Written: 1/16/2012

It’s a long article, but Dan Savage picks apart Santorum as he tries to backtrack and say that he is pro-LGBT rights.  Which is a laughable claim at best, but check it out, it’s a great read.

Update: Just remember folks, it’s not that Santorum hates you and wants you to disappear, it’s just a policy difference.  Enshrining hatred and bigotry into the Constitution doesn’t mean he hates you, nor does the reinstatement of DADT, stopping gay adoptions and forcing all gay married couples to divorce.  It’s just a policy difference.

All my best,

The King of Spades

Written: 1/12/2012

What a special, special group of Republican nominees.  The nomination process is a time when they try to out-crazy one another and the hate comes spewing out to try to appeal to the more conservative base.

Here’s what we have had recently:

Rick Santorum continued his string of antigay pronouncements while on the trail in New Hampshire, saying a man in jail would be a better parent than a same-sex couple.

A commenter made the awesome remark that Santorum had both a mother and father at home, so clearly, it doesn’t always work

And not to be outdone, let’s watch Newt play the victim card:

When a viewer asked what gay couples should do who want to “form, loving committed relationships,” answers from Republican candidates during Tuesday’s debate devolved into a case for why it’s actually Christians who are being persecuted.

“The bigotry question goes both ways,” declared Newt Gingrich. “And there is a lot more anti-Christian bigotry today than there is concern on the other side, and none of it gets covered by the news media.”

Yes, because the gays haven’t been vilified enough by the Republicans.  We obviously need beat up more.  You notice that there isn’t criticism thrown at the denominations of Christianity that aren’t bigoted, that actually love everyone, just like Jesus told us to do.  Just those that try to judge everyone instead.

All my best,

The King of Spades

Written: 1/12/2012

Those politicians who “doth protest too much” against the gays.  Well….

All my best,

The King of Spades

Written: 1/12/2012

Rob over at Waking Up Now has a great article.  It’s short, so I’ll just link to it, but first, a thought.

Many who wish to take away my rights, those in the Catholic church especially, love to say they have nothing against gay people, but we should be celibate.

Now, sex isn’t everything.  I have work, friends, random adventures that I find myself off, and well, shit to do.  However, sex is still part of life.

So when someone is told to just ignore their feelings, and their romantic attractions, and to never, ever act on any of them, it’s denying a part of them.  An integral part of them.  What we do in the bedroom is not and should not be public knowledge.  But a good portion of our romantic lives are public: who we date, our complaints to friends, families, co-workers and strangers about those dates and significant others, pictures on our phones, our desks, phone calls from those we love.  All of these create a public dimension to our personal, sexual lives.

To keep that hidden, which I’ve done for so long now, is tough.  It take a lot of work, and a lot of energy.  And a lot of disappointment.  I can’t talk about things I want to with friends, I can’t bitch and cry about rejection (or most likely in my case, unpack it over a few beers). I like to think that I deserve better.  But even sometimes, that’s hard to realize.

So the next time someone says the LGBT community are fine, just as long as they’re not having sex, think about a celibate life for yourself.

But hey, I can just not have sex, right?

Read Rob’s piece here.

All my best,

The King of Spades

Written: 1/12/2012

I’ve never been a kid person (ironic, I know).  I just don’t connect well to young kids.  That’s a whole different blog post, but suffice to say, I’m looking to have kids (at least right now).

However, sometimes, asshats need to be reminded that members of the LGBT community can be awesome parents (just like they can be shitty parents too):

The Williams Institute, a research center on sexual orientation law and public policy at UCLA School of Law, has announced new findings from the U.S. National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study (NLLFS), the longest-running study ever conducted on American lesbian families (now in its 24th year). In an article published today in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, the 17-year-old daughters and sons of lesbian mothers were asked about sexual abuse, sexual orientation, and sexual behavior.

The paper found that none of the 78 NLLFS adolescents reports having ever been physically or sexually abused by a parent or other caregiver.This contrasts with 26 percent of American adolescents who report parent or caregiver physical abuse and 8.3 percent who report sexual abuse. According to the authors, “the absence of child abuse in lesbian mother families is particularly noteworthy, because victimization of children is pervasive and its consequences can be devastating

Not that science and reason has ever convinced bigots to change their minds though, but it’s nice to see a study like this.

Rob, over at Waking Up Now, takes over in another amazing column, please have a read (it’s also a piece about how those seeking to take away our rights selectively edit research done on the topic)

All my best,

The King of Spades

Written: 1/2/2012

I try not to talk about my personal life that much.  Okay, you can quit laughing.

The purpose of this blog is a place for me to talk about being a gay employee at a workplace that would fire me if they knew.  And of course I cover politics and religion, and I hope that after I find a new job, to keep the “really gay” things over here in this blog.

But I don’t talk about my sex life, or relationships or things of that nature.  There are times I want to use this space to explore some things, but don’t want to get into too much detail, lest I burn the minds of you, dear readers.

But anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my relationships with people, especially with the death of my friend, the camp director.

I’ve known this for a long time, but I think a new understanding of it, something just clicked.

I take care of everyone else around me.  To a fault.  And I think with all the work I’ve done lately taking care of my friends, and I’ve realized that maybe I need someone to help me take care of myself.

I’ve always said that I’m happier single.  But I’m not closed off if anything were to come along.  Maybe I’m just scared of being too close to drama, so maybe I just need to find more people who are drama-free.

But thinking about having someone that I could lean on in the context of a relationship, someone to help me through life (and vice-versa of course), seems really envious.

And of course, I would have to learn to let myself be helped, and be more open.  Keeping secrets for so long has made me distrustful, made me angrier than I seem, and I hate that.  I hate that so very much.  And I think I would need some help to change that back.  But being so open is scary, to anyone I suppose, but I’d like that, that’s for sure.

So that’s a little peek into the inner workings of me, I hope it wasn’t too scary.

All my best,

The King of Spades

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