Right

Because what this country needs more than anything right now is parenting input from a childless misanthrope whose sole life purpose is to inflame conflicted emotions in bitter incels.

Well, shit

In all my fun Cedar Rapids Pride Festing I never took any pictures. But I rocked my rainbow couture with hundreds of lovely rainbow-clad people from all over the LGBTQ+ spectrum along with more lovely friends than I can count. And when I just left, I passed a woman on a motorcycle parked next to a requisite bitch-crazy hate preacher. She was reviving her engine at full rev to drown out the goat-fucking vomit he was trying to yell into his sad little bitch-boy megaphone while a huge circle of us perverts blew bubbles at him. They weren’t ribbon-festooned gift bags of flaming shit, but it was a lovely start.

#LoveWins #ExceptForBitchBoy

#Pride101: What the hell do gay people have to be proud of?

We’re proud because despite relentless persecution everywhere we turn—when organized religion viciously attacks and censures and vilifies us in the name of selective morality, when our families disown us, when our elected officials bargain away our equality for hate votes they try to disguise as so-called “religious liberty,” when communities and cities and entire states codify our families into second-class citizenship, when small-importance bakers with the backing of the big-money hate industry take their unhinged loathing of us all the way to the Supreme Court, when our employers fire us, when our landlords evict us, when our police harass us, when our neighbors and colleagues and fellow citizens openly insult and condemn and mock and berate and even beat and kill us—we continue to survive.

We’re proud because pride is the opposite of shame—and despite what systemic bigotry and the ugliest sides of organized religion work so hard to make the world believe, there is nothing shameful about being gay. We’re proud because—thanks to the incredible bravery shown by gay people who lived their lives openly sometimes to the point of being defiantly in the decades before us—we can live our lives more and more openly at home, at work, with our families, on social media … and even on national television.

We're proud because we've worked tirelessly to achieve legal equality in marriage, adoption, parental rights and many other ways that make our families recognized as Families in our states and across our country. And though we have much more to accomplish—and though bigotry disguised as morality and religion and the supposed mandates of constituents work and sometimes succeed at eroding our newfound equalities—we have the momentum and intelligence and drive and humanity and ability to keep driving back the hate as we continue to drive forward with both our newfound and future equalities.

We’re proud because we currently have an openly gay married man as a viable candidate for the Democratic nomination for president--something most of us never even considered would EVER happen--and not only is he enjoying enthusiastic support from Democratic voters, but leading Republicans seem to have learned that while they can attack him for reasons they’d attack any other candidate, attacking him for being gay is completely unacceptable.

We’re proud because through our tireless work and the prevailing powers of common sense and compassion, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and Proposition Hate and the so-called Defense of Marriage Act long ago collapsed onto their illogical, immoral, meritless foundations—and new legislative attempts to dehumanize us gain little to no traction or visibility and soon die on the trash heap as well.

We’re proud because we are smart enough to overcome the self-loathing that our venomous, mindlessly theocratic society forces on us, and we have the power to stop its destructive cycle by fighting back and by making intelligent choices involving sex and drugs and money and relationships and the way we live our lives—and by using our lives as examples of success and humanity and love that other gay people can see and respect and emulate and achieve more and more easily.

We’re proud because after all we’ve been through, the world increasingly continues to notice and respect us and enthusiastically appropriate the often fabulous culture we’ve assembled from the common struggles and glorious diversity of our disparate lives.

We’re proud because more and more often and in more and more contexts our country and our culture see the fact that we’re gay as frankly boring.

We’re proud because especially this month and always all year we’re celebrating with parties and street fairs and parades overflowing with drag queens, leather queens, muscle queens, dad-bod queens, glitter queens, you’d-never-even-know-they-were-queens queens and even straight-but-honorary-queens-for-a-day queens, and together we can see beyond the pride in the parades of our lives and together celebrate the underlying Pride in the parades of our lives.

We’re proud because 50 years ago a small crowd in a bar in New York reached the tipping point in putting up with endless harassment and oppression and instigated a violent retaliation to a police raid that escalated to a week of riots and then to a march for equality that grew unstoppably to a national movement for equality and respect that continues proudly to this day.

Quite simply, we’re proud that we have so incredibly much to be proud of.

#Pride101:

Virtually every pride parade and public event draws a crowd of hate-filled, mouth-frothing religious bigots carrying signs (notice the ever-popular message in this photo: GAY = Got AIDS Yet?) and screaming at us with bullhorns and often trying to goad us into physical fights so they can videotape them and whimper to the police about the cruel persecution they endure just for expressing their First Amendment rights. At bigger events like the Chicago Pride Parade, they're walled off in pens like the rabid swine they are at the end of the route where they're more of a nuisance than a violence-inciting threat. But at smaller events like the Cedar Rapids Pride Fest, they wander freely in much smaller numbers at the perimeters, hauling massive signs as if they were crosses and yelling into bullhorns and goading us from afar so they can run like the cowards they are if they feel outnumbered and/or want to stoke their wannabe persecution complexes. But we keep showing up to our events, not letting their cruel, puerile, relentless harassment undermine our celebration of who we are how far we've come. THIS IS WHY WE USE THE WORD PRIDE.

#Pride101

Liberty Counsel (rule of thumb: "Liberty" almost always means "hate gay people") has made a lucrative industry of selling hatred toward gay people as an easy-sell loss leader to promoting less visceral add-on products like hatred toward non-Evangelicals and boycotts of Disney. Since 1989, they've enjoyed tax-free access to politicians and influence on public policy in their quest to literally kill gay people--among other undesirables--by halting funding on AIDS research, killing sex-education programs, preventing access to HPV vaccines, and defunding Planned Parenthood's low- and no-cost medical services. And now this: Liberty Counsel Chariman Matt Staver has issued a de facto endorsement of lynching gay and transgender people by removing them from a Senate anti-lynching bill. The Southern Poverty Law Center designated Liberty Counsel as an official hate group in 2015, yet it continues to exert influence on our elected representatives. Thankfully, many members of Congress oppose Liberty Counsel's amoral depravity and actively fight for all of our citizens. But it's clearly an ongoing war between good and Liberty Counsel's evil. THIS IS WHY WE NEED TO UNITE UNDER THE BANNER OF PRIDE.

#Pride101

Probably every gay, lesbian and trans person you know has been called a faggot. Or worse. I have. More times than I can remember. Probably every gay, lesbian and trans person you know has had something thrown at them with the intention to hurt or humiliate them. I have. It was a barrage of eggs as some friends and I stood on a sidewalk in Chicago's Boystown. Where we'd assumed we were immune from such bullshit. The worthless cowards who threw the eggs missed all of us and ran away cackling like they were big men who somehow mattered in the world. Many gay, lesbian and trans people have been physically, violently assaulted. I never have, but I have friends who've been assaulted so violently that they've been hospitalized. It's 2019. The homophobic violence that our forebears endured may have lessened, but it hasn't stopped. But we all still get up, walk out the door every day, and live our lives as openly as we dare and as comfortably as we can. THIS IS WHY WE CALL IT PRIDE.

#Pride101

It's 2019--a literal half century after the Stonewall riots and the dawn of our demands for equality, justice and our right to exist in peace--and "religious" leaders like Tennessee pastor--and sheriff's detective Grayson Fritts--just today today are angrily demanding "the death penalty for someone being a homosexual" from their pulpits and on their wide-reaching media "ministries" and inciting continued harassment and violence against us from their morally bankrupt followers. And we continue to resist and survive and love and support each other and live the open, brave lives that our forebears fought so hard to pass down to us. THIS IS WHY WE CALL IT PRIDE.

Remember when President Obama was VILIFIED for:

• Arugula
• Flag pin
• Tan suit
• Mustard
• Chewing gum
• Private schools
• Healthy eating initiatives
• Michelle's bare arms
• Being black
• Oops! Did I just say being black?
• Overcoming a proudly obstructionist Congress to provide affordable healthcare for millions of Americans
• Being black

We're here

For all the irrational hatred and the isolationist hypocrisy and the manipulative demagoguery Trump and his vile, desperate, defiantly hypocritical sycophants are using to tear this country apart morally, socially and intellectually ... for all the ignorance they've perpetuated and the lies they've parroted to shore up their base ... for all the ugliness and hostility and racism and sexism and phobias they've unleashed from the dungeons and the shadows and the basest instincts of humankind ... they've ironically and unintentionally and no doubt regrettably inspired something quite beautiful: a mass uprising of love and support for every person they vilify and every minority they oppress and every demographic they scapegoat in their bloodthirsty quest to dehumanize and destroy us all for their own gain.

And if you're a trans person--especially if you're a trans kid--we want you to know we're here.

There are legions of us who have been and who currently are and who will continue to be your friends and allies and champions with no judgments, no condemnations and no barriers. We may not have been as visible to you as we'd have liked in the past out of consideration for your privacy or lack of a forum to communicate to you or even out of concern that we might inadvertently say or do something awkward or uncomfortable or insensitive around you. But we're here. And it is now our moral and social and just simply human imperative to make sure you know who we are.

Whether you're just coming to terms with your need to transition, beginning to comprehend the emotional and physical and social journey ahead of you, taking the first tentative steps in changing your persona and your presentation and your name, or standing bravely and confidently and proudly at any point on the transition continuum ... our primary interest in your trans identity is that you are safe and healthy and happy.

We may never fully comprehend the extent of what your personal or collective journey has entailed--and we may ask a lot of questions both out of curiosity and a sincere need to better understand where you've been and where you're going.

But we're here. And we stand with you both in person and at the dawn of a new sense of community. And we want you to know we love and respect you just as you are. Or just as you need to be.

We're here.

Flashback Friday: Fuckshit Edition

Has it been only a year? Here's what I wrote a year ago today to the puerile, diaper-shitting man-boy "president" of the party that just demanded "civility" from the thinking public: 

Judging from the comments on these posts, this is the epitome of tone and content that inflames the euphoric passions and defiant allegiances of your desperately subnormal base.

BUT YOU ARE UNFORTUNATELY FOR ALL OF US THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, and your lack of capacity for shame, judgment, maturity, impulse control, intelligence, ability and rudimentary adult behavior has turned our country into an international laughingstock that through what's left of our influence and economy is endangering political, financial and social systems around the world. You have a congress working overtime to strip affordable, vital healthcare from millions of poor sick people simply because it was given to them by a black man. You haven't bothered to fill hundreds of essential governmental positions from your cabinet to our country's global ambassadorships, which became an embarrassing liability when seven of our sailors were recently killed in a ship collision just outside of Japan. Your press secretary has escalated from literally hiding in bushes to escape the press that HE WAS HIRED TO ADDRESS to now banning cameras at the press briefings he manages to bumble through, while your congress has now blocked the press from talking to them in hallways. You keep deflecting the catastrophic failures you precipitate every time you breathe as "I inherited a mess" and you scream FAKE NEWS! like an uncontrollably shitting toddler every time your failures are brought to light. And instead of pulling yourself away from your grueling schedule of completely ignoring your wives and kids to fix any of this to the best of your feeble abilities, you tweet insults and gossip as though doing so were mature, appropriate, relevant, true or apparently in your disease-ravaged mind presidential.

Smart people hate you. Educated people hate you. Aware people hate you. Literate people hate you. Entire international populations hate you. The only people left who love or at best tolerate you are pants-wetting cretins who see their empty, meaningless, ugly, unfathomably stupid lives reflected in you.

What the hell do gay people have to be proud of?

On this, the Gay High Holidays of the Tony Awards, I offer again my annual explanation and celebration of what gay pride means from my own journey and my own experience and my own big-ol’-proud-gay-man perspective:

We’re proud because despite relentless persecution everywhere we turn—when organized religion viciously attacks and censures and vilifies us in the name of selective morality, when our families disown us, when our elected officials bargain away our equality for hate votes they try to disguise as so-called “religious liberty,” when communities and cities and entire states codify our families into second-class citizenship, when small-importance bakers with the backing of the big-money hate industry take their unhinged loathing of us all the way to the Supreme Court, when our employers fire us, when our landlords evict us, when our police harass us, when our neighbors and colleagues and fellow citizens openly insult and condemn and mock and berate and even beat and kill us—we continue to survive.

We’re proud because pride is the opposite of shame—and despite what systemic bigotry and the ugliest sides of organized religion work so hard to make the world believe, there is nothing shameful about being gay. We’re proud because—thanks to the incredible bravery shown by gay people who lived their lives openly sometimes to the point of being defiantly in the decades before us—we can live our lives more and more openly at home, at work, with our families, on social media … and even on national television.

We're proud because we've worked tirelessly to achieve legal equality in marriage, adoption, parental rights and many other ways that make our families recognized as Families in our states and across our country. And though we have much more to accomplish—and though bigotry disguised as morality and religion and the supposed mandates of constituents work and sometimes succeed at eroding our newfound equalities—we have the momentum and intelligence and drive and humanity and ability to keep driving back the hate as we continue to drive forward with both our newfound and future equalities.

We’re proud because through our tireless work and the prevailing powers of common sense and compassion, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and Proposition Hate and the so-called Defense of Marriage Act have collapsed in on their illogical, immoral, meritless foundations—and new legislative attempts to dehumanize us gain little to no traction or visibility and soon die on the trash heap as well.

We’re proud because we are smart enough to overcome the self-loathing that our venomous, mindlessly theocratic society forces on us, and we have the power to stop its destructive cycle by fighting back and by making intelligent choices involving sex and drugs and money and relationships and the way we live our lives—and by using our lives as examples of success and humanity and love that other gay people can see and respect and emulate and achieve more and more easily.

We’re proud because after all we’ve been through, the world increasingly continues to notice and respect us and enthusiastically appropriate the often fabulous culture we’ve assembled from the common struggles and glorious diversity of our disparate lives.

We’re proud because more and more often and in more and more contexts our country and our culture see the fact that we’re gay as frankly boring.

We’re proud because especially this month and always all year we’re celebrating with parties and street fairs and parades overflowing with drag queens, leather queens, muscle queens, dad-bod queens, glitter queens, you’d-never-even-know-they-were-queens queens and even straight-but-honorary-queens-for-a-day queens, and together we can see beyond the pride in the parades of our lives and together celebrate the underlying Pride in the parades of our lives.

Quite simply, we’re proud that we have so incredibly much to be proud of.

Bitch Kitty bids you all a scowly goodnight

Asses, asses and more asses

Read all about these asses and their asses here

I find myself having a difficult time caring about these two self-absorbed asses and what they're about to face, but I am worried that the evangelical American Taliban will blow this story into a rallying cry around this "proof" that all gay people are perverted degenerates who brazenly commit "religious insults" (because -- for the purposes of this one specific news-cycle outrage -- the American Taliban will suddenly become VERY concerned about the cultural sensitivities of foreign religions) and then dotard will opportunistically climb on board to get points for hating gays AND punishing them -- though, as always, he'll have zero influence on anything to do with their punishment or anything else in the world for that matter -- and his shit-drooling minions will be emboldened to exhibit even more hate toward even more people in this pervasively toxic political environment he and his mouth-breathing orbit continue to breed, grope and propagate.

Pence will hurl anything he finds in his diaper at Constitutionally protected freedoms and basic human decency

We're here. And we salute you.

For all the irrational hatred and the isolationist hypocrisy and the manipulative demagoguery our pathological failure of a president and his ethically grotesque party are using to tear this country apart morally, socially and intellectually ... for all the ignorance they've perpetuated and the lies they've parroted to shore up their base ... for all the ugliness and hostility and racism and sexism and phobias they've unleashed from the dungeons and the shadows and the basest instincts of humankind in the last weeks alone ... they've ironically and unintentionally and no doubt regrettably inspired something quite beautiful: a mass uprising of love and support for every person they vilify and every minority they oppress and every demographic they scapegoat in their bloodthirsty quest to dehumanize and destroy us all for their own gain.

And if you're a trans person -- especially if you're trans military personnel -- we want you to know we're here.

There are legions of us who have been and who currently are and who will continue to be your friends and allies and champions with no judgments, no condemnations and no barriers. We may not have been as visible to you as we'd have liked in the past out of consideration for your privacy or lack of a forum to communicate with you or out of concern that we might inadvertently say or do something awkward or uncomfortable or insensitive or even uncloseting around you. But we're here. And it is now our moral and social and just simply human imperative to make sure you know who we are.

Whether you're just coming to terms with your need to transition, beginning to comprehend the emotional and physical and social journey ahead of you, taking the first tentative steps in changing your persona and your presentation and your name, or standing bravely and confidently and proudly at any point on the transition continuum ... our primary interest in your trans identity is that you are safe and healthy and happy and treated as the human -- the FULL human -- you are.

We may never fully comprehend the extent of what your personal or collective journey has entailed -- and we may ask a lot of questions both out of curiosity and a sincere need to better understand where you've been and where you're going.

But we're here. And we stand with you as proud and grateful citizens and in our public restroom and at the dawn of a new sense of community. And we want you to know we are profoundly grateful for your service and we love and respect you just as you are. Or just as you need to be.

We're here.

#TransBan
#TransRights
#TransMilitaryBan
#TransRightsAreHumanRights

They're claiming you as their messiah

And now they're expecting you to deliver on the promises they clearly heard you make.

All that hate stands for

You're not even REMOTELY smart enough to extricate yourself from the hate you've worked over a year to create and feed and now watch explode violently in our country and our world. This emasculated shithead attempt -- on a meaningless TWEET -- to urge the nation you pathologically divided to "come together" is as worthless and contemptible and worthy of extermination as you are.

Jesus fuck. Get assassinated already.

With all your catastrophic bullshit #InfrastructureWeek and #MadeInAmericaWeek failures, THIS is what you focus on? Lying about medical costs to hate transgender soldiers?

Transgender soldiers actually serve our country in the military. Chickenshit pussies like you run away because your heels hurt.

Saturday stuff

1. Sing show tunes
2. Go to the gym
3. Troll pants-wetting cretins who don't know the difference between the Salem witch trials and The Crucible

No. I'm not done being furious about this.

The ACA -- like any early-generation social program -- has its flaws, but it's designed to allow for those flaws to be addressed and corrected as they manifest themselves. The ACA has given millions of Americans -- including me -- reasonably affordable access to vital healthcare that was actively denied to us in the catastrophes of our country's supply-side healthcare model.

For you to actively -- HATEFULLY -- mischaracterize any sick HUMAN BEINGS the ACA may have failed as "Obamacare victims" to make them pawns in your divisive political propaganda instead of working to fix whatever failed them so they can get the medical attention they need is so beyond immoral and unethical that it should bring us all to our knees. And I'm so beyond tolerance for this administration that I'm not afraid to say I actively wish catastrophic medical victimhood on everyone who conceived of and works to perpetuate this moral terrorism.