Strange Radiation Archive
« bookings | Main | </sarcasm> »
Mar 16 07: bile
I have not been in the best of moods for the last few days. Not because I lose my job tomorrow, and have not yet managed to replace it, although this is entirely true. No, I blame the norovirus. For the second time in a single season, I have managed to catch the stomach flu. Not nearly as bad a case as the one back in January, but still: my temperature has gone up and down (and up and down and up and down) enough times since Sunday evening that I think my moodiness is entirely justified.
However. The stomach flu has nothing on the kick to the gut I took this evening, when I read Garrison Keillor’s new column in Salon:
The country has come to accept stereotypical gay men — sardonic fellows with fussy hair who live in over-decorated apartments with a striped sofa and a small weird dog and who worship campy performers and go in for flamboyance now and then themselves. If they want to be accepted as couples and daddies, however, the flamboyance may have to be brought under control. Parents are supposed to stand in back and not wear chartreuse pants and black polka-dot shirts. That’s for the kids. It’s their show.
Perhaps, Mr. Keillor, you are trying to draw a line here between the gay parents you seem to know and the ones I know, who are not flaming queens straight out of Lowbrow Sitcom #317. But you never mention anyone like the folks I know. You don’t really even acknowledge that they might exist. So I can’t tell if you’re against all faggots being parents or just the swishy ones. (I will go out on a limb and assume that attention to décor would be a point in the favor of dual-mommy families; and that in such cases too much sportsy outdoorsy flannel-wearing solidity would be the step across the line. Feel free to tell me otherwise.) But either way? Fuck you.
The last time I was sick with this flu, I vividly remember lying in bed and listening to your radio program on Sunday morning, and how much I enjoyed it. Your radio program has long been, for me, one of the great joys of a Sunday spent lounging in bed. But I don’t think I’ll be able to do that again for a while. Right now the idea of it turns my stomach.
For longer and better-argued meditations on the above — for instance, I didn’t even bring up the breathtaking hypocrisy of a serial adulterer’s preaching on the sanctity of man-woman monogamy, and that’s in here too — see PZ Myers or the incandescent Dan Savage.