Lundon Calling

On the January 27th Show, our guest was Dr. Peter Goldblum, Professor of Psychology and Director of the Center for LGBTQ Evidence-based Research + Director of the LGBTQ Program at Pacific Graduate School of Psychology.

The following day we received this note from Dr. Goldblum which we share with all of our listeners now.  He wrote: “Ace, I am listening to it (the Show) now.  I am really enjoying the whole program.  As I thought about it last night, I realized how rare your program really is – - funny, intelligent, and topical.  You guys are great and I can just imagine people listening who are not out; realizing that there are people like you exist.  Thanks for the honor of being in conversation with you all.”

Dr. Goldblum is also the Programming Clinical Supervisor for the University of California – San Francisco AIDS Health Project.

Don’t count the red states out.  We’re the ones making history.

Annise Parker

Five years after the bruising marriage amendment fights of 2004 and the crushing defeat of a Democratic candidate who most expected to walk away with the Presidency, the deep-red South is showing itself to contain some remarkably bright blue dots.

While the New York State Senate was dodging its chance to allow gay couples to put a ring on it if they liked it, Simone Bell of Georgia was celebrating her victory as the the first African-American out lesbian elected to a statehouse, and Annise Parker was 10 days away from making Houston the largest city in America to elect an openly gay mayor.

Now granted, electing openly gay candidates doesn’t mean Georgia and Houston are about to advance LGBT civil rights overnight.  Georgia and Texas, you’ll remember, each voted 76-24 against marriage equality in 2004 and 2005, respectively.  But now I look at the regression analysis that predicts gays in Texas and Georgia will be able to tie the knot in 2018 and 2019, and suddenly it doesn’t seem as entirely far-fetched as it did in 2004.

That’s because the regression analysis is based on the two best friends progress ever had: The incremental sloughing off of the old power structure, and the dying off of the people who keep voting to keep it in place.  I mean, can you imagine what must have gone through people’s heads when Bobby Kennedy predicted — before the Civil Rights Act had even passed — that we’d have a black president right about now?

Shucks, I can’t even imagine a gay President.  Which is how I know I’m old.  I’m already on the front porch clucking my tongue about this new generation of whippersnappers and the world they’re about to inherit — and what they’re going to do with it.  And I love them for it.

Sitting on my proverbial front porch, I remember what it was like to jump on the schoolbus in Charlotte, N.C., in 1977 and ride across town to Billingsville Elementary, where I was a minority among mostly black classmates.  I had no idea my bus route was due to a six-year-old U.S. Supreme Court desegregation order, or that in February 1978 we were celebrating only the third Black History Month in America — which was an upgrade from the Negro History Week the nation had known for the previous 50 years.

In other words, my worldview — at least on issues of race — was just about completely divorced from that of my parents, who were only 13 years into post-Civil Rights Act America.  Martin and Bobby had only been dead nine years.  Yet I took integration, my majority-black school and Black History Month completely for granted.

Knowing this, I’m now more than a little geeked up about the worldview of the 2009 version of me: A second-grader who doesn’t think twice about a black lesbian state legislator riding up to a Southern statehouse on her motorcyle and going to work for those who have no political voice.  A world where an openly gay mayor of America’s fourth largest city is seen on national TV celebrating with her partner of 19 years and their three kids.

But while we’re waiting for the second-graders to inherit the world, there’s some work we can do now.  And the elections in Georgia and Texas kinda point the way: To the pulpit.  In Houston, the ugliest attacks on Annise Parker came from pastors — yep, pastors.  Here in Georgia, there was a brief kerfuffle when campaign volunteers attempted to start a similar sectarian whisper campaign against Simone Bell.

In the end, neither effort mattered; Annise and Simone trounced their opponents.  And while I can’t speak for Annise’s campaign, I know Simone’s victory was in part because she let it roll off her back while she continued her one-on-one conversations with actual voters.

So what I take away from all this is that we’ve got to keep having those one-on-one conversations.  With neighbors.  With pastors.  With the next generation.  The voters of Houston and of Georgia’s 58th statehouse district have proven that when they meet, touch and talk to an actual out gay person, they react to the content of that person’s character first and foremost.

I remember being taught something about that in February 1978 in Charlotte, N.C.  And what do you know?  It’s turned out to be abundantly true.

So as of this writing, New York is bucking the regression analysis, which said we’d have marriage equality there this year.  But New York will still beat Georgia and Texas to the punch, I have no doubt.  It’s just a matter of time, of a changing of the guard — and of a changing worldview, one second-grader at a time.

Anyone who tells you that hard work is the key to success in life is only telling you part of the story.  It takes hard work and a little help from your friends.  Actually, a lot of help.

And that help — plus yes, some serious hard work — is what made it possible for my friend Simone Bell to jump into a five-way special election for a vacant Southern statehouse seat at just about the last minute and pull it out from under some real contenders who had a headstart not just in time, but also in fundraising, political support and just about everything else you’d put on your list of What I Need to Win A Statehouse Race.

The help came from black lesbian bikers who knocked door-to-door weekend after weekend.  It came from family members who shelved their lives and careers in Detroit and elsewhere to move into Simone’s house and cook, make phone calls, attend meetings and play chauffeur.  It came from people who knocked on the front door and stuffed $5 into Simone’s hand.

It also came from the Georgia transgender community: Cheryl Courtney-Evans, who turned Simone’s front porch into her own campaign call center; Chanel Haley, who claimed a spot on Simone’s sofa and seemingly never left it as she phone-banked her way into ultimately running the campaign phone banks; and Vandy Beth Glenn, who stood with me on a cold street corner on the morning of Simone’s victory, urging voters to send Simone to the very Legislature from which Vandy Beth had been fired when she announced her intention to transition from male to female.

The help came because Simone has spent 20 years doing the kind of community organizing that some folks still don’t seem to understand even after they elected a President with that on his resume.  And as anyone who works in any kind of community can tell you, when you put yourself out there the way Simone has, you make a lot of friends.

It started when Simone realized she had a passion for equal access to healthcare.  It continued when she and her partner, Val, moved to Atlanta’s Reynoldstown neighborhood and helped longtime residents do things like shut down a bar that had opened across from an elementary school.  And it brought her to Lambda Legal, where she traveled to 13 Southeastern states as an out black lesbian, organizing local communities who had experienced horrors such as the partner-visitation tragedy at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami; the arrest and outing of 40 gay men in the Tri-Cities of Tennessee/Virginia, some of whom lost their jobs (one even committing suicide); and the firing of Vandy Beth Glenn.

So while I was standing with Vandy Beth on that cold street corner holding my Simone Bell sign and complaining about my numb feet, I might have been feeling a little bitchy, but that was just on the surface.  Deep down, I was so proud of my brothers and sisters who had hit the big pause button on their own lives to help Simone get to the finish line.

Simone’s campaign proved that when you put yourself on the line for people, they give it back to you tenfold.  What we may have lacked in time, money and clout, we gained in beautiful people who showed up weekend after weekend to knock on doors, make phone calls and pull together house parties.

In a normal statehouse campaign, you probably have about three core volunteers; Simone had more than 70 before we gave up counting.  Now that the campaign’s over, I might be feeling a little lost — but I’ve got 70-plus new friends, and dang do we feel powerful!

So I was sorta trying to get out of jury duty about a month ago.  I stood up and told the defense and prosecution that I had gone to military school, where I was an expert marksman, and also that I was a PFLAG regional director, was on my church’s board, and was active in Democratic politics.

The defense attorney asked me what PFLAG stood for.  “Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays,” I volunteered.  I figured the combination of God, guns, gays and bedwetting liberalism would make me unpalatable to either side.  And best of all, it was all true.  It seemed less obvious than wearing my “Change the Game” Obama shirt and/or announcing that I had a chip on my shoulder about “the system”.

It didn’t work.

I couldn’t figure out which side might have picked me for that particular kickball team.  Or maybe I was such a wild card that they both agreed on me.  One thing’s for sure: Next time I’m wearing the shirt.

My days in military school don’t come up much in conversation, but the headlines these last few days about an Atlanta school system that’s opening an opt-in military high school have me looking back on my days in uniform and thinking that what’s apparently been good enough for the school system that produced our current Secretary of Education is probably not a bad idea for Jawja.

Not that I was a model cadet by any means.  In fact, I managed to get in so much trouble at Oak Ridge Military Academy that two weeks shy of graduating, I had the school’s honor council a hair’s breadth away from expelling me, sans diploma.  (Of course, this was all over a stolen brownie, but you can’t really vow to follow an honor code and then just not do it.)  I spent those last two weeks on the military-school equivalent of house arrest, stripped of my rank and coasting toward that newly-precious diploma.

Oak Ridge was a boarding school, like the one in the movie “Taps”, and not, I imagine, like the public military high school being contemplated for Atlanta.  One assumes those kids get to go home at the end of the day.  One also assumes they won’t get into an armed standoff with the world.  Oak Ridge certainly didn’t have that potential.  Our head dude was a small, quiet, retired Air Force colonel, not George C. Scott.  Some of us smoked weed during breaks between classes.  And we were co-ed.

But we also wore uniforms during the school day and at meals, had drill practice on Wednesday afternoon with rifles that we sometimes held over our heads while running, and we were organized into a battalion with a student commander and a whole cadre of officers, sergeants and corporals who constituted our official pecking order and could discipline a lower-ranking cadet just about as firmly as any faculty or staff member.

At that time, it was the best thing that could have happened to me.  My father had just died, I was entering adolescence, and my mother and I were crammed into a one-bedroom apartment with my toddler brother in Tarboro, N.C., where if you wanted to study a foreign language at the local high school, you had your choice of Spanish and Spanish.  I was disengaged, I was angry, and I was taller than my mother.  I was also a pretty smart kid, and I think my mother feared I might turn into a bad seed out of sheer boredom and never realize a fraction of my potential.

Tarboro’s the kind of town where the same people tend to do the same things.  The boarding-school choice for a chunk of the A-list kids in Tarboro was Virginia Episcopal School, whose tuition was about eight large a year and which scared me on a couple of fronts: I wasn’t religious at all, and VES sounded like the kind of place where I might be the only kid whose family lived in an apartment.

Oak Ridge, on the other hand, was about three-quarters as expensive as VES, so we visited it, and I liked it.  The school was a bit ragged around the edges but had a college-preparatory academic program, a 30 percent gifted population, and a near-100-percent college attendance rate.

What happened to me almost from day one was like a scene or two from “Dead Poets Society”, complete with an English teacher we called “Captain” — not so much because of the Whitman poem, but because his rank at the school was indeed captain — who drew the Taoist yang-yin symbol on the chalkboard on our first day in freshman English class and proceed to teach us about Jungian phenomenology and how you could analyze literature with the same tools you’d use to analyze dreams.

I had Captain Smith for two years in a row, and for those two years he made us keep “active/passive imagination journals” where the active imaginings were anything we came up with during our waking hours and the passive ones were our dreams.  Of course, being high school students we used this whole system to our advantage, and more than once we’d show up empty-handed the morning a paper was due and announce, “Captain Smith, I just had the craziest dream last night!”  And thus earn a one-day reprieve.

Captain Smith had studied under a student of Carl Jung, the groundbreaking Swiss psychiatrist who was a student of Freud but who broke with him and proceeded to produce a body of work that included original concepts such as synchronicity, psychological archetypes and the collective unconscious.  And while we were learning about the ego, shadow, anima and animus, MTV was showing Sting singing about synchronicity, Prince messing around with our ideas of masculinity, and Annie Lennox doing the same for the feminine.

And if you’re wondering how all this was happening right under the U.S. military’s nose, that’s easy: Even a dedicated full-on private boarding military school has a sort of civilian-military power-sharing thing where the administration and academics are all run by civilians, and the discipline side is handled by actual military personnel.  (Yes, our president was an Air Force colonel, but a retired one.)  Oak Ridge handled this in just about the most casual way possible: We didn’t have an actual military officer as our commandant (i.e., chief disciplinarian) until my senior year, and the two guys who ran our Army JROTC program were relegated to two rooms in the basement of the science building.

The Army JROTC program was what made us a bona fide military school, so I’m guessing that what Atlanta’s about to get is a Marine JROTC program.  Chicago has six such schools, so I’ll bet there’s one for each military branch.  At Oak Ridge, that “J” basically meant that we weren’t promised to the Army in any way, shape or form.  (Take that “J” off and you’ve got a college ROTC program, and that’s a whole different story.)  For us, JROTC meant that for our last four years at Oak Ridge we all had to take a class called Leadership Development that was taught by the two Army guys.

If you’ve read this far looking for a military-indoctrination conspiracy, Leadership Development is where it might have existed.  LD is where we learned all sorts of military concepts (mostly from reading about them, unsupervised, in 10-point Courier type out of a drab Army manual) that I’ve since completely forgotten — except the word “azimuth” has stayed with me all these years — and every now and then we’d run over to the range and fire .22 caliber air rifles.  Which is where I earned my expert-marksman badge.

But mostly, LD was a study period.  I forget how the Army guys framed it, but it happened more often than actual instruction did.  There just wasn’t that much military material for us to cover.  And then, in senior year, you had to deliver a 20-minute talk and be graded on it.  This was before PowerPoint.  And I knew just how to fill 20 minutes.  I did my talk on the poetry of Sylvia Plath and filled the time with leisurely, nuanced readings of “Daddy”, “Lady Lazarus” and “The Applicant”.

The person I delivered my talk to was Sergeant Major Woodard, the head army dude, a nice enough guy in his 50′s with bryclreemed hair, and with whom I don’t think I ever had an actual conversation in the four years I was at Oak Ridge.  He listened, expressionless, while I filled my 20 minutes, and he gave me an A.  It was my first presentation of that length, ever, anywhere.

I suppose Sergeant Major Woodard’s polar opposite might have been the quiet, Mercedes-driving chain-smoker in the corner office back in the main building.  She was our academic dean, and we all called her Miss Hobbs even though her rank was something like Colonel.  About halfway into my time at Oak Ridge, I learned that while Miss Hobbs might not have been on the radar for many of us, many of us had certainly been on hers.  She called me into her office one day to encourage me to attend N.C. Governor’s School, and we started a conversation that went on for the next two years.

Through those conversations it became clear to me that Captain Smith wasn’t some madman who’d infiltrated Oak Ridge to plant counterculture seeds in our minds in the midst of the Reagan era.  He’d been hand-picked by Miss Hobbs.  In senior year she taught us AP English, and it was there that I saw just how much our two years with Captain Smith had been the literary-analysis equivalent of Mister Miyagi telling Ralph Maccio to “wax on, wax off”.

I skunked the AP English exam, I wasn’t valedictorian, and I didn’t go to Harvard as Miss Hobbs encouraged and my mother hoped.  I did spend a weekend at the Citadel while I briefly competed for a full-ride scholarship there, and it was just enough for me to understand that I didn’t want a free education that badly.

But to this day, I still call my boss “sir”, I like to keep my shoes reasonably shined, and I can make a bed so tight you can bounce a quarter off it.  When I took martial arts, I understood the military-style discipline and actually kinda loved going back to it.

Whether all this makes me a better person is anyone’s guess.  I regard myself as dreadfully undisciplined in a lot of ways.  But I understand the place that this type of discipline can have in our lives, and I don’t think school is such a bad setting for it.  Of course, I wasn’t so high on military discipline about two weeks before graduation, when I was on the verge of losing everything and was on such a tight lockdown that I never got to see my girlfriend play the lead in her school’s production of “The Glass Menagerie”.

But I wouldn’t trade any of it for what was waiting for me in Tarboro.  The small-town social order.  A million reasons to underachieve.  Oak Ridge was far from perfect — in fact, in so many ways it was typical, particularly when it came to some of the cruel things we could say and do to each other.  But by wearing uniforms and having the student body organized into a cadet corps with rank and identifiable leadership, I think we left some things at the schoolhouse gate that needed to stay out there.  And I think we also grew and developed in some ways that didn’t need to wait if they didn’t have to.

I have no doubt Atlanta’s in for a bit of a dust-up over the proposed military high school.  But to the well-meaning folks who see U.S. warmongering in just about everything the military touches — and trust me, I’m pretty much there myself — I say swap out the word “military” with something like “peace-loving bureaucracy”, talk to a couple of military school graduates, and see if you still feel the same way.  If the same Education Secretary who recently announced that he wants to make every U.S. school a safe learning environment for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students thought six public military high schools were a good idea for Chicago, can one really be that terrible an option for Atlanta?

If you’re like me, you probably figure that if Don Wildmon of the American Family Association says it’s bad, then it must be good.  His latest target is PepsiCo, the parent company of Frito-Lay, Quaker Oats, Tropicana and Gatorade.  They’re also of course responsible for Pepsi, which you probably grew up drinking if you’re from anywhere but Georgia, where Coca-Cola is so ubiquitous that I grew up calling every soda “Coke” — as in, “Would you like a Coke?”  “Sure, I’ll have a Sprite.”

Anyway, PepsiCo is on Don Wildmon’s doodoo list because they’re a corporate sponsor of the über-harmless PFLAG, an organization dedicated to essentially helping families stay together in light of the news that a family member is gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender.

Well, I already knew PepsiCo supported PFLAG.  Then on their website I learned that they’re also sponsors of the indie-music-industryfest SXSW.  And all of a sudden, PepsiCo strikes me as pretty darn hip indeed.

Don, on the other hand, seems comparatively stuffy and histrionic.  Or probably just greedy.  Because hey, if you told me I could get rich by sending out semi-regular emails scaring people into making it rain on me in order to to fend off the bogeyman I kept telling them was at their door…  Well, I’m not saying I’d do it, but you can see where it might get tempting.

At the end of this entry is the latest monster-under-the-bed help-me-pay-my-bills screed from Uncle Don.  I won’t bother to deconstruct his childlike arguments (and seriously, if you’re in the mood for a quasi-daily chuckle, get on his email list), but the one thing I think it’s important to point out is that he tries to hold the widely discredited “ex-gay” organization PFOX up as somehow being equal to PFLAG — and the fact is, I figured PFOX was pretty much gone by now.  They’ve been discredited by everybody, including their own ilk.

PFOX is the same organization whose board president in 2003, Richard Cohen, was permanently banned from membership in the American Counseling Association for unethical practices.  Believed to be a front for the Family Research Council, PFOX peddles “reparative therapy”, which has been declared unethical by all the major medical and mental health professional associations.  And not only has the “ex-gay” organization Exodus International (whose members can’t seem to stop finding the big gay love of their lives from within the membership) publicly distanced itself from PFOX, but the national PTA rebuffed PFOX’s request to participate in its 2005 convention.

Meanwhile, PFLAG chapters participate in PTA conventions all over the country.

And here’s the ever-ready Don Wildmon, putting on his PFOX mask like Cillian Murphy in “Batman Begins”, spraying us with a fresh dose of gay panic, and getting his charge-card authorization doohickeys fired up.  It’s just another Wednesday for a certain brand of domestic terrorist.  His war is the “culture war” he keeps flailing at with one hand while his other hand is groping for the wallets of the gullible.  The 1-800-GIVE-NOW preacher who lived on the outer reaches of your TV dial in the 1980′s has made the digital transition all right — to the interweb.

Well, as we say here in the South, “Bless his heart”.  Surely Wildmon is reading the tea leaves and took note when James Dobson stepped down this month as chair of Focus on the Family, which laid off 200 employees last fall and has acknowledged some difficulty raising money from its bread-and-butter audience of young families.  But then again, greed can make you do some pretty counter-intuitive things.  Like endorse a nationally discredited organization that should be gone by now but apparently can’t stop doing its part to psychologically damage innocent young people who are just trying to live openly and honestly.

Anyway, I won’t deny you any longer.  Here’s the chuckle-worthy email that was waiting in my inbox this morning.  Enjoy it while I head to the store to stock up on Doritos and Pepsi.

[PS: Coca-Cola also supports PFLAG.]

—–

Pepsi refuses to be neutral in the culture war, remains the leading corporate sponsor of homosexual group

PepsiCo is the leading corporate sponsor of Parents, Families, & Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG)

March 25, 2009

Dear Lance,

Like AFA, Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays (PFOX) has its own problems with PepsiCo. PFOX works to help those who desire to leave the homosexual lifestyle.

By issuing national press releases against PFOX, by organizing protests at ex-gay conferences, by publishing anti-ex-gay literature, and by opposing ex-gays equal access to public venues, Pepsi-supported Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) contributes to the intolerance of the ex-gay community, stereotypes former homosexuals, and continually misrepresents PFOX’s mission.

PFLAG is a vocal and activist homosexual group that calls those who oppose homosexual marriage “the forces of prejudice and discrimination.” PFLAG not only cheered the California Supreme Court’s ruling on May 15 which legalized same-sex marriage, it was also vociferous in its opposition to Proposition 8, the ballot initiative which restored traditional marriage in California on Election Day.

By funding PFLAG, PepsiCo and its shareholders help promote fear and hostility against the ex-gay community and other heterosexuals. PepsiCo is the leading corporate sponsor of PFLAG.

Clearly, PepsiCo has no intentions of being neutral in the culture war. Instead, PepsiCo has thrown their entire influence behind the homosexual movement. Some shareholders will introduce a resolution in the upcoming PepsiCo meeting, asking it to be neutral in the culture war.

# # #

Atlanta is my Goldilocks city.  After living in small-town New Hampshire for eight years, and then in New York City for a couple of years, Atlanta is a nice compromise.  It has four distinct seasons that pretty much happen when the calendar says they’re supposed to, it’s a very green city, and it’s a nicely diverse city.  So as Goldilocks would say, Atlanta has been “just right” for me.

Or so it seemed until Sunday night.  That’s when, just a few hours after I’d walked my dog in Piedmont Park — the big park in Midtown that’s just as important to intown Atlantans’ ability to recreate as Central Park is to Manhattanites — a 28-year-old gay man was beaten in an ally after leaving a popular gay bar that faces the park on one of the main streets in Midtown.

And all of a sudden, there’s a lump in my Goldilocks bed and Atlanta’s not “just right” anymore.  And not just because a gay-bashing happened in an area very familiar to me.  It’s also because Atlanta — dubbed “The City Too Busy to Hate” during the racial unrest that gripped many of America’s other cities in the 1960′s — finds itself reminded that it’s smack-dab in a state too busy to take itself off the list of the last five states in America that still haven’t passed a hate crimes law.

I’m not talking about a hate crimes law that just protects gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.  I’m talking about no hate crimes law, period.  In fact, Georgia’s last hate crimes law was ruled too vague to interpret a few years ago in a case involving violence motivated by racial bias.  Since then, the state Legislature hasn’t seen fit to protect anyone from crimes motivated by hate.

What makes this even tougher to swallow is that our state Legislature is actually in session, and there was a hate crimes bill kicking around, and it died yesterday.  That was Crossover Day, the deadline for bills to pass one of the two houses in order to stay on track to becoming law.  The hate crimes bill wasn’t one of them.

This is a bill, by the way, that the director of the state Bureau of Investigation endorses.  And this session wasn’t its first time at the legislative rodeo.

So this is where Atlanta founders a bit in its march toward progress.  Because this is a city whose mayor in 1961 became one of the few Southern white mayors to support desegregation of the local schools.  The same city that 13 years later elected its first African-American mayor, who proceeded to turn our airport into the world’s busiest.  The same city that elected an out lesbian to be its first female City Council president in 2002 — and that was the same year that I moved here, the same year that our state hate crimes law was tossed out.

Responding to an email I’d sent out about this year’s hate crimes bill before it died, one state legislator described this year’s session to me as “toxic” to progressive initiatives.

Toxic, indeed.  Toxic, like getting kicked in the face in an alley and having a tooth knocked out four months after you’ve moved to Atlanta so you can be yourself and feel safer about it.

Meanwhile, New York state has a hate crimes law and a statewide nondiscrimination law (the former being transgender-inclusive and the latter somewhat), and it recognizes same-sex marriages from other jurisdictions.  New Hampshire has a hate crimes law and a statewide nondiscrimination law (neither of which is transgender-inclusive) and allows same-sex couples to enter into civil unions.

So much for Atlanta being “just right”.

This city is a paradox.  It’s home to one of the largest LGBT populations in America, and it’s also the place where arguably the greatest number of LGBT people live with the most personal vulnerability — to violence, to losing their jobs because of who they are, and to a government indifference to their lives that leaves their family structures legally naked.  We have this in common with Texas, where Dallas and Houston function as urban oases for LGBT people, whose dreams of equality pretty much die at the Statehouse steps.

Welcome to the Sunbelt.  People are moving to places like Georgia and Texas in droves for our high quality of life (read: it costs less to live here), and they’re moving from places like New York, where this destructive paradox doesn’t exist.  It also doesn’t exist in California, whose political approach to LGBT issues was largely influenced by the efforts of Harvey Milk in San Francisco, which in the 1970′s became the one place in America that LGBT people knew to be safe for them.  In the same way that America’s LGBT population poured into San Francisco almost four decades ago, the country is now emptying its Rustbelt into the Sunbelt.

Southern LGBT people in particular are drawn to Atlanta for much the same reason that LGBT people across America moved to San Francisco all those years ago: A (perceived) safety in numbers that says you can be yourself and it won’t cost you your life or your livelihood.

So here we all are: Refugees from highly taxed states that provide better legal environments for LGBT people, and refugees from places where the vulnerability of being openly LGBT can make it hard to go outside sometimes.  We all enjoy the same low cost of living, the abundant sunshine, and the natural charms of a city that, despite its abundant sprawl, still looks incredibly green when seen from above.

I still love being here, and I look forward to what the future will bring in this rapidly expanding city.  But there’s still that lump in my bed, and I wonder how long it’s going to be there.

For listeners of the February 11th show, let me give you some background on the cheerfully destructive new force in my life who introduced herself during the show: Daisy, a rambunctious 38-pound puppy a friend of mine found in a Kroger parking lot. 

Daisy’s Dogbook profile

They say children teach you things about yourself, and so far what I’ve learned is that if you push on my bathroom door while it’s shut, it’ll open right up for you because whoever installed the door strike didn’t hammer in the little tongue that meets the spring-latch.  Needless to say, I’ve just fixed this.

Already, Daisy is many things: A playpal, a napping buddy, a household destroyer.  And a good bit of the time, she’s my shadow.  I’m still getting used to the fact that if I’m wandering in the house and have lost track of her, there’s a 99.44% chance she’s right on my heels, tucked slightly out of sight.  I don’t know how she does it.

It’s that shadow thing that alerted me to the bathroom door situation.  I suppose it’s a testament to civility that I was never alerted by one of my human friends to the fact that my bathroom door could be opened with just a push. 

And last night’s podcast just put me over the edge.  Pets, like children, blow me away with their ability to choose to do exactly the thing that will get you the most unglued once they detect that you think you’re glued to some task.  In my case, it was the podcast microphone I was attached to — and Daisy was there to prove to me that she could detach me from it by making five separate trips to the bathroom to retrieve two bars of soap, two cleaning sponges and a Kong doggy bathing sponge, bringing them into the den and proceeding to eat them right in front of me.

I was pretty cool with the whole procedure until I saw the first bar of soap go into her mouth.  And that’s when I excused myself to deal with my child.

This morning at 7:30am, I fixed the bathroom door strike while Daisy looked on with her usual curiosity.  (Is this going to turn out to be a game?  Will there be food involved?)  Now I just need to figure out how to fix the French doors in the den so she can’t push those open either.  I’m thinking of a barricade.

Idle paws are the devil’s playthings, so I try to keep Daisy within my field of vision.  The first time I tried to watch a full-length movie on my sofa, I ended up building barricades to keep her from wandering into the dining room behind me, which leads to the kitchen and hallway.  They worked for the first movie, but by the second movie she was crawling through and over them like an escaped prisoner of war.  So now the “no dogs on the sofa” rule has been adapted to “no dogs on the sofa without a human present”.

I think one of the ironies of dog ownership is that they need boundaries, but as quickly as you can establish boundaries for them, they’re showing you the power they have to erase yours.  Daisy already knows to sit and stay before she can have breakfast, dinner, a treat or a trip outside.  But let’s just say that before I fixed the bathroom door, there was no part of our lives that we didn’t share.

More than one friend has already remarked that they never saw me with a dog, and I’m not sure if it’s because I adopted a pet or because it’s a dog.  Of course, I figure I’ve been clear on both fronts: Cats are gross, and I’ve always known I’d be happy to adopt a dog if it came my way.

Daisy came my way because she’s a pit mix, and apparently animal shelters don’t put pits or pit mixes up for adoption because of the liability issues.  Based on how clean and healthy she seems, I’m guessing she was turned loose by someone who decided they couldn’t keep her.  

I’m not sure what God had in mind with the timing of Daisy’s arrival, but I can already tell that just as quickly as I’ve fixed the bathroom door so that it closes for sure, there’s another door somewhere that’s probably opening for good.

As a native Atlantan, I’m somewhat sorry to see the choice of Rev. Rick Warren to deliver the Inaugural invocation overshadow the choice of Rev. Joseph Lowery, who will give the benediction.  ”Benediction” being an ecumenical way of saying “he gets the last word”.  Rev. Lowery, considered the dean of the civil rights movement by many, opposes anti-gay discrimination and to this day doesn’t shy away from controversy, as we all know from the eulogy he delivered at Coretta Scott King’s funeral — a eulogy in which, incidentally, he cited Coretta’s own stance against homophobia.

Having heard Rev. Lowery speak, I know what he’s capable of.  The man is an agitator and always has been.  It’s a mantle he’s carried since the early 1960’s, when the local newspaper in Mobile, Ala., first labeled him as one. He recalls being offended at first, but now he loves to tell the story of how a local woman he met there helped him view the label in a different light:

“… She took me home with her and told me not to be offended and showed me this brand new washing machine that she had in her house and she said, ‘You see that red, round thing in the middle?’ She said, ‘That’s an agitator… no matter what kind of detergent you use, no matter what brand of washing machine, nothing happens positive until that agitator does its work.’ “

For my part, I’ll be tuned in on January 20th to see one of my favorite agitators do his work.

Today is the 19th anniversary of the death of Ace’s lifelong love, Patrick, from AIDS.  If you’re like me and you haven’t experienced first-hand the true horror of AIDS, I commend to you Randy Shilts’ groundbreaking — and heartbreaking — story of the early days of the epidemic, “And The Band Played On”.

I’ve had this book for years but only now brought myself to read it, partly because it’s a fitting follow-on to the story of Harvey Milk, which Shilts chronicled in his book “The Mayor of Castro Street”, and which I’ve just finished.  Reading these two books back-to-back, you can see how AIDS brought the gay-liberation spirit of the late 1970′s to a grinding halt.

For instance, Harvey Milk’s contemporaries in San Francisco fully believed that within a few short years, a national gay civil rights bill would land on the President’s desk.  Instead, with his assassination and the emergence of the AIDS epidemic, the gay community was forced to turn its newfound strength inward and develop a support system to cope with a horrifically expanding epidemic that the federal government seemed all but incapable of responding to.

Today, everyone agrees that AIDS is a worldwide epidemic that must be stopped, but we still fall tragically short of committing the necessary resources to making that happen.  Consider the following from an August commentary in the Washington Times by Susan Blumenthal, a senior policy and medical adviser at AmFAR, the American Foundation for AIDS Research, and Melissa Shive, a former research assistant at AmFAR: 

“A report released in August by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) revealed that 56,000 people become infected with HIV annually in the United States — 40 percent higher than previously estimated.  In addition:

– Every 10 minutes an American is newly infected with HIV, and 34 percent of them are under 30 years old.

– There are more than 1 million people who are HIV-positive in the United States, and 25 percent are unaware of their status. 

– The majority of new HIV cases in 2006 — 53 percent — were among men having sex with men (MSM).

– Forty-five percent of all new HIV infections occurred among blacks in the United States, though they comprise 12 percent of the population. 

– Women account for an increasing proportion of the epidemic, growing from 8 percent of cases in 1985 to 28 percent in the United States and 50 percent of those affected worldwide.

– HIV infection is on the rise among youth age 13-24. 

A recent Kaiser Foundation study found that:

– Only 4 percent of the $23 billion spent on American HIV/AIDS programs supports prevention. 

– When adjusted for inflation, there has been a decrease in the CDC HIV/AIDS prevention budget by 19 percent since 2002. 

– Flat funding of the National Institutes of Health has resulted in an 18 percent decline in the agency’s ability to fund scientific studies.”

Meanwhile, the US government has just renewed PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief to the tune of $48 billion over the next five years.  This is laudable, but now we need to hold the incoming Obama administration to its stated goal of increasing funding for research, care and prevention while developing a national HIV/AIDS strategy within the first year of the new administration.

You can add your voice to the chorus of voices calling on the Obama administration to make good on that promise.  Go to www.nationalaidsstrategy.org and sign the petition today.

Ace is in L.A. for Thanksgiving with family, so I’m doing the Thanksgiving Shout-Out from the Talk Show You’ve Been Waiting For.

It’s the holidays now, a time for festivity.  And what could be more festive than a protest?

Yes I know, we’ve already protested the passage of Prop 8 in California (and in some quarters, that protest is continuing).  But now there’s something else worth protesting: A national theater chain whose CEO gave $9,999 to the Yes on 8 campaign.  

The CEO is Alan Stock, the theater chain is Cinemark, and the chain is being targeted in advance of the December 5th wide-release date for “Milk”, the biopic about San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk, the first openly gay person elected to public office in a major American city.  It’s not a stretch to think that Cinemark theaters will soon feature — and therefore make money from — a film about a man whose legacy was to show gay people that they could fight for, win and exercise political power.

The protest is already underway: I’ve just finished watching video of a massive protest outside a Cinemark theater in Evanston, Ill.  So this thing is on.  The question now is, how far will we carry it?  Personally, I hope we carry it all the way.  I hope that from this moment forward, not a single pair of LGBTA buns will warm a single seat in any Cinemark theater anywhere — at least until Alan Stock demonstrates a serious personal conversion.

Voicing our disapproval of Prop 8 supporters has already worked in at least one instance.  There’s the theater director in Sacramento who we helped to see the err of his ways to the extent that he made a $1,000 contribution to an LGBT movement organization as a means of offsetting the $1,000 he gave the Yes on 8 campaign.  (He’s also no longer the director of that theater.)

We lost the Prop 8 vote in California, but we should continue to vote with our feet and with our pocketbooks.  We should all be taking a hard look at the rolls of pro-Prop 8 donors and helping them to live with the economic impact of their bigotry.

I have no doubt Harvey Milk would approve.  After all, he was instrumental in launching the gay boycott of Coors that continued past his death and led Coors in 1978 to drop a sexual-orientation screening question from their mandatory pre-employment polygraph test (oh how I wish I were making this up), and then in 1995 to extend their existing domestic-partner benefits to gay and lesbian employees.  Milk was also the chief spokesperson against Prop 6, which would have banned gays from teaching in California public schools — and which went down in flames thanks mostly to his tireless efforts.

And what better time to mount a boycott of a movie chain whose profits supported an anti-gay ballot initiative than on Thanksgiving, a major moviegoing day — and a day that also happens to coincide with the 30th anniversary of Harvey Milk’s assassination.

I know that on Thanksgiving we should be counting our blessings.  But among those blessings are memory, reason and skill.  And our collective memory should remind us, on the eve of World AIDS Day, that we cannot take it lightly that we are still regarded as second-class citizens.  It was that attitude toward our humanity that allowed tens of thousands of Americans to die from AIDS before our President could even be bothered to utter the word “AIDS” in a speech.

We need to know our history if we’re ever going to have a future.  And here’s what I know: Harvey Milk took office in January 1978.  Ace married the love of his life, Patrick, on August 16, 1978.  Harvey Milk was assassinated on November 27, 1978.  In 1982, our federal government — while still bumbling and fumbling the nascent AIDS crisis — swung into action when cyanide-laced Tylenol killed seven people in Chicago, with one immediate and lasting result being the tamper-proof consumer packaging that is ubiquitous today.  Yet that same year, when the city of San Francisco committed $450,000 to AIDS services, it was fully one-fifth of the total amount of government AIDS spending in America, including federal spending.  On December 10, 1989, Patrick died from AIDS complications.  Today, more than 25 million people worldwide have died as a result of the disease.

Today, Hollywood has made a film about a man who proved not only that you could be gay and win, but that gay people could wield power collectively and use it to advance their own equality – and he did it in a state that, 30 years later, still can’t seem to get its head out of its ass about the nature of true equality.

So for every two steps we take forward, society pushes us one (sometimes giant) step back.  The U.S. government has finally committed billions to fighting AIDS worldwide, but LGBT people are still viewed as some sort of “other”.  We’re painted as anti-family while our rights to marry, to co-parent and to adopt are a spotty patchwork in a nation whose founding document commands us to guarantee every citizen equal protection under the law.  We can change our sex to match our gender, but changing our driver’s licenses is another story entirely.

Here’s something else about Harvey Milk: He didn’t wait to be picked.  He picked himself.

So don’t wait to be picked.  When a meeting is called, take your place at the table; and when you’re asked why you’re there, speak.  It’s that simple.  It’s worked for African Americans, it’s worked for women, it’s worked for gay people, and now we need to put it to work for full LGBT equality.

Take your place in the picket line.  Take your place at the table.  Claim your blessing.  Claim your equality.