The State of Marriage
There’s a book out by Ted Olson and David Boies titled, Redeeming the Dream: The Case For Marriage Equality. This web site to which I’m linking claims the book is “ahistorical” with respect to gay marriage and that it exaggerates their role in legalizing gay marriage in the US. I’m mentioning this because the focus of this part of the post is about Vermont, Supreme Court Justice Beth Robinson, and the upcoming documentary The State of Marriage. My general focus is to show that the fight for same sex marriage has been a collaboration.
But first here’s something from the article about the two who have allegedly decided to rewrite gay marriage history. I haven’t read the book and don’t intend to read it.
But here’s the problem. Like Becker’s book, the Olson/Boies book reveals a profound ignorance of the decades of strategy, advocacy, and perseverance that made gay marriage in America possible. Its authors make the surprisingly callow mistake of participating in an important cause, seeing success around them, and arrogantly assuming they did it all by themselves. And in doing so, they, like Becker, make it harder for the world to understand what’s truly involved in successful social change.
The article goes on to talk about how these two authors did it all by themselves and those who helped were supporting THEM. It’s a fascinating piece and one I think is important to read because history is often rewritten to suit the needs of the most self-serving.
And people like Supreme Court Justice Beth Robinson who married Tony and me last January have been working to legalize both domestic partnership and same sex marriage long before most people even knew it was an issue, socially or politically. The fight to legalize gay marriage has always been, and continues to be, a collaboration of many different people and factors and no one person should be credited directly.
In any event, I think the upcoming documentary, The State of Marriage, that Tony and I were lucky enough to be part of will show a great deal of how same sex marriage began in the US and how it’s evolved, historically speaking. I’ve posted about this many times and you can read more here. Best of all, The State of Marriage had a crowdfunding campaign with Indiegogo and they reached their goal. You can read more about that here. There’s also a video clip and we’re at the end.
Jock Underwear Investigation
When I posted about the audience chanting gay slurs at a World Cup event last week I had no idea this is how things would turn out. But I guess I shouldn’t be all that surprised either. FIFA doesn’t seem to think the anti-gay chants are important enough to investigate, so they are going to worry about something far more important. They will be focused on an investigation that deals with a jock wearing the wrong kind of underwear. That’s right. Underwear.
Brazilian soccer star Neymar was spotted wearing a pair of Blue Man boxers, featuring his country’s yellow and green flag against Cameroon on Monday.
But the only problem is that Blue Man is not a FIFA World Cup sponsor.
According to Brazilian media reports, the 22-year-old soccer superstar is now being investigated by his choice of underwear with FIFA claiming it violates its disciplinary code.
You can read more here to find out how FIFA ruled on chanting the word “Puto.” There’s also a photo of the underwear and a jock.
Once again, sports trumps equality and discrimination.
FREE Gay Excerpt My Fair Laddie by Ryan Field
Here’s an unedited excerpt from a book I wrote titled, My Fair Laddie. It’s not fanfic. It’s a gay interpretation/parody of a classic storyline called Pygmalion that’s been reinvented many times by many other people. I just happened to reinvent the gay version, with highly erotic gay scenes, for people who enjoy reading gay stories. As far as I know, that was never done before I did it. Think of the way they are planning to interpret the old movie, Gay Father of the Bride.
There’s also a huge e-book sale happening over at Allromanceebooks.com that I didn’t know about until I looked for the link below. Prices have been greatly slashed. My .99 e-books are selling for .69. I feel like Second Hand Rose 🙂
My Fair Laddie by Ryan Field
Harlan Henderson threw two huge parties a year. One was in late springtime, where his historic Greek revival, located on an elegant Savannahsquare, was filled with fresh exotic flowers and the swimming pool overflowed with handsome young men in skimpy bathing suits. The other fell at Christmastime, where there was a fully decorated Christmas tree in every room and a lit candle placed in the middle of every windowsill.
Harlan came from an old, respected Savannahfamily. Aside from his Aunt Margaret who spent most of her time in New York, he was the only one left.
The spring party always sported a different theme. One year it was roses. The entire house had been filled with roses in every size, shade, and variety. Another year is was purple ribbons, with aubergine silk flowing from every window, sconce, and chandelier. But the year Harlan chose a pomegranate theme was probably the springtime party Harlan would remember, in detail, for the rest of his life. And that’s because it was the party that would change his life in ways he never could have predicted.
Though most of the pomegranate theme party hadn’t been much different from his other spring parties, the last fifteen minutes made Harlan’s eyes cross and his face turn red. While he was standing at the front door saying goodnight to the last of his guests, he moved a large cache pot filled with pomegranates away from the wall to show one of his guests the cache pot was an important Asian antique that had been in his family for years. Only he forgot to move it back against the wall when he was finished explaining, and an awkward young waiter carrying a tray of empty martini glasses tripped over it on his way from the dining room to the kitchen. The waiter lurched forward; the martini tray flew up in the air. Then the waiter pressed both palms to Harlan’s back and the tray landed on Harlan’s most important guest of the evening: a female senator from Georgia. Though for the most part the martini glasses had been empty, there had been remnants of pomegranate martini in a few of them.
When Harlan looked up and saw his distinguished guest had two small spots of watered down pomegranate martini on her beige cocktail dress, he clenched his fists and glared at the young waiter. He didn’t bother to notice the waiter had spilled more pomegranate martini on his own white shirt, and he didn’t bother to ask if the young waiter had hurt himself during the fall.
Harlan turned to the senator and said, “I’m so sorry. Please send me the bill for the dress. I can’t seem to find good help anywhere these days.” Then he sent the young waiter a seething glance. Harlan had seen this guy working around the house. Usually, he was working outside with the other landscapers, but Harlan had never actually met him.
The senator wiped the drops of pomegranate with her palm and smiled at the waiter. “I’m fine,” she said. “I’m sure my dry cleaner can remove them. Don’t give it a second thought.”
The waiter regained his balance and stepped forward. He appeared large and awkward and gangly; his pants too short and too tight and his white shirt so large the shoulder seams drooped down his arm. “I’m sorry ma’am. I been on my feet all night and didn’t see them red fruits down there in that there big ole pot. I know they wasn’t there before. Someone must a moved’em.” He looked up at Harlan and then pointed. “Them things is dangerous. Ya’ll ought to get’em out of the way before a person falls and breaks somethin important.”
Harlan’s eyes bugged and his jaw dropped. He kicked the cache pot into the wall and said, “Them things is only dangerous when there are idiots in the room.” He wasn’t shouting, but he mocked the way the young waiter spoke. This guy had the worst, backwater drawl Harlan had ever heard. It brought chills to his spine and pain to his eardrums. And Harlan knew all about dialects. He’d been studying two distinct aspects of dialect all of his adult life: regional and social class. He not only had a doctorate in applied linguistics, he’d also written text books and given lectures about the differences between regional and social class dialects. And this waiter, as far as he was concerned, had the worst combined regional and lower class dialect he’d ever heard in the entire country. There was something unusual about it that didn’t make sense.
The senator smiled and shook Harlan’s hand. She pointed to a section of her dress, down near the hem, where the drops of pomegranate martini had landed and said, “Look, no harm done. You can hardly see anything now.”
“I’m so sorry ma’am,” the waiter said. “I like to die when that tray went over, I did.”
Harlan smiled, thanked the senator for attending his party, and watched her walk down the front path. By the time Harlan turned around, his closest academic associate, Dr. Fritz Gordon, an older professor who had once been Harlan’s teacher, was grinning at him.
“Calm down, old boy,” Fritz said. “No harm done. I saw it from across the hall. The lad tripped over the fish bowl because it was in the middle of the room. It wasn’t his fault.”
“See,” the waiter said. “I told ya it weren’t my fault.” Then he smiled at Fritz and said, “Thanks all the same, but I ain’t no lad. Just turned twenty last week.”
Fritz smiled and bowed. “My apologies then, young man.”
But Harlan wasn’t smiling. He raised an eyebrow and glared at the waiter who was now down on the floor, on his hands and knees, picking up pomegranates two at a time and placing them back in the cache pot every which way.
The boy looked up and said, “Ya’ll are getting all worked up over nuthin when the lady already went and said them little drops weren’t botherin her. You couldn’t hardly seen’em.”
Harlan took a quick breath. In all the years he’d been studying and writing text books and papers about regional and social class dialect, he’d never met anyone who spoke as poorly as this young man. His drawl was so thick it was difficult to understand most of his sentences. And there was an unusual hint of British cockney mixed in with the drawl. He dropped all g’s, usually ignored h’s, misused most verbs, and didn’t have a clue when it came to the differences between words like them and those. It was almost as if he were speaking a completely different language.
“She was being gracious, you little fool,” Harlan said. “The woman is a senator and her campaign depends on large donations from people like me. She is probably in her car, right now, cursing me, not to mention my party. I’ve never been so mortified.”
The young guy plopped the last pomegranate into the cache pot and stood up. He put his hands on his hips and frowned. “Who you callin a fool? I like to die when them funny lookin apples damn near knocked me into the next room. If ya’ll axes me, ya’ll are the fool for leavin them there things out in plain sight where a person could kill hisself.”
This guy didn’t just use improper grammar and speak with a drawl. He mispronounced words, too. When he pronounced sight as sot and ask as ax, Harlan rolled his eyes and looked up at the ceiling for help. “Where on earth did you go to school? I’d like to meet your first grade teacher and club her. I’ve never heard such a bastardization of the English language. You, my dear boy, are the reason refined and educated southern people get a bad reputation all the time. You make the rest of us look bad.”
The waiter blinked. Though he seemed clueless, he knew Harlan was insulting him. “I’m a good kid, I am,” he said. “Never got messed up with no drugs and don’t even drink no beer likes the rest a them kids I know. Ya’ll got some nerve talkin to me as if I’m some kinda trash.”
