Forget the Red or the Blue Pill, Neo! Give me the GREEN Pill, Morpheus! [It's a reference to the movie The Matrix, available at a video rental store, mini-mart, or liquor store near you.]
For that matter, I'm sick and tired of all this red states and blue states. What do you get if you mix the red, white, and blue all together? You get the most patriotic of all colors, lavender!
Let me set you a little scene in the cable TV of your mind's inner eye. A gay man is sitting in his apartment in San Francisco's Castro District, the homosexual heart of the queerest city in America. He's doing his job: watching television to find good bits to write about, but he's wearing a pink t-shirt while he does it, and leafing through newspapers from The Onion to the Washington Post [They put out a dead-tree edition, too! Who knew??] to the Morgunblaðeð from Iceland. He watches everything from CNN to Comedy Central to CBS to CBN, plus the National Geographic Channel just because it's really cool. (He wants to bond with his father over Megastructures and Seconds from Disaster because his dad was a failure-and-damage analyst, specializing in tornadoes, hail storms, and, oh, what was it — oh, yes, hurricanes.For that matter, I'd like to bond with you, Dad, about the trip the two of us took to Biloxi, Mississippi, and Mobile, Alabama, at the very end of 1978, to look at hurricane damage ... but I digress. Our fictional gay man in the Castro is watching Weekends at the DL on Comedy Central. The show is pretty good so far, the first episode our hero has caught, although he has several of them still on his TiVo, but then we cut to commercial break.
What could the people at Comedy Central come up with to make our viewer not only watch but actually slo-mo the commercials? How about some ads for BOD body spray? The breathy bimbos gasping about how they "want your hot bod" really don't do much for our man in San Fran, so he slo-mo's through the scenes with the hunky surfer boyz who ain't got no shirts on they bodies and gets the girl right out of that fantasy. Then they run another variant from the same ad campaign, later in the same commercial break. Be still, my beating crotch! My dear, I think I have the vapours!
But yet again I digress. The thing about Weekends at the DL is that D.L. Hughley puts together a diverse panel of guests, often including an openly gay guest. [I know this from the promos that I've seen.] They talk openly about racism and homophobia and other forms of bigotry.
Where all of this comes into some relation to the Castro Street Fair is that the theme of the CSF this year is a little bit different. In recent years, the CSF has been very much about popping off into a fantasy land where we can pretend for a few hours that people like George W. Bush don't exist or at least don't matter to us.
This year, the theme of the Castro Street Fair is "Engage." The gay "community" is fractured; to quote a song lyric, "Is this my community? Sometimes I want to mutiny." Worse yet, many people in the community are disengaged politically. (Governor Schwanzenego vetoed the gay marriage bill by the faultiest of faulty logic: if he truly felt that the courts should resolve the conflict between Prop. 22 and AB 849, he should have allowed the bill to proceed without his signature and go to the state Supreme Court so that the conflict could be resolved.) We need to engage if we want to be able to get engaged.
Much as I hate large crowds, I think I'll go mingle for a while this afternoon.
For that matter, I'm sick and tired of all this red states and blue states. What do you get if you mix the red, white, and blue all together? You get the most patriotic of all colors, lavender!
Let me set you a little scene in the cable TV of your mind's inner eye. A gay man is sitting in his apartment in San Francisco's Castro District, the homosexual heart of the queerest city in America. He's doing his job: watching television to find good bits to write about, but he's wearing a pink t-shirt while he does it, and leafing through newspapers from The Onion to the Washington Post [They put out a dead-tree edition, too! Who knew??] to the Morgunblaðeð from Iceland. He watches everything from CNN to Comedy Central to CBS to CBN, plus the National Geographic Channel just because it's really cool. (He wants to bond with his father over Megastructures and Seconds from Disaster because his dad was a failure-and-damage analyst, specializing in tornadoes, hail storms, and, oh, what was it — oh, yes, hurricanes.For that matter, I'd like to bond with you, Dad, about the trip the two of us took to Biloxi, Mississippi, and Mobile, Alabama, at the very end of 1978, to look at hurricane damage ... but I digress. Our fictional gay man in the Castro is watching Weekends at the DL on Comedy Central. The show is pretty good so far, the first episode our hero has caught, although he has several of them still on his TiVo, but then we cut to commercial break.
What could the people at Comedy Central come up with to make our viewer not only watch but actually slo-mo the commercials? How about some ads for BOD body spray? The breathy bimbos gasping about how they "want your hot bod" really don't do much for our man in San Fran, so he slo-mo's through the scenes with the hunky surfer boyz who ain't got no shirts on they bodies and gets the girl right out of that fantasy. Then they run another variant from the same ad campaign, later in the same commercial break. Be still, my beating crotch! My dear, I think I have the vapours!
But yet again I digress. The thing about Weekends at the DL is that D.L. Hughley puts together a diverse panel of guests, often including an openly gay guest. [I know this from the promos that I've seen.] They talk openly about racism and homophobia and other forms of bigotry.
Where all of this comes into some relation to the Castro Street Fair is that the theme of the CSF this year is a little bit different. In recent years, the CSF has been very much about popping off into a fantasy land where we can pretend for a few hours that people like George W. Bush don't exist or at least don't matter to us.
This year, the theme of the Castro Street Fair is "Engage." The gay "community" is fractured; to quote a song lyric, "Is this my community? Sometimes I want to mutiny." Worse yet, many people in the community are disengaged politically. (Governor Schwanzenego vetoed the gay marriage bill by the faultiest of faulty logic: if he truly felt that the courts should resolve the conflict between Prop. 22 and AB 849, he should have allowed the bill to proceed without his signature and go to the state Supreme Court so that the conflict could be resolved.) We need to engage if we want to be able to get engaged.
Much as I hate large crowds, I think I'll go mingle for a while this afternoon.
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