Gay and lesbian ‘leaders’ sell us out

I hate gay and lesbian business owners. They sell us gay men and lesbians out every time.

My favorite thing is to peruse a typical gay and lesbian publication and see all of the ads for alcohol and for gay and lesbian bars and clubs – and the rehab ads. They get us coming and going! Not to mention all of the images of Adonises that give average gay men a complex about their body image.

Let’s fucking face it: We gay men and lesbians have been reduced to a target audience.

Fight for equal human and civil rights? No, we are to be consumers! Good consumers!

Gay and lesbian “leaders,” especially gay and lesbian business “leaders,” sell us out every time.

I’ll use a local example. Not to (excessively) pick on this guy, but to use him as an example of the typical gay and lesbian business “leader” who puts his own pocketbook far above the Much Bigger Picture:

In the Sacramento Bee story titled “Gay Leaders Wary of Boycotting Prop. 8′s Supporters,” the publisher of one of the local gay and lesbian rags, Outword, Fred Palmer, is quoted as having said that he opposes boycotting a business because an individual from that business contributed to Proposition 8. (In most cases when a business has been boycotted, it’s because the owner or an owner of that business contributed to the pro-Prop 8 campaign. It would logically follow that if a business owner hates fags and dykes, fags and dykes might not want to give that business owner their money. Duh.)

The Bee story notes that Palmer is president of the Rainbow Chamber of Commerce, the local gay and lesbian chamber of commerce.

Gee, do chambers of commerce tend to care about people and people’s rights — or do they tend to care about $$$?

Kaaa-ching!!!

The Bee also reports:

Lester Neblett, executive director of the Sacramento Gay and Lesbian Center, advocates spending with businesses that support gay rights, as opposed to the kind of protests that targeted the Music Circus and Leatherby’s ice cream.

“The gay community has a lot of discretionary money available to them. They can use this wisely,” he said. “We’re continuing to encourage people to support people who support us. That’s been the word that we’ve tried to get out to the community all the time.”

Gee, maybe Prop 8 wouldn’t have passed if our “leaders” could fucking lead, if they actually had our best interests at heart.

Palmer strikes me as being more concerned about losing advertising revenue more than he’s concerned about anything else, and Neblett just sounds like a coward who doesn’t want to — gasp! — offend anyone.

Palmer should be careful, lest we boycott his rag that probably does us more harm than good anyway, by encouraging us to become self-loathing, alcoholic, sexaholic, consumeristic zombies for his own personal profit.

And Lester Neblett — with a milquetoast name like that maybe he couldn’t help but be a coward. He needs to grow a pair or step aside for someone else who already has a pair, maybe even a lesbian, maybe even preferably a lesbian.

Our “leaders” aren’t leading, and so we individual gay men and lesbians are taking things into our own hands, especially with the organizing power of the Internet – whether our self-serving, wussy ”leaders” like it or not. They need to actually fucking lead, follow or at least get out of the fucking way.

Prop 8 = American Taliban

I saw that on a sign at the protest of the passage of the fascist, anti-American Proposition 8 at the state Capitol here in Sacramento on Sunday.

And it’s so accurate.

The Mormons and the Catholics (among other haters) who gave money to the pro-Proposition 8 campaign are now being outed (so to speak…) and boycotted.

One guy, a Mormon who worked at a Sacramento theater company as its artistic director, resigned today after the theater company and he took some heat over the fact that he gave $1,000 to the pro-Prop 8 campaign.

I don’t feel sorry for him. You work for a theater company and give $1,000 to keep gay men and lesbians down and expect that to go over well? WTF???

If I gave money toward a hateful, bigoted proposition designed to deny a historically oppressed minority group its equal civil and human rights – and such donations are public record — I would expect there to be repercussions.

But the Mormons and the Catholics and the other haters who gave significant sums of money to pass Prop 8 and are now facing backlash, including boycotts — there is an ice cream eatery here in Sacramento called Leatherby’s that, I discovered, gave $20,000 to the pro-Prop 8 campaign, and I’ll never give them another fucking penny again — but they are whining that they are the victims.

No, fuck that shit.

If you are a Mormon or a Catholic or another assorted wingnut and you oppose abortion, don’t have one. If you are a Mormon or a Catholic or another assorted wingnut and you oppose same-sex marriage, then don’t marry someone of your own sex. Ditto for premarital sex, porn, marijuana, etc.: if it’s against your belief system, then don’t do it; but keep your church out of my state (to quote yet another protest sign that I saw on Sunday).

The “Christo”fascists are arguing, surreally, that if we don’t allow them to impose their Dark-Ages beliefs on the rest of us who are sane, then we’re somehow violating their religious freedoms. No, it’s pretty fucking simple: You have the religious freedom to believe what you want to believe and to live according to those beliefs, as long as you don’t hurt anyone else. Trying to take away others’ rights is hurting them, and the harming of others is where your religious freedoms end. 

But, just as the “Islamofascist” members of the Taliban want to dictate to everyone else what they may and may not do, so do the Mormons and the Catholics and the other “Christo”fascists.

It’s not enough for them to be ignorant, hateful and miserable themselves; they want the rest of us to be miserable too, because misery loves company.

Yet another sign at the protest here in Sacramento on Sunday read simply: “This means war.”

Yup.

We gay men and lesbians were minding our own fucking business. The Repugnican-dominated California Supreme Court in May ruled that we have the constitutional right to marriage, that separate is not equal (yet another message on some of the signs at Sunday’s protest…).

Fearful that someone might actually be happy and free — and that, God forbid, this happiness and freedom might spread across the land like a cancer! – the Mormon cult and the Catholic church poured millions of dollars into the pro-Prop 8 campaign, flooding the state with false and misleading advertisements, not entirely unlike the smear campaign that the Nazis (who also persecuted homosexuals, which my protest sign reminded people on Sunday) perpetrated upon the Jews.

That is why Prop 8 passed: because the modern-day Nazis, most of them from out of state, pumped millions of dollars into the pro-Prop 8 campaign.

Because we Californian gay men and lesbians were minding our own fucking business, trying to have ourselves some life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, which is supposed to be guaranteed to all Americans, and these “Christo”fascists made an unprovoked attack upon us, they declared war against us.

When you declare an unprovoked war against a group, prepare for some backlash.

To hear the Mormons whine about how they’ve always been the victims when they started this fight is nauseating and is indicative of how the Mormons clearly don’t follow the teachings of Jesus Christ, but are nothing but an ignorant, fearful, hateful, lying cult.

And to hear the Mormons and the Catholics and the other assorted wingnuts cry and whine about how their rights are being violated because of the backlash after the passing of Prop 8 is disingenuous beyond belief.

The anti-American “Christo”fascists who gave money to the pro-Prop 8 campaign and who voted yes on Prop 8 exercised their right to do so.

Those of us real Americans who don’t want our nation to become an American Taliban, to be ruled by the likes of the Mormons and the Catholics and the other “Christo”fascists with their Dark-Ages mentality, have the right to fight back within legal means.

That means boycotts. That means publicly chastising those who gave significant sums of money to the pro-Prop 8 campaign. That means holding public protests. That means using the court system, such as asking the California Supreme Court to overturn Prop 8, as we have done. (California voters in 1994 passed the hateful, bigoted, anti-immigrant Proposition 187 by 59 percent, but a federal court struck it down as unconstitutional, so there is precedent for a proposition passed by California voters to deprive a historically oppressed minority group of its human rights to be struck down by a court as unconstitutional.)

We will overcome. 

We didn’t start this war, but we will win this war.