations on, “Because the Bible tells me so,” which in terms of Constitutional principles is indistinguishable from the more honest “Fuck you, faggot!” Hetero liberals have a much harder time of it. After all, everyone wants to have admirable principles, but no one much enjoys having to sacrifice on behalf of them. Trice wants to conceal the real the issue here by reducing it to one of sensitivity – in essence, taste – when in fact it's one of justice. When everyone is not entitled to marry, the rose petals bride and groom tread upon are in fact the faces of those who have no such right. No one can claim to support transportation equality and then ride while others walk. Whether or not we drunkenly flash our tits and pass out as we go by is style, not substance.

Chesterson said of Christianity, it “has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.” The same could be said of liberalism. This issue is terribly difficult, so much so that in my own life, I've thus far dealt with it by declining invitations to the weddings of friends and families with polite excuses. I've been doing it for decades. I've failed to find a way to tell the truth that doesn't contain an implicit demand, and I find myself unwilling to make such a demand of friends and family on my own behalf. But my oldest niece is now engaged, and my family deserves (and will demand) more than a social lie. I can already hear my mother shrilling, “You know, this isn't all about you!”

However, last week a 17 year old from Charlotte testified before Vermont's Senate, prior to the hearings that passed their same sex marriage bill. James Neiley spoke with a calm self assurance I could never have commanded at his age. To be fair, at 17 I was very busy recovering from a failed suicide attempt and running away from home. Having barely discovered I possessed a self worth defending, I wasn't quite ready to do so publicly. Forty-some years later, I need marriage like an Olympic swimmer needs bloomers, but it's not about me, is it?

It's about James Neily, who I'm told came out to a supportive family when he was 11. It's about Lawrence King, who having been murdered for being a second class citizen won't ever find out whether or not he cares to marry. If the party brides at the club down the street will get this through their expensively coiffed heads, I'll wear their trashy lingerie on my head and cheer while they dance naked on speakers. And when I try to explain this to my family, perhaps they'll understand that it's not about me. It's about our own next generation – the children my two nieces may or may not choose to have – and the effect all our just or unjust choices will have on them.

After all, these things run in families.

Dirty Haiku Thursday

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 05:03:44 -0400

He's into wrestling

So can you keep a secret

I'm letting him win

Only You Can Help

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 22:03:26 -0400

[Cue Melancholy Guitar from “Brokeback Mountain”]

My name is Bryan Harrison and as a renowned nothing celebrity, I feel a strong obligation to bring a matter of grave importance to your attention. Of all medical disorders, none are so tragic as those which affect the brain, depriving innocent victims of their very identities.

Sufferers of TSTS (Taking Shit Too Seriously) all too often live alone and in shame, and even as I speak, many are at risk of losing their lives and identities. While such people appear healthy, they periodically experience a crippling inability to process absurdity. Without regular transfusions of irony from compassionate people such as yourself, victims of TSTS develop behavioral problems that have tragic consequences for family, friends, and society.

I'm pleading with you because, like so many, I suffer from TSTS. While the initial symptoms were subtle, recently they've become so severe that I can no longer ignore them.

[Cue Theme from "Jaws"]

You see, I want to slap the Pope.

Yes, that's right – slap the Pope. In the latest of his seemingly inexhaustible pontifical idiocies, Benny the Rat has claimed condoms aggravate rather than ameliorate the problem of HIV infection. It's not the first time, and since many here and elsewhere have already covered the destructive lunacy of this, I can't see any point to recouping the debate. After all, there is no debate. "Debate" implies two sides. Here we have only the enormous body of knowledge demonstrating the efficacy of condoms and the tragedy of failing to use them, and the malicious insanity of one insanely destructive God-crazed white man and his vast legions of ignorant dupes.

Since The Rat has already been refuted by better minds than mine, I have only one thing to contribute: my vast overweening desire to slap that lying son of a bitch in the face. Mind you, since I've always regarded violence as the last refuge of the incompetent I can't escape what this implies about me. I've master minded computer networks, construction sites, orgies, a Tupperware party, and perhaps more to the point, dozens of funerals, but I can no longer manage my feelings all by myself. I need your help.

The one armed bandit of my sense of humor has been fed one too many counterfeit coins. I pull the lever and instead of “Hah!”“Hah!” and “Hah!”, the little windows come up “Bap!” “Smack!” and “Kpow!” I wanna slap that stupid fucker so hard his head spins like Linda Blair's, sewing her mother's socks in hell.

[Cue Thelma Houston “Don't Leave Me This Way]

I'm not like this. Really. Giving a constipated rat shit about the Pope makes me feel so ashamed. I'm a fun guy. Please. Don't leave me this way.

It's not the vast shambling zombie dance party of the dead that goes on in my back brain that's finally brought me low. (Shit happens and if a plague isn't shit, I don't know what is.) It's the way I and everyone else I know changed our behavior and the entire basis of our culture virtually overnight. We voluntarily sacrificed traditions, institutions, behaviors, and identity. We worked and fought and educated not just for other fags, but for hookers, junkies, and children who hadn't even been born. Dykes who had no personal stake in the game pitched in unstintingly. We rerouted our lives, sacrificed other hopes and dreams, and broke our hearts.

We did this largely without government funding, against public health policies based on denial, and in a media environment more concerned with the delicate sensibilities of middle class white people than with saving lives. And then we changed all that too, never ceasing to wipe butts, distribute meds, make tasty meals that nobody could keep down, and deliver eulogies in the meantime. Those of us who aren't dead, burned out, profoundly embittered, or so fucked up with PTSD that screaming nightmares preclude more than a couple hours of sleep are still trying, one way or another, to get through this.

[Cue Bronski Beat "Disenchanted"]

I can accept that the culture I love was destroyed, along with my career and whatever claim I had to sanity. The above paragraphs notwithstanding, I don't even whine unduly in public. I can accept that 25 years after I first played body guard to a drag queen handing out condoms to hookers and their clients in DC's red light district, America's capitol city leads the way in new HIV infections.

But I just can't accept that Benny the Rat and his co-rodents are still blithely trying to undermine the accomplishments of so many better men and women. If I had any such beliefs, I'd call him Satan and leave it up to God, but I don't and so am not free to pass the buck. I can forgive what Father Bob did to me in the swimming pool 41 years ago, but I can't forgive this.

So I'm not talking a little “Oh you cad!” slap like Scarlett gave Rhett. I'm talking the big, heavy, bruising slaps the primate in me reserves for males I don't respect enough to punch. I don't hate Benny – again, that would imply respect – and I certainly don't want to kill him (martyrdom also implies respect). In fact, I don't want anything at all for him. This is about me.

I want to deliver a lifetime of injury, frustration, and rage that I can no longer put into words in the form of a lip-fattening, jaw-dislocating reality check. I want to take the 50 years of undeserved persecution I've received at the hands of the Catholic church, hold it in my right hand, and use all 225 pounds of me to return all the lies, hurt, injustice, humiliation, violation, and damage to their symbolic source. I want to knock that uncaring irresponsible fucked up old douchebag's stupid hat right off his evil head and watch his nose bleed all over his embroidered gown.

[Cue Mary Martin “I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair”]

Then I'll have a good long cry, try to meet a nice boyfriend in prison, and if I ever get out, market it all as a video game.

Move over Whack-A-Mole – here comes Slap-The-Pope.

Oh. Look. I've sort of made a funny. I guess I can cancel my flight to Rome.

See the good you can accomplish by generously giving only a few minutes of your time?

Bless you, my children. Bless you.

What It Is

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 19:03:02 -0400

It's 1984 and my office chums and I are eating lunch in our conference room. Eric is reading The New York Times, no doubt looking for something to argue about. He's twice my age and a brilliant policy analyst whose expertise is fostering technological innovation. I am a mere typist, since six months ago when my career as a sex worker foundered on my inability to put out for Republican closet cases.

Eric is also a former Marine. I am very much a current homo. We are star-crossed adversaries who occasionally drive our coworkers to grab their sandwiches and flee due to our willingness to lock horns over everything from nuclear proliferation to cheese.

Eric rattles the paper. “This is interesting.”

I say, “Oh?”

Sarah, our administrative assistant, groans. She understands that “interesting” is code for ”something I can use to bait Bryan.” Others at the table look anxious.

“The Times has had some sort of computer fit and moved the decimal points in the numbers throughout an entire article,“ Eric notes innocently.

Sarah reads over his shoulder as Eric points. “‘Current research indicates that it is not unusual for a gay man to have as many as 1,000 sex partners in a single year, and lifetime totals of 10,000, while unusual, are not unheard of.‘”

Several coworkers began picking up their lunches.

I snort. “They find the cocksucker equivalent of 100 crazy cat ladies, extrapolate to an entire population, and call that statistics.”

Eric can snort too. “I think they need to hire an editor who can count zeroes. Someone's going to be stupid enough to believe those numbers.”

“There's nothing wrong with the numbers and everything wrong with the generalization.” I'm delighted that Eric is so naive, and prepare to savage him.

Eric looks delighted - he thinks I'm clueless. “So you're trying to tell me some guy is having sex a thousand times with a thousand different guys in one year.”

I'm smug. “Who am I to argue with the newspaper of record? But it's 1,000 partners, not 1,000 times. One presumes some of these pigs went back for seconds at least a few times.”

Sarah groans again. “If I wanted to smell this much testosterone I'd work handing out towels in a locker room. If you're going to keep this up, I'm going to finish my salad in my office.” We ignore her as she packs up her things and prepares to follow the other evacuees.

“That's nearly three times a day, forever. I don't think that's possible.” Eric is being very much the jarhead.

This catches even Sarah's attention. “It does seem a little excessive. Not to mention tiring.”

I'm unruffled. “You don't get it. It's not three times a day. It's none all week, then go to the baths on Friday night and do 20 guys, then go back on Saturday and do 40.”

“I can't image that.” Sarah frowns. “Actually, I can.” She looks startled.

Eric is not amused. “It is not possible for any man to have sex 40 times in one night.”

I'm confused by this statement, “It isn't?” I'm trying to remember if I personally have ever been so extroverted. Sarah has assumed cat/canary expression I can't interpret.

I honestly don't get it. “It may be tacky, but it's definitely not impossible. Just dedicated.”

“It's impossible! It is impossible for a man to have sex 60 times in one night.” Eric's getting a bit loud. Sarah turns to me with a “your serve” expression.

Light dawns. “Uh, Eric… What do you mean by ‘sex?’”

I'm thrilled to see Eric blushing. He has more degrees than I can count, but stammers beautifully.

Sarah has had enough of this. “You've upset his delicate USMC sensibilities. He means he can't come 60 times in one night and neither can anyone else. Though you know I wouldn't mind trying.”

I'm baffled. “Who said anything about coming?”

Eric isn't done being flustered, so Sarah interprets. “It isn't sex unless Eric comes.”

Eric takes umbrage at this and blurts, “Well not just me!”

I'm horrified. “You mean if you don't get it up, stick it in, and get it off, it's not sex?“

Eric is puzzled. “Well that's what it is!”

Sarah heads out the door. “I think I'm going to become an anthropologist.”