Oh Danny boy

Because my brain works this way, I had a song from the movie version of the musical Hello, Dolly! stuck in my head the other night. It was the opening number and not "I Put My Hand In" which is the opening song in the show and only hinted at in the movie version. Rather, it was a song written for the movie (and, let's be honest, probably for Barbra Streisand) "Just Leave Everything To Me." I don't know how it got stuck in my head, although my suspicion is that someone at work said "leave everything to me" and well, there you go. Instant earworm if you live with my brain.

20 years ago, I had a brief love affair with the movie Hello, Dolly! One spring break, while the rest of my classmates were probably on South Padre Island or somewhere warm, I was back at home inverting my biological clock by staying up all night working on schoolwork and watching movies. I had made it a goal to watch as many of Streisand's movies as I could. I had read stories about how Hello, Dolly! effectively killed off the big budget Hollywood musical and was eager to see whether I agreed with this assessment. I wasn't really very familiar with much of the story despite having seen a community theater production of it when I was in high school. Naturally, I knew the title song (who the hell doesn't?) but beyond that nothing. Truth be told, it's not a horrible film, but it is a bit of a lumbering dinosaur. There are a lot of things wrong with it, not the least of which is that Streisand, who was 27 at the time, was WAY too young for the role of Dolly Levi. Sure, she sings the hell out of the songs, but she's supposed to be a widow - and an Irish widow at that! But even so, the songs are definitely old-school musical - very cheesy and complete with elaborate choreography and larger than life sets. Witness:



Anyway, having "Just Leave Everything To Me" stuck in my head prompted me to go read the Wikipedia article on the film, as I recall from other things I've read that Barbra Streisand and Walter Matthau fought like cats and dogs during the shoot. Because it's the nature of the beast, I clicked on links for other members of the cast. Besides Streisand and Matthau, there's a pre-Phantom of the Opera Michael Crawford as Cornelius Hackl and Danny Lockin as Barnaby Tucker - two employees of Walter Matthau's Horace Vandergelder who get wrapped up into Dolly's scheming. As I mentioned, I knew that Michael Crawford went on to better things, but what about his counterpart, Danny Lockin? I clicked on his Wikipedia article and found it to be rather brief. And then, I read the final sentence. Lockin was tortured and murdered by Charles Hopkins on August 21, 1977 in Westminster, California. I'll be honest, my heart sank a little bit.

A little bit of investigation (ok, a lot of investigation) brought out the details, but at the same time, many of the details are left out. As it turns out, after appearing on The Gong Show in August of 1977, Lockin stopped at a bar on the way home and left with Charles Hopkins. According to this site, Hopkins called the police later that night to report a robbery. When the police arrived, they found Lockin's body, complete with 100 stab wounds. They also found what was likely the weapon used and a sex/torture magazine as well. Hopkins was charged with first degree murder. However, due to the fact that this evidence was found without a search warrant, none of it was admissible into the trial. Ultimately, Hopkins was found guilty of manslaughter and served four years, which if he did indeed do it with premeditation (and all signs point to yes), justice was NOT served in that case.

The unspoken subtext here is what is gets me. Clearly, the implication is that Lockin was gay, was leaving a gay bar and that this was a one night stand gone horribly wrong. Whether that's true or not, we may never truly know. Lockin was married and had a son, but as we all know, many married men eventually come out of the closet. This was especially common pre-Stonewall. For some reason, in my mind, the fact that this could be related to sexual orientation makes it even worse and more gut-wrenching. What gets me is that 34 years later, we still see this kind of thing happening, despite all our progress on gay rights and increasing acceptance of homosexuality in our society as a whole. A world with craigslist killers and hate-motivated crimes seems not all that different from the world in 1977. Watching Lockin's performances in Hello, Dolly!, he seemed like a very gentle person whose life was tragically cut short because of either idiot prejudice or self-loathing or something so fucked up we'll never know what the real motivation was.

So on a day when we memorialize people that have gone before us, I'd like to take this time to memorialize Lockin - although many people have done it much better than I ever could. It ripped at my gut to find out the fate he suffered. May this never happen again.

Glasses or bust

Yesterday started out on rather a bad note. I picked up my glasses from my bedside table and the left temple completely and utterly fell off. You would have thought that I had thrown them across the room - honestly, all I did was pick them up! I am notoriously hell on glasses, and these frames, having been a little more of the wiry type than I had been accustomed to had suffered unduly. As I held the broken glasses in my hands, trying to put them back together again which is no small feat when you can't see, Heidi woke up and wondered what I was cussing at. "My glasses just broke!" I said. Ever the resourceful one, she pulled out the iPad and looked up Lenscrafters and saw they had 50% off lenses. Plus we had our AAA discount which would buy us 30% off - whichever was the better deal. We had already been planning on heading down to Ankeny to go eat at IHOP just for the fun of it, so we decided to head down to Des Moines as well. So I found my old glasses from 2 years ago and off we went. It was around 9AM.

After getting sufficiently full on pancakes we set out for Merle Hay Mall. Merle Hay Mall was the site of many after-Christmas mall trips for my family when I was in college so we could spend our Christmas cash. It is, like many malls, a shadow of its former self, but it's trying hard in the changing economy. We arrived at Lenscrafters and it didn't take me long to pick out a frame that I really liked. I had always been partial to my Dr. Who glasses that I wore from 2006-2009 and the only reason I gave them up is because they were so broken that I couldn't repair them anymore. Not surprisingly, I picked out a frame that looked a lot like them but was yet new and exciting at the same time. They were Ray Ban 5169 2383 frames, black plastic frames with a hint of green as well. All I had to do was have them get my prescription from Pearle in Ames and we'd be set to go.

Only Pearle couldn't find my prescription. And when they did, it was expired. At first, I thought, well, why can't they just use it anyway? And then I thought about it in terms of a prescription I might get in my work. There's no way on God's green Earth I would take a 2 year old prescription. Not only is it not in the best interest of the patient as people's health can and does change over the course of 2 years, it's also illegal. So I set about trying to figure out how to remedy this. The easiest option would be to just get an eye exam right there. The only trouble was, they were double booked. So was the Valley West Mall location and the Jordan Creek location. Heidi pulled up "Des Moines optometrists" on her Palm Pre and started calling around while I headed down to the Merle Hay Mall Pearle Vision. They had no one on site that day AND it just so happened that the Iowa Optometric Association was holding their spring meeting that day, so not many doctors would be around. Just my luck. I need an eye doctor and they're all at a meeting! They did, however, call out to the Pearle Vision Express at Southridge Mall and they did have an opening. So we piled in the car again and headed across town to the south side of Des Moines. By now, it was about 1PM, and my appointment was for 2:15PM.

The exam was uneventful and pretty much like every other eye exam I've had in the past. When I got there, I was immediately taken aback by all the Christian imagery - they had the Ten Commandments posted at the reception desk. I wondered if I qualified to be seen since I'm a heathen, gay-people loving, barely-church-going kind of guy, but I must have looked the part. The office staff was very nice and the doctor pleasant and competent. They even took my insurance which was nice. A $25 copay and an hour later, we were out the door and headed back to Merle Hay Mall so they could get started on my glasses. Heidi was going to wait for me in the car but came in because Anna was getting crabby and complaining about the lack of internet in the parking lot. Privileged child. Time at the tone: around 4:30PM.

We went to supper at Applebee's and had supper. After supper, I go back to Lenscrafters. It's now 5:45 PM and I'm told that one of the lenses was made wrong, so they had to redo it, which added another 30 minutes to our wait. At this point, everyone's edges were fraying so we just sat at the play lot while Anna, the tallest kid there, tore around and burned off all the energy that Heidi and I both seemed to be lacking. At 6:30, I headed back in and, at long last, my new glasses were on my face.

We stopped in Ankeny on the way home at a park (we had promised to take Anna to a park in Des Moines but it just never worked out.) While we were there, Heidi snapped this picture of me with my phone.


So I'm back to looking like a NASA scientist in the 60s, but hey, I really like it. And again, there's something Whovian about them.

Lenscrafters. Glasses in about an hour. Or eight.

Postscript: Even though we blew the whole day getting me glasses, my only regret of the day is patronizing an establishment that felt the need to shove its Christianity down my throat. For all the screaming of the right wing and how the "liberal agenda" is being forced on them (especially the nefarious "gay agenda"), I really felt like this was as bad as what they complain about. No, they never mentioned God once, but for all the Christian imagery and literature in the office, they might as well have. The doctor did ask me if I listened to Jan Mickelson in the morning. Mickelson, for those that don't know, is our own sort of homegrown Rush Limbaugh and is virulently homophobic. Also, checking out the office's web site, I noticed that they link to Exodus International, the famous "pray the gay away" group. In the light of day today, I find myself thinking, what if I had been a gay man, there with my partner and this had been my only avenue in a day long effort to be able to see? I find it unlikely that the office would have refused to see me, but would I have been able to swallow it and be seen - which I did yesterday and only to be left with a bitter aftertaste. The fact that my money might be going to further this kind of homophobic bullshit sickens me, but I'm going to count this as balancing out his karma and to never forget that this stuff is out there. It doesn't affect me directly, but man, there are so many people I know and love that it does affect. So to them, I am sorry. But I really really needed to see.

Insignificant Others

I haven't read any Stephen McCauley in a long time. The only other book of his that I've read is The Object of My Affection. I read it after I saw the movie starring Jennifer Aniston and the always-great and guy-I-wish-I-were Paul Rudd. The movie version was a cute little romantic comedy with just the right amount of bittersweet infused. Just thinking about it makes me want to watch it again. The book was another animal altogether. It is a well written book and certainly worth the read, but I was in no way prepared for the incredible melancholy that inhabited the book. Even for someone like me who is ok with melancholy and bittersweet, it was too much and mostly made me depressed. But I saw his latest novel, Insignificant Others, on Amazon and thought that I'd give it a whirl. Surely, it couldn't be as depressing as The Object of My Affection was.

Boy, I couldn't have been more wrong.

The plot of the book revolves around two coupled gay men, Richard and Conrad and their "insignificant others." Richard, the narrator of the story, is a 50+ man that is obsessed with fitness and oddly matched with the narcissistic and moderately younger Conrad. In the book's first chapter, Richard discovers a text message to Conrad from someone with an Ohio area code. Conrad, whose business requires him to travel quite frequently, has been making more and more trips to Columbus, OH. The arrangement of their relationship allows for dalliances, but they are never allowed to become anything that would threaten the main relationship. As it turns out, this Columbus rendezvous of Conrad's is just that.

Not that Richard is blameless, sitting in the middle of the room with a halo over his head. He has an insignificant other as well in the form of closeted married guy Ben. They meet for "long lunches" every now and then at a leased apartment that Richard has close to his work. The trouble is that, despite his assertion that Ben is an insignificant other, now he's beginning to wonder.

I made a big deal to Heidi about how this book was sad and yes, it really was. I was really caught up in the story and the characters but I couldn't shake the feeling of despair that hung over them as well. All the relationships seemed so unsustainable. They were fraught with all the problems that go along with intimate relationships and then complicated by the insignificant others. Richard was also an eternal pessimist, always able to find the flaws in everything. He assuaged this part of himself by keeping an "at least..." list i.e. "at least I'm not doing this...or that..." He had a lot of wry observations in life that were depressing but also rang at least slightly true. Although perhaps the only reason they rang true was because I was stuck in Richard's head which wasn't always the best place to be.

The character for whom I felt the most empathy was Ben, the closeted married man that Richard was having an affair with. This is impressive because how can someone whose life is basically one big deception of those he claims to love - his wife, his children - be sympathetic? He's basically a shithead for doing this, right? Well, I don't think it's quite as simple as that. No one knows him completely - not his friends, not his family, not even Richard (although he probably comes closest.) Basically, his life is a well-constructed lie built on sinking sand. By compartmentalizing himself so much, he's living as less than a whole person and living like that will eventually catch up with you. It's this kind of thing that I mean when I talk about how we're the sum of all of our parts, even the parts we don't like. Yes, he's a shithead for lying to his wife and deceiving her all these years, but the way his character is drawn in the book, you really can understand why and you end up really feeling for him.

The book wrapped up tidily at the end after I had been afraid there would be no resolution at all, especially the Richard/Ben relationship. Ultimately, this book was less than adept at balancing bittersweet with just plain bitter and for that reason it loses points with me. I was still very engaged in the book and the characters even though most of them were not very redeemable, but I was kind of glad when it was over. I'm not sure I could have taken any more melodrama.

I simply MUST find something happy to read.

Year of 25 Books: #22 - Summer Song

I've read a lot of m/m fiction between reading my wife's work for Dreamspinner and doing galley proofs for them as well. Summer Song was a book I had the distinct pleasure of proofing earlier this summer before life became so insane that I had to back off almost completely from doing any kind of proofreading. That said, I can't recommend this book highly enough. First time Dreamspinner author Louise Blaydon tells an intriguing story set in 1950s California, back when LGBT was just a random set of letters that don't carry the meaning they do now. Best friends Billy and Kit are returning to high school after a summer apart and something seems off, especially when Billy starts acting strangely around Leonard, the new student at their school.

So frequently in romantic fiction - not just m/m fiction but also heterosexual romance - the romance is so much the central relationship, that the other relationships in the story suffer. Friends and family members do little more than take up space on the page and are so often pulled from stock that the characters are cliched and frankly, not very believable or interesting. Not so with Summer Song. What I loved most about this book was how it effortlessly blended the story of Billy's love for Leonard with its ramifications on his friendship with Kit. I felt very invested in both relationships and thought that Blaydon did a exceptional job of showing how a close friendship between men - regardless of orientation - can be frought with some of the same difficulties that you see in romantic relationships.

This was one of those books that really made me feel good at the end because ultimately, it really was a love story that involved all the characters in some way or another.

Summer Song is Blaydon's first book for DSP, but I'm eager to read more from her.

(Yes, I really am going to get to 25 before the end of the year. I'm starting 13 days off right now and it WILL get done.)

This grinch won't steal my Christmas

Tonight at supper I was perusing the news and I came across this link and the little bit of Christmas spirit I actually had evaporated. For those that don't want to subject themselves to the article, resident arch-conservative and gay-hater Bob Vander Plaats is at it again. He's calling on the remaining four Iowa Supreme Court justices that authored the state's 2009 unanimous ruling that allowed marriage equality in Iowa to resign at the Condition of the Judiciary speech. He says that they should do this because had they been on the ballot with their three former colleagues, they would have been booted from the bench. He then goes on to make a completely nonsensical metaphor comparing someone to teenagers fleeing a beer party but for the life of me, I can't figure out who he's talking about.

This made me equal parts sad and fiery angry. I am so tired of this guy spouting off. I am so tired of him thinking that he speaks for the majority of Iowans. Sure, he might have been speaking for a slim majority of voting Iowans in this election, but that's not the same as speaking for all Iowans. I am especially weary of his smug assurance that he's right, all the while continuing to preach hate, intolerance and prejudice. It makes me want to smack him every time I see him on the TV or in the paper.

As if this weren't bad enough, he speaks of the ills of gays and lesbians serving as foster parents and how those in the LGBT community can be teachers as long as they don't rub our face in it. Oh, and the repeal of DADT will "endanger the military." To add insult to injury, three incoming freshman legislators are drafting impeachment legislation against the remaining justices for...DOING THEIR JOB.

This is the problem with feeling passionate about an issue. Things like this REALLY wear you down. I would like to believe that, as they have been saying all year, it will get better, but with Repubs in charge of the Iowa House and in the governor's mansion, things have a much higher likelihood of getting worse before they get better. Right now, one man (Mike Gronstal) stands in the way of writing discrimination into Iowa's Constitution and you better believe the Republicans are after him.

But instead of feeling defeated, I'm going to turn that negative energy into something positive. Now more than ever we need people to speak up in favor of marriage equality. Being a silent supporter is not good enough right now, not when we're being drowned out by the opposition. I still can't do cold-calling, but I will continue to advocate for the rights of all LGBT Iowans and stand against the idiot prejudice and intolerance. These kind of setbacks are bound to happen. As a friend of mine says, the march forward on progressive causes are frequently two steps forward, one step back.

So my wish for Bob Vander Plaats this Christmas? Originally it was for him to shut the fuck up and go far far away. But now, I just want his heart to grow three sizes. I know that it probably won't happen, but Christmas is a time for miracles and if anything would count as a miracle, that would be it.

I'm also not going to let local politics ruin my Christmas because that would just be plain stupid. It looks like we might be snowed in tomorrow, but we have many festivities planned for the next few days. And next Friday, my little sister gets married AND all three Cullinan siblings will be in the same room - something that doesn't happen very often. I'm looking forward to it.

I may do a couple posts tomorrow if we're snowed in, but I have Heidi's presents to wrap so who knows. If not, Merry Christmas to everyone reading.

Is it over yet?

I think this has been the longest election season in history. Tomorrow is Election Day and I have had enough of this. I almost don't care that the Democrats are going to get crucified in the election tomorrow. I just want the whole bloody thing to be over with. That way, the ads (which I think have been particularly horrible this year) will finally be off the airwaves. Seriously, they have been the worst ever. You can see it even on the local level. One ad I heard on the radio today was talking about how a candidate for either the Iowa House or Senate was a wife beater and a deadbeat dad. Now, if this is truly the case, well, sure he probably shouldn't hold elected office, but how much of it is true and how much of it is typical election season hyperbole? You really can't believe ANYTHING you hear any longer.

I was talking with Matt last night who is a political junkie. We talked at length about what is probably one of the more heartbreaking races here in Iowa - the vote to retain three of Iowa's Supreme Court justices. As most everyone knows, in April of 2009, the Iowa Supreme Court unanimously struck down the state's marriage law defining marriage as between one man and one woman, making same-sex marriage legal in Iowa. This (predictably) got the social conservatives' undies in a bunch, particularly perennial also-ran Bob Vander Plaats. After losing the Republican gubernatorial primary to Terry Branstad, he made ousting the three Supreme Court justices who are up for retention this year his raison d'etre. Never mind this won't change the law. Never mind that no justice has been ousted in Iowa history. NOT ONE.

It's no secret around these parts that the Supreme Court decision that allowed all Iowans to enjoy the benefits of civil marriage and not just the ones that happen to be heterosexual made me very happy. So the fact that 37% of those polled favored ousting all three judges vs. 34% who favored retaining them made me a little sad. (10% favored retaining some and I have no idea what the remainder would do.) What this really is is a referendum on marriage equality - make no mistake about it. Put to a vote now, I have a feeling that a constitutional amendment would pass. It would be a squeaker, but I think we'd succeed in putting discrimination into the Iowa Constitution.

But it's not just the question of judicial retention that has me on pins and needles. House and Senate Democrats have been pretty successful at blocking a vote on a constitutional amendment defining marriage as one man-one woman. Republicans promised to make it a campaign issue and honestly, I haven't seen it much. Granted, my House district is heavily Democratic so we're likely to re-elect our current representative. Our Iowa Senate candidate is a bit more of a toss-up. If you were to go by yard signs, I'd say that he has a bit of a fight ahead of him. But that's the thing - polling numbers for races like that are virtually non-existent. So we won't really know until tomorrow night. The CW says that one of the chambers has the potential to flip to Republicans, and the other is safely Democratic (I forget which is which.) But even one chamber going Republican forces a vote in both chambers and I'd rather keep pushing that off. The longer we wait, the more likely an amendment vote is to fail.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a one issue voter. But this is a HUGE issue for us and one that we're heavily invested in personally. I take solace in knowing that I'm on the right side of history when it comes to this. But just because the rest of the country isn't ready for it doesn't mean that we should have to wait for them to catch up with us.

I've been saying over the last few months that Iowa is better than this. And we are! But tomorrow night I think I'll be watching election returns through my fingers as if it were a horror film. Wake me when it's over.

And just think, the 2012 presidential campaign will begin in earnest early in 2011. I can't wait.

Parallels along the spectrum

I came across this article buried at the bottom of the Google News home page (which, incidentally, am I the only one that really dislikes the new layout?) Given Heidi's and my interest in gay issues, it caught my attention.

The Last Person Out of the Closet: The Bisexual Male

The article made think of two things - one addressed and one, oddly, not.

1) If the struggle for gay rights really is the civil rights issue of our time, the parallels between being bisexual and multiracial really are appropriate and one I had not thought of before. While I feel that the stigma of being multiracial has lessened since the early to mid 20th century if not evaporated altogether, I think it will be a while before those people who identify as bisexual are not perceived by society at large as being on a train - next stop, Gayville. I think human sexuality is so much more complicated and bigger than our paltry labels.

2) I maintain that the biggest objections to homosexuality in our society stem from how it has turned the traditional concept of masculinity on its ear. How a guy like me that is not interested in sports or cars or many of the "traditional" guy things can be straight yet a big burly trucker interested in those things can be gay messes with our collective heads. This is ultimately a good thing as it causes us to see things through a different lens. The fact that the article does not mention bisexual women only solidifies this in my head. That is not to say that bisexual women don't face similar hardships, but rather that the underlying masculinity issue as it pertains to gay rights is the rather large elephant in the room.