Burning Man Update

Well, it seems like our little group of three local guys trying to do Burning Man together has dissolved. Oh well. I'm still committed to going anyway. Two of us have decided to continue on and try to make it work. We're supposed to meet this Monday. I'm also in contact with a couple of gay guys in San Francisco. Ideally it would work out so that the two groups merge and become one.

Battlestar Galactica Next

Finally some real news! Rumors are that the SyFy channel is contemplating a new BSG spinoff. Woohoo!

Irrelevancies

Friday of this past weekend I finally wore the kilt I bought at Mid Atlantic Leather weekend out. Needless to say a lot of people played with it/me all night long as well as asking if had on any underwear. Of course I didn't.

Then on Saturday I wore my new five fingered shoes to the naked cocktails and the party afterwards. I also wore them to Costco the next day as well.

This last pic was taken in a dressing room of the Levis store in Tyson's mall. Very often when I go into dressing rooms the BF comes with me. I like him to come so that I can get his opinion and also because since we wear the same sizes he often tries on whatever I'm going to buy and vice-versa. Well at the Levis store the changing room attendant was this cutist little 18ish blond-hair'd boy. When we told him we only needed one room he jokingly said we would only have 2 minutes. We laughed. He really was joking.

Porn is Good

Finally, just the justification that we've all been waiting for...

But seriously, I am by nature a scientist and so tend to put a lot more stock in good studies than anectodes. Perhaps the issue isn't porn though. Perhaps it is in the inherent harm that we do to ourselves when we try to deny our nature that has been built up over the course of millenia. This doesn't mean that we cannot progress. It just means that lying about who we are is counter-productive.

Despite the widespread and increasing availability of sexually explicit materials, according to national FBI Department of Justice statistics, the incidence of rape declined markedly from 1975 to 1995. This was particularly seen in the age categories 20–24 and 25–34, the people most likely to use the Internet. The best known of these national studies are those of Berl Kutchinsky, who studied Denmark, Sweden, West Germany, and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. He showed that for the years from approximately 1964 to 1984, as the amount of pornography increasingly became available, the rate of rapes in these countries either decreased or remained relatively level. Later research has shown parallel findings in every other country examined, including Japan, Croatia, China, Poland, Finland, and the Czech Republic. In the United States there has been a consistent decline in rape over the last 2 decades, and in those countries that allowed for the possession of child pornography, child sex abuse has declined. Significantly, no community in the United States has ever voted to ban adult access to sexually explicit material. The only feature of a community standard that holds is an intolerance for materials in which minors are involved as participants or consumers.


In terms of the use of pornography by sex offenders, the police sometimes suggest that a high percentage of sex offenders are found to have used pornography. This is meaningless, since most men have at some time used pornography. Looking closer, Michael Goldstein and Harold Kant found that rapists were more likely than nonrapists in the prison population to have been punished for looking at pornography while a youngster, while other research has shown that incarcerated nonrapists had seen more pornography, and seen it at an earlier age, than rapists. What does correlate highly with sex offense is a strict, repressive religious upbringing

Read more here.

Racial Perspectives

Recently I was talking to a black friend of mine who was recounting a sexual encounter that he had had with a white guy. Now, for the record I know this friend to date whites, blacks and latinos at a minimum and is obviously comfortable around all. Perhaps he has a racial preference for dating, but I am completely unaware of it.

While in the midst of having sex the white guy says to my friend 'I love your black skin.' I think I can safely say that all black guys that date white guys have heard some version of this at least a few times. My friend asked me how would I feel if someone had asked me this. He said that it didn't cause him to bail out on the sex, but that he didn't like it at all.

So what does a black guy think when he hears this?

We hear that we have been reduced to a melanin fetish. Our partner doesn't see us as complete human beings, but rather the stereotypes connotated with by our skin. That there is nothing special about us that attracted this person other than being breathing and being black and that any person with a similar skin tone would have done just as well.

So what the hell is a white guy thinking when he says it?

Well, first the problem with the statement is that sometimes the white guy means exactly what the black guy thought he meant. But not always...

Sometimes what the white guy is saying is that although some people may discriminate against you because of your skin, it is not a barrier for him. That he finds beauty in the very thing that some say lessens you. Or... he may mean nothing deeper than when we say that someone looks good with a tan.

Honestly the statement has never bothered me probably because I am a hopeless optimist and always think the best. Nonetheless... a recommendation for white guys (probably the same for girls too), just don't say it. Not because there is inherently anything wrong with the words but because the chance if it being misconstrued is great.

Besides, if you do say it, you just might not get laid.

Naked Happenings

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Bullshit

Not only is this video from the Onion is hilarious but it also makes an incredibly good point about the state of our news.

Burn, Burn, Burn

They danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes

I came across this today on one of the Burning Man forums. I love it!

Another Casualty

Two posts in the same day on the same theme. Both were people ravaged by the consequence of a society that resulted in them believing that they could not live life as gay.

This time it's the suicide of Marie Osmond's son. At least according to this article in the National Enquirer (I know, but hey they did break the John Edwards story) the 18 year old Michael Osmond jumped from 8th floor of his apartment building.

Another Outed Republican

Last week Californian state senator, Roy Ashburn, was arrested for DUI when he left a gay bar (story here). What made this story notable was that the fact that he was a Republican that consistently voted against gay rights while in office.

Somehow stories such as these don't make me feel happy or vindicated. Rather, I feel sad. Most of us over a certain age have passed through a time when we grappled with our sexuality. Try to remember how this was a time when it felt like that the world was arrayed against us. It was a time when our inability to even fathom life as gay either forced us into mental dissonance or into a life filled with depression and self-loathing. Now imagine if those forces were so strong… or if you were a just a little weaker how your life might be if you still lived in that state.

This is Roy Ashburn as well as the others in the recent string political outings including Larry Craig, Foley and perhaps others such as Crist. This phenomenon is not unique to politicians but is a constant mental anguish experienced by millions.

So I think of the lifetime of pain and self-hatred and above all else it saddens me that we live in a culture in which some feel that they are forced to live like that.

Dance Naked

Came across this video while reading the Naturists, Young and Active! blog. It supposedly depicts frat pledges that are forced to go naked all the time during the pledging process and are told to do stuff. Not sure I buy that, but still... looks good.

See the original posting here.

Criminal

I think payday loan services are among the worst type of organization. They prey upon the weakest and most uninformed in our society under the guise of performing a supposed service.

I ran across this quote today from The Atlantic:

A good friend of mine got sucked into the payday loan scam a while back. They had some medical bills and things got tight so they borrowed $600 from a payday loan place. The terms of the loan were as follows:

1. The loan had to be paid off in full all at once. So in any given month you were not permitted to pay down any fraction of the principal. You had to come up with all $600 all at once.
2. The interest rate on the loan was 50%/month. So to keep the loan current it mean paying $300/month.

This of course meant that they would have to be able to scrap together $900 in any given month in order to pay off the loan. Given that they were struggling to get $600 together in the first place, getting $900 all in one month would have been a stretch. Paying the $300/month was painful but doable, but the problem was that they couldn't get out from under the loan because they couldn't get all of the principal together in any given month.

 

Terrible! But in then name capitalism we allow them to continue to rape the poor.

Bodily Harm

This article describes how a NJ family were ordered by the police to cover up a naked snow-woman. First, it's not real; it's not even life-like. Second, it was a replica of the famous Venus de Milo, so it was definitely art. But most of all, are we that scared of nudity? That's what I thought when I saw the article. Are our bodies that evil? The unhealthy insanity of our society is killing me.

Palin

A quote from Sarah on the Jay Leno:

I studied journalism, my college degree there in communications. And now I am back there wanting to build some trust back in our media. I think the mainstream media is quite broken and I think there needs to be the fairness, the balance in there — that’s why I joined Fox. Fair and balanced, yes. You know because, Jay, those years a go that I studied journalism it was all about the who, what, when, where, and why, it was not so much the opinion interjected in hard news stories...

I can't be only person that is dumb-struck by her inability to actually say anything.

Marriage Comes to the District

I'm a strong believer in marriage but always hated the idea of having to go through a wedding. Nonetheless, it affected me more than I thought it would when I heard the news that the Congress allowed DC's new marriage law to go into effect. It brought a smile to my face and suddenly I was dreaming of a beautiful wedding with attended by my friends and family. It made me think of several friends of my mine that already have set dates for their weddings.

Marriage just became a lot more real for me today. Congratulations to DC and America!