Bill Weintraub

Re: I HAD TO KICK SOME BUTTF****R ASS ...LITERALLY!

1-30-2005

Thank you Oscar.

Another terrific post.

There's an old Hindu saying:

"The big fish eat the little fish, and the little fish have to be smart."

At present, we are swimming with two very big fish: the analist barracuda; and the religious right's great white shark.

So we have to be smart.

Oscar is very smart.

First of all, he took the time, even before he found this site, to train in combat sports: martial arts and boxing and kick-boxing.

Like he says: "I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN A WARRIOR but I didn't know it."

Fortunately, and unlike many gay-identified men, Oscar was smart enough not to deny his warrior instincts, but to explore and develop them.

Doing that heightened his self-confidence.

Not to mention his ability to defend himself.

In fact, his training probably prevented him from being raped by the kitchen boss that night or on a subsequent night.

Because as we saw in Beagle's post, One Beagle's Story, and as we've talked about in Is Unwanted Anal Penetration Date Rape?, it's common for analists to resort to rape as a means of enforcing the analist status quo on defectors and refuseniks like Roger and Oscar.

Being raped would have done untold damage to Oscar's self-esteem, and might have exposed him to anally-vectored STDs, such as HIV, as it did Beagle's bonded brother Roger, who died of AIDS as a result of being raped.

Instead, Oscar emerged from the confrontation with his dignity, his health, and his job still intact, and his standing among his fellows greatly enhanced.

Not bad for a few moments of fisticuffs.

It was common, when I first started doing anti-violence and self-defense work in the early 80s, for gay men to complain to me -- actually they tended to whine -- that they shouldn't have to train in self-defense, that the police should protect them.

Of course it's true that all members of society deserve police protection.

But it's also true that the police cannot be everywhere every moment of every day.

Like in the kitchen of the hotel where Oscar works -- you can't really station a cop there 24/7 on the off chance that the kitchen boss will flip out some night.

Of course, Oscar could have filed a report with the police after the kitchen boss had raped him.

But by that time the barn door would have been kicked wide open and the horse of Oscar's self-respect, and possibly his health, long gone.

Better by far to have nothing to report, other than that you successfully fought off an attacker.

So it's very important to learn basic self-defense, which includes some kicking and punching and blocking skills, particularly if you're gay-identified or live in an area in which you may be thought to be gay.

Because being gay or thought to be gay makes you a target.

In addition, as Oscar points out, his self-defense training has enabled him to interact physically, and have a lot of body contact, with guys, presumably straight-identified, whom if he'd stayed locked up in a gay gym-bunny ghetto, he'd never have encountered.

That too -- training with those straight-identified guys -- has strengthened Oscar's self-esteem and given him additional skills.

And Patrick and I can assure you that that physical contact, which is often and to some degree erotic, benefitted not only Oscar, but the other guys too.

Because they're men too, and they need that sort of contact with other men.

The cocktocock aspect of jiu jitsu, which Oscar describes explicitly -- "making actually COCKTOCOCK CONTACT" -- is something Naked Wrestler, who's an olympic wrestler and who's now studying jiu jitsu and other forms of submission grappling, and I have often discussed via email.

So it's not just Oscar who's aware of that; it's real, and it's in Patrick's story The Inquisitor as well.

You'll notice also from his pic that Oscar is not a muscle queen.

It's not necessary to look like something out of the insect family to be able to fight and defend yourself.

In point of fact, many big and/or muscled guys don't know how to fight or are very sloppy fighters, primarily because they rely on their size to intimidate other men.

Which means that a skilled fighter like Oscar can take them apart.

Thus the old saying among boxers and street fighters: it's not the dog in the fight, it's the fight in the dog.

In addition, many straight-identified guys who bully gay men assume, as did Oscar's boss, that just being straight will be enough to cause their target to roll into a ball on the floor and let himself be kicked into oblivion.

Those guys are usually shocked -- Oscar: "he was in shock never imagined that I knew fighting he thought I would cry or something" -- when their victim fights back, and that alone is often enough to get them to back off -- even run away.

So often when gay men get beat up, it's because they don't how to fight back, and even worse, believe they can't.

When Patrick was in college in the early 80s, there was a very big guy in one of his classes named Eugene who was also very effeminate.

One day Patrick came upon Eugene being beaten up by a gang of "straight" college kids.

Patrick made short shrift of them (that's a polite way of saying he beat the shit out of them), and after they had scattered to the four winds, and the campus police were on their way, Patrick told Eugene he was so much bigger than his bashers that he could have easily fought them off himself.

But Eugene had internalized the idea that because he was gay, he couldn't fight.

So he hadn't thrown a single punch in his own defense.

Eugene wasn't smart.

He'd accepted at face value all the lies and destructive myths about men who love men.

And he'd internalized them.

So the big fish started to eat him.

He could have gotten killed that day or another -- because of what he believed.

Just as so many of his fellows got killed by anal penetration and HIV infection.

They weren't smart either.

It pains me to say that because many of them were my dearest friends.

But they couldn't think outside the box.

At some point in the mid-70s someone told them that gay equaled anal, and from that time forward, they believed that to give up anal was to give up being gay.

Of course gay does NOT equal anal.

Gay = having a more or less exclusive erotic interest in one's own sex.

Guys for guys and girls for girls.

That's "gay," that's all it means, that's all it's ever meant.

You can be gay as a goose and never do anal "sex."

And of course hetero people do anal too.

But no one says straight = anal.

Which gets us to Oscar's next point.

Remember that Oscar's smart.

Using those smarts, Oscar makes a very important observation about the BFD:

I think for a lot of gay men will be very hard to accept our message because always will be easier to remain being the same although miserable than to change in order to improve.

Besides, every man, but specially every gay man thinks that nobody is going to teach him a goddam thing about sex, gay men see themselves as the ultimate mind liberated sexual experts, capable of practicing something so sophisticated and exclusive as anal "sex" among other multiple fetishes (fisting, scat, S/M, threeways etc), but that is a totally wrong attitude and nobody can deny the physical, emotional and spiritual realities of this self-destructive and self-loathing pointless death-loving sexual ideology.

"every gay man thinks that nobody is going to teach him a goddam thing about sex, gay men see themselves as the ultimate mind liberated sexual experts, capable of practicing something so sophisticated and exclusive as anal "sex" among other multiple fetishes (fisting, scat, S/M, threeways etc)"

That's exactly right, and that attitude is part and parcel of the dominant culture of anal penetration, which in turn is part of the ideology of multipartnered pansexualism.

Why are gay men so vulnerable to that ideology?

First off, of course, it's not uncommon for an oppressed minority to claim that they're better than the majority in some arcane area of life, and that they cannot give up their "specialness."

I've often mentioned on this board in that regard the work of Henry Lewis Gates, the chair of the department of African-American Studies at Harvard, who talks about an "oppositional subculture" among Black teenagers, in which, for example, high grades are denigrated, and gangsta rap is celebrated.

You see the same "oppositional subculture" among gay men, where a kiss is considered more intimate than getting fucked, promiscuity more valuable than Fidelity, and anal penetration better "sex" than Frot.

But there's another reason gay men are so vulnerable to that destructive analist ideology, and that's due to the way they live their lives.

In the ordinary course of life, boys are raised by their parents, they become adolescents, they date, they court, they marry, and they in turn become parents and fathers and have kids of their own, whom they must provide for and nurture and raise.

That eats up a lot of time and energy.

And for most men, that providing for and rearing of their young is their primary reason for being.

And they don't need to justify it or defend it.

That's what a man does: he takes care of his family -- specifically, his wife and most especially his kids.

In our little corner of the space-time continuum, however, most men who self-identify as gay don't have children.

Which means not only do they have a lot of free time, but they also need some way of justifying their presence on the planet.

And so they become, in Oscar's felicitous phrase, "the ultimate mind liberated sexual experts," whose entire existence is defined by the weird and boundary-pushing things they do in the bedroom and, often, in sex clubs, bath-houses, and urinals too.

Yet, most of what they do has nothing to do with sex and even less with liberation:

practicing ... anal "sex" among other multiple fetishes (fisting, scat, S/M, threeways etc), but that is a totally wrong attitude and nobody can deny the physical, emotional and spiritual realities of this self-destructive and self-loathing pointless death-loving sexual ideology.

Oscar's right.

This is not about sex, it's about ideology, and, as Oscar says, a self-hating, death-loving ideology at that.

You can see the very schizoid nature of that analist ideology when you look at its notions around masculinity and being intergendered.

One of the major justifications for anal penetration, and part of that sense of superiority which Oscar speaks of, is that being penetrated allegedly enables a man to get in touch with "the feminine side" of his essentially intergendered -- that is, both male and female -- nature.

And that gay men are therefore superior to straight men, because they dare to get penetrated and thus acknowledge their inner woman.

And because they accept manifestations of "the feminine" -- actually effeminacy -- in gay male life in the form of self-references to she and her and bottombitches and pussyboys and sluts and whores and manginas; and in the adulation of drag and drag queens.

At the same time, gay male subculture puts an enormous premium on being masculine and "straight-acting."

But that subculture can't have it both ways.

If men are by nature a mix of masculine and feminine, and if it's good for them to be effeminized by anal penetration and drag, then you can't expect them to be masculine.

That's not realistic -- men whose masculinity is constantly degraded by buttfucking and by an ideology which derides masculinity and treats it as the root of all evil, are not going to be masculine.

Rather, they will be self-hating, self-destructive, and very bitter queens.

Bitter for good reason: their masculinity, which is theirs by right of birth, indeed of conception, has been stolen from them by their subculture -- which is supposed to care for and protect them.

And there's another self-serving analist myth, which too derives from the intergendered part of their ideology:

That because gay men are intergendered, they're more empathetic and nurturing than straight men.

That's nonsense.

I lived through AIDS and was a caregiver to people with AIDS in the gayest city on earth, and I can assure you that most gay men have the empathic abilities of a stone and the nurturing instincts of a rock.

Fact: Most gay men in SF ran from AIDS.

So did most straight people.

That's the ugly truth.

Yes, there was something called the "San Francisco Model," which relied heavily on volunteerism to make up for the absence of government programs in the early AIDS years.

But the volunteers were not exclusively gay.

Some were gay.

And some were straight.

Fact: most people, gay or straight, didn't volunteer or do anything else.

They avoided the disease and contact with those who had the disease.

Further, it's not true that "straight men" lack empathy or aren't nurturing.

It's that most straight guys put all their nurturing into their kids and other family members.

And that's true throughout the human race and regardless of gender.

Most people limit their empathy and nurturance to members of their immediate family and, usually, a few close friends.

Very few human beings are able to see beyond those few people.

It is true, of course, that members of an oppressed minority are *sometimes* more sensitive to the oppression of others.

But not always.

Most white gay men, for example, appear to be about as racist as their straight counterparts.

While among African-Americans, some folks are good on gay issues, but the Black churches -- the single most important African-American community institutions -- are awful, and have emerged as among the staunchest opponents of gay marriage.

And why be surprised?

Colin Powell, a Black man who benefitted from Harry Truman's courageous decision to integrate the US military, was a determined opponent of gays in the military.

He climbed up the integration ladder and then pulled it up behind him.

So -- the notion that gay people are in some way special -- sexual revolutionaries, more empathetic, more nurturing, more tolerant -- is nonsense.

But without question the most destructive piece of that nonsense is the intergendered part, because it provides the ideological foundation for anal penetration, and all the woes which flow from it.

In the Alliance, we've gotten rid of the effeminist bullshit.

We say that men are men and women are women, and that this dimorphism is a manifestation of a genetic reality -- an XY chromosome pair as against an XX pair; and that the Y in that XY pair is enormously powerful in shaping the male physically, emotionally, and behaviorally.

Not surprisingly, our unalloyed embrace of masculinity, and our championing of the warrior ethos, is one of the most popular aspects of our program.

At the same time, it has greatly offended some of my old colleagues in Gay Lib, for whom feminism is a matter of faith.

But I've seen the feminist reality.

And while some of it is fine and proper, much of it is simply chauvinism in female form, and at the expense of masculinity and the masculinity of men who love men.

That's not acceptable to me.

I don't believe that the only way women can rise is on the backs of emasculated men.

I think that notion insults women at the same time that it does great damage to men.

My life in large part has been about the beauty of men, the beauty of men who love men, and the beauty of masculinity.

And I will do nothing to damage men, and everything I can to raise them up and exalt them.

Particularly those men who are so honest as to acknowledge their need for, and their love of, other men.

I thank Oscar again for his posts.

Oscar is a great example of why

Bill Weintraub

Re: I HAD TO KICK SOME BUTTF****R ASS ...LITERALLY!

2-6-2005

One more point about Oscar:

He's also generous.

Oscar lives in Mexico, where of course wages are significantly lower than in the US; and he's a waiter -- not a doctor or a lawyer or an accountant or a CEO.

Yet he's donated to the site.

We have doctors and lawyers and accountants and CEOs who "visit" this site.

Yet they've never donated.

Which is why the older I get, the better the Bible seems to me.

The Old Testament is one long warning against the rich and the powerful oppressing the poor and the weak.

In the New Testament, Jesus reduces much of that to a simple statement: it will be harder for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven.

Jesus is right of course.

There's something about having money that makes the rich very reluctant to part with it.

And when they do part with it, they do so proportionately at a significantly lower rate than poorer folks.

If for example, a guy who makes $10,000 a year donates $10, hasn't he given more, proportionately, than a man who makes $100,000 per year, and gives the same?

Yep.

Guys, you wouldn't believe the way the rich boyz nickel and dime me.

If I say that membership is $60 per year, they'll say, "I'll send you $15 now and more later."

Which sometimes they do and more often they don't.

Yet you know they wouldn't hesitate to pay $60 upfront for a business lunch.

Because there they'll be spending money to make money.

It's spending money without the prospect of making money which bothers them.

The idea that the sites are only here because other guys contributed, so they might contribute too and thus pull their weight -- eludes them.

They're dopes.

So: Oscar's generous, but he's also smart.

And part of the reason he's donated, I suspect, is that while he very kindly acknowledges that the site has helped him, he knows too that it's in his interest to keep the site online.

Those of you who haven't yet read Oscar's first post, Is Anal Penetration Pleasurable?, should take the time to do so.

It fills in some the autobiographical details he refers to in this post, as well as being really great in its own right.

Oscar Vallejo is a smart, generous, Frot man.

If I were the BFD, I'd worry about guys like Oscar.

But I wouldn't worry much about the rest of you.

Joel

Re: I HAD TO KICK SOME BUTTF****R ASS ...LITERALLY!

2-6-2005

just finished reading Oscar's post...it is a real eye-opener...i thank you Oscar for it...and it caused me pause to think...

last night i was watching Everybody Loves Raymond...good show...funny...but a theme runs through that sitcom...as it does through many sitcoms...and it is that men are dumb...childish...and need to be led by their wives or girlfriends...i have seen this theme on virtually every sitcom since the end of the eighties...and even in dramas i notice that the men are weak...ineffectual...or just outright assholes...i ask where are the heroic men on these shows...where are the noble warriors who demonstrate the qualities of dignity...strength of will...honor...integrity and compassion...as much as the BFD is out to effiminize gay men...the media itself is out to emasculate all men...gay...bi or straight identified...it seems to be a concerted effort to sap all men of their will to be men...and it is not subtle...the greatest laughs on these sitcoms comes from the men acting like fools...or getting caught in ridiculous situations...often related to promiscuity...men are being programmed to accept their role as jesters and fools...clowns for the entertainment of corporate robber-barrons and social ideologues...men are sytematically being emasculated...

as far as the effeminization of gay men...the sitcom that must be considered a great threat is Will and Grace...i have seen the show a few times...but i cant really stomach the overuse of sexually related humor...and the Will's gay friend there is clearly meant to be the 'ideal' symbol of gay men...foppish...self-absorbed...and ridiculously feminine...now that gay characters are appearing more frequently in television and in the movies it is going to be even more challenging to overcome the stigma of the feminine gay man...think about the millions of viewers...many of them young viewers...who are being indoctrinated into the ideology that Oscar speaks about in his post...they come away from that show thinking that gay men are like Will's sidekick...and even Will presents a rather weak male image...as more and more networks become accustomed to gay characters...more and more you will see that foppish, feminine gay stereotype hitting the airwaves...that makes it even more crucial that young gay males especially be given an alternative view...

the movie Alexander poses an interesting situation...here Oliver Stone took the unorthodox stand that Alexander had a male lover...Hephaesteion (sic)...but even Stone rarely displayed that relationship on screen...what we got for sure was Alexander's tryst with the very feminine persian eunuch...so here the great historical hero...who ought to be a role model for young men...is made to prefer the feminine over the masculine...at least in terms of his erotic desires...as we never see Alexander and Hephaesteion in a truly erotic scene...

so we are faced with a two prong attack...the gay man image and the straight man image...the former is a foppish femme...and the latter is a bumbling idiot...is it no wonder that the male population is so screwed up...it looks forward to being a pseudo-woman...or Barney Fife...

the one regret i have about Oscar's post is that because we can't afford to advertise, more of our warrior brothers won't get to read it...so many men...and not just the gay-identified ones...fall into that category of prefering the comfortable, and familiar life to the uncertainty of change...

it is shameful that men are content to this way of life...and it bothers me that more do not speak out...i am still calling on brothers in the New England area to speak up and make contact...here i am giving a real time opportunity to do something other than chat on the internet and no one has committed...its shameful...

more to come...

JOEL

Bill Weintraub

Re: I HAD TO KICK SOME BUTTF****R ASS ...LITERALLY!

2-6-2005

Hey Joel

Thank you.

But you needn't worry about the number of posters.

Nor that your own organizing efforts are going slowly.

There's a "Rule of Ten" in organizing that every activist soon learns:

If you hand out 1000 leaflets announcing a rally;

100 people *might* show up for it; and,

10 of them *might*, if mightily exhorted, put there names on a sign-up sheet as potential volunteers; and,

1 *might* actually do something: make a phone call, write a letter, help staff a booth.

So: on this board, you have to assume that for each post you see, there were at least 1000 visitors who did not post -- and I think, given the subject matter, it's actually greatly in excess of that.

Because guys who are into guys are taught to hide that interest -- and with a vengeance.

And Frot men are even more marginalized and further silenced.

Yet we have more than 2000 posts.

At a minimum that's 2,000,000 visitors -- at a minimum.

The actual figure is probably about 5 million.

The same Rule of Ten applies to your, and Beagle's in Portland, and anyone else's, organizing efforts:

If you've spoken to 1000 people, and one agrees to get involved -- you're doing very well.

Great, actually.

The first guy you email is very unlikely to volunteer.

That's why this is about perseverance and endurance.

When we started in the early 70s, gay people without any question were the most marginal group in society -- we were regularly used by sociologists as the example of deviance.

That is, we deviated from the norm, which of course was heterosexuality.

The other truly marginal group of the day, by the way, were the evangelicals -- who became the religious right.

99 point 999% of Americans were avowed heterosexuals, and most of them belonged to mainstream Christian denominations: they were Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Presbyterians, etc.

Today, the two most important groups in the culture wars are gay people and the religious right.

Neither could be said to be marginal any longer.

That's the result of thirty years of relentless organizing.

What's important to understand is that it did not happen for either side overnight.

It took years of hard work.

Once again, the race is not to the swift.

The race is to he who endures.

Never give up.

Finally, about Alexander:

Without question, the great love of his life was Hephaestion.

No one disagrees on that.

The "Persian boy" can best be understood as part of his effort to integrate Greek and Persian culture.

An effort which was mightily resisted by the Greeks, who considered themselves superior to the Persian "barbarians."

So Alexander took Persian wives; and he took a Persian male lover -- which was a very Greek thing to do -- of the sort that the Persians themselves could understand.

And he was very open about it -- it wouldn't have served as propaganda had he not been.

There was a famous moment -- I haven't seen the movie so I don't know if Stone included it -- when the boy won a dancing contest.

The Greeks loved contests, and Alexander was constantly arranging them for his troops.

Alexander was about to award the boy the traditional Greek victor's crown of leaves.

When his soldiers started shouting, "Give him a kiss! Give him a kiss!"

Alexander, the son of Phillip II, a notorious and very publicly bisexual rake who was murdered by a jilted boyfriend, was himself very reticent about any sort of public display of sex.

Nevertheless, he did, reluctantly, and in front of his entire army, give the boy a kiss.