July 02, 2009

In 1982, when I was—well, let's just say that my age was still rendered in a single digit—my Great-Aunt Y., who was visiting from wherever she lived at the time, decided she wanted me to go on a trip with her. Everything she told me about it sounded exotic and very exciting, so it was with tremendous anticipation that I walked into our living room with her to announce our plan to my parents.

FAUSTUS'S GREAT AUNT: I want to take Faustus on a trip.
FAUSTUS: CanIgocanIgopleasepleasepleasecanIgo?
MRS. FAUSTUS: That sounds great.
FAUSTUS: PleasecanIgocanIgopleasepleasepleasecanIgoplease?
MR. FAUSTUS: Where do you want to take him?
FAUSTUS'S GREAT AUNT: Afghanistan.
MR. and MRS. FAUSTUS: ?!
FAUSTUS: PleasecanIgocanIgopleasepleasepleasecanIgo?
MR. and MRS. FAUSTUS: !?

(Afghanistan in 1982, for those of you who weren't alive then, was a very dangerous place, occupied by the Soviets and embroiled in a civil war.)

MRS. FAUSTUS: (makes choking sound)
MR. FAUSTUS: Um.
MRS. FAUSTUS: No.
MR. FAUSTUS: Absolutely not.
FAUSTUS: But whynotwhynotwhynot?
MRS. FAUSTUS: Did you actually expect us to agree to this?
FAUSTUS: Whynotwhynotwhynot?
MRS. FAUSTUS: Why would you make such a ridiculous suggestion?
FAUSTUS'S GREAT AUNT: Because it's a crime that this child has not seen the Khyber Pass by moonlight.
MR. FAUSTUS: ...
FAUSTUS: I want to see the Khyber Pass by moonlight! It's beautiful! Aunt Y. says so!
MRS. FAUSTUS: ...
MR. FAUSTUS: There's the small matter of the civil war.
FAUSTUS'S GREAT AUNT: Oh, don't be ridiculous.
FAUSTUS: Pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease!
MRS. FAUSTUS: And the Soviet occupation.
FAUSTUS'S GREAT AUNT: We'll just take side roads.

(It is clear that Mr. and Mrs. Faustus are not going to relent.)

FAUSTUS: IhateyouIhateyouIhateyouIhateyouIhateyou!
FAUSTUS'S GREAT AUNT: So you want Faustus to grow up into a provincial buffoon?
MRS. FAUSTUS: Yes.

(Faustus runs out of the room in tears.)

The thing is, I still kind of want to go. But, while I somehow believe that I'd be absolutely safe under her protection, she died seven or eight years ago. So I don't really know what to do.

Posted by Faustus, MD at 04:11 PM | Comments (0)

July 01, 2009

Last year, upon the publication of Swish, I had a gay-off. Since my quest to become the gayest person ever had failed, I explained, the post was still available, and whoever wrote in with the most convincing explanations would win prizes.

Well, I'm having another one this year.

Since, like our founding father George Washington I cannot tell a lie, I must confess that I have yet to mail the prizes from last year's gay-off. There's a very specific reason for this, however, which won't apply this year; last year's prizes involved brownies, and every time I make the brownies to send out I end up eating them all. I have high hopes that at some point this year the winners of last year's gay-off will receive their prizes, and I promise that this year things will be different.

So here are the rules: Send me an e-mail about the gayest thing you did as a child. Note, please, that you needn't be gay to enter. Technically you must have at some point in your existence been a child, but I won't be checking rigorously.

The winner of the gay-off will receive an inscribed copy of Swish and either a knitted hat or a knitted penis cozy (his or her choice). The runner-up will receive either an inscribed copy of Swish, a knitted hat, or a knitted penis cozy (his or her choice). The deadline for entry is July 15 at 11:59 p.m.

May the gayest person win!

Posted by Faustus, MD at 10:48 PM | Comments (0)

June 30, 2009

This may be the best idea anybody has ever had.

Unfortunately, though I looked everywhere, I couldn't find the practitioner, which leads me to believe either that he or she was killed by unhypnotized bacon shortly after erecting this sign or that there was in fact never any bacon hypnosis at all and this was a cruel joke played on me and the other market visitors by an uncaring fate.

Posted by Faustus, MD at 11:00 PM | Comments (3)

June 29, 2009

In tenth grade Biology, when we dissected fetal pigs, I named mine Benito so that it could be a fascist pig.

Posted by Faustus, MD at 05:39 PM | Comments (3)

June 27, 2009

I once had a job with which I became so disillusioned that one day, when my boss came back from lunch, I actually said to her, "Um, somebody called for you while you were out, but I forgot his name and I didn't write down the phone number."

I kept the job for another three months.

Posted by Faustus, MD at 07:49 PM | Comments (2)

June 25, 2009

So the other night I watched the movie of The Count of Monte Cristo on pay-per-view. As I've said before, recently, The Count of Monte Cristo is my all-time favorite book, because it is basically 1,100 pages of revenge, which warms the cockles of my cold and bitter heart. The problem with adapting it for the screen (or for the stage, for that matter, which I once attempted, with disastrous results) is that what makes the book so fabulous is the inexorable slowness of it. He takes 800 pages to ruin the lives of everybody who framed him. It simply isn't possible to convey this in less than, oh, say, six or eight hours. Apparently there is a French mini-series but I'm scared to see it because it stars Gérard Dépardieu.

In any case, I watched the movie not in hopes that it would be a particularly good adaptation, but simply because I enjoy a good costume drama.

What I do not enjoy is when people in a costume drama call each other the wrong thing. Everybody in the movie kept on calling the Count of Monte Cristo "Your Grace," and it made me want to claw my eyes out.

"Your Grace" is what you call a duke or, in some cases, a bishop.

Nobody would everhave called the Count of Monte Cristo "Your Grace."

Yet movies and TV shows get this wrong all the time. I can't think off the top of my head of a royal costume drama I've seen in which people didn't fling "highness"es and "majesty"es around indiscriminately as if they were water balloons at summer camp.

It's not that hard, people.

In addition to the fact that forms of address have changed over the centuries, there's a great deal of flexibility built into the system, so royal and noble tempers can be appeased and nobody's head gets chopped off. In this case, there's even more flexibility, since people seem to be speaking English on screen when we understand that they're actually speaking French, so there are two different aristocracies to deal with and a translation. But it's one thing to write a script in which people call a bishop "Your Grace" when strictly speaking they should be calling him "Your Excellency"; change the country he's from and/or the country he's in and you might be right after all. But for people to slouch around calling counts "Your Grace" is as realistic as people addressing the mayor of their town as "Mr. Ambassador."

Counts are actually a particularly tricky case, since although in English we have the word "count" there are in fact no counts in England; the corresponding English rank is earl. The wife of an earl is a countess. An earl is addressed as "My Lord," a countess as "My Lady." So presumably one could get away with calling the Count of Monte Cristo "My Lord." In French the usual form of address is "Monsieur le Comte," so that would be fine, although translating to English and calling him "Mister Count" would just be weird. (The Count of Paris is addressed as "Monseigneur le Comte," but I have yet to see him in a movie.) It's also possible to address a count as "Your Excellency" (in French "Votre Excellence").

Notice that "Your Grace" does not appear in the list of options.

Herewith, therefore, a brief and not comprehensive discussion of how to address various people in English. (These are all to be used the first time one speaks to the person in question. After that you just say "you" (or "sir/ma'am") and drop the title occasionally into the conversation depending on how obsequious you want to be.)

Kings and queens are addressed as "Your Majesty."

Their prince and princess children are addressed as "Your Highness," unless they are directly in line for the throne, in which case it's "Your Royal Highness."

Emperors and empresses are addressed as "Your Majesty" but referred to in the third person as "His/Her Imperial Majesty."

The pope is addressed as "Your Holiness" or "Holy Father."

Cardinals are addressed as "Your Eminence."

Bishops are addressed as either "Your Excellency" or "Your Grace" (depending on the place of their bishopric, but screenwriters have enough to worry about that I feel they ought not to be required so to extend themselves on research).

Pretty much everybody is addressed as "My Lord" or "My Lady." This includes barons and baronesses, marquesses and marchionesses, viscounts and viscountesses, and plain old lords and ladies. There are a lot of complicated rules about the older and younger children of all of these people, which I won't go into here.

Other possibly useful information:

When the king or queen of one country writes to the king or queen of another country, the salutation is "Sir My Brother" or "Madam My Sister," unless the two rulers are actually related, in which case that gets stuck at the end; e.g., "Sir My Brother and Father." (Let's just not touch the incest implications here. But all those royal families are inbred anyway.)

When a king or queen writes to the president, the correct closing is, shockingly, "Your good friend."

When the Holy Roman Emperor (you never know when that'll come back) speaks of himself to someone else, he says "Ma Majesté."

And one other thing about The Count of Monte Cristo, the movie: at one point, the hosts of a party that the count has been invited to see another couple there and say "what are they doing here?" Then it becomes clear that the count has invited the second couple to meet him at the party.

The Count of Monte Cristo would no sooner have issued a second-hand invitation than he would have chopped his own arms off.

And the next time I hear somebody address a princess as "Your Majesty" I won't be held accountable for what happens.

(I will admit the infinitesimal possibility that I'm wrong about some of the above particulars, though I don't think so; if I am, though, "Your Grace" for the count is not one of them.)

Posted by Faustus, MD at 09:36 PM | Comments (19)

June 22, 2009

I wrote this for an upcoming issue of HX magazine celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots. It'll be part of a section in which several people prognosticate on the future of the gay community and its culture. My thoughts on the issues involved are somewhat more complicated than shows here, and I'm leaving a lot of things out, but I only had 350 words, and this communicates the gist of what I wanted to say.

Here are Harvey Milk's words, familiar to many of us from the movie Milk:

"Without hope, not only gays, but the blacks, the seniors, the handicapped, the us-es, the us-es will give up. And if you help elect, to the central committee and other offices, more gay people, that gives a green light to all who feel disenfranchised, a green light to move forward."

In the future, the LGBT community will actually live by these words rather than simply paying lip service to them. We will understand that "us" has to be not just gay people but all the disenfranchised—black people, disabled people, Asian people, the poor, the homeless—that when any of them suffer yet another indignation, it hurts us too. We'll realize that, as we sit at our computers (which we own) in our houses (which we own) after coming back from our jobs (which we have), if we don't turn at least some of our attention to those of us in far worse shape than we are, we've missed half of what Harvey Milk was trying to say.

When there's another Proposition 8, we'll actually take out ads in black newspapers and put up posters in black neighborhoods and show black people in our television commercials, instead of ignoring them, and this time the proposition will fail.

Our support for the transgendered will go beyond adding a T to the names of our organizations. We'll be racially integrated not just in the ad pages of our periodicals but also at our dinner parties.

We'll learn that those who stand against us may be more complicated than they appear: That Isaiah Washington, before he shocked us with his bigotry when he called T.R. Knight a faggot, had played one of the most memorable characters in gay film, Kyle in Spike Lee's Get on the Bus, and written an article for Essence decrying homophobia in the black community. That Rick Warren, whose participation in President Obama's inauguration we protested because of his horrific slanders against us, has almost singlehandedly forced evangelical Christianity to start paying attention to the environment and to world poverty.

In short, we'll get what Harvey Milk was trying to tell us.

Posted by Faustus, MD at 10:19 AM | Comments (3)

June 19, 2009

Since I've made a few posts about my dad and the Supreme Court lately (with the notable exception of yesterday), here's a piece he wrote a few days ago.

While Supreme Court watchers have been sparring over whether Judge Sonia Sotomayor once said something racist, the Court itself has been considering whether to rip the heart out of the most effective civil rights law ever passed.

The endangered law is Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the showdown will come in the next two weeks when the Court decides the case of Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No .1 v. Holder, sometimes nicknamed the MUD case.

Based on the Justices' questions at the oral argument in April, the Court seems to be evenly split. In the end, it may be outgoing Justice David Souter, in his last act as a Supreme Court Justice, who finds a surprising way to save the law.

The question for the Supreme Court to answer is not quite what many people think it is. Many think the question for the Court is is simply whether the protections of the law are still needed, but that was actually the question for Congress to answer. Congress, which has the responsibility to enforce the guarantees of the 14th and 15th amendments, answered that question in the affirmative only three years ago. After extensive hearings and a 15,000-page record, Congress voted to renew Section 5 in 2006 by bipartisan margins of 390-33 in the House and 98-0 in the Senate. President Bush signed the bill in a Rose Garden ceremony. At this stage, the question for the Justices is not whether they themselves believe the protections of Section 5 are still needed, but whether Congress acted reasonably or was so far off the wall that its action was unconstitutional.

The difference between the two questions may decide the case. If the Court focuses on whether Congress acted reasonably, it will probably uphold the law. If the Justices—or a majority of them—believe they can override Congress based on their own views about what protections are still needed, the outcome is anybody's guess.

Whether Section 5 is still needed is central in the MUD case because it is a temporary remedy. As part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that broke the back of disfranchisement in the South by outlawing literacy tests, Section 5 was included to protect the gains and prevent backsliding. For states with the worst history of discrimination, Section 5 set up a special streamlined procedure to block new, potentially discriminatory voting rules. It acts as a "temporary injunction," suspending all new voting rules until they get federal approval ("pre-clearance"). This is in contrast to the ordinary procedure of allowing new rules or laws to be enforced unless and until someone goes through the difficult, lone and expensive process of bringing and winning a lawsuit. As Chief Justice Earl Warren said in 1966, Section 5 was adopted "to shift the advantage of time and inertia from the perpetrators of the evil to its victims."

Since its adoption, Section 5 has blocked thousands of discriminatory voting rulers—from major changes like gerrymandering designed to keep county councils all white, to smaller ones like a last-minute move of a polling place to a remote location inaccessible to black voters. Many of the discriminatory changes blocked by Section 5 have been very recent. In one example, discussed in the oral argument in the MUD case, a Texas county tried to minimize black voting in a special election by scheduling it during the vacation time of the local black college.

The stringency of the remedy, and the formula that covered only certain states, were based on a massive record before Congress. The Supreme Court held in 1966 that Section 5 was well within the constitutional power of Congress to enforce the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments.

Since then, Congress has revisited the continuing need for Section 5 on four occasions, the most recent being the 2006 renewal. Each time it has concluded that the law is still needed to block voting discrimination. In the past, the Supreme Court has rejected constitutional challenges to the law and has upheld Congress's judgment.

The question now is whether this Supreme Court will defer to the judgment of the legislative and executive branches or whether the Court will substitute its own contrary belief about what laws the nation needs.

The Court has gone down this road before, and the result was an unmitigated disaster. That was in 1883, in the aftermath of the Civil War and Emancipation, when the Court struck down a civil rights law that Congress thought was necessary but the Court thought was not.

Then as now, the question was how long civil rights laws would be needed to prevent racial discrimination. Congress passed a series of protective laws including the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which outlawed discrimination in restaurants, theaters and other public places. The need for the law was shown by massive evidence before Congress of systematic and violent resistance to the rights of the freedmen.

But when the law came before the Supreme Court in United States v. Stanley (also called The Civil Rights Cases), the Court made its own political judgment about what laws were needed and for how long: "When a man has emerged from slavery, and by the aid of beneficent legislation has shaken off the inseparable concomitants of that state, there must be some stage in the process of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen, and ceases to be the special favorite of the law."

Congress had made the decision that the time to let up was "not yet," but the Court on its own said the time was "now," and held the statute unconstitutional. Justice Harlan accused the Court of turning the 13th and 14th amendments into "splendid baubles, thrown out to delude those who deserved fair and generous treatment from their nation," but he was a lone voice in solitary dissent. The 1883 case paved the way for the world of Jim Crow, even before the decision in Plessy v. Ferguson.

(In a foreshadowing of current events, the opinion in The Civil Rights Cases was written by the Justice (Joseph Bradley) who six years earlier had cast the deciding vote to pick the President of the United States after the 1876 elections were contested because of disputed votes in Florida (!) and two other states.)

More than a century later, the same concept of judicial supremacy was being heard at the oral argument in the MUD case, especially from Chief Justice Roberts and Associate Justice Scalia.

The Chief Justice compared the problem of voting discrimination to a joke about a man using an elephant whistle to keep imaginary elephants away—a comparison that makes sense only if you believe voting discrimination is nothing but a figment of someone's imagination.

Justice Scalia derided the strong congressional vote, saying the Senate's 98-0 vote made him suspicious (apparently forgetting that his own nomination as a Justice was confirmed by the same 98-0 vote).

The comments of these Justices contrasted sharply with their oft-professed view that judges should defer to policy choices of the legislative branch, and with their criticism of so-called "judicial activism" of earlier courts. But whereas earlier decisions were "active" in overriding Congress to enforce the guarantees of the Bill of Rights and the constitutional promises due process and equal protection of the law for every citizen, the new judicial activism of the Chief Justice and Justice Scalia seemed to be enlisted in the cause of resisting Congress's efforts to make constitutional rights real and effective.

By the end of June, all these speculations will be answered in the Court's decision.

Which is where Justice Souter comes in. Early in the argument, he began questioning whether the MUD district had "standing to sue" and whether there was an actual "case or controversy." These requirements must be met for any case to be in federal court, and they depend on proof from the plaintiff—here the MUD district—that it has a real dispute as opposed to a theoretical disagreement.

Justice Souter's questions are critical because the MUD district, while arguing that it shouldn't be covered by Section 5 at all, doesn't have a voting rule it is seeking to enforce. And it may not ever have one, since its elections are all conducted by its county—which not only supports Section 5 but has filed a brief in the Supreme Court saying so.

If the Supreme Court dismisses this case for lack of MUD's standing to challenge the constitutionality of Section 5, it will not end the controversy over the law, but it will leave it for another day. And if Justice Souter leads a majority of the Supreme Court to a decision saving Section 5, even for a time, it will be a fitting end to a fine career.

Posted by Faustus, MD at 08:58 AM | Comments (2)

June 18, 2009

N.B.: The first part of this entry was originally posted on July 22, 2004. I repost it now so as to be able to give you an update. Also, if you find the post and/or the update amusing, I hope you'll consider buying my book.

One of the many things I like about my relationship with E.S. is that the sex is consistently fabulous. However, he being a first-year resident at a hospital, there are perforce occasional periods during which we don't see each other for a while; at such times, I have not infrequently performed certain endorphin-releasing activities on my own. On these occasions I have been content to use as visual aids the small stash of pornographic videos I collected in the early 1990s, when my taste in such things seems to have been formed. The haircuts are most unfortunate, but I find the body shapes on the whole more pleasing than those in videos being made today.

However, a couple weeks ago, I ordered a new video from the folks at TLA (that link is safe for work, by the way, though certain pages on the site are most certainly not). The detailed review of the movie on the web site indicated that it contained a scene involving a fairly uncommon sexual activity that I find particularly arousing. The one or two times I've actually participated in this activity, the experience has been unerotic and, in fact, somewhat distasteful, so I have no plans to try it again; nevertheless, the idea of it remains exciting.

A few days later, the TLA package arrived--on a day, it so happened, when E.S. was going to be on overnight call at the hospital, so I had ample time to enjoy my purchase. The film started off promisingly enough, with someone who could conceivably be a high school student if high school started at age 26 entering what could conceivably be the principal's office if principals' offices were badly-lit rooms empty of all appointments save a curiously bare desk. Someone who could conceivably be the principal entered and began to castigate the student for spending so much time sucking cock that his grades were suffering; the scene progressed satisfyingly if predictably from there to its inevitable conclusion. The next scene had similar credibility issues but was equally fulfilling--from a mathematical perspective, in fact, it was twice as fulfilling, as it had twice as many people in it.

The third scene was the one in which, according to the review, the activity for which I'd purchased the movie occurred. I watched as the school janitor (the first well-cast role in the piece) chanced upon some contraband material in a student's locker and took the student down to the boiler room to punish him. Strangely enough, these two were inclined to behave in the the same manner as the principal, the detainee, the athlete, his coach, and his two teammates; however, after a while they stopped doing that, and seemed to be preparing to do something else. Breathless with, um, anticipation, I awaited eagerly the extensive scene the TLA review had described--

--and got about thirty seconds of the tail end of it, after which the two actors moved on to something else.

I went nearly mad with shock and dismay. After finishing the task at hand--not nearly as pleasant an accomplishment as I'd expected it would be--I called up the web page and reread the review, thinking that perhaps my wishful memory had played me false. But no: right there in black and white--with full color photographs--was a description of events that did not take place in the movie I had bought.

Clearly this was an untenable state of affairs. But resolving it was going to be tricky. After all, the all-but-omitted sexual activity was just enough beyond the pale for me not to feel comfortable calling the company and identifying myself as an aficionado in an effort to correct the error. True, I could simply return the movie for a refund, but that would destroy any chance I had of actually obtaining the movie I'd thought I was buying, which was of course the most desirable outcome.

Eventually I hit upon the brilliant solution of sending TLA an e-mail into which I pasted the relevant paragraphs from their own review; I bolded the parts that had been left out and asked them to let me know how I could get a copy with those parts put back in. That way I didn't even have to refer to the damning sex act by name--whoever got the e-mail couldn't very well turn his nose up at his own company's language. Pleased as punch with myself (and full of endorphins, however unfulfillingly released), I went to bed.

And woke up the next morning to find an e-mail in my inbox saying, "Pardon the inconvenience, but please contact us by phone to resolve this issue."

Fuck.

So today, when I got home from the gym, I called them.

"Hello, this is Nick," said the guy on the other end of the phone. "How can I help you?"

"Well," said I, "I recently bought a video from you that seems to have part of a scene missing. There's a scene described on the web site that isn't all there."

"Oh?" he asked, concern filling his voice. "What was the movie?"

"It was [Name of Movie]," I answered, after which I gave him my order number.

"So you say there was part of a scene missing?"

"Yes."

I was silent, hoping against hope that Nick, wonderful Nick, cute, understanding Nick, would know exactly what the problem was without my having to explain it.

"What was missing?" he asked.

Hateful, ugly Nick.

I wondered desperately if Nick spoke French. My French is good enough to return a movie.

Then I realized I didn't know the name of the activity in French.

"Um," I continued in English, "well, there's a [name of activity] scene, and only part of it appears on the disc."

"Yes, I can see that there's a [name of activity] scene. But what part of it is missing?"

I attempted to develop spontaneously the ability to project my thoughts into the minds of others, so as not to have to continue this conversation, but I failed.

"Do you have e-mail?" I asked wildly. "I could just e-mail you a description of what's missing."

"If you send an e-mail it won't be dealt with properly."

I thought about becoming an ex-gay so as to have an excuse not to own this movie, but realized quickly that I like getting fucked too much to become an ex-gay. There was nothing for it but to, um, plow ahead.

"How about if I just read you the section from your web site that describes the part that's missing?"

"Okay."

"Okay, so see where there's the paragraph that ends, um, 'A willing Chad takes stream after stream of Matt's impressive load in the face without flinching'?"

I considered traveling back in time and preventing human beings from developing the power of speech.

"Yeah, I see that."

"Okay, well, the next paragraph, the one that starts, ah, 'Next up is the adorable Billy, who [performs the activity in question on] Eric like there's no tomorrow,' nothing described in that paragraph is on the disc I got. And then the first sentence of the next paragraph, the one that says, 'Then we're treated to the delightful sight of Eric [performing the activity in another way,]' that's not there either. I only have the scene starting from the next sentence, 'To finish things off before going in for the kill, Billy [performs the activity in yet a third way.]'"

By this point I was strangling with mortification.

"Hmm," said Nick. "Okay, let me go check with my manager, who's in charge of ordering these."

During the two minutes during which I was on hold, I started to check out airfares to Siberia, where I could drown myself in Lake Baikal, the largest freshwater lake in the world. Unfortunately, Nick returned before I'd been able to finalize my purchase.

"My manager says we must somehow have sent you the retail version. He says the [activity] scene is really quite extensive in the director's cut. Let me give you a return authorization number so you can send the disc back. As soon as we get it, we'll ship you out the correct version."

"Oh, great," I said tearfully, grateful that I would soon be able to hang up and instantly repress all memory of this conversation.

"I'm so sorry for the trouble. Is there anything else I can do for you today?"

"No, thank you."

And it was over. Slowly--oh, so slowly--but surely, the excess blood began to drain from my face and redistribute itself throughout the rest of my body. My breathing started to return to normal, and I thought, Well, at least I know I'll never be that embarrassed ever again in my entire life.

Then I realized that my door was open and my brother's houseguest had been sitting on the couch in the next room the whole time.

Update, June 18, 2009: The replacement video that TLA sent me was similarly truncated, as was the replacement replacement video that TLA sent me. A year or two later I tried again, figuring that perhaps they'd just had a bad batch of DVDs. Of course I couldn't find the replacement replacement video so I had to buy it again. Imagine my lack of surprise when the [activity] scene was missing the exact same parts. Then when I started downloading torrents I naturally found a torrent of the video, but when I watched the file—which took several days to download completely—it was the regular version, not the director's cut, so there was even less of the [activity] scene than before. The second time I downloaded it exactly the same thing happened. Then, a few months ago, I found the studio's website and signed up, credit card and all, and paid to rent the movie for 48 hours, but the file I downloaded wouldn't open. This turned out to be, as I found out when I e-mailed the studio (I didn't have to speak with anybody this time; thank God for small favors), because I hadn't read the platform requirements on the website, and the download-for-48-hours feature only worked on PCs. The customer service representative who explained this to me (the embarrassment I was saved by the representative's not being Nick was made up for by the representative's being a woman) wrote that she'd credited me for an hour of the watch-now-online (streaming) feature. The scene turns out to be pretty fucking impressive, but the two times I've watched it I've been so worried about using up as little time as possible that I might as well have been watching an episode of Flip This House for all the good it did me.

The universe is obviously trying to tell me something.

I'm not listening.

Posted by Faustus, MD at 10:31 AM | Comments (5)

June 16, 2009

It was just over a year ago that my book Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever was released, and I am now at liberty to reveal a piece of information about which I have heretofore held my tongue:

Swish has not sold as well as my publisher hoped it would.

I have no idea what this means in terms of actual copies sold, since this information is more difficult for an author to get hold of than, say, the Golden Fleece. But I had lunch with my agent some weeks after the release, and the fact that the sentence that contained the word "failure" ended with "not your fault" didn't prevent me from bursting into tears.

This is how publishing works: Each season publishers like Random House put out a number of books, each of which tends to fall into one of three categories: sure-fire bestsellers, like any book by Dan Brown or John Grisham; pretty good bets, like books by celebrities; and everything else. Publishers plan to spend a significant amount of money promoting all the books in the first two categories, but there simply isn't enough money to commit firmly to supporting all the books in the third category. What happens, therefore, is that publishers give them all a little help so they can get off the ground. Then they wait to see which two or three catch on; once they've figured that out, they commit to supporting those two or three firmly, and perforce leave the rest to get by as best they can. As far as I can tell, the time a book has to catch on before the publisher has to stop paying attention to it is about six weeks. It's hideous, of course, but it's also exactly what I would do if I were a publishing company; given that the number of books published a year has more than doubled in the last seven years (from 135,000 in 2001 to 280,000 in 2008*), while the number of books bought a year has stayed more or less the same, I'm astonished that any company can do more than scrawl a book's title on a Post-It and toss it out the window.

But now, back to our story. After I stopped crying, and finished a pint and a half of Häagen-Dazs Chocolate Peanut Butter Truffle ice cream, it became crystal clear what the problem was:

The title and the cover.

When the book was released and the reviews started coming in, I was delighted, because for the most part they were very favorable. But then I started to notice something, which was that almost every one said something along the lines of, "From the cover I thought this was going to be fluffy and shallow, but then I read it and I loved it." Then people who had read the book started e-mailing me, and almost every one said something along the lines of, "From the cover I thought this was going to be fluffy and shallow, but then I read it and I loved it."

The problem, it turned out, was that while many people saw the cover, thought the book was going to be fluffy and shallow, and bought it and read it anyway and loved it, they were far, far outnumbered by people who saw the cover, thought the book was going to be fluffy and shallow, and, since they weren't interested in fluffy and shallow, went and bought something else (Backdraft: Fireman Erotica, one presumes).

(At least there were more people who bought it anyway and loved it, though, than people who bought it and then grew angry when it wasn't fluffy and shallow. Seriously. A couple reviews were like, what is this? Where's the Cher? There are hunky guys on the cover, why is he telling us about his dead mother?)

Now: I think the hardback cover is brilliant and beautiful. Since I know myself, I get a kick out of the disjunct between the cotton-candy outside of the book and the much richer chocolaty insides. Unfortunately, my editor and I forgot that the book-buying public did not know me. Seeing the unsubstantial outside, therefore, they assumed that book had an unsubstantial inside as well. It was awful. They were judging the book by its cover.

(There's also of course the very real possibility that the reason people weren't buying the book was that it was bad. But let's assume this wasn't the case, if only for the sake of discussion.)

So my publisher was about to do what was as I've said the only sensible thing: admit defeat, sell the paperback rights (which meant that they would at least make some of their money back), and move on.

Then I got a strange e-mail followed by a phone call from a Very, Very Famous Person, whom I can now reveal to have been Sir Elton John. He had read Swish, he said, and loved it. He said many other nice things about the book and offered to do whatever he could to help me out.

I e-mailed my editor with this information, naturally, and after a time got a reply containing the fabulous news that her boss thought they could use this as a sales hook, so they were going to go ahead and publish a paperback. Repackaged, with a new cover and a new subtitle. Naturally I celebrated by eating another pint and a half of Häagen-Dazs Chocolate Peanut Butter Truffle ice cream.

It took literally months to come up with the new cover and subtitle, but my editor's assistant told me that I should see this as a good sign, because they wouldn't spend so much energy on something they didn't really believe in. (Then my editor got laid off—note, please that she had become my editor after my last editor had gotten laid off—but her assistant stayed, so I felt I could still trust her advice.)

So the paperback was released today. It's called Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever and What Ended Up Happening Instead, it has a beautiful cover (click the image below to enlarge) that more clearly implies the material inside, and it's graced with a foreword by Elton John. Of course I hope it will become a smash hit, but mostly I'm just grateful that the book has gotten a second chance.

*These statistics don't include the 285,000 books self-published in 2008, which number represents an almost 500% increase from 2006.

Posted by Faustus, MD at 05:15 AM | Comments (18)

June 15, 2009

The last thing my father needs is more stuff to put on shelves, so for his birthday last year my brother and I promised him a trip with us wherever he wanted to go. We finally made good this weekend, when the three of us went to Mississippi, the site of many of my father's early triumphs.

We spent our first day in Jackson, where he and my mother lived in the late 60s working for the Lawyers' Constitutional Defense Committee. The next day we went to Vicksburg, site of the 1863 siege that cut the South off from the Mississippi River, effectively winning the Civil War for the Union. Then we went up through the Mississippi Delta, where my father had argued his first civil rights cases.

Most of the small towns there seemed much better off, he said, than they had forty years before, but he was worried that the improvement had been achieved by the exodus of the poorest residents to cities like Chicago and Atlanta, and some of the small towns we saw, including one called Midnight, seemed to be just as badly off, he said, as they had been in the 1960s. I would post photographs, especially as I'd forgotten what rural poverty looks like, but the people weren't showing off their penury for our entertainment, and the idea of taking pictures felt odd.

On our way back down to Jackson, we stopped in Indianola to visit the post office, which is at the center of the story of Minnie Cox, one of my favorite civil rights stories of all.

In 1903, the white citizens of Indianola decided they'd had enough of getting their mail from a black postmistress, so they ran Minnie Cox out of town, expecting President Theodore Roosevelt to give the post to a white person. He decided to deal with the situation a different way, however.

He just closed the post office.

And had Indianola's mail rerouted—remember that nobody had cars yet—to the town of Greenwood, thirty miles away.

Eventually, after a year, during which he naturally kept paying Minnie Cox her salary, he appointed a new postmaster and reopened the Indianola post office; he then downgraded it from third class to fourth class because the year's receipts had been so low.

Man, I love a good smackdown.

The post office can't possibly be in the same place as it was over a century ago, but I was nonetheless thrilled to discover that Mrs. Cox has not been forgotten:

Now if only the rest of the state were as enlightened. . . .

Posted by Faustus, MD at 11:18 PM | Comments (1)

June 14, 2009

Okay.

After a conversation with my dad, who as I've mentioned knows something about constitutional law, here's how I'm really, really, really hoping the hideous Department of Justice brief supporting the Defense of Marriage Act happened.

1. The makeup of the current Supreme Court, which is where this suit would end up, pretty much guarantees that a constitutional challenge to DOMA would ultimately fail. If that happened, DOMA would be ruled constitutional, and there would be no way to get rid of it other than legislative repeal (very difficult) or a constitutional amendment (well nigh impossible). If the Obama administration really does want to kill DOMA, but is planning to wait until Obama has had a chance to appoint a few more liberal Supreme Court justices (which it's very likely he's going to be able to do), such a turn of events would be bad. Therefore, it wants to prevent Smelt v. United States from going to trial. This can happen only if the DOJ files a brief.

2. Now, the DOJ is essentially Congress's lawyer. As such, it has a legal obligation not just to advocate on behalf of its client but to advocate as vigorously as it can on behalf of its client. It would be unethical for the DOJ to file a pro forma brief or one asking that the case be dismissed for lack of standing. So if they filed a brief at all (which they had to do—see above, "prevent Smelt v. United States from going to trial") they really had to throw the kitchen sink in. They didn't have to make it all so insulting and homophobic, but . . .

3. . . . we know the brief was written by W. Scott Simpson, a Bush holdover who was, as Andrew Sullivan points out, given an award by Alberto Gonzales for his defense of the Partial Birth Abortion Act. I believe that it's reasonable to assume he is not the LGBT community's best friend.

4. It would be great if he were the highest-ranking DOJ official on the brief, because apparently none of the highest-ups at the DOJ pay attention to briefs filed in district court cases (i.e., lower-than-Supreme-Court cases). Unfortunately he's not; the highest-ranking DOJ official on the brief is Tony West, the Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Department. So what I'm really, really, really hoping is that Tony West is an idiot and that, when he saw a hideous brief written by a bigot, he idiotically didn't realize that as a brief on such a high-profile issue it ought to be checked with extreme caution, and he also idiotically didn't realize he ought to give Lambda Legal, the ACLU, and other gay legal organizations a heads-up beforehand, and idiotically just filed the damn thing.

5. Tony West is at this very moment being reamed a new and extraordinarily painful asshole by many, many, many very, very important people, and a number of other very, very important people are trying to figure out how to clean up the mess he made.

6. (Also, apparently, the people in the DOJ's Civil Department are widely known to be clumsy fuck-ups whose blunders the DOJ's Civil Rights Department—not the same—often have to fix.)

So I'm really, really, really hoping that's how it happened. Because if it's not, I'm not sure how to escape the conclusion that I voted for a liar.

Even if that is how it happened—which I truly do believe is possible—at this moment I feel that Obama has just used up the last bit of LGBT slack I've been willing to cut him.

Posted by Faustus, MD at 03:07 AM | Comments (4)

June 08, 2009

Several months ago my wallet was stolen. I had like a dollar in it, so other than the inconvenience of calling credit card companies the only real problem this caused me was the loss of my driver's license. The other day I finally decided to do something about it and went to the website for the South Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles, the agency that issued my license, where I made my way to a page with this heading:

I dutifully filled out what information I could and clicked "Submit," whereupon I was confronted with this:

Picture 10.png

I don't know what to say except thank God I got out of there.

Posted by Faustus, MD at 08:41 AM | Comments (8)

June 04, 2009

Cary Tennis, Salon.com's advice columnist, may be the wisest person who has ever lived. I read his columns every once in a while but lately I've been looking back through his archives and it's really astonishing. If you don't know his work, go over there and take a look.

Here is a recent example. I mean, is this man not amazing?

Dear Cary,

All my life I have been trying to grow webbed feet.

It seems my willpower is not strong enough, or perhaps my shoes are interfering with the necessary concentration.

Should I switch to growing webs between my fingers?

Aquatically Challenged

Dear Aquatically Challenged,

This morning I have been reading Dylan Thomas, who had webbed feet. How he grew them has been lost to history since he died at such a young age. But one imagines that the poet, focused as he was on achieving the impossible, grew them through prayer and chanting, through excess and monasticism, through worship of words and revery and fearless surrender to their ecstasy. He grew them through constant study of the masters, through copying out in his crabbed and insecure longhand the works that inspired him, through blinding himself to reality and focusing only on what he dreamed, through drinking into the late, wee hours, through channeling his birthright and nationhood and ancient soil-bound spirit.

We imagine such things as becoming poets and kings and growing webbed feet or wings and it is to our credit that we do; in imagining them we encounter the oldest philosophical problems of power and matter and transubstantiation: How can my blood become wine or vice versa, how can this base metal become gold, how can my words become birds, my voice a hurricane, my eyes like stars, my shoulders trees? How can this be done? How can this adolescent become a man? How can this seed become a child? Some of these things are doable and others not, and why? How can I transform with a few drops of whiskey this dim and quiet bar into a festival of souls unleashed? How to make this piano into a dancing girl?

Each of us desires a different impossibility but we all seem to fervently desire the impossible. What is it about the impossible that makes it so precious? As a young boy I lay on the floor of the porch trying to lift myself to the ceiling; day after day I concentrated on levitating; one reads about levitation in comic books and sees vivid pictures of it; one reads about masters of levitation in books; one sees levitation on television; one is told that it isn't real but one doesn't know whom to believe when one is young; one is lied to so often anyway. One knows they lie just to shut you up. So many have probably told you that you cannot grow webbed feet. But perhaps you can. I did not learn to levitate but today I can sometimes rise above the ground and float for a few seconds; I can stay above things; I can get off the ground. No one knows this but me of course. I appear to be always on the ground, which is all to the best, considering. One learns, also, to keep these wishes secret lest you be scorned and laughed at or examined by ungenerous clinicians.

Long concentration on a goal however illusory and impossible may bring fruit, if not literally the fruit you desire. You do not order up your fate. You do not create yourself. You are made and in being made must crawl on your belly because the order in which the gifts are handed out is not up to you; if you can accept that fact, then crawling can be an ecstasy of surrender to what is real and what is given and what is possible at this moment. If you cannot accept that then of course they call you too big for your britches, and no pants ever fit you. You go through life beeping at everyone. Likewise, though they may be just baby talk, those first few words you speak may be an ecstasy of accomplishment and an offering of gratitude to those who gave you life. Your toes, too, are a miracle; consider their plumpness, their surprising dexterity. (No better word could exist, etymologically speaking.)

Sure, you joke, and I joke too, I joke with you, and yet I see in your joking something you walk home with still wishing for, something you do not even dare to say: That you do wish for something beautiful and impossible, something given to other species, and in wishing thus you are like all of us, beset and crushed and cursed with imaginings beyond our size and skill; we wish to build airplanes and then climb aboard and fly; we wish to swim across vast oceans; we wish to compete with ducks and fish; we wish to have something no one else has. We wish to write grand books and die young and be worshiped and have folk singers name themselves after us, and thus to spawn whole generations.

Sit and wish for this. Wish for it for hours. Fix it in your mind as you sit. Imagine it. Dream it. Rub special cream on your toes. Eventually, through the sheer force of the mind's concentration, something will appear at least for an instant, something that was not there before; it might be a new species of salamander crawling away on a rock; it may be a crow that settles on a branch and speaks to you, saying in its guttural mobster voice, "Web feet, web feet." It may be that in wishing for this you attain what you unknowingly want, the thing for which your wish is a code name; it may be that in wishing for it you simply sit long enough for the puzzle to unravel, and that will be your reward.

Posted by Faustus, MD at 05:07 PM | Comments (4)

June 01, 2009

I was going to post a detailed account of the several nights I spent in bed last week with Legend of the Seeker's Craig Horner (image barely SFW)—

—but the ability to concentrate on anything at all has been driven out of my head by my excitement at ABC's upcoming remake (as a series!) of V, the 1980s miniseries to end all miniseries (if you are unlucky enough not to have been born in time to watch it, behold this and this to see the wonders of which television was once capable).

(I am, alas, just kidding about Craig Horner.)

Posted by Faustus, MD at 11:43 PM | Comments (7)

May 28, 2009

You will not be surprised, I trust, to learn that I spend a great deal of time meditating on the idea of revenge. I think revenge gets short shrift in modern society. By now I'm sure that the list of people upon whom I would like to revenge myself is far too long for me to get through even if I were to start right now.

The Platonic ideal of Revenge, I believe, is governed by two main principles, both of which I derived from The Count of Monte Cristo, a book I reread every couple of years or so. The Count of Monte Cristo is the story of a man who spends the first three hundred pages of the book languishing in prison because his enemies set him up and who spends the remaining eight hundred pages of the book taking implacable revenge upon them. (Actually, at some point near the end the revenge becomes placable, which is to my mind the only real fault of the book.)

The first principle of truly satisfying revenge is that the perpetrator must do no more than create favorable circumstances; the victim has then only to act according to his wicked character, and he will destroy himself. Fernand in The Count of Monte Cristo, for example, betrayed the Greek pasha to his enemies on his own; the count merely helped bring the truth to light. Similarly, the count merely engineered matters so that Danglars's risky business ventures failed; it was Danglars himself who, out of greed, invested everything he had in them.

The second principle of revenge is that the victim must know or learn that he is being ruined because of what he did to you. Fernand, Danglars, de Villefort—by the end, the count has revealed himself to them as the Edmond Dantès, the wretch they imprisoned so many years ago.

It is by these principles that I am guided in all my revenge fantasies. Say P.C. Richards refused continually to refund the money I spent on a defective washer-dryer. I might imagine that the Attorney General of the United States shut the company down for fraud, discovering in the process a drug smuggling ring that would send all the executives to prison; I would be there in court, smiling at them as they were dragged off in handcuffs to a place where there would be all sorts of things it would be difficult for them to refuse.

But there's one incident for which, even though it happened a few years ago, I haven't been able to construct the appropriate fantasy. It happened on a rainy weekday afternoon; I was walking in midtown on my way to deliver a script to an agent or something like that. Now, when I say "rainy," I mean really rainy, and I had neglected to bring an umbrella or even, I believe, a raincoat. I got to the end of one block and needed to cross to the next, but the space available to do so was limited, two cars having gotten very close to each other with perhaps a person and a half's width between them. I saw a woman carrying a large umbrella coming toward me from the opposite direction, but I figured, what the hell, we'll probably both be able to get through. This turned out to be incorrect, however, and when we collided she yelled, "WATCH WHERE YOU'RE GOING!"

Understand, please, that at the time of this incident I was not nearly as well medicated as I am now. And so when she yelled at me I was instantly filled with rage. Such rage, in fact, that, as you can see, I still remember it years later.

But I don't know what the revenge fantasy is.

I imagine the spines of her umbrella coming to life and growing long enough to gouge her eyes out (and then doing so), but that violates both principles of revenge; even if they told her as they were gouging her eyes out that it was because she had been mean to me, the fantasy would still violate the first principle.

So any help you can give me would be most appreciated.

Note that, while umbrellas can apparently come to life in my revenge fantasies, I myself am subject to the same limitations that compass me in real life, so I can't do things like divine her address and show up at her apartment.

Posted by Faustus, MD at 01:37 PM | Comments (8)

May 27, 2009

The other day, while E.S. and I were watching The Millionaire Matchmaker, we were both struck by how well the millionaire and the girl he had chosen for his first mini-date were getting along—from their badinage you'd think they'd known each other for years. Then E.S. and I had the following conversation.

FAUSTUS: He picked her because she has a personality.
E.S.: He picked her because they have similar defensive structures. They both use humor to protect themselves, so they feel safe and comfortable with each other.
FAUSTUS: That's why I didn't like you when we went out the first time!
E.S.: You still don't like me.
FAUSTUS: Well, right, but—we have different defensive structures.
E.S.: No we don't.
FAUSTUS: Yes we do.
E.S.: We're both avoidant.
FAUSTUS: I use humor as a defensive structure. You're not funny.
E.S.: You use narcissism as a defensive structure. You think you're funny.
FAUSTUS: Get away from me.

Posted by Faustus, MD at 10:57 PM | Comments (3)

May 25, 2009

By this time tomorrow, the whole issue will have been settled one way or the other, but while it's on my mind I want to write about the grammar of California's Proposition 8, which amended the state constitution to add a section 7.5 reading "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California."

Let's say we analyze the structure of the sentence as "Only [noun] [prepositional phrase] is [adjectival phrase]." We could then create an analogous sentence that read, "Only Sam over there is good in bed." It's nonsensical to read this as indicating that Sam is good in bed when he is over there but not when he is anywhere else. The only possible reading of this sentence is therefore that the Sam who is over there is good in bed, but that nobody else is. (Note that such an assertion, were we actually to make it, would be libelous; I happen to know from personal experience that, while Sam certainly is a sexual dynamo, he is by no means the only one in the world. Or in New York. Or, you know, in his family.) If we apply this structural understanding to our original sentence, we see that the only possible reading is that a marriage that is between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California, but that nothing else is. Not same-sex marriage, of course, but also not felony statues, not stop signs, not the laws of physics.

Actually, it's a little more complicated than that, because in addition to the "only" problem we also have the issue of "or" (valid or recognized) and whether it's exclusive (he'll take my virginity tonight or tomorrow, but not both) or inclusive (he'll sleep with me, Jim, or me and Jim (separately or together—an inclusive "or" allows for both) ). If "or" is exclusive, then, according to section 7.5 of the California constitution, heterosexual marriage is 1) valid or 2) recognized, but not both. Adding the "only" back in means that everything else (same-sex marriage, felony statutes, stop signs, the laws of physics) is either 1) valid and recognized or 2) neither valid nor recognized. If the "or" is inclusive, then heterosexual marriage is 1) valid, 2) recognized, or 3) both, while everything else (same-sex marriage, felony statutes, stop signs, the laws of physics) is neither recognized nor valid.

(And I'm not even going to start with "in California" and whether it governs "valid and recognized" or just "recognized.")

To mean what its proponents say it means, Proposition 8 would have to read something like, "In California, marriage is valid only if it is between a man and a woman." But it doesn't. So instead it means that, constitutionally, the only way for the laws of physics to be valid or recognized in California is for same-sex marriage to be legal.

Anyway, I think I'll head west. When I get there, depending on how they're interpreting this stuff, I'll get married or go on a consequence-free murder spree. Really, I'm fine either way.

Update: Consequence-free murder spree it is. Fuck.

Posted by Faustus, MD at 10:39 PM | Comments (7)

May 24, 2009

E.S. and I went to see Star Trek this evening, and I'm sorry to report that I have to break up with him. He's a nice guy, and the sex is good and all, but it's obvious to me that whoever wrote the dependent clause "Since my customary valediction would seem oddly self-serving" is in fact my soul mate.

Posted by Faustus, MD at 11:30 PM | Comments (9)

May 21, 2009

It has been a year and eleven months since I turned in the manuscript for Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever. I have spent most of that time tearing my hair out trying to figure out what to write next.

Today, thanks to an old friend and a former classmate, I think I got it.

Posted by Faustus, MD at 07:58 PM | Comments (8)

May 19, 2009

I'm really worried here.

It was one thing when I missed it before.

But why is the Internet not full to bursting of Adam Lambert/Kris Allen slashfic?

Is there something really wrong with me?

I mean, even wronger than I thought?

Posted by Faustus, MD at 10:03 PM | Comments (6)

May 15, 2009

Great. After sticking with it for years, after spending an entire season's worth of Thursday nights whispering to myself, "Denny's ridiculous and annoying reappearance is not shark-jumping, Denny's ridiculous and annoying reappearance is not shark-jumping," I decide to give up on Grey's Anatomy two weeks ago. Now I can't look at my computer screen without reading about the season finale, and it's maddening because 1) I am furious that I missed it and 2) I kind of don't care anymore.

Posted by Faustus, MD at 04:30 AM | Comments (6)

April 13, 2009

The short version: Amazon.com has instituted a new policy whereby, if the company decides a book has "adult" content, for all intents and purposes it doesn't come up in a search. LGBT books, including mine, are disproportionately represented in this group. If you're as outraged and frightened by this de facto censorship as I am, go to http://www.minalhajratwala.com/blog/ to find out what you can do about it.

The longer version: Amazon.com's new policy, as set forth in an e-mail from one of its customer service representatives, is to strip "adult" books of their sales rank, which means that the books in question no longer appear in a search. LGBT books seem to be especially subject to removal, including not just my own memoir SWISH: MY QUEST TO BECOME THE GAYEST PERSON EVER AND WHAT ENDED UP HAPPENING INSTEAD--the Kindle edition is available but neither the hardback nor the upcoming paperback can be found without great effort, which means that nobody without a Kindle can read the book--but also books like NOW THAT YOU KNOW: A PARENTS' GUIDE TO UNDERSTANDING THEIR GAY AND LESBIAN CHILDREN, DEAD BOYS CAN'T DANCE: SEXUAL ORIENTATION, MASCULINITY, AND SUICIDE, and Foucault's THE HISTORY OF SEXUALITY. "Adult" books with a more heterosexual slant seem to be much less affected--PLAYBOY: SIX DECADES OF CENTERFOLDS, for example. If you do a search for "homosexuality," the first result on amazon.com is A PARENTS' GUIDE TO PREVENTING HOMOSEXUALITY.

If you are as outraged and frightened by this as I am, here are some things you can do:

1) Sign the protest petition: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/in-protest-at-amazons-new-adult-policy.

2) Call Amazon customer service at 1-866-216-1072 or Amazon executive customer service at 1-800-201-7575.

3) Complain via an e-mail form at http://bit.ly/amazoncomplain or complain via e-mail to Amazon’s “executive customer service”:at ecr@amazon.com .

4) Twitter using the #amazonfail hashtag.

5) If you belong to a group that cares about books or rights, encourage your organization to make a public statement.

6) Close your account via an e-mail form at https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/contact-us/general-questions.html?ie=UTF8&browse_node_id=508510#csTop .

You can read more about the situation at http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2009/04/amazon-deranks-gayfriendly-books-the-twitterverse-notices.html .

Here, in case it's helpful, is a copy of the e-mail I just sent.

Dear Mr. Bezos:

I am horrified at Amazon.com's new policy of stripping books with "adult" content of their rankings and thereby of their appearance in searches. I'm astonished to find myself writing that the fact that books with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transsexual themes are disproportionately likely to be among the deranked books is almost beside the point; the disgusting thing is that you're deranking any books at all. Although Amazon.com is a private entity and entitled by law to sell the books it wishes to sell in the manner in which it wishes to sell them, it is also the first bookstore of choice for the plurality, if not the majority, of book buyers in the world, and for many of them it is also the last bookstore of choice. This policy, in other words, amounts to de facto worldwide censorship; and it's simply impossible for me to patronize an establishment that operates in such a repulsive way. Over the years I have spent thousands of dollars at Amazon.com, but I have written to close my account; I'll also be forwarding this e-mail to everyone with whom I'm in touch via e-mail, Facebook, and my blog--this is thousands of people--and encouraging them to cancel their accounts too.

If Amazon.com revokes this policy immediately and issues an abject apology for showing such astonishing scorn for the principle of free speech upon which this country has operated for hundreds of years, I will consider signing up again for a few months, to give you the chance to begin to rebuild the trust you have destroyed. Otherwise, I will never purchase anything from Amazon.com again.

Yours truly,

Joel Derfner

Update: Amazon is apparently now claiming that the disproportionate representation of LGBT books is a glitch. Whether you find that believable or not, what isn't a glitch is that they're deranking any books at all. And that's much worse.

Posted by Faustus, MD at 01:07 AM | Comments (9)

April 02, 2009

Okay, so I just watched the pilot of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency on HBO, and of course it was as delightful as I was hoping it would be.

Most of it was a pretty faithful adaptation, and what changes they made all seemed very sensible to me. The addition of the swishy gay hairdresser friend, for example, in the person of Desmond Dube: in the novels there are innumerable passages representing Mma Ramotswe's inner monologue; the only way to convey these thoughts on film is to give her somebody to speak them to. Or, I suppose, to have her speak them to herself, thereby making everybody around think she was a crazy person and cringe from her in fear, which was not I think what the show's producers were going for, so the swishy gay hairdresser friend it is.

Except they seem to have left out the part about how in Botswana homosexual sex is punishable by up to seven years' hard labor. Actual prosecutions are apparently rare, but, from what I can divine, Botswana isn't the kind of place where a boy can flounce around talking about being uninterested in women and not risk getting beaten up, even in big cities like Gaborone. So what gives?

Posted by Faustus, MD at 03:47 PM | Comments (5)

March 30, 2009

This represents my bank account. Can you find what is wrong?

Picture 18.png

Posted by Faustus, MD at 08:48 PM | Comments (8)

March 24, 2009

My parents, as I've mentioned a few times, were civil rights workers in the 1960s—they were largely responsible for the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which guarantees black people's right to vote—and my father, in addition to continuing that work, has more recently also done a lot of work on behalf of labor unions (as would my mother be doing, I'm sure, were she still alive). So I grew up in an atmosphere in which working to make the world a better place (in Hebrew, tikkun olam—"the healing of the world") wasn't just a virtue; it was an imperative.

I am therefore somewhat ambivalent about having gone into the theater; in a way, the fact that I'm not in a third-world country working to create food distribution systems makes me feel like a moral failure. (When I'm at my most self-loathing, I say, "My parents secured black people the franchise, and I write pretty music that makes upper-middle-class white people feel nice.")

But my self-loathing aside, the fact is that theater does have the power to inspire its audience to tikkun olam; actually, we seem to be getting closer to measurable evidence that it does.

I recently read an article on Slate.com about "elevation," one of a group of self-transcendent emotions behavioral scientists have recently identified and begun to study.

Powerful moments of elevation sometimes seem to push a mental 'reset button,' wiping out feelings of cynicism and replacing them with feelings of hope, love, and optimism, and a sense of moral inspiration. . . . Elevation is good at provoking a desire to make a difference but not so good at motivating real action. But . . . the elevation effect is powerful nonetheless. . . . It does appear to change people cognitively; it opens hearts and minds to new possibilities.

Juxtapose this with the article in the New York Times Magazine a couple years ago about a scientific study showing that when people think about morals, religious or otherwise, they are more generous—4.33 times as generous, to be exact—than at other times.

We talk about how theater (and art in general) can make people better, but we're talking about an abstract idea, immeasurable and unproven. Now, however, we seem to be discovering that moments of elevation—including, one presumes, elevation induced by art, music, theater, and the like—have the power to make people quantifiably more open-hearted.

Which to me means that we who write for the theater have an absolute responsibility to use that power. When I see theater that doesn't seem to take this responsibility seriously, I find myself getting angry. Every season I see at least one musical that is brilliant and hysterically funny and through which I sit fuming more and more violently by the minute because, as I look at it, though the writers could have invested it with immense power for tikkun olam, without making it a jot less brilliant or a jot less hysterically funny—and very possibly more brilliant and funnier—they chose not to, which to me makes the show both a waste of their talent and a moral failure of its own.

I'm not saying that a show's morality has to be Big and Serious and Important. Little Shop of Horrors is deeply moral. And I don't mean that a show has to Have a Message or Enlighten the audience. I've sat through any number of shows about how Greed Is Bad (or Racism, or Intolerance of Others, or Whatever), and I've wanted to put my eyes out. They were turgid and sententious and ghastly, because the story and the characters were subordinate to the Message.

I've never been able to figure out how to express the difference between what makes a show elevating and what makes it ghastly—until now. The other day I came across an essay by D.H. Lawrence, an analysis of Walt Whitman in Studies in Classic American Literature, and he had this to say:

The essential function of art is moral. Not aesthetic, not decorative, not pastime and recreation. But moral. The essential function of art is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind. The mind follows later, in the wake.

The morality in a show needs to be passionate and implicit—a morality which changes the blood. If you write a show—or create any work of art—in which you're trying to change people's minds, you're being a preacher first and a storyteller (a distant) second, and the story will ring false. But if the work's morality is directed at the blood, if it communicates itself in how the characters treat each other and themselves, then its creators are simply storytellers, fulfilling the responsibility with which the power of art has invested them.

Posted by Faustus, MD at 03:21 AM | Comments (10)

March 19, 2009

I've written before about the crack house a couple doors down from me. Since I last mentioned it, it's been busted by the police several times, the last one apparently very effectively, and sold for an amount of money that made it clear there was fraud going on.

Well, earlier today it caught fire.

Nobody was inside.

It's funny: As I write this I'm trying to figure out the funniest way to comment, and I find that I can't. I mean, lots of funny things are occurring to me to say, but something about the raw, destructive, elemental power of fire leads me to hold my tongue.

Posted by Faustus, MD at 02:49 PM | Comments (6)

March 16, 2009

I just watched Never Been Kissed, the movie in which Drew Barrymore plays a journalist who goes back to high school undercover to report on Today's Teens.

Here is a shot from a scene in which the math club is having a bake sale.

Today's Teens, indeed.

O tempora, o mores!

Posted by Faustus, MD at 12:02 PM | Comments (7)

March 14, 2009

Last night I dreamed that E.S. and I were staying in an apartment not our own; the only appointment I can remember is a lame popcorn popper. Tamara Tunie from Law & Order: SVU walked in, and E.S. revealed to us that he had just jacked off.

Then we decided to go to the movies to see the new release of Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video. We took separate cars (if I hadn't already known it was a dream this would have tipped me off, since I am a terrible, terrible driver; when I was driving, back in high school, I caused nine or ten car accidents, though I feel I am owed a commendation because I swear that old lady and her granddaughter were up to something shady).

E.S. turned off the highway into the parking lot of a diner because he needed to look at a map. When I got out—somehow our two cars had magically become one by this point—I saw that the left front tire had melted. I went into the diner and called AAA, but I was connected to somebody in Wisconsin who couldn't help me because we were in Virginia.

Finally a car repair service called ZZZ showed up unasked; I worried that they were con men but, since we had no other options if we wanted to see "Thriller," we paid them to replace the tire. While they were working, Karl Rove tried to enter the diner, but with lightning speed I pushed the inner door open really wide and trapped him in between the door and the wall of the vestibule, whereupon I performed a one-act musical at him.

At that point his wife showed up, and unfortunately she was so nice that I let him go, at which point E.S. and I left for the movie theater. In two different lines for concessions I stood in front of two different men, the erection of each of whom I could feel against my ass through our pants. Neither of them was as attractive as E.S., though, so after buying a chocolate-chip-blueberry cookie I went with him into the theater.