You can see by our outfits that we are both cowboys

#Oklahoma! #CowboyHats #TheStreetsOfLaredo

Happy #Hallowmeme!

1 day till #Hallowmeme!

2 days till #Hallowmeme!

3 days till #Hallowmeme!

4 days till #Hallowmeme!

5 days till #Hallowmeme!

6 days till #Hallowmeme!

7 days till #Hallowmeme!

8 days till #Hallowmeme!

9 days till #Hallowmeme!

There is an ENDLESSLY amusing hashtag thread on Twitter right now ...

Yup

#same

The corn is as high as a six-foot-one guy

#Iowa, bro!

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

#UnwantedIvanka

#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: The 50th Anniversary of Stonewall

Fifty years ago today, the New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn--a gay bar in Greenwich Village that catered to drag queens--in an ongoing campaign of harassment and intimidation specifically targeted at people wearing clothing that didn’t conform to the conventions of their “assigned gender.” These arrests usually led to people’s names and photographs being published in the newspaper … which carried the high risk of the them losing their jobs and even their families.

Usually the people submissively complied as they were being arrested. But this time they fought back. When an officer clubbed a black lesbian named Stormé DeLarverie over the head for complaining that her handcuffs were too tight, the crowd that had gathered outside the club had had enough. Marsha P. Johnson, a black drag queen, and Sylvia Rivera, a Latinx queen, were two of the first to actively resist the police that night, and their fellow queens joined them in throwing bricks, bottles and shot glasses at officers and effectively shutting down the raid. I mention these people’s ethnicities and orientations here to give credit to the non-white, non-cis-presenting people for showing the courage and gumption to initiate the fight back and start what ended up being six days of riots in the neighborhood surrounding the Stonewall Inn that finally ignited a national fight for the rights and equalities that everyone under the LGBTQ+ rainbow enjoys today.

Stonewall wasn’t the first riot in defiance of police raids; in 1959 angry gays fought police after a raid of Cooper’s Do-Nuts--a gay-friendly diner--in Los Angeles, and in 1966 a trans woman threw a cup of hot coffee in a police officer’s face in a raid at Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco, sparking a riot that inspired the city to acknowledge the trans community and develop a network of trans-specific social, mental-health and medical services. But Stonewall was the turning point. The police raid quickly drew a large mob whose collective lifetimes of oppression and discrimination boiled over into a violent revolt that trapped police in the bar until the NYC Tactical Patrol Force was dispatched to rescue them. Riots erupted the next night and through the week in the Christopher Street and other nearby gay neighborhoods, including one mob that threatened to burn down the offices of The Village Voice for describing the riots as "forces of faggotry" and "Sunday fag follies." The next year, an orginization called Chicago Gay Liberation organized a parade on the anniversary of the Stonewall riot, and the city has staged a parade on the last Saturday in June ever since.

Now every major metropolis and many smaller cities have pride parades and events, many of which spill beyond the last week of June to pop up in celebrations all year. But June is officially Pride month in the hearts and minds of gay people--and an exploding population of straight people and businesses large and small--and we owe it all to the brave gay people who had had enough and fought back at great risk to themselves and even to our community fifty years ago today.

THIS IS WHY WE CELEBRATE PRIDE.

#Pride101:

In 1983--at the height of the HIV and AIDS epidemic in the United States--the CDC instituted a lifteime ban of blood donations from gay men (specifically “men who have sex with men,” a distinction necessitated by a sizable population of MSM who refuse for any number of reasons to be identified as gay or bisexual). The ban was actually even broader than that; it also included women who have sex with MSM and transgender people. At the time, HIV was--and was perceived by the broader population to be exclusively--a “gay disease” and was gleefully used by religious hate groups to perpetuate their vilification of--and mock and exploit the deaths of--gay people. The ban was an extreme measure, but as 1980s technologies in HIV detection weren’t very effective it was seen as prudent--with no resistance from leading gay organizations--and it no doubt prevented an even larger American HIV epidemic. As HIV spread beyond the gay population, the infection demographics leveled out and HIV-detection technologies advanced, in 2015 the guidelines regarding blood donations from MSM were reduced from a lifetime ban to a one-year-of-celibacy ban. Today, the Insti HIV test--considered to be the most accurate--has a 99.96% accuracy rate, with results provided in one minute. (For the record, the relatively small populations of people with certain medical conditions, people on certain medications and people who have had blood transfusions are subject to restrictions and bans.) With often desperately low stockpiles of donated blood in the United States, there is no reason to specifically ban blood donations from MSM based on outdated demographic medical information and stigmas regarding HIV. But progress is being made; many 2020 Democratic candidates include a repeal of the ban in their platforms. The march to erase the stigma and embrace 21st Century medicine is on, and gay people without other risks are proudly willing to step up and do our part as blood donors.