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 Savannah
square, 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 Savannah
family. 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.”
