The Agenda:

Testing the Premise: Are Gays a Threat to Our Children?

What the "Dutch Study" Really Says About Gay Couples

Federal Hate Crime Statistics: Why The Numbers Don't Add Up

Refuting Christianity Today

  Favorites:

Still Life At Sunset

Anderson Cooper and Scooter

Wandering, Wondering

The Aperture of Memory

Easter's Birthday

The First Time I Cussed

  Photo Essays:

The Anasazi Ruins of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico

Monsoons of 2004

Miracle Mile

Now Showing / Reflection on Hayden, Arizona

Family Values
Monday, February 28, 2005

Here's a great way to spend a Saturday morning: raising the walls for a Habitat for Humanity home.

This year, a broad coalition of GLBT groups here in Tucson banded together to form the Rainbow Build Coalition to build a house for an elderly couple and their hard-of-hearing daughter. Last Saturday was the wall raising celebration.

© LookingForSam / Jim Burroway
 

There was an excellent turnout of several hundred people in the surprisingly hot Arizona sun for the initial program, consisting of a few mercifully brief speeches and blessings (including a beautiful reading from Nehemiah), along with a couple of songs sung by the Desert Voices. Then it was on with the raising.

Habitat for Humanity was formed so that ordinary people could help less their fortunate neighbors build their own home. It is a very simple concept going back to the pioneer days of this country, when ordinary folks got together for a house raising or a barn raising. There's nothing political about it – it's just folks being neighborly. Folks like you and me.

And that, I think, was the best way to look at today's event. Despite what they say, we're just folks. In today's political climate, when gays are being blamed for all manner of evils in society, where we are being blamed for the breakdown of the family and the ruination of the youth, we were focused on something far more fundamental: we were helping a family to put a roof over their heads. Frankly, that is a family value that I can be proud of.

They like to paint us in ugly colors, but we're just not that easy to caricature. They say we're selfish, indulgent, even hedonistic. Yet as Kent Burbank, Wingspan's Executive Director pointed out, we're the ones who have always had to come together to take care of our own, simply because no one else will.

We had to take care of each other during the AIDS crisis because no one else would. We have to take care of each other when our youth are disowned and kicked out because no one else will. And now as the political climate gets uglier and uglier, we will have to take care of each other even more.

But of course, it's not enough to take care of only our own. We also need to take care of those around us. Our generosity should know no boundaries when dealing with the needs of the community. That is why the Rainbow Build Coalition is helping to build a home for this couple, and didn't hold out to build one for a gay family.

This is the right thing to do. It is, in fact, the Christian thing to do.

© LookingForSam / Jim Burroway

This may come as news for the larger community. Not many Habitat projects get the attention of the local news media like this. This is believed to be the first broad-based GLBT coalition in the country to come together to sponsor a Habitat home. (Soulforce by themselves sponsored one in Virginia in 2000).

But its not the attention of the news media that's important. It's about helping an elderly couple that is currently living with their hard-of-hearing daughter in an old guesthouse with no heating, cooling or hot water.

It's about family. And it turns out that even when we go outside of our own parochial concerns, we're still taking care of our own.

By today's guest blogger, Christopher Gerron:

Elegance Is the Greatest Amount of Being That Can Be Brought Into Appearance.

Or, What Do Poets Want?
Monday, February 21, 2005

A few weeks back it was Jim’s birthday and it seemed timely to trot him out for some loud music and Glenlivet, so I logged-on to see what would work. Nothing moves Jim or myself as deeply as storytellers who are really musicians who are really storytellers, and in a coincidence of near cosmic significance the choice came down to two artists who have long commanded pure respect from each of us. Laurie Anderson was doing her new show in Phoenix and Mike Doughty was playing at the Fillmore in San Francisco.

While it’s worth any inconvenience to see my mild-mannered missile-maker emerge as a supple black-clad party fiend, getting to San Francisco was a logistical nightmare, so we opted for the local gig and spent one of the more profound evenings of our lives listening to Anderson muse about time, artifice, and her talking Jack Russell terrier, Lulabelle.

I’m loyal to the artists I admire and fine American poets are, to my mind, few and far between. There’s composer John Adams, there’s sculptor James Turrell, there’s Laurie Anderson, and then there’s the guy we didn’t go and see in San Francisco, a guy named Mike Doughty.

Doughty is the songwriter and singer responsible for one of the records that Jim and I each think is the gold-standard on how it’s done. In 1994 he and his band Soul Coughing released a record called Ruby Vroom, and it’s been hard to settle for less ever since. We’ve admired him for years but only recently discovered that he’s been keeping a regular online journal, and thought it only right to introduce you to him.

Considering the proverbial darkness of his chosen field of dreams – making and publishing songs – Mike’s journal is a bright and forthright path through his poetically imagined life. He writes mostly with optimism, but even in his admissions of uncertainty you never lose a sense of his humor, and much of the directness of his songwriting is evident in the writing and personal photography on the site.

Recent entries document his head-rushing through the process of making the next album. He keeps it simple and it’s never dull. Discerning thinkers will appreciate Mike’s notes on the artistic life’s fun-house gods and monsters, and unrepentant voyeurs will savor the always tantalizing peek into the mind of a really adorable straight guy.

If good art gives you pause, there’s the possibility that whatever Mike ends up making might somehow find its way into your lives as well, and that means you’ll need to buy the record, but in the meantime there is this glimpse into the process. Here’s the link, meet Mike Doughty.

Coyote Love
Monday, St. Valentine's Day, 2005

Love is in the air this February, and it's more than just Valentine's day. You see, it's mating season for coyotes. And they seem to have gotten quite a jump on things this year.

The back half of the lot on which our semi-rural home sits is bisected by a wash, which serves as a highway of sorts for all kinds of wildlife, including coyotes. And the coyote wildlife is especially raucous this year. Gotta hand it to them, some of these creatures go all night long! The yipping and the howling barely fifty yards beyond our bedroom door make for quite an exotic symphony at three in the morning.

Coyotes are a danger to small pets. Whenever we let our dog into the back yard, one of us always has to stay with him. Our yard is surrounded by a wall, but coyotes have been known to jump over them. Lately when Twister goes outside, there have been a few times when he stopped dead in his tracks, sniffing the air. The last two nights, he stood sentry over our bed facing the back door. Standing guard over our little pack and keeping danger at bay. There's definitely something out there. He's hasn't been getting much sleep lately, and he's a little on edge. Chris and I haven't gotten much sleep either.

But it doesn't matter, February is still one of my favorite months, at least in the evenings. I haven't lost that boyhood sense of the exotic whenever I hear a coyote howl. It's not the plaintive howl of a wolf that you hear in the movies. Coyotes are more insistent in their howl, more firm. Where wolfs sound like they're asking "Where are you? I'm lonely.", coyotes are more assertive like the hookers on Miracle Mile as they boldly proclaim, "Haaay! Come over here! Sugar, I got what you need!"

This will go on for another month or so, then everything will be quite again and we won't hear the coyotes until the young pups start to venture out of their den in August. Then it will be the high-pitched yipps of roving bands of adolescents, testing their mettle with each other in preparation for the day when they too, on a cool moonless night, will venture forth for love – or its approximation – on Valentine's day.

Happy Valentine's day, Chris.

And to all of you out there, whether you already have somebody waiting for you in your den, or whether you are one of those out there howling in the arroyo, happy Valentine's day to you too.

□■□■□

Mike Airhart at Ex-Gay Watch published an article I wrote. Check it out.

Under the Weather
Thursday, February 10, 2005

Arizona is now on the frontlines of the latest flu epidemic, and I am one of her fallen foot-soldiers.

I haven't had the flu since high school. I never get the flu; that's why I've never bothered with flu shots. Not that I could have gotten one this year even if I wanted one. But if they had been handing them out like candy on the street corner I would have passed it by. I never get the flu.

Well, I am now recovering from the flu.

We've all been under the weather around here, a cloudy and rainy winter. Which is good really, because we need it against the backdrop of a seven-year drought. We might get more rain this weekend. The months of January and February are supposed to be one of our two wet seasons, so this is as it should be.

Still, I'll be glad when springtime comes and we will be able to hit the backroads again, to places like this one: the near-ghost town of Hachita, New Mexico. This "town", such as it is, is located on one of the most desolate stretches of highway in the entire southwest: over a hundred scenic miles from Columbus, New Mexico to the Arizona border with nary a gas station or outpost in sight.

In fact, beyond a few down-in-the-heel homes and a tavern, the most interesting sign of life in Hachita is this erstwhile abandoned church, one that someone managed to clean up in preparation for a wedding.

Unfortunately, nobody appears to have any plans for the old school.

© LookingForSam / Jim Burroway

Some of the old homesteads made of dried adobe mud bricks are slowly melting back into the earth, perhaps into the very spot from which the bricks were formed.

I look forward to springtime, when the sunshine returns in abundance, when maybe we will be blessed by the visitation of wildflowers, and the ruins of old ranchers' and miners' dreams beckon me once again to explore the fading stories embedded deeply into their walls.

It's Vegas, Baby!
Thursday, February 3, 2005

I have spent my entire life up to this point in complete and total disdain for everything that Las Vegas stands for: the glitz, the false glamour, the small-time chintzy stardom that everyone aspires to, the seediness, the tackiness, the excess, and the falseness of the whole thing. I envisioned it as some sort of Disneyland for adults, with themes and costumes and flash.

© LookingForSam / Jim Burroway

If Wayne Newton was "Mr. Las Vegas", then I wanted nothing to do with it. Besides, I wasn't much into gambling, and showgirls didn't hold much appeal to me.

But then I thought to myself, Vegas is an important part of American culture. It's something that everyone should see for himself, if for no other reason but to witness firsthand what an important part of America is all about. Seeing it would be good for me as an exercise in pop cultural literacy.

Chris and I went there this past weekend, courtesy of a good friend of ours from San Francisco. And everything I believed about Vegas turned out to be true.
 

© LookingForSam / Jim Burroway

It really is loaded with false glamour, chintzy stardom, genuine seediness, stupendous tackiness, fabulous excess, and a wonderful falseness everywhere you turn!

My God! It's a freakin' Disneyland for adults! Complete with themes and costumes and flash!  Oh, the flash! What's not to like?
 

I was in love!

Cher was fabulous! Blue Man Group was fabulous! The hotels, restaurants and casinos treated us like kings! The nightlife never ended, the day life was non-stop, the drinks were free, and I even managed to strike it rich at the slots. (Although truth be told, Chris had much better luck with the slots than I did).

And then I discovered roulette. The wicked temptress who sang her sweet siren's song of riches for the taking. And the riches were taken over and over through the night, until my pile was empty.
 

◄ January 2005
► March 2005

By the way, that other temptress waiting by the elevator banks? Sorry, but she didn't stand a chance. I nodded my acknowledgements like the gentleman I am and went back up to the room. It may be legal here, but what good does that do me?

And while we were here, we saw Venice, we saw France, we saw Cher's underpants. Las Vegas' version of New York may not stack up to the real thing in terms of sophistication and depth, but I'm pretty sure it smelled better. I've never actually been to any of those places, and now I don't need to. I've been to Vegas!

© LookingForSam / Jim Burroway

So now I must admit that I am completely hooked. Next time I go back, I'll even go see Wayne Newton (assuming he's still alive – we now know where all of those scientists went, the ones who used to keep Lenin from falling apart.) And when I see him, I'll let him know that there's a new Mr. Las Vegas in town.

Oh, miss! Is there a good reason why my high ball is empty? Love ya, baby!

© LookingForSam / Chris Gerron