Anyway,

Didi also had difficulty maintaining her manner, getting as clear a view as a result of the woman\’s spread legs.

Tonight they

i lay there like a piece of meat, being seen to by a butcher with seven and a half fingers left.

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One of the things which most disappoints me about people is their frequent inability to think. Perhaps even there I’m being charitable; inability is more excusable than unwillingness, because mental slowness cannot be helped, and what annoys me cannot fairly…

Thanks for emphasizing that, BTW–as often happens, i realized that this post was way too long and scattershot, and in the process of tightening it up a bit, I took out the part about being judgmental.

When I read Moore’s passage on that topic, my reaction was something like, “Speak for your own gay culture, buddy!” Everyone I’m friends with is perfectly willing to judge someone for being an unrepentant skank. Shun him, too.

The one thing I’d love to see more gay people do, however, is stop holding back judgment! I realize that many of the scars gay men carry are born of harsh judgment, but being silent when somebody is destroying their own life is not being non-judgmental — it’s being a lousy friend. If you know someone into “raw” (read: unprotected sex) who keeps talking about it, let them know if you feel it’s unhealthy and dishonest and risky and not okay. If you have a friend who’s on meth, let them know where that road inevitably ends, and whether you’ll be willing to follow them on that road.

I realize that fundamentalists and other anti-gay groups feel their being loving when they tell us that being gay is immoral and unnatural and dangerous to children and whatnot — but the difference is that THEY’RE WRONG! Fucking without a condom is *proven* to be unhealthy. Meth is *proven* to be unhealthy. Wanting to see Roger Clemens without a shirt on…I think the jury’s out on that one.

Public education isn’t as powerful as private conversations. I’d rather see money spent on teaching gay men to reclaim their right to make moral and ethical decisions.

But I wasn’t trying to pooh-pooh the problem of self-destructive behavior. Perhaps because I’ve been fortunate enough to know mostly even-keeled people whose problems don’t extend far beyond funky-neurotic, I like to think that you can at least nudge people toward unsparing self-criticism by showing that you care what happens to them. But then, as you say, how do airy political abstractions that put most of the blame on other people and evade reality help?

I try not to link to things just to belittle the hell out of them all the time, but this piece kept bringing up real, important points and then swerving away from them into La-La Land. It drove me nuts.