balding angrily

Usually this isn’t the place for me to get too political, but the Matt Sanchez controversy [link shows torso action on a page with questionable advertising, but otherwise safe for work] caught my attention. Granted, it was a picture of shaved bulging pectorals that did the actual catching, but still. Matt Sanchez, according to Queerty, is a conservative darling that recently got found out as a gay porn star and escort. Sounds like another Jeff Gannon situation, eh? This was his response, in part, to that very comparison put to him by Joe of Joe. My. God. (The rest of the interview is worth it, if you’re inclined.)

There’s something about the beleaguered gay psyche that wants to prove to the world that everyone is just as messed up as they are. So, they start off with the term hypocrite and work their way backwards looking for signs of deviant behavior in hopes of discovering some type of bastard kinship. That’s why I’ve had the term self-loathing thrown at me so often. The gay community eats its own in a frenzied hope of self-serving fulfillment.

I can’t get mad at this quote because I see evidence of gays treating other gays badly all the time. I’m guilty of having negative reactions toward other gays. I also see a lot of love in the gay community, and I tend to think that the hateful actions gays perpetrate against other gays are like the squabbles otherwise loving brothers have.

Jerry just asked me about my reaction to the latest Ann Coulter thing. She, in a failed joke, called John Edwards a faggot. The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) immediately issued a call to the GLBT community to write the Universal Press Syndicate to have her removed, preventing her column from running in your local paper. I ignored the call from the HRC, and Jerry asked why. I told him I’ve always known Ann Coulter was a stupid person; this stupid thing she said is like any other stupid thing she says. If I were to get angry every single time a stupid person said a stupid thing, I wouldn’t be able to get any work done.

But I did get angry at the HRC when they had M&M/Mars take down the infamous Superbowl Snickers commercial that showed two otherwise straight guys recover from an accidental gay kiss by ripping out their hair, slamming each other under a car hood, and hitting themselves with a wrench. I felt that the HRC had taken something trivial and blown it out of proportion. I felt that they used my money foolishly, and they associated this silly commercial with real violence against gays, thereby trivializing an important subject.

What I’m getting to is this analogy I used earlier: I’m apt to get angry at my own kind like the HRC before I get angry at someone so off-her-rocker like Ann Coulter because the HRC is my family along with bears, clones, muscle-queens, twinks, Aberzombies, lipstick lesbians, bisexuals, transsexuals, transvestites, trannies, dykes on bikes, queers, questioning-ses, bi-curious-es, and any other sub-group that I may talk about scurrilously. (Don’t get me wrong; I love a good “Ann Coulter is an anorexic harpy” joke as much as the next America-hating liberal, but in general she amuses me more than angers me.) We are, by nature, looking at our family closer because they are our family. That’s what families do. We question our family. And we nag our family. And we get in fights with our family. And we hurt our family. And we throw knives. And we throw microwaves. (Ask me again some other time.) And we make up with our family. And we love our family more than we did before the fight. And we are closer because of it. And that’s what you call stretching a metaphor too far.

So, no. We do not eat our own. We struggle and fight and hurt and make up, but we do not eat.