"But I Had Mom and Dad"

Dan Savage is not without his flaws, but he is an articulate spokesman and brilliant performer when speaking on heartfelt topics like the need to reach gay youth through the It Gets Better Project. Earlier this year, Dan spoke at the Kessler Theater in Dallas on parents, religion, bullying, and LGBT kids (some parts NSFW):





He also spoke at Rhodes College in Memphis:

Continued after the jump . . .

Was Ex-Gay, Now Ex-Mormon

You have to watch this terrific video by Steve, who tells it like it is:




And this one by Chad, who was excommunicated for publishing the Men on a Mission calendar. Then a week after graduation, Brigham Young University actually revoked his college degree.

Conversion: That's Gay

Lose the self-gaytred and go straight today!  Bryan did . . . why not you, fucker?

"A Very Isolating Experience"

Via Box Turtle Bulletin, a couple of clips from Exodus co-founder Michael Bussee (- woof -) on what happened when he left that ex-gay outfit, and what he regrets teaching; part of a series you can view in its entirety on YouTube.

First, I can totally relate to his description of being cursed and shunned:



And I understand exactly what he means about "the biggest heresy":



Interestingly, that Stonegate Fellowship Church video I referenced yesterday that Rob Tisinai posted on his blog has now been taken private by the owner; guess the secret of how to turn gay cocksuckers into born-again cuntlickers will have to remain a mystery known only to the saved.

Excuse my language, guys, but this subject really pushes my buttons:  that bullshit theology crucified me all of my teenage years, and came very close to killing me.  I still have the scars.  And they still fucking hurt.

That was the Devil's work, not God's.

Casualities of the Culture Wars

Hey guys, you have to check out Frank Rich's brilliant summation of George Reker's obscene hypocrisy in the NYT, along with some very perceptive observations on sex, hypocrisy, and the culture wars.  Excerpt:

OF all wars, only culture wars offer the hope of sheer, unadulterated hilarity. Sex and hypocrisy were staples of farce long before America became a nation, and they never go out of style. Just listen to the roaring audience at the new hit Broadway revival of the perennial “La Cage aux Folles,” where a family-values politician gets his comeuppance in drag. Or check out the real-life closet case of George Rekers, who has been fodder for late-night television comics all month. . . .

But once we stop laughing, we must remember that culture wars are called wars for a reason. For all the farcical shenanigans they can generate, they do inflict real casualties — both at the micro level, on the lives of ordinary people, and at the national level, where, as we’re seeing right now, a Supreme Court nominee’s entire record can be reduced to a poisonous and distorted debate over her stand on the single culture-war issue of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” . . .

By late last week, double-entendre wisecracks about Kagan’s softball prowess were all the rage on Fox News and MSNBC. These dying gasps of our culture wars, like Rekers’s farcical pratfall, might be funnier if millions of gay Americans and their families were not still denied their full civil rights.

Help for You Homos

Dear friend, have you been impacted by same-sex attraction issues?

Are you struggling with homosexuality?*

Do you think God doesn't want an abomination like you in church?

Do you secretly yearn to be married indissolubly to a nice, wholesome, middle-aged lady who reminds you of your mother, and have two-and-a-half kids, a picket fence, and musty-damp control-top desert-tan pantyhose draped across the shower rod every blessed morning of the rest of your life?

Well, brother, in that case get your faggot ass down to West Texas because Stonegate Fellowship, a "plant" of the Southern Baptist Church in Midland, Texas - hometown of that great American patriot, President George W. Bush - has got a real hope for you:  be a Christian, not a cocksucker. 

Golly gee, fellas, wouldn't that be swell?  You too can be a practicing heterosexual just like George Rekers Ted Haggard Larry Craig dear old Mom and Dad.

Cruise on over to Rob Tisinai's blog and catch the video now.  Be sure to read Rob's dead-on-target analysis of it while you're there.

Oh, and take a barf bag with you.  I'm just saying.

P.S. - My late husband, a native Texan himself, used to say the reason they call West Texas "God's Country" is because nobody else wants it.


* - It may be you're just not doing it right.  If unsure, call your Head Trucker for expert mentoring and, um, guidance.  Special rate for regular Blue Truck readers . . . group discounts also available.

Physician, Heal Thyself

Via Joe.My.God.:

There is a moral crime here. We are, after all, talking about men in positions of authority and reach, men who could make laws and influence public perception and who used that power against their own.

Put yourself in the shoes of the teenager, bewildered and frightened by these feelings he or she is not "supposed" to have, feelings of sexual attraction to people of the same gender. You try to deny them, try to ignore them, try to suppress them, but they will not go away. You are all alone, isolated behind a secret that presses down on you like weights, a fear of rejection that haunts you like ghosts.

And here comes Dr. Rekers telling you that you are abnormal, telling you that you are bad, telling you he can cure you, as if you had a disease like measles or the flu. Then, in his off hours, after he's done curing you, he's trolling rentboy.com looking for young men to handle his, ahem ... baggage.

That's more than hypocrisy, more even than self-loathing. It is a betrayal of one's own, a sellout of the most vulnerable. And what's sad is not just that a George Rekers would do this, but that ours is a culture that would encourage and reward such duplicity in the first place.

He purported to heal homosexuals? One is reminded of an injunction from the book of Luke: "Physician, heal thyself" (4:23). Rekers would be wise to heed that advice.  Homosexual urges are the least of his afflictions.

--Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr.

On a lighter note, via Box Turtle Bulletin:  Reker's I-am-completely-heterosexual defense was anticipated by The Onion five years ago.

So They Went to Uganda

The MSM is a little slow on the uptake in this day and time, sad to say.  Sullivan reports that the New York Times has just discovered - oh my! - the link between American Christianists and the Kill-the-Gays bill in Uganda:

For three days, according to participants and audio recordings, thousands of Ugandans, including police officers, teachers and national politicians, listened raptly to the Americans, who were presented as experts on homosexuality. The visitors discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how “the gay movement is an evil institution” whose goal is “to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity."

Sullivan:

The Bible is absolutely clear that the death penalty applies to homosexuals. Why are these Christianists not following God's literal truth? Or now that they have unleashed a proto-fascist pogrom against gay, bi and trans people in Africa, have they finally come to terms with the actual consequences of what they actually believe? Here's hoping it's the latter.

But if you ever wondered what the ultimate fantasies of the Christianist right are with respect to gay people, just look at what they say when they think no American is listening.

I'm too pooped tonight to write more on this topic at the moment, boys, but give both articles a read.

And send them on to your nearest and dearest who think the big preacher bubbas can do no wrong.

Update:  Check out the NYT multimedia page, with short audio clips featuring four Ugandans.  Also the editorial, "Hate Begets Hate."

And fellas, before you climb in the bed tonight, reflect on all this a minute - and then get down on your knees and thank your Maker that you live in the U. S. of A.  For all its faults, it's still a damn good place to be living. 

You could be in Uganda, you know.

Or a worse place than that, even.

Two gay teens executed in Iran, 2005.

Highway of Holiness

In case you missed it last year, here's Pat Robertson tripping out over the idea that I-35, which runs from Texas to Minnesota, is part of God's plan to recover this sinful nation from the heathen evildoers, especially teh gays. It's in the Bible! You can look it up!



That's funny; I've driven up and down I-35 many a time, and it didn't do a thing for me. Still gay as ever.

The preacher lady who says "We want a holy nation" creeps me out big time. I can just imagine what that would look like: I-35 lined with the skinned carcasses of field-dressed queers all the way.

Oh, and about the young guy in this clip who got suddenly, miraculously "healed" of his gayness right there on the street in Oak Lawn (Dallas's main gayborhood)?

He's bipolar, was off his meds. The church sent him off to ex-gay camp in Kentucky, but he got kicked out. Seems the brainwashing, um, I mean rehabilitation wasn't working too well. He's now telling folks to steer way clear of all that wacked-out bullshit, according to this report in the Dallas Voice.