Love in the Uncertain, Wintry World of 'Sup?'

Bart, Paul and I just saw Bros, which was in turns witty and hilarious and finally touching, just the way a romantic comedy is supposed to be. 

The heart swells in the right places.

The central conflict is emotional unavailability, which feels very 2022 to me.

There's a running joke about Debra Messing, and another one about Hallmark movies.

'Love, Simon,' And Why Not?

Just back from Love, Simon, a gay Little Shop Around the Corner that couldn’t be more Capra.

The film was touching and sweet without being cloying — or such was my opinion, clearly shared with the 30 high school girls in the audience who saw it with me.

The rest of the cinema was full of 80-year-olds watching some stupid caterwauling Jesus movie.

Highlights include Simon’s fantasy of a rainbow disco college and his high school’s dreadful production of Cabaret.  

Nick Robinson, the regular-guy heartthrob who plays Simon so effectively, is straight, but said the movie caused his brother to come out.

Homosexuality and Enlightenment

Eckhart Tolle has put his finger on something here that I’ve wondered about for a long time.

“As you approach adulthood, uncertainty about your sexuality followed by the realization that you are ‘different’ from others may force you to disidentify from socially conditioned patterns of thought and behavior,” Tolle wrote in his book The Power of Now. “This will automatically raise your level of consciousness above that of the unconscious majority, whose members unquestioningly take on board all inherited patterns. In that respect, being gay can be a help. Being an outsider to some extent, someone who does not ‘fit in’ with others or is rejected by them for whatever reason, makes life difficult, but it also places you at an advantage as far as enlightenment is concerned. It takes you out of your consciousness by force.”

I presume this is also one reason so many gay people turn to the arts, where an outsider’s perspective can be a source of inspiration and insight. 

Saying Goodbye with Kerouac and Ginsberg

Seventeen-year-old Allen Ginsberg had fallen for an 18-year-old cerebral charmer, his fellow Columbia University student Lucien Carr, at once. Ginsberg’s infatuation with 21-year-old Jack Kerouac, a sensitive and articulate merchant seaman, was equally instant.

All three were also in the giddy early stages of a love affair with intellectual enlightenment. Carr later called it the rebellious students’ search for valid values.

Jack Kerouac (l.) and Lucien Carr

“Their walk had taken them to the Union Theological Seminary; they stood on the corner of West 122^nd Street and Broadway and looked down the hill to the gray spread of Harlem,” wrote Barry Miles, Ginsberg’s biographer. “Allen was moving out of the seminary and still had a few things to collect. He and Jack had discussed their admiration of Lucien, so there was a mutual understanding when Allen pointed out the door where he had first heard the Brahms Quintet (that had introduced him to Carr) six months earlier.”

“Allen collected the few books and belongings he had come for, and as he turned from the dormitory suite he bowed to it, made a gesture of farewell, and said, ‘Goodbye, door.’ He continued down the stairs, saying goodbye to each step as he went. He bade farewell to the seventh-floor landing, the sixth-floor landing and all the rest, like a poem, all the way down. Kerouac was struck by this: ‘Ah, I do that when I say goodbye to a place.’ They had a long, excited conversation about the recognition of each of the stairs as the final stair and about Allen’s realization of the changes in himself since he first climbed them six months before.

“‘That struck him as an awareness of a soul in space and time, which was his nature,’ Ginsberg said later. Jack asked him if he knew any other people with the same awareness. Was it awareness? Was it poetry? They decided that everyone had it who was in any way conscious or sensitive. ‘Everyone has the same soul. We’re all here together at once in the same place. Temporarily, with a totally poignant tearful awareness that we’re together,’ they decided. This recognition became the basis of their deep and lasting understanding of each other.”

I'm Crossing You in Style Some Day

Audrey Hepburn as the Truman Capote character whose cards read "Holiday Golightly, Traveling."

When I first watched Blake Edwards’ 1961 film Breakfast at Tiffany’s at age 12, I was immediately fascinated by Holly Golightly’s veneer of toughness over vulnerability, particularly because Audrey Hepburn’s plucky portrayal of Truman Capote’s character was counterpointed by the poignancy of Henry Mancini’s song Moon River.

 “I suppose you think I’m very brazen or très fou or something.” Mad parties, mean reds, the cat in the rain. Youth and beauty and longing.

Thus have gay voices always reached across the generations to each other, even when others could not hear them.

Suspended Between the Depths and the Light

'The Swimming Hole' by Thomas Eakins (1884-85)

Poet Walt Whitman loved swimming with other young men, nude in the fashion of the 19^th century, their bodies electric.

Poise on the hips, leaping, reclining, embracing, arm-curving and tightening,

The continual changes of the flex of the mouth, and around the eyes,

The skin, the sun-burnt shade, freckles, hair,

The curious sympathy one feels, when feeling with the hand the naked meat of the body,

The circling rivers, the breath, and breathing it in and out…

“The young men ran dancing and laughing along the sand, bathed in the surf, fished, dug clams, speared messes of fat, sweet-meated eel,” wrote biographer Justin Kaplan. “He loved swimming, of a passive sort — ‘I was a first rate aquatic loafer,’ he recalled. ‘I possessed almost unlimited capacity for floating on my back.’ Cradled, rocked and drowsing, his body rolling ‘silently to and fro in the heave of the water,’ he lay suspended between the depths and the light, between the unconscious and the world of necessity.”

What They Said He Deserved

At right is movie star Ramon Novarro in 1925. At left are his murderers.

At 69, the former silent film star Ramon Novarro was murdered by two brothers who were male hustlers.

At their murder trial, defense attorney Richard Walton told the jury, “Back in the days of Valentino, this man who set female hearts aflutter was nothing but a queer. There’s no way of calculating how many felonies this man committed over the years, for all his piety. What would have happened if Paul had not gotten drunk on Novarro’s booze, at Novarro’s urging and at Novarro’s behest? What would have happened if Novarro had not been a seducer and traducer of young men? The answers to those questions will determine the issue and degree of guilt of Tom Ferguson and the issue and degree of guilt of Paul Ferguson.”

Paul Ferguson in a "physique" magazine.

Being beaten to death is what an officer of the court felt free to argue that a gay man deserved in 1969, two months after the Stonewall Riots.

Puritan Power in American Pop Culture

Fin de siècle French supermen like Fantomas were all rampaging Id, glorying in their elaborately planned terrorist attacks and, without hesitation, murdering anyone who stood between them and their desires.

But 1930s American pulp supermen like the Shadow and Doc Savage seemingly had no personal desires. They were all Superego, devoted to impersonal crusades for justice and/or helping the helpless — a legacy of both America’s all-business attitudes and Puritan origins that also informed westerns and detective stories, among other genres.

Primitive chaos doesn't daunt the technocratic wonder Doc Savage

“Whether as conscious reflections of ideology or disguised myth, basic cultural assumptions embedded in our national mythology often appear in our popular forms of entertainment,” wrote Columbia University film professor Jim Holte in his essay Pilgrims in Space. “Puritan ideology stated that sexuality was an outward and visible sign of a corruption that would destroy any covenanted community beset with such real and immediate external dangers as the wilderness, the Indians and a seemingly endless number of heresies. To confront the terrors of the unknown and continue his mission, the Puritan needed all the discipline and resolve he could muster. No distractions were permitted. It was enough to make anyone grim.”

Not the Rights They Were Fighting For

The bored Marines stood at attention, listening to Buck Rogers describe homosexual sex acts.

In his WWII Pacific combat memoir Goodbye, Darkness, William Manchester recalled that his captain, “Buck” Rogers, would read aloud from Navy courts-martial arising from sexual indiscretions.

“As unsubtly as possible, we were being warned that no matter how horny we got, we couldn’t go down on each other,” Manchester wrote. “It mystified us. Youth is more sophisticated today, but in our innocence we knew almost nothing about homosexuality.”

“There was so much excitement (and apocrypha about) heterosexuality that we seldom gave homosexuality a second thought. Had we been told that practitioners of oral sodomy wanted to live together openly, with the approval of society, and insisted on being called ‘gay,’ we would have guffawed. That just wasn’t one of the rights we were fighting to protect. We weren’t exactly prejudiced. It was, literally, mindlessness. We hadn’t thought about it. That didn’t make it unique. We weren’t fighting for the emancipation of housewives, either, or for the right of blacks, who performed menial, if safe, tasks far behind the lines, to bleed alongside us. Like most soldiers in most wars, we were fighting for status quo ante bellum. And like the others, we were doomed to disappointment.”

All those bored Marines knew were that perverts were guys who lisped and longed to put on a dress. “Therefore the other NCOs and I laughed when our sergeant major told us, in a drunken moment (and an unusual one, because liquor was generally reserved for officers; enlisted men, including sergeants, got beer), that he had slept with men. Mike Powers was in the regular Marine Corps, a professional soldier; he had served in Nicaragua, Haiti and on Gibraltar. It was on Gibraltar that he had, by his soused account, violated Chapter Two Specification Seventeen almost nightly. His lovers had been civilians, he said, some of them distinguished European civilians.”

Powers told them that when he retired, he planned to write a book called Famous Cocks I Have Sucked.

“We didn’t take him seriously, partly because in the Marine Corps there was a constant rivalry to see who could be coarsest,” Manchester wrote. “His behavior was in many ways regrettable, but always in macho ways which, we thought, were the exact opposite of homosexuality. Six feet two, blond and virile, he was heavily muscled and deep voiced.”

Powers was tough and brave, but he had a flaw in combat. “Our strutting, bullying, powerfully built sergeant major just couldn’t stand the strain of concentrated enemy shellfire,” Manchester said. “He could take small-arms fire, and once he demolished a Nambu light-machine-gun nest with a hand grenade. But artillery turned his bowels to water.”

And so one night, when the firing stopped after a sustained attack from 81-millimeter mortar shells, Powers cracked up. The Marines knew that the silence was a tactic to draw them out in the open so they could relieve themselves, at which point they’d be caught in a fresh fusillade. Powers began ranting and yelling and ordering a charge that would have gotten them all killed, so Manchester was forced to relieve Powers and get him to a battalion aid station.

Manchester never saw Powers again, but he learned Powers’ fate much later, when Manchester, bedridden in a naval hospital, heard the officer of the day describe the court martial of one Michael J. Powers. Powers had been caught having oral sex with the young medical corpsman who had soothed and befriended him when Manchester left him at the aid station. And he’d been sentenced to 85 years in Portsmouth Naval Prison for it.

Empowerment and Super-Empowerment

The Invisible Woman of the Fantastic Four. Art by Stuart Immonen

The relations between the sexes still leave something to be desired in superhero comics.

For example, in a 2007 issue of Ultimate Fantastic Four, Reed Richards has been abusively addressed by his father and refuses to discuss it with Sue Storm. As he walks away, Sue forms a force field and slams Reed into it face first. Hardy har har.

Reverse the situation. If Sue had asked for privacy and Reed had instead slammed her into a force field wall, the readers would be livid. As well they should be. Writer Mike Carey appears to have confused empowering women with turning them into bullies.

Yes, Sue was a something of a shrinking violet when the Fantastic Four began in 1961, but overcompensation is not the answer.

And yet the attitudes of all the superhero comics in 1961 were not as retrograde as people think. Check out the Julius Schwartz titles at DC — Flash, Green Lantern, the Atom and Hawkman. Iris West, Carol Ferris and Jean Loring were all independent career woman focused on the own accomplishments, not on their boyfriends and certainly not on the weird costumed heroes who operated at the margins of their lives. Hawkgirl and Hawkman were married, and full partners in crimefighting.

And not one of them needed to slam her man’s face into a wall to make a point. The real point that should be kept in mind, I think, is mutual respect.

Richard Burton: The Subject was Sex

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

Richard Burton had no particular complaints about literary pornography or sex, and was suspicious of those who did.

“The unctuous rubbishy shit written about pornography is nonsense,” wrote the Welshman in his journal for Nov. 17, 1966. “Practically all good pornography is best-selling, so I understand, and yet I have never found anyone who when asked if they enjoyed it will ever admit it.”

“(Author Malcolm) Muggeridge quotes Hugh Kingsmill as saying that the act of love is ludicrous and disgusting. Speak for yourself, Kingsmill. I love its disgustingness and comicality. Put some jaundice in your eyes and the act of walking is ludicrous and obscene, and swimming and, above all, eating. All those muscles, in most people, 50 percent atrophied, sluggishly propelling people over land or through water or gulping oysters. Come off it.

“It is an important thing to kill cant and humbug even if one is a humbug oneself."

With his fine voice, the well-read actor could hold forth on many topics. And one of them, apparently, was homosexuality.

That nettled Gore Vidal, who recalled that whenever he met Burton, Burton would launch into “…an extravagant aria about why he was not homosexual. I’d listen as long as I could and then say, ‘Who cares, Richard? Let’s talk about dermatology. Now there’s a subject!’”

Burton was always touchy about his bad skin, so touché.

The Burdening and Unburdening of the Burtons

The Burtons, Richard and Philip

The actor Richard Burton was neither the first nor the last young man to benefit from the presumably chaste devotion of a presumably gay older man.

Until he met his mentor, the upper limit of advancement for this Welsh coal miner’s son was some job where your neck stayed clean (Burton’s was in a clothing shop, and he absolutely loathed it).

A handsome lad with a steady gaze, rugby-mad, a troublemaker in love with language and life, the teenaged Burton needed someone who might broaden his horizons. He found him in Philip, another Welsh coal miner’s son who was 20 years his senior, but one whose mother had propelled him into the University of Wales, where he’d earned a double honours degree in History and Mathematics.

A teacher and playwright and church organist, Philip also worked as a freelance writer, producer and actor on BBC Radio in Cardiff.

“He read deeply and liked his own company,” wrote biographer Melvyn Bragg in Richard Burton: A Life. “He used to tell (his landlady) Mrs. Smith that ‘a cultured person is never lonely.’”

Perhaps not, but this austere, tidy man — “38, formidable and, locally, not a little feared” — was missing something that he found in a restless, fearless boy with smelly socks.

“You could see that the ‘rough and fearless’ young rugby player, the suspicious street boy now, despite his pock-fretten skin, coming into a youthful handsomeness which men and women alike would call ‘beauty,’ would break like a wave on the serenity of Philip’s rock of scholarship,” Bragg wrote.

“Scholarship and sport and money and poetry: four of the things that mattered to the young Welshman, and something else he needed more: opportunity. He had been given and had himself taken an immense amount out of that mining culture. But his was still a subject class. He and Philip … conducted what could be looked on as some kind of elaborate courtship ritual which would result in his hurtling onto a world stage.”

Philip worked ceaselessly and for years to provide Burton with acting training and opportunities. Burton moved out of his sister’s home into Philip’s “spotless bachelor” quarters at Ma Smith’s.

Philip and Richard with Elizabeth Taylor

“When he was in school I gave him every chance I could to play before an audience, both in the school and in the local YMCA,” Philip recalled in his memoirs. “He loved performing. When he first came to live with me, he showed some envy of his young brother Graham’s success at the local eisteddfodau, the Welsh competitive festivals. I pointed out that his voice had certainly ceased to be soprano, but he pestered me to teach him the solo for the next eisteddfodau. It was Sullivan’s ‘Orpheus with his lute.’ One evening I reluctantly agreed to go back to the school and attempt to teach him the solo. (I was the pianist in the school assembly which began the morning)… Richard faced the nonexistent audience and so couldn’t see my reaction as he gave vent to excruciating sounds. At last, I could contain my laughter no longer. He turned on me in dumbfounded fury. Then he stalked out angrily, exclaiming, ‘I’ll show you. Someday I’ll show you.’

“And he did. On the first night of ‘Camelot’ on Broadway, on Dec. 3, 1960, I went into his crowded dressing room after the performance and he greeted me with: ‘Well, I showed you, didn’t I?’ I didn’t know what he was talking about.”

When they met, Philip’s name was Burton, and Richard’s was Jenkins. To get Richard into a six-month program at Oxford while he was an air cadet, Philip adopted Richard as his ward as a way of resolving what he called the “question-raising ambiguity” of their relationship.

That relationship remained as complicated as it was intense. In an interview with the Telegraph, Rosemary Kingsland claimed she had an affair with Burton when she was 15 and he was 30. She said she believed Burton was referring to Philip when he told her, “There was someone [who had] been in love with me for ages and I knew it. I played him like a fish on a hook to get what I wanted.”

On another occasion, she said Burton called Philip “…a bloody arse-bandit. If I wasn't sitting on it, studying all those bloody books he set me, he would have stuffed himself up it.”

“Richard had built up a deep anger within himself and much of it was directed at Philip Burton,” Kingsland said. “He never mentioned him with affection. There was always a feeling of angst or regret.”

Whatever the relationship was, it remained deep.

“In later years, he always referred to me as his father,” Philip wrote. “He told me that, when he heard in 1957 that his father had died, his immediate reaction was, ‘Which?’” 

When Your Bigotry Blows Up in Your Face

Called out on the pandering “religious freedom” law he proudly signed, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence's instinctive strategy was simply to lie and say that his pro-bigotry law does not favor bigotry. Republicans have been trained to believe that, like Bill O'Reilly, they can lie about the most glaring facts and get away with it.

Given the fact that the First Amendment already fully protects the exercise of religion in this nation, exactly what “religious freedoms” are crying out to be “restored?” The proponents of the Indiana law fall silent on that point — and well they should — because majority religion Christians are not oppressed or even inconvenienced at any place or any time in this country. What they don’t dare say is that the intent of the law, the practical effect of the law, is to embolden fundamentalist Christians to exercise their bigotry in denying American citizens public accommodations. And that’s hatred (rhymes with “sacred”).

Lively 'Planet' Champions Compassion

Jake Cole and Blake Morris in a Daily Eastern News photo.

By Dan Hagen

Eastern Illinois University’s “Lonely Planet” is a showcase for the considerable and well-matched talents of two actors, Jake Cole and Blake Morris, who play urban gay men at the height of the AIDS epidemic.

Steven Dietz’s play, ably directly by Kevin Doolen, is about how a person should respond to a crisis that threatens all around him — by hiding in safety, or by reaching out in compassion. The point is made with clever byplay and symbolism — a map shop as a metaphor of an orderly microcosm, chairs as the ghostly remnants of the people who sat in them.

As Carl, Cole blows through Morris’s sedate map shop like a whirlwind, literally smashing the door open at one point. He feints, charms and cajoles, and even the breezy lies he tells about his occupation turn out to have a poignant point.

As Jody, Morris hides his fear beneath an engagingly winsome surface. His soliloquies are fascinating, whether he’s cheerfully explaining the nuances of cartography or revealing his anguish in dreams. And no matter how close you sit to the stage, you won’t catch a single emotionally false note in either actor.

The heavy topic is illuminated by plenty of lighter moments. An extended stage combat scene, for which the actors were professionally trained, is a fluid marvel of mock derring-do.

The Wilde, Wilde Victorian Era

The raised-eyebrow reticence of some older biographies can strike 21^st century readers as amusing.

In his 819-page biography of Victorian Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, published in 1966, Robert Blake noted that the wily Tory politician had few friends his own age. “To say that Disraeli only gave his confidence to young men and old women would perhaps be an overstatement, but not an outrageous one,” he wrote.

Take, for example, Lord Henry Lennox, an acid-tongued, gossipy bon vivant who, as the younger son of a duke, was too lofty to work but too poor to get by comfortably.

Benjamin Disraeli

“Lennox is of interest as a type, but as a person he was never more than an intellectual flibbertigibbet,” Blake wrote. “He would long ago have been forgotten had it not been for the affection which he inspired in a man of genius. “I can only tell you that I love you,’ wrote Disraeli on Sept. 1, 1852, and a fortnight later, ‘Even a line is pleasant from those we love.’ The language must be discounted as the hyperbole of the time. But it remains something of a mystery that Disraeli should have been as he was of such an essentially trivial personality.”

Oh? And why must his declaration of love be “dismissed as hyperbole?” Today, applying Occam’s Razor, we wouldn’t regard the business as such a mystery.

“Disraeli’s previous biographers have noticed that there were some romantic irregularities in his past: he preferred old ladies to young women; he married late; he had a passion for male friendship,” wrote historian William Kuhn in Sexual Ambiguity in the Life of Disraeli.

“The standard explanation for this is that in those pre-Freudian days there was a Romantic cult of friendship and that love between men was sexually ‘innocent’ (the underlying assumption being that sexual contact is ‘guilty’).

“Some of his earliest biographers (such as W. F. Monypenny and G. E. Buckle) explained away Disraeli’s odd history of affectionate relationships by saying it was due to the ‘oriental’ part of his nature. By this they meant that he was Jewish and thus partly ‘foreign’ and un-English. They were also hinting at a Victorian prejudice that sexual license, including same-sex contact, was more common in ‘the East’ or what we would call the Middle East.

“Lord Blake, whose 1966 biography is still authoritative, hinted that Disraeli was a lot like Oscar Wilde, and left it there. Two more recent biographers (Sarah Bradford and Jane Ridley) have been more comfortable referring explicitly to the homoerotic element in Disraeli’s personality.”

“There’s a way in which the absence of a homosexual identity in Disraeli’s time — and the disinclination of the general public to talk about such things — made it possible for men to love each other under the radar screen,” Kuhn wrote. “Of course, the more severe penalties and consequences of being caught in that time cannot be forgotten. Disraeli, however, was able to flaunt his approval of Greco-Roman sexuality, demonstrate his knowledge of Turkish baths, celebrate effeminacy, and dwell upon romance between men in his fiction — even as he experienced huge success in the world of politics and literature. Thus we can no longer regard the Victorian era as a uniformly dark age for men who loved other men. Disraeli not only got away with all this; he gloried in it.”

That something that was thought to be monstrous in one era can be seen as being merely incidental in another may be regarded as one of the ironies of social progress.

Sources: Disraeli by Robert Blake; Sexual Ambiguity in the Life of Disraeli by William Kuhn.

The Brokeback Kid Rides Again

The collected series was released in hardcover in 2010.

Jack Kirby's Rawhide Kid, back in the day.

In 2003’s “Rawhide Kid: Slap Leather,” Marvel’s 1950s-1960s Jack Kirby/Stan Lee gunfighter hero is re-imagined as an archly funny guy with no eye for the ladies at all but a killer fashion sense. 

If you know what I mean.

“Re-imagined” may be too strong a term, since it’s remarkable how little realignment is required for writer Ron Zimmerman and artist John Severin to cast the original slight, lithe and dandyish character in this new light — a light this Rawhide Kid would insist must be flattering to his complexion.

All that’s really required is a dash of double entendre, a wink of wit and a sense that the Kid knows a great deal more about what’s going on than anybody else in the story — and isn’t talking.

Series editor Axel Alonso said, “We thought it would be interesting to play with the genre. Enigmatic cowboy rides into dusty little desert town victimized by desperadoes, saves the day, wins everyone’s heart, then rides off into the sunset, looking better than any cowboy has a right to.”

It’s the most artful introduction of gay elements into traditional comic book material that I’ve run into — accomplished not with sex, but, more effectively, with style.

Steve Sampson Explains It All for You

"After living a lifetime in the rainstorm of hate and lies and ugly dangerous words, we have chosen to stand tall in the sun and celebrate life. Celebrate Life. Life. Why do gays celebrate? Because we are alive and free."

One Smart Dame, Just Like Her Mother and Aunt

The Monster in the Mirror

By Dan Hagen

The men who loudly advertise their loathing of gay people are generally ashamed of their own secret homosexual desires.

There’s not really any question about that any more. Everybody seems to know it, except perhaps those men themselves.

It’s classic psychological projection — the Other being despised because you have identified it with the Shadow you have cast out, that dark secret lurking inside you that you dare not even look at.

What’s really frightening these men is the monster in the mirror.

At the University of Georgia, researchers conducted an experiment involving 35 homophobic men and 29 non-homophobic men. All of the men participating in the experiment considered themselves exclusively heterosexual. This study, published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Volume 105, No. 3, August 1996, described how each of the participants was shown sexually explicit heterosexual, male homosexual and lesbian videotapes.

Sexual arousal for the homophobic and non-homophobic men was found to be similar when they viewed both the heterosexual and the lesbian sexual activity. However, when the two groups viewed the video of two men engaging in sexual behavior, a significant statistical difference arose. In this instance, the group of homophobic men showed a considerable increase in sexual arousal while the group of non-homophobic men did not. The clear implication of this study is that homophobia in men is a reaction to their own repressed homosexual urges.

Nor is that study alone. “Homophobia is more pronounced in individuals with an unacknowledged attraction to the same sex and who grew up with authoritarian parents who forbade such desires.” That was the conclusion of physiological studies conducted by scientists at the University of Rochester, the University of Essex, England, and the University of California in Santa Barbara. “Individuals who identify as straight but, in psychological tests, show a strong attraction to the same sex may be threatened by gays and lesbians because homosexuals remind them of similar tendencies within themselves,” wrote Netta Weinstein, the study’s lead author. “In many cases these are people who are at war with themselves and they are turning this internal conflict outward,” said co-author Richard Ryan.

So the men who rant against gays are, all unaware, announcing to the world what their real feelings are.

That would, of course, include people like former Sen. Larry Craig, the fascist FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, the vicious Roy Cohn and the Rev. Ted Haggard, Jonathan Merritt, to name a few from an endless and growing list.

All famous conservatives, you’ll note, and that’s no coincidence. Four common psychological manifestations of defensiveness are denial, rationalization, minimization and projection. All are constantly wielded as Republican political weapons. When your policies actually harm the people you are trying to bamboozle into supporting you, they're all quite useful.

Psychological projection is a key tactic of the contemporary GOP. They always loudly accuse their opponents of doing everything they themselves have done, are ashamed of doing, are still doing and intend to continue to do.

Claiming to speak with the authority of God, for example, Haggard encouraged young gay people to despise themselves while he was practicing homosexuality himself. And he did it to get rich.

I can forgive some vicious actions, particularly if they were inspired by the nasty, ancient dogmas that still blind and shackle so many people in this world. Conformity can create creeps. But I don’t forgive leaders in positions of authority who use that authority to victimize helpless people.

On the other hand, I will always admire those gay people who didn’t cower or hide, who summoned from somewhere the courage and the honesty required to stand up to whatever filth government, society and religion chose to throw at them.

Life’s not worth a damn until you can say, “Hey world, I am what I am.” Sometimes you can find wisdom even in musical comedies.

The damage that people who lead inauthentic lives inflict on their society, on the people who know them and on themselves — that, my friend, is what’s truly monstrous.