Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Don't You Want Me, Baby. Just DON'T

If there's one thing "talk radio pioneer" and polyglot Barry Farber has learned in his 80 years on this planet, it's that you bitches want him.  And he'd like you to stop.
The right not to be erotically enjoyed
I wouldn't want to be seen naked by a homosexual male.
Granted, it's never pleasant watching an innocent passerby suddenly struggle with the dry heaves.
I wouldn't mind in the slightest being seen naked by a straight man
The feeling's not mutual, Pops.
OR – gripping mood music would fit nicely here – by a male whose sexual proclivities were unknown, hence presumed to be heterosexual.
While I don't object to Barry's yen for a little Music To Be Gripped By, I wonder what tune would set the proper mood.  Unchained Melody?  Theme from A Summer Place?  Yakkity Sax?
This is nothing less than the proclamation of a new civil right – the right not to have your body enjoyed erotically against your will.
The Alta Kocker Martin Luther King.

Barry has drawn a line in the sand, using his grotesquely elongated scrotum as a stylus: this far, and no further!  Being glimpsed by a possibly gay man at the gym is the moral equivalent of having your skull split open by a rifle butt on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Unfortunately, his timing may not prove the most propitious, as it doesn't appear that the Roberts Court is particularly enthusiastic about the creation of new civil rights.
More accurately, that's far from a new civil right.
"In fact, I'm now saying the opposite of everything I said before.  Gay dudes?  Check -- me -- out!
It's a right we've always had but never had the need to invoke and defend until the government overthrew "don't ask, don't tell."
So are you planning to join the Army's elite 1st Hoveround® Calvary, or what, Barry?
Women, in particular, have always held that right dear
Yes, women have always had to deal with men being jerks.  For us, however, this whole taste-of-our-own-medicine thing is new and unexpected, since homosexuality was only recently created by an act of Congress.
...and men have helped them preserve it. ("Officer. That man in annoying me!" "OK, buddy. Move along!")
We men will keep you ladies safe from us men, so long as we're all in a Bowery Boys movie.
The only thing that's new is the prospect of men and women in the service now openly preferring intimacy with members of their same sex.
I hope nobody tells General von Steuben, or he'll start camping it up all over Valley Forge.
All other arguments against gays serving openly in the military are moral, legal, tactical and practical.
And none of those have worked, so let's try basing public policy on an octogenarian's fear that buff young men might see his schmekel.
This one is highly personal. This one zooms right on by all those earnest questions of "unit cohesion," what course do military chaplains now take whose religions consider homosexuality an abomination
How about a course that leads in the general direction of the 21st Century?
how many dramas might begin with a homosexual of superior rank hitting on a same-sex subordinate and to what deleterious end might those dramas lead, etc.
True, it's much more dramatic when a male superior sexually harasses a male subordinate, rather than, say, when a male sergeant rapes a female recruit at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds, because that belongs more in the commedia dell'arte category.
It was dismaying to hear the president spin a heart-warming anecdote about a commanding officer who revealed himself as gay and whose supportive heterosexual troops declared, "We knew he was gay all along, and he's the best commander any of us has ever had." I don't doubt that story's veracity, but I question its typicality.
Don't forget; it was an official of the Nazi German Embassy in Copenhagen who tipped off the Danish Underground that they were about to round up the Jews and deport them to concentration camps. That particular "Nazi" saved 6,000 Jewish lives. Some American civilians paid their own way to the Philippines in 1946 to testify on behalf of a Japanese prison camp commander who was uncharacteristically kind to his prisoners.
I'm simply saying there was a good German here and a good Japanese there. I'm not saying the wartime Germans and Japanese were a good ol' bunch of boys. And, no, dummy; I'm not comparing gays to Nazis or imperial Japanese.
"I'm just saying that good gays are as rare as good Nazis."
And, no, this is not an anti-gay screed. This may be the most pro-gay piece you've read lately. 
It's so moist -- even dripping -- with acceptance and love that I'm going to need some Handi-Wipes, or maybe a sponge mop.  But why is Barry so pro-gay?  Simple: he wants the gays out of the showers and back in the closets not because he's a bigot, or because he finds the mingled scent of unwashed pits and mothballs arousing, but because he knows that continued segregation and discrimination will keep the gays safe.  After all, those Alabama state troopers didn't shoot and club Blacks before they started protesting and demanding civil rights, did they?  Well, they did, but it was more of a hobby.
I literally fear instances of straight GIs losing it and actually murdering their gay comrades-in-arms. And I feared that long before any present debate or legislation about gays in the military.

In the mid-1990s, I got a call from a listener to my radio talk show who told of serving with five or six other men in close quarters in an Arctic hut in Greenland. One of the men started making subtle and then not-so-subtle homosexual advances. "We put him out," said the caller. "You did WHAT?" I asked. "You heard me," said the caller. "We put him out." "Did he survive?" I asked. "Of course not," said the caller without remorse. "This was the Arctic." A conscientious listener notified the police. This was an open, if anonymous, confession of murder. The FBI asked the network for a tape of that conversation. I heard nothing further about it.
I completely believe this story, because my father-in-law was stationed at Thule Air Force Base in the 1950s, and he mentioned that their unit motto was "You Tease, You Freeze."
Help yourself to an "inconvenient truth."  Apparently, gays are not enraged by heterosexual sex practices. 
Although they're maybe grossed out a little when we start doing that baby talk thing.
Vice-versa does not obtain. Gay sexual practices can trigger anti-gay rage among some heterosexuals.
Side effects of bigotry include mood swings, impotence, helpless rage, circular reasoning, Godwin's Law-breaking, elevated blood pressure, excessive drinking, irregularity, persistent feelings of sexual inadequacy, and irrational panic in locker rooms.  Ask your doctor if Intolerance is right for you.
Only gays dare comment on gay behavior, so I'll settle for quoting the mantra at a gay San Francisco bathhouse. "Rub-a-dub-dub. Three men in a tub. And that's on a slow night!"
What!  Gay men are making jokes about a nursery rhyme we used to make jokes about on the playground?  Freeze them!  FREEZE THEM!
I recall shower time during basic training at Fort Dix, N.J. It was like watering cattle down before shipping them out of Omaha in boxcars. At least a dozen shower nozzles and a hundred naked men screaming, cussing, carrying on and even washing. I remember thinking, "I would rather take a shower like this with a hundred gay men who I didn't know were gay than with 99 straight men and one known homosexual."
That's so funny, because I recall when I was in elementary school, I remember thinking, "I hope Ronald Reagan is elected President some day so he can eliminate the Fairness Doctrine, and then somebody can invent right wing talk radio so eventually Barry Farber can be retire from it, and then after someone else invents the Internet, he can write a piece telling us how his thinking on homosexuality hasn't advanced one millimeter since 1948." 
Go ahead and laugh, denounce, demean, berate, snarl, spit and threaten. I remain the world's foremost authority on whom I'd like to take a shower with.
While I remain the world's best source of information on when to avoid the shower room at the gym because there's an old guy in there with a ball sack like the pendulum on a grandfather clock.

12 comments:

M. Bouffant said...

Nice picture. Never seen a human face that responsive to tidal forces.

preznit said...

gripping mood music would fit nicely here

Tubular Bells? Theme from Shaft?

how many dramas might begin with a homosexual of superior rank hitting on a same-sex subordinate

UCMJ:Codgers Unit

I heard nothing further about it.

yeah, legal departments, the FBI and the judiciary just love to blab about that stuff

I recall shower time during basic training at Fort Dix

you'd think the name might have been a tip off

Bill S said...

Every notice that the men who worry the most about gay men ogling them are always the ones who have the LEAST to worry about?

Doghouse Riley said...

It's a right we've always had but never had the need to invoke and defend

Well, he's just being modest; none of us who was around at the time will ever forget Ronald Reagan adding the "and no ogling, either" clause before he finished writing the Equal Rights Amendment.

heydave said...

...gripping mood music would fit nicely here...

OK, I'll confess: I read that as gripping wood music and couldn't figure out what the hell that should be.

Shorter Barry: No, I only sound like a fucktard.

p.s. Word verification: "mitifici" which makes me so very happy for some reason.

Brian Schlosser said...

How do your balls hang??

"Heavy... pendulous... black..."


Doesn't Barry know the Hemingway rule? The minute they hit toilet water, its shotgun time.

Anonymous said...

Christ! For a minute there, I thought that was an age enhanced photo of Woody (no pun intended), Harrelson.
Nanute

Carl said...

Barry Farber is that rare creature who is unintelligible and idiotic in 80 languages.

Anonymous said...

lovely stuff. You (and Riley, of course) are masters at this, but you must admit that the gene-deep retardation of the anti-gay arguments is a key assist. It's low-hanging fruit (pun intended, now that I see I made one) but you do so well.

I teach my students 'fisking'--it's one of the newest internet rhetorical skills. But this is something else, comic or satiric fisking. When it comes to gay arguments, maybe we should call it fistking? don't know. Anyhow, my only regret is that the original writers aren't forced to face how stupid they are. This geezer, with his pruny recollections, is clearly lost. But I wonder what you think of this:

http://www.dilbert.com/blog/entry/?EntryID=545&print=1&Page=6

a website where we can challenge people to take a wikified fact test?

Ice

Scott said...

Oh, I fully and freely acknowledge the value of low-hanging fruit in creating the World O' Crap experience, Ice. In fact, I'm more often to skip the trees entirely and just scavenge for the bruised and rotten stuff that's already fallen to the ground and been gnawed on by insects and rodents (I'm looking at you, Barry).

Anon said...

I haven't even read the whole thing and I can already tell it's just more evidence that straight men's homophobia is at base a fear of being treated they way THEY treat women.

round guy said...

I just wanted to thank you for making me relive my days at the Portland Y, where there were always at least 3 ancient men in the showers at all times, holding their balls up near their chins while they scrubbed them off.
I had finally suppressed that memory.
Damn it all.

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