Live 2 Learn

Mississippi Burning was a movie produced about a tumultuous summer in Mississippi when three Civil Rights workers were killed and buried under an earthen dam outside of Philadelphia in Neshoba County. Some of the events in the movie were fictionalized or based on things that happened in other counties like the one in which I grew up – Pike County. That summer was bizarre and frightening for a ten year old kid like me. Lying in bed at night I could hear explosions that sounded like thunder but would turn out to be a “Colored Church” hit with a Coke bottle filled with gasoline, it’s “wick” made from a torn cloth inserted in the bottle neck ignited just before being thrown through a church window. A couple of nights Daddy asked me if I wanted to go see the fire and I would ride with him to sit and watch a church burn down to its foundation. Even though he was a product of his upbringing and held racist views himself he would shake his head and say, “This is not right – the Klan has gone...

SHIT! Not that question! I really like Facebook but now it's making me have to come out all over again. I'm 57 friggin' years old and I'm out dammit. Everyone at work knows I'm Gay, everyone at church knows I'm Gay, everyone in my family knows I'm Gay - my partner would add everyone who has seen me knows I'm Gay (here I pause to squint menacingly at him...). BUT and this is a BIG BUT - 98% of the people with whom I graduated from high school don't know. I didn't know I was Gay when we were in high school - wait, not true - I was completely in denial about being Gay. I first "fooled around" with another guy in 5th grade but thought it was a phase. 6th grade, 7th grade, 8th...by the time I graduated high school I could count nine boys with whom I had sex but still I thought I was straight. I had never kissed any of those guys cause that would mean that I was Queer and I wasn't! I had a steady girlfriend - so I was straight - "str...

(Names are changed) A controversial photo appeared in 1989 called "Piss Christ" (click on the title of this post to be taken to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piss_Christ) It garnered a lot of attention primarily because an anti-National Endowment for the Arts group used it as exhibit one in its attempt to cut or eliminate tax-payer funding of the NEA. The photo was of a crucifix submerged in a beaker of urine - the artist's own urine. The argument was that tax payers who were offended by such displays should not have to have their tax dollars go to fund the work. The NEA really took a beating and was made to look like they were anti-Christian, anti-Christ (double meaning intended), and pro-atheist. The photo had a different impact on me - it reminded me of an event from my childhood that I had suppressed so well that I had never thought of it for almost 30 years. Here's the story as I remember it now. I grew up in a small town where the largest facility owned and opera...

Today I decided to go home for lunch - my third sinus infection in two months was making me feel like I needed some alone time. After fixing a sandwich and sitting down at the table I clicked the television on to Court TV or maybe it's called TruTV now? Anyway, coverage was focused on the conclusion of a trial involving a man accused in the robbery and murder of a Gay man. It seems that three men had been arrested when they were selling the victim's car and the defendant on trial admitted that he was involved in selling the car but that he had not participated in the murder. He actually said when he found out they were going to kill the man to get the car he told them he didn't want any part of murder but would help sell the car. He must have gotten bad legal advice because admitting what he did made him as guilty as if he had pulled the trigger (or in this case, handled the knife) under Florida law. Or maybe he was just stupid because between his arrest and the time of tri...

In February, my company held a conference in San Francisco. I am responsible for designing and delivering the conference and the audience is the VP population of my employer. There are 130 VPs who come from all over the world so the conference is expensive and important - in other words, it's a risky part of my work responsibilities each year. This year for a "give-away" for the participants of the conference we ordered beautiful crystal three-sided pyramids that could act as a paperweight - each side had a graphic from the conference to reinforce the key conference messages constantly for participants. The pyramids are about five inches tall and weigh four pounds each. The top of the pyramid and each corner of the base are very sharp points. When we got the mock-up several weeks before the conference we joked that in addition to reinforcing learning the pyramids could be used as a deadly weapon. At the end of the three day conference most of the pyramids were left o...

Senator Larry Craig REPUBLICAN from Idaho resigned from the Senate after his fellow Republicans basically drummed him out, once it was revealed that he plead guilty to lesser charges attempting to make an arrest "go away" after he was caught soliciting gay sex from an undercover cop in a Minneapolis airport men's room. Whew! Long sentence. Not as long as the "sentence" former-Senator Craig will now serve - the rest of his life. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/02/washington/02cong.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1188833432-HihlfGKMg0zSlrXLeG3DbA I was not familiar with Craig until all this happened. He was just another stereotypical Republican homophobe voting against adding sexual orientation to the Hate Crimes Act, voting for the so-called Protection of Marriage bill, sanctimoniously condemning Bill Clinton as a "nasty, naughty, boy" when the Monica story broke. He was actively anti-gay like many Republicans and like many persecutor...

I'll start this entry by saying that I don't know exactly where I am going with it - it hasn't been thought through like my other entries but by the time I finish I hope that I understand a reaction I had a couple of weeks ago and maybe both of us can learn from it? It was my birthday and to celebrate my partner invited four of our friends to dinner at Sampaio - my favorite Brazilian restaurant in Austin. We all know each other, some better than others, so I was looking forward to a nice, relaxing, fun conversation. We are all gay, fairly liberal politically, literate, educated, well-read and skilled conversationalists - what could go wrong? Religion. Maybe that's the biggest source of difference for us and in hindsight perhaps something we should have avoided. It started innocently enough; we were talking about relationships - the six of us constituted two single guys and two couples. One of the single guys, let's call him Jay, said that he made a pact with a singl...