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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.

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:

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

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,

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?