Letters to the Editor	Letters Archive

Wants BP Article

How can I get a copy of the article you had on the CEO of British Petroleum who had to resign just before retirement when it was disclosed he had a boyfriend/ lover?

R.S.
San Francisco, California

Find June '07's "Big Oil, Gay Touch, Messy End" at Guidemag.com, or send in $5 for that back issue.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell? Quel dommage!

I enjoyed reading your "Election '08: Gay Votes, Gay Issues" [August 2007, available at Guidemag.com].

I

View our poll archive

laughed out loud -- twice -- reading [in comments about Hillary Clinton's assertion that gay people could usefully serve in the military as badly-needed translators]: "They may not be able to fight or operate heavy machinery, but verbally, those sharp-tongued queens got rhythm."

from "Paulkasman"
via e-mail

Ignore Our Mayor

It is important for you and your readers to know that Greater Fort Lauderdale remains a warmly welcoming destination that is safe, unbiased, and very gay friendly.

The actions and hospitality reputation of this destination speak far louder than do the isolated words of one man. Ten years ago, our tourism industry rolled out the rainbow carpet to GLBT travelers. All of us are shocked by the mayor's remarks [regarding gay men and toilet sex]. As a member of the Tourist Development Council and one of the 150 gay and lesbian owned businesses who rely on tourists for our existence, I encourage your readers to reward a destination that stands united and proud to have long been enjoyed by gay visitors and supported by the local gay community. We look forward to your continued support of Greater Fort Lauderdale, now more than ever.

Richard Gray, proprietor
Royal Palms Resort
Fort Lauderdale, Florida

Thanks for Festival Sponsorship

On behalf of the Rhode Island International Film Festival, I would like to thank you for sponsoring the Providence Gay & Lesbian Film Festival. Our 11th anniversary festival was a huge success. Your generous sponsorship was greatly appreciated. The event had over 22,000 people who enjoyed the parties, events, and, of course, films. The event was spectacular in part because of your participation. We look forward to working with you again next year -- we're already planning for 2008!

Marc A. Olechnowicz
Associate Marketing Director, RIIFF
Newport, Rhode Island

Foe is Fear

I read your August 2007 editorial "January 20, 2009" [available at Guidemag.com].

The biggest task we all have, no matter our professed sexuality, is removing fear from the face of the earth. There are specific strategies and policies we must invent to do that. We might not be able to do that in America, though: the Magna Carta and the Constitution we have had are now gone. We failed to move beyond being a republic toward being a democracy. Republics cannot right themselves.

Let's work to develop the strategies and policies that will remove fear from the face of the earth.

from "Wildecker"
via e-mail

Craig's Politics a 'Sideshow'

All the recent coverage about] sex between men in public bathrooms prompted by the recent arrest of right-wing Idaho senator Larry Craig in a clear case of entrapment at the Twin Cities airport provokes me to offer the following observations.

Aside from the fact that tearoom trade (such as Craig appears to have been involved in) is harmless and not even noticed by other non-participating men at urinals, so-called public sex these days is an issue the ex-gay/lez movement generally will not defend. Quite the contrary, it supports the police and the "law" in its desire to portray same-sexers as goody-goody two-shoes and upstanding patriots.

This toadying anti-sex stance came about in the late 1970s when the bourgeois feminist movement adopted its anti-male, antiporn, anti-public sex, anti-pederasty, anti-SM policies, begun by Anita Bryant in 1977 and culminating in the NOW resolution condemning all these fun activities that it adopted in October 1980 (at the behest of its Lesbian Rights Committee). However, in the early 1970s -- to give but one example -- New York's Gay Activists Alliance not only protested police entrapment of men in tearooms in Westchester County, but actually traveled there to denounce publicly the entrapment, at a time when the only organized gay presence was in the city itself, not in the suburbs.

Craig's oinky and self-hating politics is a side issue. The main issue is police entrapment and the self-repression of many men nearly four decades after Stonewall. The fact that Craig was only ten years old at the time of the notorious Boise, Idaho, sex scandal in 1955 (in which the arrest of several prominent men for sex with teenage boys produced a witchhunt whose repercussions continue to this day) makes his case all the more poignant. The saddest aspect of it, however, is that sexual liberation has vanished as a goal of the gay/lez movement, which has substituted for it a feminist- and heterosupremacist-inspired anti-sex and anti-gay-male sexism, an aping of heterosexuality by embracing coupledom and marriage, a goal of getting into the imperialist military to do the dirty work of Wall Street by killing third world babies, and efforts at thought control by urging adoption of "hate crimes" laws.

David Thorstad
Minnesota