Eye of the Beholder

Perception is everything.

Over in the Toolbox, I've posted some pics (NSFW) of ultra-hot David Anthony, a new porn star with TitanMen.  He really winds my crank, I gotta tell you, guys - but I was struck by this editorial comment in Titan's press release about him:

Working with David is a lot of fun, because he’s such a nice and intelligent man. He has the kind of confidence that only a mature man can have. . . .  At 41, David is the archetypal TitanMen “Daddy”, mature, sexually confident and swinging a big stick!

Say what?  And here Daddy was thinking, man, what a fine boy he would make.
 
Which tells you something about me, I guess.
 
The Toolbox post also has a link to a clip of David off-duty in a San Francisco park, answering nature's call.  Which is pretty hot if you like to watch that kind of thing.
 
But then at the end of the clip, big porn stud rides off on a bicycle.  Yeah, yeah, I know it's like totally cool and earth-friendly, yada yada yada.  Yet I can't help thinking, just like a kid riding home from the playground.
 
Which tells you something about me and my generation, I guess.  Driving off in a butch pickup or jeep would have been a lot sexier way to end the clip.
 
On a side note, David shows no hesitation about peeing for the camera out in a public place.  That reminds me how far we've all come in this internet age. 
 
Just 10 years ago, when I got my first home computer - yeah, I joined the party late, I kept thinking it was all just a fad - I remember I was startled to see all these ordinary guys posting their self pics online for all the world to see.   I couldn't imagine doing a thing like that, myself.  What's wrong with these people, I thought, have they no sense of shame, or dignity?
 
But I got over it.

Waitin' for the Weekend

Stay right where you are boy, and don't move until I get there.

(Psst - Does anybody know this stud's name?)

Dutch Treat

Patrick Decker and Stephen Hengst, married during Pride last June in Amsterdam

Lisa Belkin in the NYT interviews M. V. Lee Badgett, director of the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law & Public Policy at the UCLA School of Law and a professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, on data from the Netherlands, where same-sex marriage has been legal for nearly a decade.

Q.  Did the legalization of same-sex marriage somehow change marriage in the Netherlands?

A.  I looked hard for evidence of changes in the cultural idea of marriage and for evidence that heterosexuals and gay and lesbian couples have different ideas and behavior related to marriage — but I couldn’t find any. The trends in marriage and divorce didn’t change. The ideas about marriage expressed by lesbian and gay couples lined up with the ideas of their heterosexual peers: marriage is about the love and commitment of two people who work together as equals to weather life’s ups and downs, become members of each other’s extended families, and often (but not always) raise children together. Couples who formalize their relationships — gay or straight — are more likely to choose marriage than a civil union.

Q.  What is the “take away” for those who are debating these questions in the U.S.?

A.  The big point is that all of the evidence suggests that same-sex couples will fit right into our current understanding of marriage in the U.S. Marriage itself will not be affected. Dutch heterosexuals appear to have adapted to the legal change by changing how they see same-sex couples, not how they see marriage. Now they see gay couples as people who should get married, and they are happy to remind their gay and lesbian family members of that fact!

We also see why the word “marriage” matters. The Dutch same-sex couples I interviewed saw their civil union-like status as “a bit of nothing,” as one person called it, or as a political compromise that an accountant might invent. Only marriage has the social understanding to back up the legal status, and the social meaning is as important as the legal rights. Civil unions just don’t have that social meaning. One woman I interviewed put it this way: “Two-year-olds understand marriage. It’s a context, and everyone knows what it means.”

Finally, as in Europe, in the U.S. we see the most liberal states — the most tolerant of homosexuality, the least religious, and the ones with more family diversity — taking the earliest action through courts and legislatures to legally recognize same-sex couples. That’s not surprising, of course, but it suggests that we’re going at about the right pace for social change.

Cowtown Clash over LGBT Rights

Christianists got in teh gays' faces during protests yesterday at the Fort Worth City Hall.  Mike Lee reports in the Star-Telegram:

The City Council voted 6-3 late Tuesday to expand its anti-discrimination ordinance to include transgender people, capping a marathon debate over a series of gay-rights proposals that were forwarded after a controversial inspection of a gay bar.

A majority of council members spoke in favor of the proposal when it was introduced last week.  The inspection at the Rainbow Lounge in June left a man injured and sparked protests in the city.  Fort Worth officials appointed a task force to recommend ways to mend fences with the gay community shortly afterward.  The vote dealt only with one facet of the proposals: expanding the city’s anti-discrimination ordinance to include transgender people. The ordinance already prevented discrimination based on race, sex, religion or sexual orientation.

A lot of the debate, though, centered on broader proposals, some of which the council has already tacitly approved. City staffers will be trained on dealing with the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, and the Police Department has appointed a liaison to the community. Other recommendations will require further study, including offering domestic-partner benefits and expanding the city health insurance plan to cover gender reassignment procedures, including sex changes.

Very amusing video report here for all you big confused, effeminate, hellbound sissy sodomites:

In Memoriam: Veterans Day

Today it is fitting that we all take a moment to honor the memory of those who fought and those who died in the service of our country.  If you know a veteran, smile and say "thank you."  It is always right to admire the individual courage and dedication of those men and women who put themselves at the nation's call, and in harm's way.

In my mind there is a big difference between honoring those who have served, remembering with immense gratitude those who made the ultimate sacrifice of their lives; and, on the other hand, taking to task those politicians who have sometimes abused the trust granted them by the people and sometimes sent young men and women to die unnecessarily for a political purpose.  A soldier has no choice but to obey; a citizen has the duty to dissent from and expose unworthy political schemes put forward by those in power, that no soldier, seaman, or airman may die in vain.

On a personal note, this is an especial day of rememberance for me.  A grandmother and an aunt both died on this day, in different years - one of those odd coincidences.  It also happened that way on the other side of the family with a grandfather and an uncle. 

And then in a new twist of fate, my faithful little Rocky dog died two years ago today; the last living link with my late husband, Cody.  So it's a day full of memories and bittersweet recollection for me. 

But life goes on.

Marriage, Explained

Found on Joe.My.God. today:  Dan Savage gets right to the heart of the marriage argument.



All that Dan says is correct.  Until straight people changed the laws - with no little opposition from conservatives, mind you - in the late 19th/early 20th century, women in the English-speaking world who married lost their legal identity, being subsumed into that of their husbands':  a single woman, in legal terms, was a femme seule (single woman); a married woman, however, was a femme couvert (hidden woman).  A woman's property, with rare exceptions for very wealthy women, belonged entirely to her husband, down to her smallest personal possessions.  If a husband wanted to, in theory he could sell all her dresses - though of course, I doubt any man who enjoyed three homecooked meals a day and some nookie at night would be that stupid.  But realistically, women had no legal say in the disposition of their money or property:  a husband, for example, could demand that an employer pay his wife's salary to him, not to her.  And so forth.

The point being, until the laws on property and divorce were changed, women were in a legal sense owned by their husbands:  I don't have time now to go look up the references, but I can tell you that both Queen Victoria and Virginia Woolf - and it's hard to think of two more contrasting personalities - at different times in their writings made the identical statement:  women are slaves to men.

But most people's historical knowledge does not extend any further back than their parents' time or their grandparents'; yet they believe that the way mama and daddy lived is the way people always lived, as far back as Adam and Eve.

It just ain't so.  Marriage in the Old Testament often included multiple wives:  go look it up.  But oh my goodness, you never hear the Bible-thumpers arguing to bring back polygamy, do you?  A while back, I wrote a lot more in my post about the history of marriage, and the difference between civil marriage and religious marriage, if anybody wants to read it.  Bottom line:  just as Dan said, straight people have been redefining marriage for centuries, millennia, as it pleased them.  But people forget that:  it didn't happen in mama and daddy's time, so they don't know anything about it.

Legal marriage serves a number of very useful, necessary purposes for society and for individuals.  There's room enough for gay people - my God, it's not like we're asking to abolish it, we just want to get on board with it!  

Not that everybody needs to be married:  I'm thinking of some straight and some gay people.  Some folks are just not equipped for the job, some just can't stand to be "tied down," and some just don't want that much responsibility.  But for those who do, it should be an equal opportunity institution.

Spell Check

I see I'm up to 80,000 hits - thanks for your interest, guys - and nearly 800 posts.  Last night, just for shits 'n' giggles, I decided to try out this new label cloud feature that Blogger has:  you can see it down at the bottom of the blog on the right.  When I pulled up the screen, my first thought was, OMG have I really written about that many different topics?

Guess I'm just an old scatterbrain or something.  Anyway, it keeps me off the streets and out of trouble.

Not that I'm too high fallutin to mind getting into a little t-r-o-u-b-l-e now and then - depends on how you spell it, and how hot and handsome he is.  But that kind don't come around near often enough to suit me.

Whatever.  That's the breaks when you get to be an old man like me.  Thanks for giving the Blue Truck a read, fellas - appreciate ya.

Photo:  Edu Boxer.  Como se dice trouble en Espanol?

Got Stache?

When I mentioned Gillette yesterday when talking about my beard, they must have heard me in Boston, because it wasn't long before I saw a Gillette ad pop up.  But they have this facial styler thing that is pretty cool, I had fun with it.  You upload a face pic of yourself, and then it shows you what different stache/goatee/beard styles would look like on you - go try it.

Course, since I already have a beard, it didn't work that great in most cases.  Better you have a clean-shaven pic to work with.  But I always have wished I had a wider, thicker stache, a real Sam Elliott.

Only problem is, all Gillette can do is take hair off your face, not add it to.  Damn.  So much for this age of technological progress.

What Might Have Been

From Fortune magazine, "Queer Inc:  How Corporate America Fell in Love with Gays and Lesbians" (2006):

Mike Syers, a 42-year-old partner at Ernst & Young, was coming out in a very big way. About 3,000 partners of the firm had gathered in Orlando for a conference last year. A two-minute video of Syers played on giant TV screens throughout the convention center. He sat in the audience watching himself.

"When I started in public accounting," the onscreen Syers said, "I really didn't think there was a long-term career opportunity for me. Being a gay man, I didn't see gay partners." But things were different at E&Y, he said. He felt comfortable and welcomed.

As the screen went dark, Syers's BlackBerry began vibrating. Messages of support poured in. Afterward a partner came up to him to say that his son was gay, and that he would call home that night to tell his son how proud he was to work at E&Y.

E&Y had asked Syers to make the video because he is a leader of bEYond, the company's GLBT employee group. bEYond is only two years old, but it sent 72 people to this fall's Out & Equal convention. It also sponsored the 2006 Reaching Out MBA conference, a gay and lesbian recruiting event that attracted about 700 MBA students to New York. Courting them were Accenture, Dell, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase, Lehman Bros., McKinsey, Merrill Lynch, Microsoft, Target and Toyota, among others.

I almost feel like crying.

Back in 1975-77, after dicking around through most of junior college, I thought I'd finally settled on a good game plan:  I'd become a CPA.  I managed to get an associate's degree in accounting at the college by dint of a year spent packing in all the courses I could carry, then transferred to a university that had a great accounting program, well regarded in the corporate world, where almost every graduate got a job just for the asking.  I even got a job working part-time for a CPA, doing the simpler kinds of balance sheets and tax returns.  I thought I was on my way to a successful, rewarding future.

But after I got to university, although I was doing well in my classes - and studying my ass off, attending extra tutorials and study halls - I slowly began to realize that I didn't fit in.  As far as I could tell all the other guys in my accounting and finance classes were straight as a board; most of them seemed to be the jock/fratboy type, and outside of class interested only in baseball, football, Playboy, and Camaros.

The accounting department was run by a gruff-but-kindly old guy who had made a mint in the corporate world, then retired and started a second career as a professor.  He worked us like the devil in those classes, but you didn't mind because you knew you were getting all the right tools and knowledge for a CAREER - only 18 months away if you stuck it out and took summer classes.  But the old guy had set up an internship program where you could get placed with a major accounting company like Ernst & Ernst - now Ernst & Young - for 9 months of on-the-job training.  It lengthened your schooling, of course, but the up side was that most of those interns subsequently got hired by the companies they'd interned for.

It was all but a sure thing, if you studied hard, made good grades, and measured up to expectations.  And a sure thing sounded great to a 21-year-old guy from a broken home, living in deep poverty, with no rich or even mildly affluent parents to help him along.  I reached out and made a grab at the brass ring.

But the feeling that I just didn't belong grew and grew.  One time, seems like it was early spring semester, there was a big do organized by our department chair at his country club, I forget the occasion; but although attendance was strictly voluntary, you knew it was a good thing to show up and have your presence noted.  So I duded up in my best and most fashionable togs, including the platform shoes and wide tie, and went.  Like a fool. 

Continue reading after the jump.

Also, enter to win a prize; see contest rules at the end of this post.

Lovelight: On the Run

Never heard of Aiden James before, but I like him a lot.  Think you will too.



Sometimes you find a lovely plant and bring it home.  And despite good soil, sun, shade, and water, and all the loving care you bestow upon it, it just won't thrive:  withering slowly away until only brown leaves remain to show what once was blooming and alive with tender, hopeful buds. 

Love is like that too sometimes, and who can say why?  It's the fault of both.  It's the fault of neither.  It just turns out that way, and after all is said and done, there's no real explanation that makes any sense.  Just the brown leaves of memory left:  the mute and crumbling testament of all that might have been.

'Night, guys.

Jesus, Gays, and Texans

Andrew Sullivan, a devout Catholic, has posted this today; the story's from a couple months back, but still pertinent:



MCC churches in North Texas have put slogans like these on billboards in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.  Which has annoyed the hell out of Bible-believing Christianists.  But perhaps it will make some people stop and examine what it is they really believe, and consider whether their thinking is consistent and compassionate, which is always a good thing.

Would Jesus discriminate?

The early church welcomed a gay man.

Jesus affirmed a gay couple.

Ruth loved Naomi as Adam loved Eve.

David loved Jonathan more than women.

Your Head Trucker spent many years reading and studying and researching the Scriptures on this point, looking desperately for a loophole, a window of hope that God loved me too.  And that search will run you crazy - and I do mean crazy - after a while.  Because that Bible was written down by straight men to serve their purposes and their view of the world and of God.

I don't have time today to go into all this deep subject.  And I don't want to step on anybody's toes, who have found a way to interpret the awful homophobic passages differently.  But it is true beyond any doubt that Jesus himself is not recorded as saying anything at all about same-sex love, one way or another.

And after many years of trying to reconcile the truths I was taught in church with the truth within me - the goodness and rightness of my own identity and feelings and nature - I finally came to realize that God, if God exists, is much bigger than the Church.  And much bigger than the Bible.

I haven't renounced my belief in Christ; I'm an Episcopalian-on-hold as I've explained before.  But to make a short conclusion, here's where I am now:  God is above all things and beyond all things; yet God is also very small and very close.  God is that light of goodness and peace inside you and me and everyone; anyone can be in touch with it, you don't need creeds and scriptures and rituals to find it, and you don't have to go searching in some holy place. 

It's already there inside you; and in a certain sense, you are the holy place yourself, the temple, as it were, of spirit.  And so am I, and so is every man and woman, though we can blind ourselves from perceiving it.

And that inner light is God, and God is Love.  It's important to pay attention to it, and not just our feelings and thoughts and bodies:  it's part of those things, but something else too.  More than that I can't say.  But that helps me. 

What helps you?

National Beard Month

David Traver of Anchorage, Alaska, won the World Beard and Moustache Championship for Team USA last May.  Very cool braids - imagine how long that took - but I prefer the natural look, myself.

I'm a week late posting this, but a reader tells me it's National Beard Month, so I reckon that's cause enough for celebration.  He doesn't sign his name, but he has a Facebook page where you can learn more about it.  I don't belong to that and can't get in over there, so I can't say anymore about it.  But I think it's a fine idea.

Actually for your Head Trucker, every month has been beard month since I was 21 years old.  Why grown men want to follow an indisputably unnatural practice and scrape their faces smooth like a girl's has always been more than I can understand.  Seems pretty damn queer to me.  Animals don't scrape off their natural coverings unless they are diseased or deranged, ya know?  And somewhere in Leviticus, the Bible says not to cut your beard off . . . you follow me, bud?

And if I ran the world . . . . oh well let's just say Gillette would be out of business in a hurry.

Does anyone second the motion?

Sunday Drive: Farther Along

An old favorite in these parts.  Memories of sitting in a wooden pew, everybody in their go-to-meeting clothes, a comforting arm wrapped around a sleepy little boy, paper fans waving all around imprinted with pictures of Gethsemane, the sweet, faint scent of lavender sachet and waxed wood, the reverent silence of a summer Sunday morning, and the prospect of fried chicken and dinner on the ground . . . . memories from the dawn of a little boy's life, when God was in His heaven, and all was well with the world.

House Passes Healthcare Bill

220 to 215.  Now I suppose the real showdown will be in the Senate.  Let's just hope that after all is said and done, we have a realistic public program that a working man or woman can afford - that will actually take care of people's needs and not simply feed the fat cat insurance and medical and drug interests.

And will same-sex partners be covered?  Had you thought about that? 

On my way to bed after staying up way too late.  Y'all have a good one, I'm outta here.