Call Me Party-Pooper.

Sorry, but I can't get too excited about what people are calling the first-ever national pro-LGBT rights legislation being a law that enshrines our status as victims.

The bill is named for Matthew Shepard, whose murderers, as I understand it, got the maximum penalty possible. This hate-crimes (thought-crimes) law would not have made any difference in their sentences. Is this really the right time to be drumming up reasons to put more people in prison? Does anyone really think making prejudice a crime is going to prevent gay-bashing?

I Don't Know, It's Some TV Show.

I just this moment realized that for years I've been confusing Arrested Development with Curb Your Enthusiasm. When people would ask me if I'd seen Arrested Development, I'd say I had watched part of one episode and had to turn it off because a man and a woman were shouting at each other for like 10 minutes straight and I couldn't take any more.

But that was Curb Your Enthusiasm. I had never actually seen Arrested Development, until very recently. A couple friends insisted insistently that J and I watch it because they love it and thought we would love it too. We rented the first season on DVD and watched the first two episodes. I sort of wondered while watching when the yelling was going to start, but I figured it must have been a later episode I'd seen.



So Arrested Development wasn't the unbearable yelling show after all, but it was boring and forced, and we didn't watch more than the first two episodes.

Amazing.

Can't Get Off My Joni Jag.

To Have Survived.

I learned yesterday that a dear friend, who is in his mid-thirties, recently became HIV+. A man I am seeing (also in his mid-thirties), on our first date when we were having the "HIV conversation," expressed real surprise when I told him I was negative, as if that is rare and shocking. I don't know the numbers, but I guess it must be uncommon to be a homosexual man over 40 and not have contracted HIV. I'm surprised myself. I was surprised when I had my first HIV test at 30, and I think I have been surprised every time since.

They used to say that we had survived, that we who had managed to avoid HIV infection were survivors. But since the mid-nineties people with HIV survive. Their lives are changed dramatically, but, in some very meaningful way, most of them do survive. So what are we now? Escapees? Fugitives?

Holidays.

Does anybody even know when Columbus Day is, except on Columbus Day (and only because they tried to go the post office or the bank )? I'm glad you "discovered" America, etc., but I was planning to register my car today and now I can't.

This has got to be one of the stupidest holidays ever, when we celebrate that some person from the distant past did something which he didn't, strictly speaking, do. I guess a lot of holidays fall into that category. Christmas, for instance.

Alex P. Keaton Hijacks Gay Rights Movement.

I don't know, maybe it's an old saw by now, but this video clip made me sad and bitter. This is so not what I've been fighting for.

We all keep talking about how, for this new generation, homosexuality is no big deal. It's true, and that's great. But I feel the need to constantly point out that a big part of the reason for that, a big part of the reason the new gay agenda suddenly has so much straight support is because the agenda has become so conservative.

I keep harping on that fact because I have the sense that most people don't get it, don't see that connection. But maybe they do. Maybe it's obvious, and maybe that's exactly what they want. Maybe it just comes down to opposing worldviews. When I was marching in Washington in 1987, I was against the nuclear family, I was against the military. I was marching against the exact institutions that the new gay rights movement is marching for. Maybe the ideal world that has always motivated my political convictions, my activism -- a world of possibility, freedom, openness -- maybe my dream of sexual liberation is hopelessly fringey and outdated. Maybe they're brilliant and I'm just old.

I have to admit that a part of my bitterness is a sort of petulance at being left out. I loved those Washington marches back in my ACT UP/Queer Nation days, how exhilarating they were, how powerful and visible we felt. We were pushing against the mainstream, carving out space for our lives in America; we were brand new. I couldn't have marched yesterday because I don't support any of the things they're fighting for, and that makes me sad.