The Invisible Counterpoint

But last week, he drew gasps instead of laughs during a gig in Nashville. As audience member Kevin Rogers wrote in an explanatory "Why I no longer 'like' Tracy Morgan" post, Morgan peppered his set with anti-gay remarks, including the assertion that "all this gay shit was crazy and that women are a gift from God and that 'Born This Way' is bullshit, gay is a choice, and the reason he knows this is exactly because 'God don't make no mistakes' (referring to God not making someone gay cause that would be a mistake)." He also reportedly said that his son "better talk to me like a man and not in a gay voice or I’ll pull out a knife and stab that little nigger to death." Rogers says that "As far as I could see 10 to 15 people walked out. I had to fight myself to stay seated, but I knew if I got up ... he won." [. . .] If there's any good to come out of Morgan's completely boneheaded behavior, it's that he w...

A book finds same-sex couples produce perfectly healthy offspring. Is this the best argument for marriage equality? (Tracy Clark-Flory, “Gay marriage: Good for the kids?,” Salon, 9 Nov. 2009) In Canada, some on the left are beginning to favor imagining "their" constituents as more everyday folk than components of an urban mosaic. That is, there's a switch to imagining them as hardworking, traditional-minded, unpresuming and humble -- and therefore deserving of employment, etc. -- away from imagining them as urban, artistic, complex, diverse. It's a move to the right, in my judgment -- toward the German volk, in fact -- by the less evolved in the left, by the newly devolving on the left. In British Columbia, for instance, Save our Rivers does great 'cause "they" portray their movement in a way Cdns are ripe to accept and therefore not question -- as good hearted, rural folk, that is -- whereas anti-Olympics does poorly 'cause the country is be...

The first time somebody wanted to be my fag hag, it was the year 2000, I was 16 years old, and I was sitting in the back of a high school physics class. A fun South Asian girl to whom I'd recently admitted I was a "flaming homosexual" was chatting with me about her boy problems, and, at some point, the discussion veered onto familiar territory: "Will & Grace," the hit NBC show about a gay man living with his straight female friend. I don't remember much of the conversation. I do remember the following: She told me that she was going to be the "Grace" to my "Will," and then uttered the words that would haunt me for years to come, "I want to be your fag hag." [. . .] But the neutered gay characters on the show were about as sexual as a pastel-colored cardigan, and in the decade since the show first aired, the fag and his hag have become a tired trope everywhere from "Sex and the City" (Carrie and her queeny si...