A Fat Gay

Surveillance video released in the case where investigators say the two Queens men taunted Jack Price and yelled anti-gay slurs before punching and kicking him last Thursday after he left a 24-hour deli near his home in Queens.

NOTICE THE CAR THAT DOES NOT STOP

‘Nuff said.

Really Kanye? You are an arrogant, IGNORANT piece of filth. You desecrate hip-hop.

In fourth grade, I would strut around the schoolyard in my red Michael Jackson “Beat It” jacket. It had exactly 27 zippers, just like the King of Pop’s jacket. To say I loved him is an understatement. I idolized him, emulated him, cried over him, devoured every Michael Jackson poster and pin I could find. Then, one day, my mom came to me and said, “we have tickets to the Michael Jackson concert.” I think I blacked out for a moment and then just waited for the day. I envisioned him calling me onstage to moonwalk with him, because I could do it so well. It was 1984 and I was now in 6th grade. It was the Victory Tour with the Jackson 5. I sat in that stadium so excited, I could hardly breathe. My mom knew I was going to blow her eardrums out so she had cotton stuffed in her ears. The lights dimmed, the crowd roared so loudly I couldn’t hear my own voice. I was so excited I almost threw up. Smoke was all over the stage as Michael’s brothers took their places. Everyone was in place except for Michael. I was dying. Then, from the bottom of the floor, into the air stood this perfect smoky figure with sequined pants and a white glove. Michael Jackson was rising from the floor of the stadium and I began to cry. I could not even help myself, the tears just flowed. I screamed so loudly I just know he heard me as he began to break out with “Wanna be startin’ somethin.” I felt connected. I felt his prescence and always have since that day. I have remained a tried and true MJ fan for 25 years. Even through the weird stages and false accusations, this lesbian was in love with Michael Jackson. When I heard of his death I had no words. Only more tears for the talent and the tragedy of his life. I never saw this coming and I am in disbelief and shock. The drug addiction is hard for me to acknowledge, but it appears I am going to have to swallow this pill..pun intended. I mourn the loss of a consumate professional, an icon like no other, a friend to the world, a man whom you never saw angry, a man who never had the chance to “be normal.” I still hear that faint goodbye from his concert so many years ago, “goodbye, goodnight, I love you all.”  I love you too Michael. May you finally have peace.

So I was in the pool yesterday, enjoying the wonderful sunshine, burning my flesh of course. I had family over so there were several people enjoying the gorgeousness of the day. However, isn’t there always a however, the gay bug struck. What do I mean you ask? Well, I am the only person to get my flesh sucked and gnarled on by some mysterious bug floating around the crystal blue waters. I felt the stinging on my arm and I looked over and saw a very strange looking thing on my fat flesh that left a big ole welt on my arm. As I was the only casualty, I can only assume it is the super bug put out by the anti-gay movement to kill us all off quickly. The gay bug got me and I will update you with my symptoms.

So the big news now is that Kate spanked Leah. Are you friggin’ kidding me? This is what we as society are going to crucify this woman for? She smacked the kid on her ass for God sake. Millions of parents have done the same thing, just not under the watchful eye of the paparazzi.  Jon Gosselin probably spanked Deanna and no one cares!!! I must have a differing opinion because I am gay and should never have kids, eh? LMAO…here is the story. Let me know your thoughts.

“Don’t get on Kate Gosselin’s bad side.

Once again, the matriarch of “Jon & Kate Plus 8” has found herself at the center of the media limelight, this time for spanking one of her eight children.

Mama Gosselin allegedly grabbed her daughter, Leah, by the arm and smacked her rear end before walking away from the crying child.

Photos released by In Touch Weekly show Gosselin holding her squirming child by the arm, and the next image of Leah crying and holding her rear. The photos do not actually reveal Gosselin’s hand touching her daughter.

According to the magazine, Leah had been asked to stop blowing a whistle and was not listening.

“The girl was screaming and crying. Kate just pushed her away and walked off with her coffee,” a witness told In Touch. “Her older sisters were trying to make Leah feel better.”

In response to the recent controversy, Gosselin is defending her actions.

“Whether the paparazzi are there or not, I am a mother first,” Gosselin told Life & Style Weekly. “I love my children and when they misbehave, I discipline them as I deem appropriate for the situation.”

The Gosselin clan has long been under a watchful camera lens thanks to their TLC reality show, but the family has recently received extra public scrutiny due to an allegedly crumbling marriage and accusations of extramarital affairs.”

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/gossip/2009/06/17/2009-06-17_kate_gosselin_defends_spanking_her_daughter_leah.html#ixzz0IjqbuGVE&C

I wasn’t going to post again today but once I saw this, I just had too. If you have really been looking into your blog stats, you know that you can look up how your blog is referred and also search terms that bring people to your blog. This will help bloggers utilize keywords for their posts. So I decided to have a gander at yesterday’s search terms for my little ole blog. I saw the same general stuff I usually see, however, halfway down the page I saw a very strange search term. This is what I saw : fat people with rainbow poop. Seriously? What in God’s name was this person looking for when they typed that in the box? And how in the hell did my blog show up in the results? Hang on a minute, I am going to type in that phrase in Google and see what happens. BRB. Wow! I am on the first page of results with that phrase due to a previous post on dangling cat poop. Who would have thought? I seriously want to meet the person that was searching for fat people with rainbow poop.

I came across this article on Yahoo Buzz and thought it a good idea to share with you. I never imagined anything like this before, mainly because this type of technology did not exist when I was a kid. However, this article shows just how far companies like Sony and EA Sports will go to keep from being gay friendly. Enjoy:

“Why is the issue of sexual orientation so explosive that the very act of saying the word “gay” or “lesbian” is sometimes against the rules? Bioware found itself on the wrong end of this controversy when a community manager gracelessly began locking threads that discussed the issue, and then claimed that there simply were no gay or lesbian characters in Star Wars. Maybe those words don’t exist in galaxies far, far, away, but the characters often do: Bioware themselves created a game with a character who laid down with another woman as with a man.

Sony was a part of a similar controversy after the words “gay” and “Jew” were edited out of Home, the company’s social online service for PS3 owners. And Microsoft made headlines when the company banned a player who self-identified as a lesbian, claiming any notice of sexual orientation was against the terms of service.

In some ways it’s unfair to take the world of gaming to task for its immature handling of gay and lesbian issues. After all, it’s hard to find a game that takes any kind of relationship seriously. This is an art form that knows how to show two people killing each other nearly perfectly, but seems to turn into a bunch of fifth-graders when dealing with a kiss, much less when that kiss is between two men or two women. It’s clear that something has to give, although companies only seem to pay attention after receiving the wrong kind of attention for their policies.

This is for your own good

The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation contacted EA over the Bioware issue, and received an e-mail and phone call from the Vice-President of EA. His defense of the actions is interesting, and it highlights the problem even as it shows how sincere EA is in its efforts to “fix” it.

“Filtering the words ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ was clearly a mistake; but one made with the intention of providing a civil atmosphere for players—certainly including gay and lesbian players,” EA wrote. “I hope that you and everyone associated with GLAAD understand that this was a mistake based on a sincere effort to filter hateful language off of our web site, and not to discriminate against anyone in the player community.”

Taking away the very words used to discuss the issue would certainly lead to less discrimination, as it just pretends that gay and lesbian players don’t exist. If we don’t talk about the problem, if we take away the ability to even say the word “gay,” we’ve very efficiently brushed the issued under the carpet. We’ve shoved gay players back into the closet, and installed a door with no key. Does anyone really believe that the word “lesbian” is hate-speech?

What does who you sleep with have to do with your gaming, anyway?

There is a nasty counter-argument that one often sees in this discussion: why not just keep sexual politics out of the world of gaming?

Taking away the very words used to discuss the issue would certainly lead to less discrimination, as it just pretends that gay and lesbian players don’t exist.

“I feel that a lot of ’straight’ people take for granted that everyone around them is also straight. They just assume that everyone feels the same way and enjoys the same things they do,” Flynn De Marco, the Editor in Chief of GayGamer, told Ars. “This is clearly not the case. Being able to identify as gay or lesbian in an online gaming perspective has its positives and negatives. The negatives being obvious in that they face endless harassment. The positives are that maybe you can connect and play with someone else without having to listen to a litany of gay jokes and ‘fag’ insults,” he explained.

“I would prefer to play with people of a like mindset as me, gay or straight. Wouldn’t you?”

There is also the subtle change in context that happens when you censor a word: it risks creating the impression that the very act of being who you are in the game constitutes a threat to the community. The attitude behind the censorship seems to be that gamers who aren’t straight need to sit down and shut up about it, but of course this is for their own protection.

“I think that in one way [gaming companies] are trying to avoid any controversy or use of the words as derogatory,” De Marco noted. “On the other hand I think it shows an extreme short sighted-ness and a bit of ignorance as to who some of their customers or potential customers may be. Accidentally repressing GLBT visibility in forums, even with good intentions, only makes it safer and more acceptable to use hate speech. Visibility is key to equality.”

Does gay and lesbian content need to be disclosed?

With same-sex marriage being a hot-button issue in the US at the moment—and some groups claiming that same-sex marriage could hurt the American family—what would gay and lesbian content do to the rating of a game? We reached out to the Entertainment Software Ratings Board and asked if game ratings differentiated between different kinds of sexual content.

“We’ve encountered the issue of same-sex content before—the boy-boy kiss in Bully being one example—and, as with any sort of suggestive or sexual content, there is always thoughtful discourse as to how best to address it from a ratings perspective,” Eliot Mizrachi of the ESRB told Ars. “While there aren’t any content descriptors that specifically identify same-sex content, our raters are trained to consider these types of elements within the context of the overall game, and to weigh those factors, among others, when deliberating about which rating and content descriptors would be most appropriate.”

We also asked Common Sense Media how they dealt with gay or lesbian content when giving parents guidance on which games and movies are appropriate for their children. “Our philosophy is that all parents are different. We’re here to make you a better parent,” Marisa Connolly, Communications Manager of Common Sense Media told Ars. “We want to provide as much information as we can, just literally saying here is the content. Here is what goes on in the movie, how much, how explicit it is. Here’s how much drinking, those sorts of things.”

The content is noted, but like the ESRB, these issues don’t affect the guidance on the media. “The idea is to be as objective as we can possible be, we say it’s there, but we don’t to my knowledge… if it’s explicit, we would give it the same ratings as heterosexual activities. We do mention it because we do know that everyone parents differently.”

Gaming needs to grow up, in more ways that just this one

“I definitely feel that the LGBT issues are part of the larger issue of gaming’s immature treatment of sex,” De Marco said. “I would also say that this applies to the US in general when it comes to sex. It’s such a huge taboo here, when in other countries they are more worried about things like kids being exposed to violence.”

The problem is that while gaming may treat sexuality as a whole clumsily, non-traditional sexual roles in gaming are treated borderline offensively. “At the same time, the immature treatment of LGBT issues goes way beyond the treatment of straight sex. Many of the ‘gay’ characters seen in games are pure negative stereotype, much like many ethnic depictions,” De Marco claims. “People want to suppress or marginalize what they don’t understand. Gaming reaches many walks of life, to be certain, but I think we all know that many games are taken in by impressionable young people who need to be taught that everyone they meet in the world is not a walking stereotype. It would be great to see the industry start taking some responsibility about the lessons it is teaching young gamers.”

The problem is that we’re so far away from having a reasonable discourse on the subject that the very words used to describe it are being treated as toxic in gaming and in official fora. Online gaming is a social activity where anyone can be anything they want, and people are free to explore new ideas and to meet new people. By limiting or even removing the ability to take part in, much less discuss at all, same sex relationships, we’re putting an artificial barrier on expression and open communication.

If you can’t be yourself in an online game or community, where can you? Gaming should be an escape, a diversion, and a safe place to play. It’s certainly the first two things, but the third is a much harder trick. Simply forcing gay and lesbian gamers into silence, however, isn’t the answer.”  By: Ben Kuchera