There's Something About Channing Tatum I Like

This post isn't going to be about Channing Tatum; sorry. But I was inspired to write it by a quote of his, as he talked about his new film Magic Mike, vaguely based on his own life as a 19 year old stripper in Tampa: "I was definitely looking for something to take me into the dark side. You learn something about yourself, you learn something about men, women, you see a lot of depressing shit, people that are lost. But at the same time, the dark side can be exciting. It can feel like you're cheating death every night." OK, that's the end of the Channing Tatum part of the post. Like I said... sorry. The rest is about me. Say bye-bye, Tatum; hello, Howie:


I imagine I was born gay. When I was pretty young I felt some insistent stirrings for other guys but once I figured out just how disapproving society was of that sort of thing, I repressed it. "It" popped out a few times until sometime during my early twenties-- and living in Amsterdam-- I went to a shrink and he persuaded me to give myself a break and just be who I was. That was a relief. And my family was very supportive and so were my friends and it never held me back in my professional life. So what's the complaint? You know it's comin'.

That stuff Tatum was saying about the dark side... that was really what attracted me to the gay lifestyle. If you wanted gay reference points when I was a kid you read Jean Genet and John Rechy. I did. And did I ever get inspired! Even just purchasing and reading The Thief's Journal, Querelle, Numbers and The City of Night (the first two by Genet and the second two by Rechy) were taking a step into the dark side. A gateway drug. If I were growing up today and my cultural touchstones were Will & Grace, Queer Eye, Glee and Queer As Folk I probably would have looked for something else to identify with instead of homosexuality. Hard to imagine going for it with Glee in your mind... instead of Kenneth Anger.



Two things I never wanted anything to do with in the universe were going in the army and getting married. And that's what the great gay strides of my lifetime boil down to! Look, I was in NYC last week. I went for a wedding on my very dear old friends Ellen and Paula. Everything about it was fantastic. God bless lesbians and everyone who supports their right to marry and join the army (and fight on the front lines) and play golf at the Augusta National Golf Club. But... well, not "but"... AND I visited an old haunt when I was there, a place I learned about from a contemporaneous Ramones song, 53rd Street between Second and Third Avenues. I once, briefly, supported myself on those blocks. As Tatum said, "I was definitely looking for something to take me into the dark side. You learn something about yourself, you learn something about men, women, you see a lot of depressing shit, people that are lost. But at the same time, the dark side can be exciting. It can feel like you're cheating death every night."

I wasn't expecting anything there. I wouldn't have even gone by, really, if I wasn't on my way to meet a friend for lunch at Marcus Samuelsson's Aquavit, which had moved east since I was last there. I knew that long ago people had given up that kind of dark, anti-social lifestyle for fun nights of getting together at someone's place to watch Shahs of Sunset, American Idol or Modern Family. The first time I drove to L.A., I used Rechy's Numbers as a guide book. Go get married or drop bombs on some poor Afghani family. By all means assimilate into the Borg, order some takeout from Applebee's and turn on Bravo for a night of Real Housewives of New Jersey. Don't worry about Hubert Selby's Georgette; stick to RuPaul's Drag Race. But if you know someone who's a little rebellious-minded and thinks he might be gay... there's always Thief's Journal:

Flowers bedeck the fragility of the convict and I garlanded myself, lovingly pursuing a journey through sweat, sperm and blood that led to prison. Without what people call my evil, I am castrated. Un petit-bourgeois rien. There was a moral vigour in the acceptance of my destiny. I was hot for crime.

I give the name violence to a noble boldness that hankers for danger, and I have seen it in many of the pimps and thieves I have worked with, men whose authority and beatific treachery bent me to their will. Rene, Stilitano, Guy ... I could describe them, but I won't. I am too much of a literary outlaw for that. Instead, let me take you back to the Barrios in 1932, where I used to jerk myself off into a sperm-spotted handkerchief, while thinking of my mother.

Oui. I am my own Dieu, I fashion my vanity, delighting in the vicarious transgression that has fashionable artists like those fools Cocteau and Picasso, who have never dared to have oral sex with a leprotic geriatric vagabond.

Is any of this true? Who cares? It is if I say it is, for I define my existential self. Je suis what I say je suis, I beat up queers and stole from churches; burglary became a religious rite, elevating me to poet of the underworld even as I willingly debased myself in pissoirs
Rene jerked himself off in a café full of whores to calm himself down, before stabbing the Gypsy boy through the heart for a few sous. In that moment of love and death, I caught sight of Stilitano looking on and knew I must drink in the beautiful odour of his never-washed body. He was the Sacred Black Stone to which Heliogabalus offered up his wealth and I prostrated myself to his treachery and indifference.

I was born in Paris in 1910. My mother was a whore and I have my roots in the parched bones of the children who were massacred by Gilles de Rais. There was no precise time I became a thief, just a metempsychosis of Uranus that saw me graduate from the Reformatory to the Foreign Legion and thence to the piss and shit of the sewers.

Stilitano and I travelled through Czechoslovakia, Poland, Italy and Germany, becoming spies and finding a purity of evil idealism in the SS. I longed to play with the cellulose grapes that hung from his member while he pushed me away like the bitch I was. I wanted him to beat me. I became his noble valet, reduced to even greater humiliations, and even now I am reduced to verbal automatism in thrall to his deity.

Can you feel the degradation? Allow your hands to wander inside your uptight bourgeois pants and feel the excitement of my squalor. But don't stop there! I can give you so much more if only you will open your flies to me. Lose your suburban values and embrace the negative hell of the poet of the woebegone.

I dressed as a woman and went to Tangiers with Maurice and Robert, occasionally allowing myself to commit an act the gravity of which gave me consciousness. Oui, I was ennuyé. It is no boast to say I was a clever thief, but still I went to prison where I found security in a world that had rejected me, offering up my mobile buttocks to anyone who showed interest. Michaelis wanted me to love him, yet I taunted him with abstinence when I met Java, a muscle-bound Stilitano. Java still liked to go with whores, but occasionally he would let me thread myself inside him when he was asleep, crying out in anger when I made him come. I then met * - I cannot mention his name because he is still alive, though maybe only in the Sartrean sense in which je suis - and we pleasured one another as an SS guard told us of the joy he got when he could see tears in the eyes of the victims he was about to kill.

My work as writer is mere pleonasm. It passes the time as I pursue the rehabilitation of the purulent, the dark thrills of the interdit. I left Nazi Germany because it no longer interested me; there, stealing did not differentiate me from authority. Where was the liberation in that? My aesthetics of crime were self-creation and I went back to shack up with Stilitano. Carrying packages of opium for him gave me a sense of CAPITAL LETTERS, MY SUBSERVIENCE A PURPOSE.

This is the life I lived and these are the people with whom I was preoccupied between 1931 and 1942. Bof! But I can sense your erection fading. So let me tell you more about the pleasure of treachery, how I bit Lucien until he bled while he opened up like an anemone, how I sucked off Bernardini, the head of the Marseilles secret police. Was I guilty? Who knows? I just became that of which I was accused.

Voilà. Vous are encore dur. What more can I say? This book is my ascesis. I wanted to rob cripples and queers, I wanted to reclaim the joy of tragedy. But most of all I wanted to glorify myself. Being a thief is banal but writing about it is magnificent and with this exhibitionist act of tedious subversion, I have recreated myself once more as gullible, European radicals reclaim me for their own.

I'd rather be straight than assimilate... or is that oxymoronic? Back to our regular programming tomorrow... promise.

Only An Idiot-- Like Our Mass Media-- Would Compare Eric Massa To Mark Foley... Now Sen. Roy Ashburn Is Something Else

When I was really young, like maybe 11 or 12, my mom must have sensed I was gay. I hadn't thought about it myself... didn't even know what it was, although I did feel some kind of undefined attraction for some of the older guys in the neighborhood (older meaning 16 or 17). Anyway, she told me she wanted me to meet someone and to hang around because he was coming over before dinner. It was her hairdresser, a guy with two first names, one of which was Michelle (or at least whatever it was was pronounced "Michelle," like in Bachmann). So Michelle is a walking, breathing stereotype. I can still recall the fluffy pink mohair sweater, the screamingly dyed blonde hair in a style that didn't look like anything any man I had ever noticed had. And his wrist was the limpest wrist I had ever seen. Maybe he was just putting it on thick for me. But it worked. Although I had a couple of discreet "experiments" while I was a teenager, I stuck with girls; I forced myself to, without even making a conscious decision. I knew I wasn't like Michelle; that's all.

I read Hubert Selby's then brand new 1964 now-classic Last Exit To Brooklyn and realized there are gay people in Brooklyn, although it was a painful revelation. Wikipedia synopsizes two of the 6 parts:

• The Queen Is Dead: Georgette, a transvestite hooker, is thrown out of the family home by her brother and tries to attract the attention of a hoodlum named Vinnie at a benzedrine-driven party. [And, yes, I'm certain that's where Morrissey got his song title.]

• Strike: Harry, a machinist in a factory, becomes a local official in the union. A closeted homosexual, he abuses his wife and gets in fights to convince himself that he is a man. He gains a temporary status and importance during a long strike, and uses the union's money to entertain the young street punks and buy the company of drag queens.

That kept me in the closet for another few years. It really all seemed so furtive and ugly and sad back then. The experiences I had-- as a hitchhiker going back and forth from Brooklyn to Manhattan-- weren't very satisfying. Girls were way better. But... something wasn't right and sometimes I got this unconscious feeling. By the time I was in college drugs were an integral part of my life-- and in a very big way. They do wonders for inhibitions... as well as for denial. I had sex with a guy who I really liked but when my girlfriend found out and demanded I make a choice, I picked her and quickly "forgot" I had ever even had sex with a guy, even though, in the depths of my consciousness I knew that that was exactly the right thing for me.

I had a big transitionary stage after graduation when I was celibate for years, traveling around Asia looking for myself. I found me... in Amsterdam (of all places) and when I went to a psychologist and told him I suspected I might be gay he was waiting for the punchline. Finally he asked me if I had come to see him to get addresses of places where I could meet other gay guys. I took that as a professional blessing-- and I didn't need any addresses because I lived directly across the street from the Vondel Park.

I started making up for lost time with a vengeance. But the closet had scarred me and it took another year before I was able to tell my family (back in America) and my old friends. I was lucky. My mother's reaction, after trying a little denial for a few moments, was "Does this mean you want to start wearing my wigs?" I didn't and there was never a bump, not even the tiniest one. No one ever considered inviting me to anything without my boyfriend or didn't accord him the same love and respect and acceptance they had always given girlfriends I brought home.

I was very lucky. Not every gay person is. Ex-Congressman Bob Bauman's wife, like him a devout Catholic and, also like him, devouter conservative, was-- again, like him-- a founder of the Young Americans For Freedom, had their marriage annulled when he was outed. He wrote the best book I ever read on the topic of a closeted conservative politician coming to grips with himself, The Gentleman From Maryland-- The Conscience Of A Gay Conservative. It should be a must-read for every closeted politician who winds up running for office. The blurb from Publishers Weekly:

Claiming that financial need compelled him to publish this "near-perfect Greek tragedy" of a life "flawed by a great weakness," ex-Congressman Bauman reveals with relentless candor the alcoholic and homosexual behavior that led to the ruin of his political career and marriage. His story is engrossing both on a personal level and as an expose of Washington's gay scene to which, he maintains, belong government, professional and corporate leaders of all political casts. While admitting his guilt, Bauman alleges that his indictment for sexual solicitation and attendant activities, based on evidence from paid FBI informants, was politically motivated by the Carter administration, "Tip" O'Neill and by a Maryland senator who considered him a potential rival. Now practicing law, Bauman still suffers from rejection of his professional talents and from social prejudice, he stresses, and, as a Roman Catholic, finds little comfort in his religion's ambivalent stance toward homosexuality.

Bakersfield state Senator Roy Ashburn, vicious homophobic Republican sociopath by day, bar trawler by night, should have read it long ago. It might have saved him a lot of misery. Outed last week when he was pulled over, drunk, with a young male he had picked up in a Sacramento bar, he actually went on a big Bakersfield radio station and told his constituents "I am gay." No shit, Sherlock! On personal leave since his arrest early Wednesday morning and avoiding the press, he figured he couldn't deny it any longer.

The arrest touched off rampant speculation about his sexuality after a Sacramento television station reported he had been at a gay nightclub in Sacramento just before he was pulled over by California Highway Patrol officers. But Ashburn had declined to comment.

He broke his silence in an interview on Bakersfield radio station KERN (1180 AM) with talk-show host Inga Barks on Monday morning, saying the incident had led to "restless nights" and "soul searching." Ashburn said he had "brought this on myself." When he told Barks he owed his constituents an explanation, she responded, "Do you want me to ask you … the question, or do you want to just tell people?"

"I am gay,'' Ashburn answered, "and so I … those are the words that have been so difficult for me for so long. But I am gay. But it is something that is personal and …. I felt with my heart that being gay didn't affect-- wouldn't affect-- how I did my job." He did not express any resentment that his sexuality had come under scrutiny, saying, "Through my own actions, I made my personal life public."

The episode, widely discussed on Internet blogs, in newspapers and on TV, spurred charges of hypocrisy against the senator from gay-rights activists who noted that Ashburn, a divorced father of four, had voted several times against legislation favoring gays and lesbians.

On Sept. 1, 2005, Ashburn voted against a bill that would have allowed same-sex marriages in California. The bill was later vetoed by the governor. Ashburn also was among the minority in voting against legislation last year that designated May 22 of each year as Harvey Milk Day.

"It is unfortunate he helped spread the bigotry that forced him to stay in the closet," said Geoff Kors, executive director of Equality California, a group supporting gay marriage. "We hope he now takes this opportunity to educate people in his district and throughout the state that his sexual orientation is irrelevant.''

Ashburn defended his votes against gay-rights legislation, saying he was reflecting how the voters in his district felt.

Listen to the whole interview with a right-wing radio host Part I:



Part II, in which he shows he doesn't understand what it means to be a self-loathing Republican homosexual:



Now, what about Eric Massa? I know Eric for a long time-- and I don't know. He told me last week that he expected to get slandered, although he was expecting to get slandered by Republicans. He was very specific about that. He said they were out to get him because he was fighting for ending DADT. Today he's going on the Glenn Beck show to denounce the Democrats for screwing him up instead! (Apparently many of his new allies don't trust him or realize that he's mentally unstable now, adding to the personal tragedy of this guy.) I think he's in a great deal of pain and overwhelmed by a sense of desperation in regard to his crumbling life. All I can say is that I'm going to pray for him (rather than for Ashburn; I'm not that pure of heart at this point on my evolutionary journey). Oh-- and I'm going to continue to work towards eliminating the strictures that closets confine people in. Politically speaking, I could use some help on that one.


UPDATE: Oy Veh!

Hoyer, as expected, called Massa's wild charges absurd but the big news-- just as Glenn Beck is about to start his exploitation session with a dangerously sick man-- and who better than Glenn Beck?-- the Washington Post reports an even worse assessment than anyone expected.

Former Rep. Eric Massa (D-N.Y.) has been under investigation for allegations that he groped multiple male staffers working in his office, according to three sources familiar with the probe.

The allegations surrounding the former lawmaker date back at least a year, and involve "a pattern of behavior and physical harassment," according to one source. The new claims of alleged groping contradict statements by Massa, who resigned his office on Monday after it became public that he was the subject of a House ethics committee investigation for possible harassment.