The Republic of T.

You Are Most Like George W. Bush

So what if you’re not exactly popular? You still rule the free world. And while you may be quite conservative now, you knew how to party back in the day!

This test is flawed, obviously.

The news about Tyrone Garner’s lack of a burial 37 days after his death doesn’t get any better. Keith has an update about how much money was raised to date. Or rather how little.

Apparently it is too late to bury Tyron Garner. I just received word from Mitchell Katine, the local attorney in the Lawrence v. Texas case, who informed me that Tyron Garner’s brother Darnell signed the papers just this morning releasing Tyron’s body to the county for cremation (at no cost). The fund which had been set up for his burial had raised only $225.00 in 6 weeks.

This should never have happened, and it should never happen again. This man was a hero to our community, and the community failed him. The average cost of a funeral and burial is $6,000, according to AARP. The group that created this fund could have written a check itself to cover the cost. Or they could have let the public know that they hadn’t raised enough money. And the community that was solicited should have given up far more than $225, almost half of which came from the lawyer. Are the lives of black gay men disposable? Does no one care?

Does no one care? Apparently not. Jasmyne has a list, and a point.

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It’s somewhat gratifying when an expert confirms something I’ve suspected all along. In the couple of years I’ve worked in blogging I’ve developed a theory, based on comparing traffic stats with comments, that only about 1% of people who read any given blog actually comment on that blog. Well now here comes Jacob Nielsen with his theory of participation inequality.

User participation often more or less follows a 90-9-1 rule:

90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don’t contribute).

9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time.

1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don’t have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they’re commenting on occurs.

That’s 1% can often consist of people who are particularly invested in disrupting a discussion on a particular site and/or in giving the impression of a larger number of discontent users than actually exists, as Nielsen points out as he discusses the downsides of participation inequalty.

The problem is that the overall system is not representative of Web users. On any given user-participation site, you almost always hear from the same 1% of users, who almost certainly differ from the 90% you never hear from. This can cause trouble for several reasons:

• Customer feedback. If your company looks to Web postings for customer feedback on its products and services, you’re getting an unrepresentative sample.

• Reviews. Similarly, if you’re a consumer trying to find out which restaurant to patronize or what books to buy, online reviews represent only a tiny minority of the people who have experiences with those products and services.

• Politics. If a party nominates a candidate supported by the “netroots,” it will almost certainly lose because such candidates’ positions will be too extreme to appeal to mainstream voters. Postings on political blogs come from less than 0.1% of voters, most of whom are hardcore leftists (for Democrats) or rightists (for Republicans).

• Search. Search engine results pages (SERP) are mainly sorted based on how many other sites link to each destination. When 0.1% of users do most of the linking, we risk having search relevance get ever more out of whack with what’s useful for the remaining 99.9% of users. Search engines need to rely more on behavioral data gathered across samples that better represent users, which is why they are building Internet access services.

• Signal-to-noise ratio. Discussion groups drown in flames and low-quality postings, making it hard to identify the gems. Many users stop reading comments because they don’t have time to wade through the swamp of postings from people with little to say.

I don’t know if I agree with all of his assertions above, particularly about politics because it seems to me some of the netroots candidates boosted by progressive bloggers this campaign season seem rather moderate.

Nonetheless I think it’s a good idea to on some sites to prohibit anonymous commenting by either requiring registration and login. Or I’d say at least require commenters to enter email addresses on the front end and employ IP tracking on the back end to get a better idea of how many people you’re dealing with (and how much time & energy to spend responding to or managing them). You might even consider posting a brief statement that IP addresses are being monitored. That might go against Nielsen’s assertions that you can’t fight participation inequality, and that one way to at least try to fight it is to make participation easier.

I don’t think the suggestions above raise a significant barrier to participation. But I do think that making anonymous participation a little more difficult adds an element of accountability. If people know that you have their email address or the IP address, they may behave differently than they would if they were sure they were anonymous, in the same way that anonymity let’s people behave differently as part of a group than they would if they thought their identity could be known.

Then, of course, there’s the matter of turning those lurkers into contributors.

Lately I’ve wished there were one or two more of me, just to deal with various aspects of my life. (It’d be easier to just get pulled in a couple of directions as opposed to half a dozen.)

HowManyOfMe.com

There are: 15 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

But I wasn’t thinking about a number as big as 15.

Hmmm. If I had a more common name, there’d be even more.

I wrote last month about the passing of Tyrone Garner, a black gay man who was one of the plaintiffs in Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court case which overturned state laws criminalizing same-sex activity; the case that led one Supreme Court justice to conclude such laws laws “demean the lives of homosexual persons,” including the unspoken but no less radical idea that gay people shouldn’t be demeaned for being gay. It was a decision that afforded gay & lesbian Americans a modicum of dignity we were legally denied before, and one that deeply affected me after growing up in gay in the wake of the Bowers v. Hardwick decision.

Now it’s time to give Tyrone Garner the same dignity he helped us achieve. Garner passed away on September 11, 2006 but, he has yet to be buried.

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I had a proud moment as a parent on Sunday, which was the result of a tantrum and a time-out. Let me explain.

Parker had been fussy the entire time we were doing our Saturday grocery shopping. Granted we’d had a busy day, including taking him to a swimming lesson, and then after lunch at home stopping to buy a birthday present for a friend of his before finally going to grocery store. Once at the grocery store, we let him pick some items for himself — like what kind of snacks he wanted for his morning breakfast and afternoon lunch during the week — from among pre-selected range of healthy items. But that didn’t help, and after we checked out I ended up talking with him about it and we had a time-out together* when we got home.

But that wasn’t the proud moment.

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Sorry for the lack of posts here. Yesterday was pretty busy at work, and by the time I got home and spent time with my family (instead of on the computer) and put the kid to bed, I didn’t have the energy for it. Plus, I think I’ve been experiencing low-grade burnout, among other things lately. I’m realizing that this blog has been a “one man shop” from the beginning, and I’m starting to envy those who are part of established group blogs

That said, there are still plenty of thing that get me back to blogging. Like this item I saw posted by Michael at Gay Orbit. In the QueerlyKos round-up, I mentioned the passing of Gerry Studd, the first openly gay member of congress. Well, it turns out that Studds’ husband can’t inherit his pension.

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During my college years, I spent a term or two as the co-director of the LGBT student organization (in the interest o gender parity, we had one male and one female co director), and when we weren't engaged in activism like getting the university to pass a non-discrimination policy regarding sexual orientation we would occasionally put our chairs in a circle during a meeting and share coming out stories. Usually it was when someone new joined the group, and it was something I enjoyed. There came a day when I realized that I'd heard everyone's coming out story at least twice, and that I just couldn't listen to anymore coming out stories.

Well.

After a week of seeing what staying in the closet can do to someone, it's been something of a relief to spend this week celebrating the act of coming out of the closet. I didn't get around to posting or re-posting my coming out story again this year. But there were so many others  posted that it seems appropriate to start out this round-up sharing them, because they may have been missed in all the other diary posts this week. And they should be read.

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This post is pretty much in the vein of the previous post about Iraq, because when I read the latest news of the upcoming book on Bush’s faith-based initiative I had the same eerie feeling of hearing someone who was “on the inside” saying a lot of what I’ve been saying from the outside. I’ve only been blogging about what I’ve read in books and the media. David Kuo is writing from the inside, as a former deputy director of Bush’s White House Office of Faith-Baseed initiatives, and he says the whole thing was a cynical, political faith-based bamboozle. But he’s got the conservative Christian cred that might make a few more people listen.

“Tempting Faith’s” author is David Kuo, who served as special assistant to the president from 2001 to 2003. A self-described conservative Christian, Kuo’s previous experience includes work for prominent conservatives including former Education Secretary and federal drug czar Bill Bennett and former Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Kuo, who has complained publicly in the past about the funding shortfalls, goes several steps further in his new book.

He says some of the nation’s most prominent evangelical leaders were known in the office of presidential political strategist Karl Rove as “the nuts.”

“National Christian leaders received hugs and smiles in person and then were dismissed behind their backs and described as ‘ridiculous,’ ‘out of control,’ and just plain ‘goofy,’” Kuo writes.

More seriously, Kuo alleges that then-White House political affairs director Ken Mehlman knowingly participated in a scheme to use the office, and taxpayer funds, to mount ostensibly “nonpartisan” events that were, in reality, designed with the intent of mobilizing religious voters in 20 targeted races.

Oh, but it gets better than that. Check out the video about Karl Rove’s derision for the Republican’s religious right base, which may be an example what Tucker Carlson said about the contempt of the Republican elite for the evangelical base.

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It’s that time again. Time to forget all the news from the past week, and enjoy some music. Maybe even dance a little. So, here’s a random ten in honor of National Coming Out day.

1. Open iTunes or whatever you use.
2. Shuffle everything.
3. Post the first ten that play.

I’ll go first.

1. Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! from the album “EBX 1 (disc 3: Oh L’Amour)” by Erasure
2. All Right Now from the album “1970′s Classic Rock” by Free
3. We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off from the album “Now That’s What I Call Music! 1986 (disc 2)” by Jermaine Stewart
4. Gypsys, Tramps And Thieves from the album “Cher Greatest Hits” by Cher
5. The Bad Touch from the album “Hooray for Boobies” by Bloodhound Gang
6. Waterloo from the album “Gold” by ABBA
7. I Got A Love Jones For You from the album “Love Jones” by Refugee Camp All-Stars Presnets Melky And Day
8. Let’s Groove from the album “The Waterboy” by Earth, Wind & Fire
9. Video Killed The Radio Star from the album “Other People’s Songs” by Erasure
10. At Least We Tried from the album “18″ by Moby

And of course, a bonus track in honor of NCOD.

I’m Coming Out (Maurice Joshua Club Mix) from the album “Diana Extended/The Remixes” by Diana Ross

NCOD is usually a normal day for me. But if you used the occasion to clean out your closet, please share? Who’d you come out to? How’d it go?

I haven’t posted about Iraq anywhere near as much as I used to, mainly because as the occupation drags on there it seems almost as pointless as blogging about torture in terms of the difference it makes to do so. Nothing that was ever said against the war in Iraq, before or after it started, seemed to make much of a dent anyway. So why waste breath and bandwidth?

But now, the body counts are high enough that more people are starting to wake up to what many of us knew — and said rather loudly — even during the build-up to Iraq. Three years in, a lot more people seem to get it. Yet I find myself conflicted as to how to respond to this change of heart, and whether it comes soon enough to make much of a difference now.

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It’s National Coming Out Day today. And for a long time it’s been a nothing-much-to-do day. Over at DailyKos, Rsevern is asking for coming out stories. I honestly don’t know which one I’d tell if I jumped in. There’s the usual story. It was a process going back as far as I can remember, all the way back to kindergarden when I first knew I was different, up through puberty when I really knew I was different because I was pretty sure none of the other guys I knew where feeling emotionally or physically. That was when I learned there was a name for how I was different, or at least one name, taught to me by my peers.

Or I could tell the story of coming out during my freshman year of college, in front of a whole audience of people. A traveling evangelist and his wife made a stop at my school, and held forth at the free speech platform for a couple of days. I happened to be among the students gathered when I heard him advocate the death penalty for homosexuality. Next thing I knew I was on the free speech platform, in his face and being rather loud. Next thing I knew after that, I was out. Word got back to my dorm before I did.

Or I could tell the story of coming out to my brother and sister, in letters to each of them while I was in college. Or there’s coming out to my parents, again in a letter.

The point is that coming out isn’t just opening the closet door. It’s every step you take after that point as well. In some ways, I do it every time we go out as a family. (Nothing and nobody can out you quite as effectively as a three year old happy chattering away to Daddy and Papa in public.) And looking back at the starting point I can honestly say that, no matter how difficult it was, the life I had now says the journey was worth it. Besides, we’ve seen over the last week just what staying in the closet can do.

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Good as you has a great rant posted about the “ex-gay” fallacy, and I can’t resist getting in on it, mainly because the part about the “countless folks who have left” the “ex-gay” lifestyle reminded me of a previous post titled “Beyond Repair,” that got lost in a database crash (thats what I get for not backing up my database regularly). In that post I linked to a few more such stories, as well as some articles from “reparative therapy” groups that have themselves abandoned the idea that they can change anyone’s sexual orientation

For what it’s worth, I’ve rescued the code from the Google cache and posted it in full here, just so I don’t have to go looking for it again. And because it seems like too good of a rant to let disappear, especially if it can be added to another great rant.

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Why am I continuously drawn to the Anderson Cooper 360 blog? Well, his face in the header graphic probably has a little something to do with it. I am a sucker for a pretty face, sometimes. And that’s a face I could forgive almost anything. But there are some things I’m not gong to buy from even the prettiest face. Like Gary Tuchman’s post about the race in Florida’s 22nd congressional district, adjacent to the district Foley represented until just recently, and asking if it’s fair that the Foley scandal has become an issue for other Republicans.

In the meantime, do you think it’s fair that the Foley situation has become an issue in this and other districts that he didn’t even represent?

Fair? Please. Don’t even talk to me about fairness in the same context as Republicans and anything gay-related. Next you’ll be telling me that it isn’t fair that closeted gay Republicans who’ve been supporting and empowering a party so dedicated to discriminating against gays that they’ve written it in to their platform might be exposed as hypocrites who’ve kept their mouths shut for the same of political power while supporting policies that have very real consequences for every day gay & lesbian Americans and their families. Next you’ll be telling me to be fair to them for supporting a party that isn’t anywhere near fair to the rest of us. That’s just another version of the notion that the tolerance of intolerance is the new tolerance.

Sorry. Not buying any today.

And as for why it’s totally fair to make the Foley scandal an issue for every Republican running for re-election this year, need I remind you that these are the people who — along with their evangelical right wing base — presented themselves as the moral betters of most of the rest of us? But I can’t break it down any better than Baratunde did.

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I didn’t have this guy’s experience, so I don’t have much to add to this. [Via Ex-Gay Watch.]

Well maybe a few things.

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Per the ending of the previous post, things have come to a pretty turn when I find myself agreeing with Tucker Carson. I mean, I have laughed at some of the Republicans’ evangelical supporters, particularly the ones tramping around the holy land as though they’re checking out the real estate so they can pick out a prime spot when they waft back down for the millennial reign, after all but 144,000 of the current residents have been…well…exterminated. But it turns out I’m not the only one who’s been laughing at them.

The Blue State has video and transcript of Tucker’s confession on the Chris Matthews Show. Watching it makes me think the biggest “outing” wasn’t Foley’s, or the threatened “witch hunt” of closeted gay Republicans, but the “Republican elite” Tucker mentions; chuckling into their cocktails at the antics of the party’s base.

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I just finished reading Their Own Receive Them Not: African American Lesbians And Gays in Black Churches on Sunday. I'm still working out a review and I expect it will take me a day or so to pull it all together. I will say that once I finished the book, it left me hungering for more relate reading. Problem is there's little out there like it. But in the meantime, as I've gone through some of the links I collected and set aside this week, I noticed that a number of them had to do with religion. So it seemed like a good time to do one of those "remainders" posts.

One thing I can say about the book is that it helped answer a question that's been in my mind for a while now: why does a non-religious person like myself care so much about religion. I came across this YouTube video by an atheist answering basically the same question: "Why does an atheist care so much about religion?" While I share all of the reasons he mentions, there are a few more that come to mind for me.

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Not. I gotta agree with Prometheus on this when he says “I got no sympathy for your log-cabin living ass.” Why? How about the news that retiring gay Republican Congressman Jim Kolbe knew about Foley’s pursuit of pages in 2000.

A Republican congressman knew of disgraced former representative Mark Foley’s inappropriate Internet exchanges as far back as 2000 and personally confronted Foley about his communications.

A spokeswoman for Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.) confirmed yesterday that a former page showed the congressman Internet messages that had made the youth feel uncomfortable with the direction Foley (R-Fla.) was taking their e-mail relationship. Last week, when the Foley matter erupted, a Kolbe staff member suggested to the former page that he take the matter to the clerk of the House, Karen Haas, said Kolbe’s press secretary, Korenna Cline.

… A source with direct knowledge of Kolbe’s involvement said the messages shared with Kolbe were sexually explicit, and he read the contents to The Washington Post under the condition that they not be reprinted. But Cline denied the source’s characterization, saying only that the messages had made the former page feel uncomfortable. Nevertheless, she said, “corrective action” was taken. Cline said she has not yet determined whether that action went beyond Kolbe’s confrontation with Foley.

How about the method to Foley’s madness, which that “corrective action” did nothing to stop, and proves that he was a very patient man, with a plan.

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Weekend blog posts seem to be getting more and more rare around here, and with a new baby to arrive in the future I think they might be ever more rare. Still, I wanted to squeeze this one in. While I was compiling links for the next QueerlyKos round-up, I came across a couple of calls to action that I didn’t want to let sit until Friday or Saturday if there’s anything I can do to help spread the word now.

First the Women of Color Blog has a call to action concerning an assault on a transgendered woman.

National Action Alert: MCDONALDS MANAGER ASSAULTS TRANSGENDER WOMAN OF COLOR WITH LEAD PIPE; NYPD REFUSES TO ACCEPT HER COMPLAINT /Call Inspector McCarthy and Officer Bonner at NYPD Midtown South PCT to Demand anti-trans violence complaint is filed Tel. (212) 239-9811

On July 10th, 2006 at 10pm, Christina Sforza, a transgender woman ate with her friends at the McDonald’s at 341 5th Ave. After eating, she tried to use the bathroom. The men’s bathroom was out of order and all evening men and women were using the women’s bathroom. She asked the person behind the counter which bathroom she should use and was told to use the women’s bathroom. The victim is diabetic and entered the bathroom to give herself an insulin injection. While she was in the bathroom, she heard someone banging on the door yelling that they were going to “kill her.” She waited a moment and then opened the door. An employee in a blue McDonald’s shirt began beating her with a lead pipe and telling her he was going to “kill her.” He used anti-gay and homophobic language. He hit her on her arms and in the groin area with the pipe while the rest of the McDonald’s staff cheered and chanted, “kill the faggot.”

The victim’s friend called the police. When they arrived they refused to let her speak and arrested her for assault. During this time, the victim discovered that the man with the pipe was a manager. They left her bag at McDonald’s and it contained all her medication, which she must take four times a day.

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Geez. I don’t even know Mark Foley (OK, I met him once ten years ago, at the opening of the 104th Congress) and I’m already sick of him. I don’t mean to be crass, but inside of a week he’s become like the tiresome trick who would not stop calling, IMing, text-messaging, and just get it into his head that it wasn’t all that and I just wasn’t that into him. Now that I think about it, that’s a pretty good summary of the whole affair thus far.

The story broke while I was traveling, and I thought by the time I had time to blog again there’d be nothing left to say. I was wrong. Conservatives are claiming Foley was set up by everyone from Hillary Clinton to Bat-girl, but I think he was framed and by his own party. And I discovered Foley and I had something in common. But enough about me and Foley. There was actually other stuff going on this week.

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