Written: 1/2/2012

At work, we have some office relationships.  I, for instance, have an office girlfriend.

We work very well together and we’re good friends, hence the designation put upon us as office boyfriend and girlfriend.  Which I’m okay with, actually.

My one boss however, I’m fairly certain he thinks that I’m gay.  And he likes to hold that over my head, and loves to make comments about me being “straight.”  Sometimes it borders on the obsession level of NOM or Santorum.

Which is funny, since there are times I keep the department together and moving forward.  But anyway, he made some kind of snarky remark about it when I was talking with MOG (my office girlfriend).  She left to grab more coffee, and I went back to my work.

It happens a lot.  A whole lot.  And if I was in any position to report it, it would probably add up to harassment (along with comments from other coworkers of course), but I can’t really report it without outing myself and losing my job.  And while my direct supervisors would be at a loss without me, and I think, even though all their joking, would genuinely miss me and they really do appreciate me (even if we’re all overworked).

The local executive however, I think would love to be able to fire me for being gay (if he had a clue), I imagine it would give him some sort of brownie points to work his way up the ladder.  I have no idea if  that’s true or not, just a though.

So maybe it’s good that I have an office girlfriend.  Not only is she a wonderful friend, but it’s a good beard for now (and yes, I feel guilty for using her like that).

Update: This kind of systematic bullying that I put up with was why I hated the job so much.  Why I was under so much pressure and so unhappy for so long.  It hurt, it still hurts.  I know that I’m worse for wear because of it, and that it’s a lot to get past.

All my best,

The King of Spades

Written: 1/1/2012

I try not to talk about my life in the bedroom on this blog.  There are enough blogs like that around the Internet, and my sex life isn’t nearly as exciting and I don’t have the energy to use enough hyperbole to make it rank with other writers.  But this falls more to comedy, so I figured I should share.

Kinsey’s scale is 0-6, 0 being exclusively heterosexual, 6 being exclusively homosexual.  Well, the New Yorker put together a new scale, from 0-24.  It’s all tongue in cheek, but I feel as though I’m a 20:

20. Homosexual, but willing to speak to heterosexuals without muttering, under your breath, “Have you ever even been to a museum?”

Check out the whole list here.

All my best,

The King of Spades

Written: 12/31/2011

Well, it finally happened.  Me being selfish and trying to have equal rights destroyed the marriage of a MN state senator who was pushing for marriage equality ban.  How could I ever be so selfish?!

Here is the apology letter sent to her.  Even though I don’t live in MN, I’m sure somehow, from PA I affected her.  So please add my name to the undersigned and accept my mea culpa.

An Open Apology to Amy Koch on Behalf of All Gay and Lesbian Minnesotans

Dear Ms. Koch,

On behalf of all gays and lesbians living in Minnesota, I would like to wholeheartedly apologize for our community’s successful efforts to threaten your traditional marriage.  We are ashamed of ourselves for causing you to have what the media refers to as an “illicit affair” with your staffer, and we also extend our deepest apologies to him and to his wife. These recent events have made it quite clear that our gay and lesbian tactics have gone too far, affecting even the most respectful of our society.

We apologize that our selfish requests to marry those we love has cheapened and degraded traditional marriage so much that we caused you to stray from your own holy union for something more cheap and tawdry.  And we are doubly remorseful in knowing that many will see this as a form of sexual harassment of a subordinate.

It is now clear to us that if we were not so self-focused and myopic, we would have been able to see that the time you wasted diligently writing legislation that would forever seal the definition of marriage as being between one man and one woman, could have been more usefully spent reshaping the legal definition of “adultery.”

Forgive us.  As you know, we are not church-going people, so we are unable to fully appreciate that “gay marriage” is incompatible with Christian values, despite the fact that those values carry a biblical tradition of adultery such as yours.  We applaud you for keeping that tradition going.

And finally, shame on us for thinking that marriage is a private affair, and that our marriage would have little impact on anyone’s family.  We now see that marriage is more than that.  It is an agreement with society.  We should listen to the Minnesota Family Council when it tells us that marriage is about being public, which explains why marriages are public ceremonies.  Never did we realize that it is exactly because of this societal agreement that the entire world is looking at you in shame and disappointment instead of minding its own business.

From the bottom of our hearts, we ask that you please accept our apology.

Thank you.
John Medeiros
Minneapolis MN

Written: 12/31/2011

A few years ago I was meeting with a friend for a project and I remember the subject of marriage equality came up.

He had the culturally safe opinion that it should be legal, but with a different name than marriage.  After pointing out the differences between marriage (civil) and matrimony (religious), I asserted that LGBT rights are the defining civil rights battle of our generation, and that we will be judged based on those rights.

He seemed to agree, we had work to do and it was a nice break before we dove back into the tedious paperwork.  So this article at AMERICAblog interested me, here’s a great quote:

Ask Matthew Shepard how trivial the comparison is.  Ask Alan Turing, who pretty much was forced to kill himself after being chemically castrated for being gay.  Or ask all those gays who were forcibly lobotomized and actually castrated during the last century how trivial their suffering was.

Like the article so wonderfully puts it, no minority has the copyright on mistreatment, suffering and pain:

The entire discussion is offensive.  It’s part of a twisted “my pain is greater than your pain” debate that some feel the need to have over and over again.  It’s also reflective of the paranoid fear some in the gay civil rights movement have of “offending” anyone.  In the end, I’m not even sure what the “debate” is about.

Give the whole things a read here.

All my best,

The King of Spades

Written: 12/31/2011

Sometimes people ask what kinds of rights the BLTG (sorry, love the BLT sandwich so much!) don’t have.  There are (at last count if I remember correctly) 1,138 rights, protections and responsibilities from the Federal Government that are barred.

So let’s talk about money for a moment:

CNNMoney reports that the federal government’s lack of recognition of same-sex marriages, which forces legally married couples to file separately on their federal returns, results in as much as $6,000 per year in additional taxes.

Not only are these couples losing out because they can’t take advantage of the lower tax rates that come from combining incomes and deductions, says to the article, it’s “also harder for them to qualify for certain tax breaks because the credits phase out sooner for single filers.”

It’s weird talking about a tangible thing, or at least, as tangible as money can be.

Guess I need to do better at saving!

All my best,

The King of Spades

Written: 12/31/2011

Last week, the Catholic Cardinal of Chicago (hey, he could be the CCC!), compared gays to the KKK.

You don’t want the gay liberation movement to morph into something like the Ku Klux Klan, demonstrating in the streets against Catholicism.” he said on FOX Chicago Sunday.