Robert David Sullivan

Lively debate on Boston nightlife typically takes place on Sunday afternoon

The debate over Boston's dull nightlife, and the possibility of improving it, has flared up again in recent weeks. The spark was the launch of the Future Boston Alliance, a group that advocates for a "loosened-up" city; it was unsurprisingly brushed off by the 19-year-old Menino adminstration. (Note to blog followers primarily interested in my Top 100 Sitcom Episodes countdown: This is not off-topic, as the depiction of community-building is one thing that interests me about sitcoms.)

This morning, on the Sunday of a long weekend when just about everyone with the means has fled Boston, the Globe's Dante Ramos weighed with an indictment of the "Boston bar buzz-kill":

Nightlife — the bars, clubs, and restaurants where people hang out after hours — is a major part of the image a city presents to the world, or at least to a crucial sliver of entrepreneurial, highly mobile workers who are prone to comparison-shopping among cities. Yet Boston’s anti-fun image isn’t just bad publicity; it’s written into the law. Happy-hour drink promotions are banned statewide under a Dukakis-era state measure meant to curb drunk driving. Another state law requires bars to obtain a specific license before they allow patrons to dance. Boston’s entertainment license application asks venues to quantify their dartboards and wide-screen TVs. The rules are enforced. At a February concert at the House of Blues, Boston police broke up a mosh pit they deemed insufficiently supervised.

Time for gay marriage foes to get the slippery slope treatment

The "slippery slope" argument against gay marriage just won't go away, despite the lack of any evidence that polygamy and bestiality have yet flourished in places with marriage equality. (@dbernstein mischieveously tweeted today: "& we're getting tired of waiting in MA".)

Slate.com's David Weigel just posted an old video featuring presidential candidate Michelle Bachman declaring that, after gay marriage, "group marriage, polygamy, and things much worse may not be far behind." And The New York Times recently posed this question to academics: "With marriage expanding in once unimaginable ways, what might the next stage in this evolution be?

But as marriage equality becomes the status quo in more states, and as the opposition melts down to the religious right, my question is: What is at the bottom of the slippery slope if we deny marriage equality?

Human Rights Campaign offers special rights to GOP allies

Since four (out of 32) Republican senators put marriage equality over the top in New York, the Human Rights Campaign is pledging to help the GOP retain control of that legislative body. From The Capitol:

What the four Senate Republicans will have is strong support from gay rights groups, who will see the Republicans’ political survival as a badge of honor they can use to convince other lawmakers in other states to change their votes.

“No Republican lawmaker who voted yes on same-sex marriage has ever lost re-election for that vote,” said Brian Ellner, the chief strategist on the marriage bill from the Human Rights Campaign.

Marriage advocates are willing to spend anything to keep that statement accurate, no matter how difficult their races and no matter their other political leanings, he said.

“We will support a Republican senator against a Democrat,” Ellner said. “We will support a Republican senator who votes ‘yes’ against a gay Democrat.”

Oh, HRC, you always make it easy to guiltlessly throw away your fundraising pleas.

Why not thank the GOP Four by staying neutral, instead of giving them money to defeat pro-equality Democrats? Marriage equality is now supported by most New Yorkers (54% in one recent poll), but the HRC seems determined to treat the GOP Four as profiles in courage, unintentionally echoing the other side's argument that these senators have taken a huge risk by voting the way they did.

Anti-marriage gays & anti-gay straights both on the wane?

Andrew Sullivan recently had another go at the "gay left" and its supposed opposition to gay marriage, prompted by the release of marriage skeptic Michael Bronski's new book A Queer History of the United States.

It has always seemed chilling to me that gay leftists — when pushed to say what they really believe — want to keep gays in some sort of glorious, oppressed, marginalized position, until the majority agrees with the gay left's view of human nature, and revolutionizes straight society as well. This will never happen (and in my view, shouldn't).

Sullivan backed off a bit in a subsequent post, more or less admitting that the separatist strain in the gay rights movement is now pretty much limited to its oldest members. I'm not aware of any polling that has broken down the gay community by age groups, but my anecdotal impression is that the "Why would we want to get married?" crowd within the gay community is skewed toward the over-50 set, parallel to the "Why would we let them get married?" crowd in the general population. (In both cases, there is a small number of younger people who share the view of these elders, mostly for the security blanket of religious or ideological orthodoxy.)

I also think there's been a convergence among gay and straight younger Americans on attitudes toward sexuality and monogamy. That is, both groups endorse a period of exploration and experimentation in young adulthood, followed by a committed relationship and, in many cases, raising children. And even as gays and lesbians have sought marriage equality, the definition of monogamy has loosened a bit in straight society. I don't mean that actual cheating is condoned, but my impression is that some former taboos (watching porn, having "work spouses," enjoying flirtatious glances at the gym) aren't as marriage-threatening as in previous generations. I don't know if properly supervised lap dances are kosher for straight married people yet (as they are for many gay couples), but if they're seeking advice from Dan Savage, it seems only a matter of time.

Less repressive and patriarchal attitudes among straight people mean that gays and lesbians would have to really step things up to remain a separate, revolutionary force in American society, and I don't think many of us have the energy or inclination for a sexual arms race. I'm certainly not capable of doing anything to shock the straight(-appearing) college kids I see every day on the Orange Line.

Are we to demand that gay couples break up every few years (maybe each time someone gets a new ATM card) or get drummed out of the queer community? I'd rather just declare victory on the marriage front and enjoy the peace.

Note: I've worked with Michael Bronski back in my Boston Phoenix days, and he's a provocative and entertaining writer with a fine sense of humor — not the kind of stern militant that some might associate with the term "gay left."

Conversation starters for April 11

Here's what you can talk about if you get trapped in an elevator with a bunch of strangers today:

• Ezra Klein points out that about 3 percent of Planned Parenthood's services are connected to abortion, and Republican Party efforts to gut funding for the organization are more likely to increase unwanted pregnancies than to reduce politically incorrect terminations of such pregnancies. (An Andrew Sullivan reader disputes this stat.)


• San Francisco faces the closure of an iconic, 30-year-old gay bookstore (A Different Light) and an iconic, 30-year-old leather bar (The Eagle). Boston's anti-gentrification movement may not have many tears to shed over the West Coast changes, as it's still preoccupied with the closure of the iconic, 47-year-old Latino supermarket Hi-Lo Foods in Jamaica Plain.


• Dave Weigel speculates that Sarah Palin's plunge in the polls has been hastened by Donald Trump's takover of the "freak show" slot in coverage of American politics.


• A new Siena Poll has 58% of New York state residents in favor of gay marriage. Among Catholics, the number is 59%, more proof that there's no such thing as a "Catholic vote" and that Catholics pretty much mirror the political attitudes of whatever state they reside in.


• People had better things to do last weekend than see a remake of Arthur.


• The Globe reports that craigslist is taking business away from shady pawn shops and free-lance fencers, especially in the stolen bike resale market. 

Image from Planned Parenthood.

Why are American Catholics so gay for gay rights?

I'm not shocked, and certainly not disappointed, by a poll showing that most American Catholics disagree with their own church on gay rights. Though evangelical Protestants sometimes think they can make common cause with the once-reviled papists on "pelvic issues," the Vatican can't deliver many votes in American elections.

Why do so many American Catholics disregard their marching orders on sexual matters? I'm struck by one piece of data near the end of the report by the Public Religion Research Institute: 69 percent of polled Catholics say that one's sexual orientation cannot be changed, higher than the 63 percent among all Americans (and presumably much higher than the corresponding figure among evangelical Protestants).

The Catholic Church may have itself to blame for this, since social scientists are nearly unanimous in concluding that de-gayification programs are bunk, and the Vatican generally accepts the validity of scientific research. For example, I'm sure there are some Catholic creationists, but the Church does not have any problem with the theory of evolution (or the idea that the Earth has been around for 4 billion years), merely arguing that however we got here, God must have started the process. Kentucky's Creation Museum is a product of the Protestant Bible Belt; most Catholic priests would be embarrassed by it.

While more conservative Protestant denominations can simply tell gays to "stop being that way," Catholics find it harder to overlook the evidence that sexual orientation is unchangeable. The Church says, "We know you can't stop being that way, so just don't ever have sex," but most Catholics find this an unrealistic (and even cruel) position, so they reject it, much as they long ago decided to ignore the Church's ban on birth control.

It's remarkable that American Catholics don't follow the Vatican line, but the headlines may oversell the idea that Catholics are more gay-friendly than the US as a whole. Here are the PRRI's top bullet points on its press release:

How to torture both straight and gay young men

Jonathan Chait has an understandable response to a particularly cruel scientific experiment:

This makes me really glad I didn't enroll in college until 1990:

IN A COLLEGE CAMPUS STUDY in 1989, physically attractive people approached opposite-sex students and asked, “Would you go to bed with me tonight?” Not a single woman said yes, but seventy-five percent of men accepted the invitation. 

The only way my college romantic life could have been any more painful would be if, at some point, an attractive woman randomly propositioned me, and then informed me that it was just an experiment to see if I'd say yes.

I symphathize. I'll also point out that the gay male equivalent of this are the attractive young men who approach me in cruisy bars, ask me if I'm interested in having some fun, then give me a "safe sex" packet of condoms and lube before walking away.

Of course they mean well, and now that I'm older, I immediately know what they're up to. But it was kind of crushing when they were about my age and seemed, just for a minute, to be hitting on me.

Illiterate, intolerant, homophobic? 5 statistically flawed raps against Boston and the Northeast

I'm not really a hometown booster, and I've bitched about Boston enough to be told "Then why don't you leave?" many times. But my parochial pride has been stirred several times in the past few days by one thing that drives me battier than the Hub's famous rudeness: Sloppy statistics.

Here are five examples of knocks (or faint praise) against Boston, Massachusetts, and the Northeast that don't stand up to scrutiny.

As reported in USA Today, Boston is only the 12th "most literate city" in America, behind St. Louis and Cincinnati.

The complete survey by Central Connecticut University is here. Note that Boston ranks 3rd, behind only New York and Washington, in the number of periodicals published here. We're 4th in newspaper circulation. (My hunch is that New York, Los Angeles, and many Western cities rank poorly in this category because of the large number of people who don't speak English as their primary language.) And we're 5th in "Internet resources."

So why aren't we in the Top 10 overall? Mostly because Boston ranks a terrible 61st in bookstores per 10,000 people; New York City is tied for 65th. I suspect that this has more to do with the high cost of real estate than with locals' reading habits. There aren't many places in Boston or Manhattan where you can pay for a storefront in a busy retail district by selling used books (as opposed to clothes, wine, jewelry, or other easily marked-up items). Second-place St. Louis has a mystery bookstore; we'd probably still have one on Newbury Street rather than just online if tourists stopped coming to that trendy address.

Also, bookstores in Boston and New York are probably bigger, if less numerous, befitting a geographically compact metropolis. And the survey is apparently limited to the city proper, which means it doesn't count bookstores in Cambridge -- where many Bostonians shop.

"Dancing Queen," stunt blogs, and Gay Pride in Boston

No. 301: "Dancing Queen," by ABBA (1976)

This post is part of a countdown series on songs that have stuck in my head and are part of my iTunes "hit parade" of most-played tracks. See all the posts here.

Would you like a year's worth of blog posts on '70s disco hits? Sorry, "Dancing Queen" is important to me, but it's not much more representative of my taste than "Jessica" is. 

So the hunt for a blog gimmick goes on. And here's one that Lawrence/Julie & Julia Project beat me to. That blog is by a guy planning to watch the film Julie & Julia every single day for a year, each time finding something new to snark about:

Naturally, since Julie & Julia is a food movie, its characters tend to spend a lot of time chewing. So today, I tried to count every instance of chewing...

The film Julie & Julia was based on the book that was based on Julie Powell's blog about making every recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking over the course of one year. (That blog is no longer accessible online.)

Powell's multimedia success has a lot of us trying to think of ideas for blogs with similar hooks. Having a fixed end point seems like a great way to impose discipline and structure on what can be a sloppy, aimless medium. More cynically, it's a way to keep to readers who might otherwise get bored and wander off. (The TV series Lost similarly kept people interested by announcing the date of its demise a few years before the fact.) Maybe readers are curious to know if the blogger will meet his goal; maybe they just want to know how the hell someone plans to get 365 blog posts out of watching the same movie over and over. Either way, the blog gets visitors.

I've tried to come up with my own concept, but others are ahead of me. Watching a terrible movie every day for a year sounds like a natural, but Nathan Rabin has already done My Year of Flops. So how about My Year of Menu Typos? Or My Year of Finding and Eradicating Double Spaces? How about watching every episode of The Simpsons, or every film ever to win an Oscar for costume design, but doing so in reverse order? There's gotta be room for a Benjamin Button Pop Culture Blog.

A blogger called the Gay Groom has already considered one gimmick with superficial appeal: trying out everything listed in the how-to book The New Joy of Gay Sex. But there were complications:

[It] turned out that there were a number of things I just don’t want to do… like a big hunk under S (I suppose it’s rather like Julie Powell’s difficulty with having to cook Julia Child’s unappealing French aspics) and I’m surely not prepared to try Celibacy, Promiscuity or Suicide.

Nor am I.

Getting back to music, I'm not sure there's a New Joy entry on shirtless dancing in public, but I would qualify for that one partly because of "Dancing Queen." In the early '90s, Boston's Gay Pride Day ended with a huge dance party in City Hall. Yes, in the multi-story lobby of Boston City Hall, one of the most-hated (and also much-loved) buildings in American architecture. It was actually a great place for a dance party, thanks to the disorienting layout that doesn't work so well if you're trying to pay a parking ticket.

Rules of conduct for a 47-year-old gay man

I turn 47 later this week, and I want my friends to take away my toaster oven if I ever do any of the following:

*Earnestly explain that I'm only attracted to much younger men. Throw a drink in my face if I ever say something like, "I can't help it, guys my age just don't do anything for me." It is true that I find younger men more attractive, but who doesn't? Men, women, straight, gay -- almost everyone prefers to look at young adults. We even prefer to look at pictures of ourselves when we were younger. It's a matter of biology and aesthetics. This preference does not mean, however, that one "can't" date people of one's own age.

*Argue that twentysomethings are morally obligated to talk to me in bars. Yes, it was tougher growing up gay in the '70s than it is now, and I made things slightly easier for the Gaga-Glee Generation by marching in pride parades and coming out to co-workers when society was more homophobic. That doesn't mean that young guys have to repay me by listening to stories about ACT UP and Queer Nation when they'd rather be on the dance floor. And it certainly doesn't mean that I get a free pass to grope anyone in their 20s. Not wanting to give a lap dance to someone twice your age does not count as "attitude."

*Dress like I'm still in college. If you're an overnight guest in my home, or you invite me into yours, you take the risk of glimpsing some skin that could once be described as porcelain white. (Now it's lumpy, hairy, freckly porcelain white -- which does not look good either on a fabric swatch or on a whole leg.) But if you agree to meet me for brunch, you are not implicitly giving consent to see my knees or armpits. Should I break this rule, you have the right to roll me in a tablecloth and dump me at the nearest WalMart.

 

"It gets better" message for bullies' henchmen

Patton Oswalt sends a message not to bullies or their victims but to "the bully’s little friends." His essay may remind you of how much school culture resembles prison culture: 

By the time middle school started, I had the Victim Kit firmly sewed on.   Cystic acne, headgear and braces, man-tits and a stupid haircut. Sixth and seventh grade were no fucking fun for me. Summer camp was torture, swimming pools were humiliation ponds, sports were a whirling wall of razors I didn’t dare approach.

 

By the time eighth grade rolled around, I’d adjusted my strategy.   Figure out who the biggest bullies and abusers were, use my nascent comedy skills to make ‘em laugh and hone their taunts, and become part of the asshole entourage.

 

It was a survival strategy. I had a hand in tormenting an awkward girl named Robin in my eighth grade personal hygiene class.   Also a fat(ter), asthmatic kid with a stutter at YMCA camp whose name I can’t remember and countless, faceless others as I glided painlessly in the wake of a trio of bullies whose names I also can’t remember.   I only knew they weren’t bullying me, and were actually glad to see me in the morning, ‘cause here comes a guy who knows seven crueler ways to call someone an asshole or shithead (beyond just “asshole” and “shithead”).

The pecking order in middle and high school can be brutal, and I admit that I tried not to end up on the bottom of it. My usual strategy was to be as inconspicuous as possible (hence, my running battles with my mother over my hair, which she wanted to keep in a crew cut -- extremely unfashionable in the 1970s). But I sometimes got on the good side of tough kids by helping with their homework, or just giving them answers outright, which was a kind of bribery similar to Oswalt's sharing his insult skills.

And in high school I did turn on one kid who was probably gay and was incessently picked on by bigger kids. He was short and skinny and had a high-pitched voice and was terrible at sports (as was I, but I pretended not to give a damn about it, so I got some points for the prized teenage quality of aloofness). He'd get shoved and kicked in gym class, and at first I was tentatively friendly toward him, maybe imaging imagining some kind of alliance.

Then one day in boys' gym class, I was crouching on the floor in an unwittingly unfortunate pose when the kid suddenly pointed at me and screamed, "I can see your balls!" Which was true, thanks to the combination of my loose shorts and my somehow pushing my package to one side when I sat down. Everyone turned to look at me.

It was all accidental, but I immediately feared that other kids would think I had exposed myself intentionally -- or, worse, had specifically "shown off" to the bullied kid as some kind of sexual overture. So I defused the situation (as best as I could tell) by standing up to tower over him and yelling, "Don't be such a baby!" I remember giving him a little shove and then looking around to make sure the right people saw it.

After that, the kid kept getting picked on -- nothing really violent, but enough to make him look like he was fighting back tears -- and I kept my distance from him. In my mind, he had tried to seize an opportunity to put me at the bottom of the pecking order (the kid who shows off his balls!) and so he wasn't entitled to my friendship or my defense from the bullies. He probably knew how I felt, since he hardly ever spoke to me again.

In retrospect and in an ideal world, he and I would have helped each other get through the hell that was high school. But as Patton notes, if you're not popular, a "survival strategy" takes over and rules your behavior.

Thank God it does get better after high school. I was hugely relieved to discover that prison exercise yard etiquette isn't the only option in the real world.

 

The steel-spike-through-head quality of drunk straight women

Some of my favorite dishing companions are straight women, but I know exactly what the Magnetic Fields' Stephin Merritt means in his interview with New York magazine:

I’m uncomfortable around drunken straight people. I’m particularly uncomfortable around drunken straight women. They tend to speak in higher pitches to seem girly in front of straight men and those higher pitches actually hurt my ears. My worst frequency is giggling straight girls trying to impress straight boys. I’m actually fine in lesbian bars. And I’m fine around large groups of straight women until there’s alcohol involved. Then I’m not fine.

I'm getting a tumor in my brain just thinking about it. And you can't escape the shrieky drunk girls by not going to bars. The subway is loaded with them, all seemingly trying to outmatch the train's brakes in terms of loudness and shrillness. The one objection I have to Merritt's description is that "giggling" greatly understates the mating call of drunk straight women. Their laughing more often sounds like ambulance sirens, all the better to convince a straight guy that whatever he said is "the fucking funniest thing I ever heard!"

To be fair, drunken straight guys are no better to my ears. The difference, of course, is that they aim their pitch downward when yelling variants of "Yah!" at the top of their lungs. And they tend not to scream in women's faces but instead show off by reacting to sports on TV (even if they're obviously too drunk to follow what's going on) or getting up into other guys' faces to shout various friendly and/or hostile ejaculations.

Since I'm not particularly attracted to aggressively "straight-acting" guys, the vocal outbursts of drunk heterosexuals of both genders offend me about equally, but your tolerance may vary.