October is LGBT History Month

This post will update with a new video every day of October, so check back to see who's up. My fave appears on the 31st!

Is Condi Rice gay?

Michaelangelo Signorile has a post about his conversation with Glenn Kessler, author of The Confidante: Condoleezza Rice and the Creation of the Bush Legacy, who brought up a few interesting facts. First, Condi's closest male friend is an openly gay man. Second, her closest female friend is a woman of unspecified sexual preference with whom she owns a house and shares a line of credit. I should have such friends.

This wouldn't be relevant if it weren't for the fact that Condi's work boyfriend/boss keeps his minions loyal by bashing gays and trying to suspend their rights to equal protection under the law. Are there ANY straight Republicans left? I'm beginning to wonder.

I've said many times that the opposite of attraction is not revulsion - it's apathy. If you aren't interested in a particular sexual activity, you just don't think about it. It isn't on your radar. If you obsess about it; want to pass laws against it; want to arrest consenting adults for doing it; think they're going to hell for it and want to speed things along by executing them; fire desperately needed interpreters in a time of war because they might be doing it; sneak male prostitutes past the secret service and into your press corps... you have a problem with your OWN attraction to said activity. Sooner or later, you get caught propositioning a cop in an airport bathroom or chasing little boys or sexually harrassing young men on your (ahem) staff.

Not that this would happen to Condi. Lesbians tend to be a little more discreet in their liasons, particularly when they have a long term partner. There are exceptions, of course, but that's the trend.

This bothers me because it smacks of venality. It means that the people in the Republican administration are working against their own kind for political gain. It means that they are manipulating the homophobia of their radical religious base while secretly doing that which they profess to abhor - kind of like those Televangelists who get caught with prostitutes. I don't know what's worse - the temerity, the hypocrisy or the denial and double-think required to function with such cognitive and behavioral dissonance.

The American people are, in large part, quite gullible. They are also poorly educated, superstitious and bigoted. If you can dig down below all of that, you'll usually find a good heart that wants to do the right thing. And that's the really furstrating part. The "Good Germans" thought they were good people, too. Patriotic, loyal, proud of their heritage, and generally everything good people want to be. The problem is that when you convince people that they have a divine mandate, the best of them will do the most horrible things, or at least turn a blind eye while others do.

I'm not convinced we can afford people the luxury of a closeted existence when whole groups of people are under attack, especially when some of those attacks originate in those self-same closets. I think it's time we all begin to deal with who we are, and to insist that those in positions of power do the same.