Via HuffPo. Video below the fold.

A picture is worth a thousand words, the saying goes. Get a bunch of pictures together, and they tell a story.The Huffington Post has posted a slideshow of images depicting the decline of Detroit, Michigan, taken from the book The Ruins of Detroit, by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre.

Steve Cappazola, at the AFL-CIO blog, has the story behind the pictures: the story of what happens when manufacturing disappears.

Photos of Detroit show boarded-up and vacant homes.  New York Times reporter Katharine Seelye describes this “as dramatic testimony to the crumbling industrial base of the Midwest.”

The U.S. Labor Department reports that Michigan lost more than 320,000 manufacturing jobs, just between 2001-2008.  Little wonder then, that without job prospects, hundreds of thousands of residents have been forced to leave.

Seelye says the massive drop-off in population is “the largest percentage drop in history for any American city with more than 100,000 residents.”  The only comparable flight would be the “unique situation of New Orleans,” where 29% of the city evacuated after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

What’s especially disheartening is knowing that Detroit’s exodus was preventable.  Failed manufacturing in Michigan, which has left so many without work, is the result of failed U.S. trade policy and little effort by successive administrations to ramp up America’s industrial base in the face of changing global economic conditions.

Times are getting dire.  What’s urgently needed is for the U.S. to implement a national manufacturing strategy to bring back good-paying jobs before it’s too late.

My husband is from Michigan, and so I’ve been to the state several times. At first, I didn’t believe his descriptions of Detroit’s abandoned skyscrapers. But then I saw them for myself, and over many more visits learned how they came to be abandoned, as Steve Cappazola described. The exodus of manufacturing jobs fueled an exodus of citizens so huge that some suggest the solution is to actually plow Detroit under and turn it into farmland.

Destroy the city in order to save it? Raze it and plow it under, rather than maybe doing something to reverse the manufacturing decline that’s the real story behind the ruins of Detroit? It seems a solution based on the assumption that nothing can be (or should be?) done about the economic conditions that quite literally sucked the life out of Detroit.

One of my favorite television shows is the History Channel series, Life After People, which is based on the premise that some unknown event — plague, planetary migration or some thing like that — has disappeared humanity from the planet, leaving our abandoned structures to decay in our absence.

But that’s not what’s happened with Detroit. Nor is this the story of some lost civilization that left only its architecture behind to help us determine just what did it in. We’re not talking about the Nazca Lines, the Lost City of Atlantis,  the lost colony.

Ever since I was a child, I’ve had an affinity for abandoned places. During trips to visit my grandparents, I would pass the time looking at the kudzu-covered shacks, the abandoned storefronts, and old, empty houses along the Georgia highways. I’d wonder about the people who lived or worked in those places, what stories they held, and make up stories about how they came to be abandoned.

But when I look at the pictures of Detroit’s ruins, I don’t have to wonder or make up the story of what happened. Neither should anyone else.

We know what happened to Detroit, just like we know what happened to manufacturing in this country. And, like Steve said, we know if didn’t have to happen. If we think about it for a minute, we also know what we can do about it.

Vintage_Gay_Couples Gays and lesbians have been around since the dawn of time, but many of us only think of same-gender couples in a post-Stonewall world. It’s almost as if they couldn’t possibly exist in public before that era and stayed hidden in the shadows—the two women "friends" who (sadly) never married so they lived together, or the rich man and his attaché who kept to themselves in that big house down the block. However, some mystery person is changing that concept. Buzzfeed found a number of photos from a Tumblr post that no longer exists. Fortunately, the Buzzfeed page does, so we were able to take the 25 fantastic shots and compile them for you in this incredible slide show.

It’s cute, and somewhat diverse. Not all of the couples pictured are white gay men. But, I got curious and started searching for other images.

I found a kind of treasure trove of vintage photos of black gay male couples.

The collection, on Flickr, is called "Hidden in the Open: A Photographic Essay of Afro American Male Couples."

From the description:

How does one write about the Afro American gay male and couple? How does one accomplish such a goal from an historical perspective?

Historically, the Afro American gay male and couple has largely been defined by everyone but themselves. Afro American gay men are ignored into nonexistence in parts of black culture and are basically second class citizens in gay culture. The black church which has historically played a fundamental role in protesting against civil injustices toward its parishioners has been want to deny its gay members their right to live a life free and open without prejudice. Despite public projections of a “rainbow” community living together in harmonious co-habitation, openly active and passive prejudices exist in the larger gay community against gay Afro Americans.

…Hopefully for this photo essay, they will challenge as false definitions of the Afro American gay male and couple imposed from the outside. Accomplishing such a task is certain to be herculean as from time to time problems have arisen when the gay Afro American male was want to define himself for himself outside the common stereotypes imposed on him for reasons not excluding those for politics and profit.

It’s a beautiful collection, and it’s rare to see so many such as these in one place.

Check it out.

And Happy Valentine’s Day!

“Do you really want it?” he sang. And by the time he was done…I did. I really did.

Yeah, I admit it. I had a “thing” for Ricky Martin from day one. Maybe it was kinda like the “thing” I had for Lance Bass before he came out. I bought Ricky’s singles on cd, stopped to watch his videos when they came on, and lingered over pictures of him when I found them in magazine and online. And, yes, like I Lorenzo and a lot of other gay men, I “knew” Ricky was gay, or at least knew the “open secret” of his orientation. Still, it remained unconfirmed until this week, when he came out.

Singer Ricky Martin has ended years of speculation about his sexuality by declaring himself “a fortunate homosexual man”.

Martin, who has previously dodged questions about his sexual orientation, finally came out on his website, saying the birth of his two sons and writing his memoirs had led to his decision.

Writing in both English and Spanish, the Puerto Rico-born singer, who has sold more than 60 million albums worldwide, said: “To keep living as I did up until today would be to indirectly diminish the glow that my kids where (sic) born with.”

I know I’m way late with this post, but with the inevitable negative and/or dismissive responses, I wanted to congratulate and support Martin the way I would anyone who choses to come out. That goes double for the fact that he came out in his own time and in his own way, which I think is usually best. In fact, it’s particularly refreshing in a time when so many anti-gay politicians like Roy Ashburn, Jim West, Joey DiFatta, Ed Shrock, Robert Allen and Glenn Murphy — not to mention Ted Haggard and others like him — fall out of the closet or are dragged out by circumstances.

Plus, as a parent, I understand how his kids would make it even more important for him to come out. Granted, some gay parents live in places and circumstances where coming out publicly is outweighed by the risks — to life and livelihood, in some cases. But even in those cases, parents will at least want to come out to their kids.

Kids pick up so much from parents, and so often what we transmit without words speaks louder than anything we can ever say. Put plainly, if kids see a parent who is secretive and ashamed of his sexual orientation, they will absorb that and apply the same to themselves and their family.

It’s much better, and much healthier to do it the way Martin did it. And not just for him. There’s anecdotal evidence that gay-friendly societies are happier and healthier.

Still, while it may have been a wrenching decision for Martin personally, there was something refreshing about eye rolling replacing homophobic invective. We should want his coming out to not be a big deal in whichever country we might live in. New research shows that tolerance of homosexuality is likely to mean we live in a democratic, developed, wealthy country. It should also mean we live in a well-educated country. And it may well mean we live in a relatively happy country.

New data from the World Values Survey, for example, has found a strong correlation between economic growth and more tolerant atti-tudes to homosexuality. Will Wilkinson, a research fellow at the Cato Institute who has been analyzing the numbers, says the reason for it hinges on what we need to survive: “According to University of Michigan political scientist Ronald Inglehart, the head of the World Values Survey, under conditions of relative scarcity and insecurity, individuals tend to develop values oriented toward survival,” he said. “In such conditions, the family is like a little mutual insurance society, and adherence to traditional family values is high. Respect for authority and conformity is also high. As economic prosperity advances, individuals naturally begin to worry less about how to simply get by and to worry more about making life meaningful. Wealth tends to produce a syndrome of ‘self-expressive’ or ‘emancipative’ values that includes a stronger sense of individuality and greater tolerance for diversity.”

So some of this is simply due to economic growth. But, Wilkinson argues, it is also due to how the economy has grown. “As we’ve transitioned from an industrial to a service/information economy, education and the ability to make independent decisions has become more valuable and therefore more widespread,” he says. “The need of the changing economy for increasingly educated, independent thinkers has helped create less conformist and more open, tolerant citizens.”

One of those independent thinkers, Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class, takes this research one step further, arguing that more enlightened attitudes can actually make people happy. He believes that it is not just the wealth of well-developed countries that affects happiness, but values as well. In a recent paper written with Charlotta Mellander (Jönköping International Business School) and Peter J. Rentfrow (University of Cambridge), Florida analyzed a global survey of life satisfaction conducted by Gallup and found that “all else being equal, national levels of life satisfaction are closely tied to post-industrial values of tolerance and acceptance of minorities.” The most intolerant societies are, generally, those with the highest levels of suffering.

Certainly, people like Ted Haggard, Larry Craig, and Mark Foley are examples of just how much suffering is demanded in a more intolerant society.

Here’s the thing. When you prefer or even require your homosexuals to be closeted and/or psychologically and spiritually tormented, you do not get to bitch when something like this happens, because you made it inevitable.

See, when you start moaning about why this was exposed now, as opposed to questioning why there was anything to expose in the first place, you’re digging down levels deeper than your usual baseline neurosis, which is the equivalent of if ignoring the fact that the elephant you’ve been pretending isn’t in the room has just crapped in the middle of it. And he’s crapped just what you’ve been shoveling all along. What doesn’t occur to you is that if Foley and Haggard had been able to be healthy, happy, honest homosexuals in your world (an impossibility because first you have to be willing to consider that one can be gay all those things as well) then Foley would still be in Congress and Mark Jones would still be an unknown former male prostitute from Colorado instead of the newest media whore from Colorado.

But back to what I said. You made this inevitable? How? Well, I’m reminded of a saying I heard in recovery circles years ago: We’re as sick as our secrets. I’d extend that by just adding that our secrets make us sick. Require someone to keep a secret, or construct some pretty serious disincentives to honesty, and … well … you make people sick.

So, maybe it’s a good sign that Martin’s coming out elicited a shrug and a “So what?” from many people. We may be approaching the day when it’s not newsworthy when someone comes out — and possibly even a day when no body needs to come out out of the closet, because no one needs to be in the closet to begin with. One thing that gets us closer to that day is more and more people coming out, thus making it less and less of a big deal.

Enjoy!

Ninth grade English teachers avert you eyes now! Middle school graduates, too. What you are about to witness is a crash course in how not to do grammar, courtesy of Tea Partiers from all over these fine United States. This is not for the faint of heart.

What’s there to see that’s so bad, you ask? A better question might be this one: what’s missing?

Answer: apostrophes in the right place. Words spelled correctly (creative interpretations of “socialist” include “scholiast” and “socilist”). An ability to master the subtle nuances of your/you’re formations. Etc.

Finally, I have something in common with the tea partiers!

I spent yesterday at home with the boys. (We all had the day off, but the hubby had to work.) It was a busy day, but I took the time to snap this picture of Parker reading to Dylan, partly because it was just such a cute picture, and partly because it made me hopeful that I’m succeeding at something I wanted to accomplish as a parent.

Being a writer and an avid reader, I always hoped to instill a love of reading in my kids. That’s mainly because of how important reading has been in my life. I don’t remember how early people started reading to me, but the result was that I was not only an early reader, but an advanced reader.

In fact, when I was in pre-school, my teacher was impressed with my reading. What seemed to impress her most was that I already grasped punctuation. Where most of my peers would read sentences without stopping until the period, I figured out that commas indicated a pause. Most kids would read most of a sentence with a flat, expressionless tone, applying question marks or exclamation points only to the very last word. I figured out that they applied to the whole sentence, and read them that way. Reading aloud sounded a lot like just talking.

My teacher was so impressed she took me to a third grade class and had me read to them. Now that I think of it, that probably did little to endear me to my peers. But it did give me the idea that reading was important, and that reading well was important.

It turned out to be true for me in a few ways. It gave me — a skinny, effeminate, non-athletic, black gay boy, growing up in the south, during the Reagan era — a means of escaping what was an incredibly depressing reality. (Actually, I med a writer of young people’s fiction, and she asked me what that experience was like. After I told her, she said it would make a good book in that genre, and I should think about writing it as a novel…) Recess would find me in a shady corner with a book, out of sight of the other boys, and hopefully out of mind. Later, I became a library assistant. I was the only boy, but I didn’t care since it gave me a reason to be even further from the playground during recess. I needed at least two things to survive — an easy escape to somewhere else, anywhere else, and an excuse to avoid my peers — and reading provided both.

Plus, if I had anything going for me at that time, it was that I was a fairly bright kid. Unfortunately, I was working with moderate-to-severe A.D.D., which would go undiagnosed until well into adulthood. I know that in some children A.D.D often comes paired with reading difficulty. For the most part, that wasn’t my experience. I’ve never been a fast reader, and that may be due to my A.D.D. I can recall my attention drifting from the page, and having to re-read sometimes, but reading and comprehending was never difficult for me.

In fact, reading was one of the was I compensated for my A.D.D. I never did well learning from lectures. In college, I tried taping them, but then I’d never get around to listening to the tapes. (Plus, that’s like going to class twice!) I’d take notes, but they weren’t always legible or complete. (A few times, I resorted to buying someone else’s notes.) But — and this was especially true when I started working on the web and learning HTML, CSS, and various software packages — I discovered that I could learn a lot just reading on my own, and taking notes on what I read or highlighting important passages. It’s something that’s carried over into my writing. I highlight, make notes, and even outline to organize my ideas. (The latter actually leads to longer pieces.)

Finally, reading saved my life as a gay man.

I retreated into books. I’d always been an avid reader, and I discovered that if I took a book with me everywhere, and buried my nose in it during recess and other times when I might have to interact with my peers, there was a much better chance that I might be left alone. I got in good with the librarian at school, and volunteered as a library assistant. So, during recess, instead of joining the other kids on the playground, I’d spend time in the library, shelving books, helping put up bulletin boards, etc., with the librarian and the other library assistants (who were mostly girls, as I remember). I learned how to use a library, a skill that has served me well for the rest of my life, and would serve me well as I figured out what was happening to me and why I was feeling what I was feeling.

Adolescence and puberty were setting in, and I found myself having other feelings for the boys around me, that were stronger and different than before; and another reason not to go into the locker room. It was clear that I wasn’t feeling the attraction to girls that the rest of male peers were – or were claiming to. So, what did I do? There wasn’t really anyone I could talk to. Especially my parents, who would just point me to the bible. So, I started reading. By that time I’d been called “faggot” more times than I could count, and I knew what it meant. But at the same time I didn’t. I wondered “What does it mean if that’s really the way I am?” I went to the public library, this time, took a big breath, and went into the section on homosexuality, once I’d located the subject in the card catalog.

In those shelves, I came across a book that I credit with saving my life. Its title was A Way of Love, A Way of Life: a Young Person’s Guide to What it Means to be Gay, and it was written by Frances Hanckel and John Cunningham; a lesbian and a gay man, I presumed. It was the right book for me at the right time. (Just a year or so ago, I decided I wanted it on my bookshelf at home. It’s long out of print, so I searched for it online, and found a copy. It’s sitting on my desk as I write this.) It covered everything; history, names for homosexuality (some of which I’d been introduced to already), sex, puberty, meeting other gay people. What I’ll always remember is that at the end, there was a chapter telling the stories of a dozen other people who were gay or lesbian. They were old, young, single, coupled, etc., and they were all living happy productive lives. By the time I finished reading it, I knew two things: I wasn’t the only one, and a happy life wasn’t out of my reach because I was gay. (I also knew that I had to get out of town. Augusta, Georgia is a pretty conservative town, and at the time it wasn’t a great place to be gay. My big plan was to go away to college and find other gay people there, which I did.)

I went back to school with a little more confidence, because I knew being gay didn’t mean I was a freak or some kind of defective. I knew there were others like me, and I knew that there were place and people out there that would be accepting, and that I just had to find them.

And later it saved my sanity as a black gay man.

Yup. That’s the book that led to my coming out. So you have it to thank or blame in that regard. If that book saved my life, then Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men saved my sanity when I picked it up while I was in college. In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology came next. Between the two, it was the first time I’d read anything written by people whose experiences were so close to mine. Again, the effect was just knowing that I wasn’t “the only one,” which went a long way to keeping me relatively sane and helping me find my voice and use it to address my own experience.

More than anything, for me reading has always been a key to knowledge — whether self-knowledge or knowledge of the world around me. Once, not long ago, Parker asked me why I felt reading was so important. “Because if you can read and understand, you can learn almost anything,” I told him. “And what you have up here,” I said pointing to his forehead, “is something no one can take away from you.”

But I realized that probably my example had more impact than my words, because Parker has alway seen me with a book in my hand, or some other reading material. (I don’t go anywhere without something to read.) Once, a few years ago, when Parker was playfully imitating me, he did it with a book in his hand — sitting next to me on the couch, until I happened to look over at him. We both laughed, and I remember thinking that of all he sees me doing, I’m glad that’s what he chose to imitate.

Soon, he started reading road signs when we were out driving, an would ask us what a certain sign said if he couldn’t read it. Later, when I read to him, he would stop me and ask me to point out a particular word to him. I figured he wanted to know which word that was when I read it. Then, he would want to “read” the word himself, as I read the story with him. Now, we take him to the library ever few weeks and let him pick out books that we spend the next few weeks reading at bedtime. He picks out books on what interests him. (Right now, it’s dinosaurs and “Star Wars.” And I’m grateful that he’s no longer checking out the Pokemon books.)

We always read to Parker. I heard somewhere that reading to an infant is helpful no matter what you’re reading. So, when he was a baby I read to him from whatever I was reading at the time. Later, we got him various “board books,” and read them to him. We got him other books, too, and read those to him. He’d ask us to read them to him over and over again. Now, he’s a pretty good reader himself.

Now we do the same with Dylan. We got him some of his own “board books,” and some of the books that he’s “inherited” from Parker. Now Dylan asks us to read them over and over again. And we do. But now there’s an added bonus. Now Parker is sharing the love of reading, and of books, with his little brother.

As a reader, a writer, and a dad that makes me feel pretty damn good.

Now I know.

The Russian prime minister was photographed engaged in a series of adventurous activities including riding a horse bareback and climbing trees in southern Siberia.

In the latest of a series of media stunts Mr Putin was snapped striding through grassy fields wearing ankle high boots, an Indiana Jones style-hat and green fatigues while visiting the remote Russian region of Tuva.

The Russian premier camped out overnight, rafted down the region’s fast flowing rivers and visited a traditional farmstead, according to Russian news agencies.

Mr Putin’s day of activities were described as a “holiday” by state media but was clearly aimed at reinforcing his tough-guy image that plays so well at home.

I guess anytime this guy want to score media points, he strips off his shirt…

In the meantime, I thought this captioning contest from McClatchy Newspapers looked like fun.

I’ll start:

Identify:

a. The applicant most qualified for the job she seeks.

b. The one who’s benefited most from affirmative action.

Have at it.

[Source.]