I hugged a celebrity!

When I wrote my angry-homo diatribe against Proposition Hate last month, I figured it would be read by all 10 of you and quickly forgotten.

But within a few days, Joe at Joe.My.God picked up on it, and my page hits (and my comments) spiked.

A few weeks later, my personal hero Dan Savage gave it a shout-out on his blog and it got another impressive spike.

Then someone at a site called reddit.com, which I'd never heard of, posted a link to it not once but twice ... and the resulting hits and comments—not to mention the thousands more links on newsfeeds and blogs and Facebook profiles—spiked so high that the FAA had to convene a special council on potential air-traffic obstacles.

Of course, I'm thrilled that my little story is getting so much attention. And I'm overwhelmed by the deluge of love and support it's generated from all over the globe. And I'm cautiously optimistic about the waves of righteous indignation it seems to be whipping up here in the USA.

But this sudden burst of exposure has me trapped in a prison of blogging inertia. It hit when I suddenly didn't have much to write about ... and for some reason I had even less time to do any writing. So all these new eyes are coming to my obscure little blog and I have nothing new or exciting or funny or even mildly anger-filled to keep them coming back. Please come back, everyone! I promise to be more interesting this week! I can tell you all about the generic fetus gifts I bought for a gender-unknown zygote thingy! And how I smashed my thumb at the gym and now it doesn't bend very well! And the ... um ... ah ... crap. I got nothin'.

Or maybe nobody is coming back to my blog. All this alleged frenzy of new eyes and supportive hearts has generated exactly three new Hustle up the Hancock sponsorships. Ahem.

I have, however, finally started receiving hateful comments to the post. What took you people so long? While there have been only three mildly snarky comments and six aggressively hateful ones, they amount to only 4% (if the domestic partner's math is right) of the currently 223 comments I've approved. And why am I not approving the comments I don't like? I actually thought about it for a long time, and I finally decided that my blog was never intended to be a public forum, and—on this issue especially—I see no reason to give voice to the people who don't think I'm worthy of marriage equality. Plus, the comments I've rejected fall into any combination of three buckets of predictable, stupid ridiculousness:

1. Reading-for-comprehension failure. The overwhelmingly most quoted part of my post says "I don’t care what you think your god tells you to believe. Your mythology does not trump my reality." Clearly, I hold no religious beliefs, so religion-based arguments mean nothing to me. Yet these people quote their bibles and paraphrase their selective exegeses ad nauseam as though the thousandth time I hear them will make them suddenly start to sound real. It's like when American tourists who don't bother to learn Spanish just speak louder and slower and add -o to random words in the hopes that they'll finally be able to get through to the waiters and clerks and hotel employees in Spain.
2. Victim blaming. If you weren't so angry at us Christians, these people tell me without a trace of irony, we wouldn't be oppressing you in the first place.
3. Empty buzzword abuse. Meaningless propaganda like "homosexual lifestyle" and "sacred institution" and "family values" and—my favorite—"building block of society" apparently still holds intellectual currency in some circles. Because these people cut and paste these sophomoric little grotesqueries from the gay-hostile playbook right into their comments ... often without even making an effort to put them in any semblence of relevant context.

But! Now that I'm done being snarky myself, I do have one very exciting byproduct of all this exposure to report. And it's a doozy. Remember Dan Savage? He's the writer, Savage Love sex column author, gay pundit, national newsmedia guest talking head, perpetual thorn in the side of the "Christian" hate industry ... and the guy who gave me the giant shout-out mentioned in the third paragraph of this long-ass blog post. Well! He emailed me personally last week to tell me he and his husband would be in Chicago over the weekend and would the domestic partner and I like to have dinner with them? Does the pope shit on the people? I would reschedule my own funeral to have dinner with Dan Savage. Which is exactly what we did. (The having-dinner part, not the rescheduling-the-funeral part. I may write long boring posts, but I'm not quite dead yet.)

And Dan and his husband were as delightful and charming and interesting and funny and totally freaking adorable as we had hoped. Plus, we could tell they're just as nauseatingly in love with each other as the domestic partner and I are. He's also the only celebrity I've ever gotten a hug from. Aside from Rush Limbaugh, of course. But he and I had our shirts off, so it totally doesn't count.

Now I'm not one to fawn over people or even buy into the celebrity-as-cultural-validation paradigm, but if I ever hoped to get some kind of reward for taking care of Thomas and lashing out against Proposition Hate, our evening with Dan and his husband is about all I could ask for.