I recognize that smell.

The Pennsylvania Senate is discussing John Eichelberger’s SB 707, which would amend the PA constitution to define marriage as between one man and one woman. The Judiciary Committee may vote on it as soon as tomorrow.

For more information see Thomas C. Waters's blog entry, which tipped me to the situation. See also Pittsburgh Lesbian Correspondents, whose blog swarm I'm joining with this entry. People like them know the situation in Pennsylvania much better than I. So I'm not going to tell you about it. But I will tell you a story.

January 27th was the last day of evidence in California's Proposition 8 trial. On January 29th Ron Prentice published a summary of the trial on the United Families International Blog. Here's the part that stuck in my head.

The controlling legal issue is not whether homosexual marriage is good or bad, but rather whether the people have the right to decide what is best.

Really?

Now that's interesting.

Because I thought that the controlling legal issue was the protection of the institution of marriage.

Let me check.

Yup. I was wasn't crazy. Ron Prentice is the Chairman of Protect Marriage dot com. Protect Marriage. Hmmmmm. I can't help but think that when he registered the domain name he thought that the core mission of his group was to, oh, protect marriage.

Make no mistake. When the Proposition 8 trial began it was all about protecting marriage. Just take a look at the Proposition 8 Trial Tracker and you'll see that. If Prentice's defense had had one iota of success in showing that same-sex marriages would harm anything at all, you can bet he'd be singing the same tune that was filling the air in early January. But he isn't. The tune has changed. Why?

I grew up on a dairy farm. My uncle sold the property when I was five, but we only moved a quarter of a mile down the road. So I spent my first decades walking the pastures and corn fields and ravines around that farm. I grew up accustomed to bad smells.

One day when I was in my early teens I was walking alone through the fields when I smelled something particularly bad. It was immediately apparent that something big had died. I followed the increasingly nauseating stench down into a ravine and, sure enough, there was the dead cow that I'd smelled hundreds of yards away.

Ron Prentice's words stink to high heaven. And just like the stench that hit me while walking through corn fields all those years ago, it doesn't take much effort to track the smell back to its source. In this case the big bloated cow carcass is Ron Prentice's desperation. He started by saying that he was protecting marriage, and the absurdity of that assertion has been illuminated. So now he's switching tactics. He'll say whatever he can to veil his hateful actions in a sham of logic.

When you look at the situation in Pennsylvania, don't be confused about What This Is Really About. The people who want to write discrimination into the state constitution want you to believe that it's about anything but discrimination. So they construct a What This Is Really About du Jour. What This Is Really About is plastic. What This Is Really About changes with the wind. Don't listen. Smell what's on that wind.

Follow your nose.

The Soloist Project

Thanks for joining The Soloist Project in its fledgling stage! If you're ready to write a letter to the editor of a Central New York newspaper, you will swoon at the convenience of the handy-dandy contact links on my Newspaper List. So far that's all I've had time for, so if you live outside Central New York, please find your hometown newspaper on abyznewslinks.com and get writing those letters! And please come back and post them here so we can all applaud your solo!

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It was around 1994 when I sang my first voice solo: a few bars from "Oklahoma" in a show tune medley. I was so scared that I entered a fugue state. It was as close as I've come to an out-of-body experience.

Solos are scary. The intertwining threads of harmony fall away, leaving your voice alone and exposed. Anyone with half an ear can hear the slightest flaw.

But you have a chance to shine, with no other lights to eclipse you. You have a chance to carry that room. God, what a thrill.

Lately there have been a lot of voices like this. They are embarrassingly desperate to affect logic but their lies and distortions are just variations on the theme of hatred. They can't disguise this any more than a man with an abscessed ulcer can hide the smell rising from the core of him.

And yet together these singers form a rough harmony of sorts. After all, if one gathers enough recta with complementary acoustic qualities, even a chorus of farts can attain a kind of sonorousness.

If you live in a small town and you're reading this, maybe you also hear a chorus of farts from your local newspaper. If you're like me, you've had it with people comparing gay folks to dogs. If you're like me, you're ready to scream at the hateful chorus.

But instead of screaming, how'd you like to sing?

Don't let the chorus be the only thing the audience hears. Take the stage, even if it's only for a few bars. Sure, the timpani and tuba and kazoos will thunder and blat in cacophonous disapproval the moment you're done, but what of it? You may not carry that room, but by god for a moment every ear will hear your joyful noise.

So make your voice heard. And don't let it be a fart - a fart alone on the stage sounds silly. Your solitude obligates you to sing well. Sing with abandon. Sing of love and grace and dignity.

Sing a solo.

The Worries of a Straight Ally

I assume that most straight guys would feel about like I feel right now, a few hours before attending a big gay event, but I don't know how much they'd actually talk about it. So here's what the topography of my mind looks like from helicopter level.

It's sort of like a lot of the landscapes I've canoed past in the Adirondacks: a mass of light green deciduous leaves blending together into a canopy, with here and there the striking dark green of a conifer poking its way up over the top.

The light green deciduous layer is this fairly lush mass of "Hey, I just want'cha ta know I'm straight, so I ain't kissin' any guys. I'm so happy about the event that I'm here in support, but don't none o' you guys try to kiss me!"

And then there are the conifers: little eruptions of "But... what if no guy tries to kiss me?? Does that mean I'm getting old and unattractive?"

'Cause I'm a guy, folks. And that's the way we roll. We tend to take umbrage at not being wanted.

So You Think Gay Sex Is Weird?

Fine. I get that. Seems a bit weird to me, too. Like I said before, though: if it seems weird to me, that's my problem; and if it seems weird to you, that's your problem. But I do understand. I believe that we're programmed to be uncomfortable with the unusual, and something that only ten per cent of the population does is fair game. However, if you could just put a pin in that for a second, I'd like to tell you about something that may alter your perspective.

Have you ever looked at a spider very closely, or seen macro shots like this one? Some spiders look like they're wearing boxing gloves. That little fifth set of legs is called the pedipalps, and if they're swollen like that, it means the spider is a male.

What are the pedipalps for, you ask? Well. Get ready, 'cause this shit's gonna blow your mind. The following is from the article ON SPERMATIC TRANSMISSION IN SPIDERS by J. W. abalos and E. C. Baez.

In 1843, Menge described the construction by the mature male of a nuptial web into which (or directly into the web of the female) he deposits a drop of semen. The semen is produced in his abdominal reproductive organs, a pair of gonads with their respective deferent ducts meeting to form a terminal duct, opening at the midline of the body into a seminal vesicle in the epigastric furrow. This drop of semen is then taken up by the copulatory apparatus situated in the male palpi, which are transformed for this purpose into more or less complex organs, according to the spider family. Once the palpi are filled with sperm, the male is ready for mating.

Copulation is preceded by a courtship typical for each species and described by various authors. The male introduces the embolus of one palpus into the female epigynum, transferring the sperm into the seminal receptacle; immediately afterwards he repeats the operation with the other palpus. The deposition of the sperm in the nuptial web as described by Menge was later observed by various authors, among whom Montgomery (1903) suggested the term "sperm induction".

Read the entire PDF for more fun. And seriously, if you can manage it, find a copy of the following article.

Studies on the Habits of Spiders, Particularly Those of the Mating Period
by Montgomery, T. H., Jr.
Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, Vol. 55 (1903), pp. 59- 149
Published by: Academy of Natural Sciences

It's nothing short of a mind-altering experience: page after page of descriptions of male spiders who, if they're very lucky, manage to mate without dying at all. The merely lucky males manage to get eaten by the female only after finishing a regime of spectacularly acrobatic sex. The unlucky ones get killed as soon as they touch her web.

Makes gay sex seem kinda boring, yeah?