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How to decline an invitation to the wedding of a same-sex couple:

“Mr. and Mrs. S. regret that they are unable to accept the very kind invitation of E.S. and Faustus for October 10, 2010.”

How not to decline an invitation to the wedding of a same-sex couple:

“Dear E.S. and Faustus,

“Thank you for your invitation. As you know we are Catholic and we believe in our religion and its teaching. We will not be able to accept but want you to know we love you very much and wish the very best for you always.

“Love,

“G. & Y.”

And yet which one do you think we got in the mail today?

I’m a little bit in shock.

Also, eating the remaining half of the grilled cheese sandwich after a whole week? Don’t these kids have a science teacher to warn them about the dangers of ptomaine poisoning?

Am I the only one who was deeply, deeply confused and offended by Tuesday’s episode of Glee?

Because usually I side, as one assumes the show’s writers intend, with Will and Emma against Sue Sylvester. There’s the occasional wonderful moment in which we’re surprised because Sue is right and Will and Emma are wrong (e.g. Sue’s harsh coaching last season of Becky Jackson, the cheerleader with Down Syndrome, since to be more lenient with her would be holding her to a lower standard, discriminating against her based on her disability), but even then I’m exactly where the writers want me to be.

Which is why I was so baffled last night when everybody on the show except Sue and Kurt went fucking insane.

And, since it’s difficult for me to believe that such skilled writers put a character who’s usually in the wrong in the right and characters who are usually in the right in the wrong for no reason, the only conclusion I can reach is that Ryan Murphy thinks the Constitution of the United States is great and all but should be superseded by good intentions.

Because that’s what Thomas Jefferson’s “eternal wall of separation between Church and State” means in today’s society, or one of the things it means: religion stays out of public schools. Students are free to pray to any deity they like at any time they like, but an institution run by the government is absolutely forbidden to force other students to join them. And if Kurt doesn’t want to sing about God, then the Constitution of the United States says he doesn’t have to sing about God, and what Mr. Schuster and Mercedes and Finn’s grilled cheese sandwich want doesn’t make one iota of difference.

And then when they go and pray for Mr. Hummel in the hospital—at that point I came pretty close to turning off my TV and never watching the show again. Because it’s difficult for me to see a big difference between that and the monstrosity that is the Mormons’ baptism of dead Jews.

And then Mercedes takes Kurt to her church and he sees that really it’s not so bad, believing in God is really okay, maybe he was wrong, maybe he should give this God thing a try, except the entire scene was a fucking lie, because Evangelical churches—which this one clearly was—tend to frown mightily on guys who suck cock. If Mercedes had said, oh, and by the way my friend is gay, everybody in that room would have dropped Mr. Hummel in an instant and started begging Jesus to make the boy straight. (So as not to leave unremarked the elephant in the room, I’ll say simply that I have a lot of thoughts about the interactions of race and sexuality, but I’ll leave them for another time. The Evangelical horror of the love that dare not speak its name is no respecter of color.)

And so when Kurt was sitting there, starting to smile, my blood—long past boiling—began to head toward a gaseous state. Because this was dishonest storytelling. Misleading storytelling at the very least—it would be like showing Pontius Pilate in a good light because of his excellent hygiene. And that’s not something I’m used to from Glee, and it’s not something I’m interested in watching. The corporations that run this country tell me lies enough every day; I don’t need more from my art.

I think I might really have sworn off the show, if it hadn’t been for the hat Kurt was wearing.

A snippet of conversation during last month’s finale of Design Star.

E.S.: It should be called Design Slut.
FAUSTUS: That would be a much more interesting show.
E.S.: “Your room design was beautiful, but your rim job sucked.”

I find children repulsive.

This will come as no shock to anybody, but I just want to remind you of that fact because it ought to put what I am about to do in some perspective.

My cousin has started a company called Child’s Turn. It’s an organization working to create an online community for parents and families of kids who have been diagnosed with disabilities; they’ve just launched a website at childsturn.com to offer, among other things, a list of service providers searchable by location and condition, a discussion forum, a well-written blog, and treacly pictures of smiling children.

My cousin pretends to be an asshole but secretly he’s actually a really nice guy, so if you have or anybody you know has a child in the family with a physical, mental, or emotional disability, take a look at Child’s Turn.

I mean, I’ll loathe a child regardless of whether it’s disabled or able, but I know that not everybody can be as forward-thinking as I. With luck my cousin and his cohorts will create a world in which all children have an equal opportunity to frighten me.

When I was but a wee thing of seventeen, I fell in love—nay, plunged desperately in love—with one of the teachers at my high school, M.R., whom I knew of course as Mr. R. I never actually took any of Mr. R.’s classes, but he was also one of the drama coaches; it was in this capacity that I worked with him, in preparation for debate tournaments and for the senior play. Furthermore, I went to a pretty small school, so everybody knew everybody else, and since I had few friends my own age I ended up hanging out with the teachers more than most of the other kids.

But I digress. As I say, I was desperately in love with Mr. R., who by the way was GORGEOUS, and I spent approximately half my waking hours during senior year thinking about a) whether he was gay and b) whether, if he was, I could get him to love me.

But I graduated from high school without ever learning the truth about either of these questions. Mr. R. and I stayed in touch, however, and before long I understood that the answer to a), at least, was “yes.” By this time I had moved away and plunged desperately in love with more boys than I could count, so my passion for Mr. R.—whom I could finally begin calling M.—had receded from the forefront of my mind, but my affection for him remained.

A few months ago I had the opportunity to see him for the first time in many years, when I was a visiting artist for a week and a half at the school where he teaches now. During the day I worked with the drama students; at night, M. and I revisited those halcyon days of yore, long gone, when we could both laugh in the teeth of wrinkles and fat; each of us remembered things the other had forgotten, so I found our conversations were deeply satisfying, in that they served the purpose not only of reconnecting with an old friend but also of enlarging my understanding of my own history.

He had forgotten, for example, the hair-product episode. At one point in the fall of 1990 I discovered that the guy who stood next to me in the choir I sang in was Mr. R.’s hairdresser. This fact filled me with a gleeful joy, because my friend Y. and I had been trying for months to get Mr. R. to tell us which product he used on his spectacular hair. Mr. R. had thus far resisted our efforts without breaking a sweat, but I made excellent use of my new connection and was able to surprise Mr. R. during fourth period with a bottle of Vavoom for his birthday.

He in turn reminded me, over dinner with a friend of his, of the Christmas episode, which had completely vanished from my memory. Shortly before Christmas vacation, school was canceled one day because of snow. (This was in Charleston, South Carolina, where it snows once a year, exactly one inch, and the city shuts down because nobody knows how to deal with it.) I wasn’t about to let the snow stay me from the swift completion of my appointed round. So I walked to his apartment, which was a couple miles from my house, knocked on his door, and, when he opened it, handed him his Christmas present.

Which was a copy of Tales of the City.

I’d hoped, of course, that he would ask me in and ravish me or at the very least open his heart to me and let me open mine to him so that we would discover we were kindred spirits, but this did not happen. Instead, he stood in the doorway, thanked me politely for the gift, and shut the door, at which point I—lithe, nubile, seventeen-year-old, unmolested I—trudged home.

When M. had finished the story, his friend’s only response was, “Gee, M., you really know how to not get arrested.”

I for my part found myself wishing ever so slightly that I didn’t have a boyfriend so that I might try again. But the Tales of the City had been over for years, and when one has lost opportunities they tend not to be found.

My father, who is a somewhat well-known civil rights lawyer, happened to be in Washington, D.C., yesterday and attended the Elena Kagan confirmation hearings. During a break he ran into the hideous Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and said, “If it’s any consolation, Senator, my friends and I all think she’s too conservative.”

He says that Senator Graham “chuckled ruefully.”

E.S.: Did you hear that Taco Bell is going out of business?
FAUSTUS: NO! Oh, my God, that’s so horrible! Why? How could such a thing happen?
E.S.: I don’t know. They looked at their profits and—
FAUSTUS: Wait a minute. Taco Bell isn’t going out of business, are they? You’re just saying that.
E.S.: Guilty as charged.
FAUSTUS: You’re so mean. You pass along vicious rumors just to make me feel bad.
E.S.: No, I make up vicious rumors just to make you feel bad.

The other night, E.S. and I watched a television program called Merlin, which seems to be a sort of prequel to the story beloved by so many. It features Arthur as a strapping blond lad (if pressed one might admit to a small desire that he be just ever so slightly more strapping) and Merlin as his macrotous contemporary, along with Giles from Buffy the Vampire Slayer as Arthur’s cruel, domineering father Uther. At one point during the show E.S. and I had the following conversation.

E.S.: Wait a minute. Which one’s Arthur?
FAUSTUS: Him.
E.S.: But she just called the other guy Arthur.
FAUSTUS: No, she called him Uther.
E.S.: Who’s that?
FAUSTUS (pausing the show): Are you serious? How can you not know basic mythology?
E.S.: How can you not know how to take out the garbage?
FAUSTUS: Uther was Arthur’s father. He married Igraine, but not before—

(E.S. unpauses the show)

FAUSTUS: But you asked me to—! You wanted to know who—
E.S.: Yes, but I’m bored now.
FAUSTUS: Don’t ever touch me again.

(It is earlier this evening. E.S. and FAUSTUS are lying in bed lazily.)

E.S.: I need to get up.
FAUSTUS: Okay. I’m going to count down from three. On one, let’s both get up.
E.S.: Okay.
FAUSTUS: Three…. Two…. One!

(FAUSTUS gets up. E.S. stays right where he is.)

FAUSTUS: You have a very idiosyncratic definition of “both.”
E.S.: I’ve changed my mind. I’m just going to lie here and become a big lump.
FAUSTUS: Become?

(E.S. uses his foot to push FAUSTUS to the edge of the bed.)

FAUSTUS: Hey!
E.S.: Did you almost fall off the bed?
FAUSTUS: Yes.
E.S.: …
FAUSTUS: …
E.S.: Well, I would have said I was sorry.