6 Reasons why you should be cool with gay marriage

Did you hear that Obama is now officially endorsing Gay Marriage? Bryan Safi has compiled a thorough list of reasons why you should get on the Obama train and be Pro Gay Marriage as well.  You van follow Bryan on Twitter by clicking HERE.

A Missing Jesus, Junk Mail & a Poor Russian

Admittedly, I have issues.  I will not pretend that it isn’t so.  Maybe it is my OCD or my occasional dyslexia but there are a few things in life that drives me absolutely nuts.  And no, not the kind of nuts where I am only mildly irritated. It drives me the kind of nuts where I want to take a baseball bat and pretend another human’s head is a piñata while humming the theme song from psycho.  I know it’s not normal to get this angry about junk mail, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons and 419 scam or phising emails, but I do.  I can’t help it.  So this past weekend I decided to take a look at the intolerable cruelties I am troubled with, see if my anger was justified and whether there actually is something I can do about it.

Sunday mornings in my neighborhood seems to be the one day of the week when Jesus seems to be missing.  Every other Sunday morning our doorbell rings.  On the other side of the intercom I can usually see two people dressed in their Sunday’s best clothes asking if we have found Jesus.  “What is he missing?” doesn’t always yield the result one would expect and ninety present of the time it only seems to aggravate them.  I have found that there is nothing worse than an aggravated and determined Christian and “Can we come in and talk to you about Christ?” is then also always my cue to hang up.  Sometimes they will press the bell for up to ten minutes, sometimes they get the message and leave.

We live in South Africa and I don’t know any people who would allow total strangers, no matter how Christian like they look, into their homes.  It’s fucking dangerous!  Besides, I don’t allow any person into our property without them being vetted or, at the very least, having done a quick background check on them.  We live in a dangerous world and I have not upgraded our house’s security to that of a fortress only to let two roaming recruiters for Christ come into my house only to rob and molest me.  Call me paranoid but at least my paranoia have kept me alive for this long.  But a missing Jesus is but only one of my bothers.  There is also the junk mail.

There is a reason hubby and I get our mail delivered to a PO Box address.  Just the other day I demonstrated one of the reasons by accidentally opening up my neighbor’s bank statements.  It was lying on the floor in front of our front door.  Without thinking I picked it up, opened it and then with a shock realized it wasn’t ours.  Naturally, I found myself to be in a conundrum:  Do I try and glue it close again and drop in over their wall or do I shred it and pretend I never saw it.  I choose the latter.

Since we moved into our house we haven’t had a mailbox.  We had no need for one seeing as we have a post box, but this didn’t stop the junk mail distributers.  Every day for the last two years we had junk mail stuck in our aloe, glued to our front door, garage door and/or wall.  So in an effort to stop these suburban terrorist from defacing our property’s façade, hubby and I bought a mailbox and spray painted it a bright red and secured it prominently to our front wall.  You would have to be blind not to see it.  This, I thought, would solve all our junk mail problems.  I could not have been more wrong.

Our fabulous mailbox have been on our wall for less than 48 hours and already we have had junk mail taped to it, stuffed underneath our door and glued to our wall.  The fuckers seem to be making a conscious effort to stuff and stick their junk shit everywhere except in our fucking mailbox.  I swear they do this on purpose to drive me crazy, and it is working!

Junk mail and its aversion to mailboxes is one thing, but when I open my email and find that I have won the UK lottery for the infinite time, some princess needs help getting her fortune, my unexpected inheritance from a relative I didn’t know I had, the poor Russian who is stuck on the international space station because they can’t afford to bring him back or the unexpected deposit into my account at a bank I don’t even bank with, I want to scream.

We all know these emails are scams.  We all know to delete them and not open up the links that are contained in them.  We all know this, but yet everyday people all over the world fall for them and lately it feels like every 419 scammer got hold of my email address.  I have replied to a couple of them mostly using really fowl language that would make my mom blush, but when I heard of the poor Russian stuck on the international space station I was particularly amused, so I wrote them back.

In my response email I expressed my concern for the Russian, who had been on the space station for well over a year, and my concerns over his mental and physical health.  I offered to send him a care package whenever they launched another supply rocket up there.  I even suggested some possible ways to get him back which included stealing a spacesuit, thermal parachute, oxygen tanks and a fishing boat.  It wasn’t even a day before the Russian’s benefactor mailed me back saying that they need to raise $13 million to secure his save return, so I offered to give them $13.13 and some Farmville cash.  Needless to say they never mailed me back.

As for the people looking for Jesus, I have found a relatively easy solution.  Seeing as they pitch up only every other Sunday, I now switch off our intercom on those days.  They can ring the bell all they want and we are none the wiser.  The junk mail and the scam emails seem to be problems that will persist.  I have thought of beating the crap out of one of those guys who clearly don’t know what mailboxes are for but I can’t afford to get a criminal record for aggravated assault and/or attempted murder.

As for the 419 scams, I must give it to them some of their emails are quite creative and fantastical and you have to be an idiot to fall for them.  But the world has many idiots, and as long as they are there I guess I will keep on getting these damn emails.

Till next time.

The Crazy Lady from Nebraska & Gay Sex

There is a crazy lady who hates the gays.  Her name is Jane Svoboda and she lives in Lincoln, Nebraska.  Last week she testified at a non-discrimination ordinance meeting where she made some startling homophobic and inaccurately graphic statements.  Later in the week it was confirmed, by Jane’s family, that she really is crazy and suffering from schizophrenia.  That being said, I thought it appropriate to take a look at some of the statements she made about gays and gay sex and examine whether any of these statements are indeed true.

Jane said that during gay sex the penis goes into the anus, which is fairly accurate.   However, she also said that during anal intercourse the penis ruptures the intestines and the more gay men do this the greater our chances of becoming “a fatality or a homicider”.  Clearly Jane is a size queen and have come across some monster cocks in her life. I assume this because do you know how huge a guy’s dick would have to be to be able to rupture another guy’s intestines?  Besides KY (if used properly) can make anything fit without rupturing the rectum, intestines or an organ.  Besides I have never heard of a gay man that has ever been fucked to death or heard of a gay man being charged with homicide by large penis.  But then again, there is always a first time.  Isn’t there Jane?  But wait there’s more.  Jane also had some insights into paedophilia and AIDS.

Besides homicidal penises and fatal anuses, Jane went further and said that “a huge percentage of gay men in school grounds molest boys mainly because they don’t have AIDS yet”.  Why crazy people always automatically assume that all gay men are paedophiles boggles my mind; isn’t that solely reserved for Catholic Priests?

Sure, there are those gay men who prefer to date twinks but there’s one big difference – the twinks are of the legal age of consent.  As for the AIDS bit, these day there are many people, young and old, who are HIV+ and you cannot assume that just because a person is young that they are not HIV positive. Just as you cannot tell a person’s status just by looking at them.  That’s why there are condoms and a thing called save sex.  But sex with minors isn’t the only thing troubling poor Jane, it is the sex with corpses that really gets her blood boiling.

Jane mentioned something about the “Candida fungus that grows hugely on a corpse and that AIDS is a Candida fungus disease”.  It is true that Candida does grow on a corpse and one of its main functions is to help with decomposition.  But I don’t know any gay men, apart from Jeffrey Dahmer that is, who have sex with decomposed corpses.  Besides it being disgusting and morally wrong it is also illegal.

Here again Jane confused homosexuality with necrophilia.  Sure there are some gay men who suck in bed, just lie there and may as well be a corpse, but they still have a pulse and are alive and well.  Rigor mortis may be a turn on for Jane and Jeffrey, but as for the average homosexual the only body part that we prefer to be stiff during sex is a dick, not a limb.

According to Jane, Hillary Clinton went gay in college.  But don’t all straight folk do that in college anyway?  Personally, I have always thought that Hillary would have made a very respectable power lesbian; just look at the way she dresses and some of her hairstyles.  I am also sure that she is very handy with her tongue as it does get a lot of exercise not to mention that strong and nimble texting fingers.  But I digress…

Getting back to Jane, she said Hillary went lez because her college didn’t have single rooms and single gender dorms.  Well that doesn’t make any sense.  If you are lonely in your own room in a dorm filled with people of the same gender, wouldn’t that actually promote homosexual experiences instead of doing the opposite?  Clearly Jane has not thought this through or watched enough porn or been in enough dorms.  According to Jane dorms can make you go gay and if you are gay chances are, according to Jane, that you are also sadistic.

According to Jane all gays are sadistic and treasonous and she arrived at this conclusion by looking at the Romans.  When I heard this I was both flattered and annoyed at the same time.  But here again the voices in Jane’s head got it wrong.  There are gay men who are sadistic and in the gay world we call them “Masters” and they are the “S” in S&M.  This is a fetish practiced in darken basements, attics and dodgy night clubs and are by no means a mainstream “gay thing”.  There are plenty of straight folk who practices S&M as well; haven’t one of the voices in Jane’s head read “Shades of Gray” yet?

As for the treason part of her zany speech, in history it is true that there were some prolific homosexual spies who betrayed their countries through espionage.  In comparison to our heterosexual counterparts the instances of gay spies are but a drop in the proverbial bucket.  Jane also mentions Judas as another historic homosexual who betrayed Jesus.  It really is a pity that there were no tabloids back then, seeing as in the absence of a tabloid photo, leaked sex tape or the odd masseuse filing a law suit against Judas we have no way of verifying if he was indeed a homo.

Lastly, Jane claims that all bisexuals always become insane and she supports this statement by saying we must read the book of Nijinsky.  Who the fuck is Nijinsky, you may ask?  Well, I Googled him and she must be referring to Vaslav Nijinsky, a Russian ballet dancer and choreographer who were also bisexual, wrote a diary and went insane.  Now, I have never quite understood bisexuals and probably never will, but one can hardly generalize that a whole group of people will go insane just because one individual did.  That would be like saying that all bisexuals will automatically be straight again, just like Anne Heche, if they wait long enough for the mothership to come and fetch them.

I know I really should not be making fun of Jane Svoboda and that mental illness is no laughing matter.  But if mentally unstable people like Jane are allowed to vent their psychiatric delusions in a public forum.  If their caregivers don’t stop them and it is broadcasted over YouTube, well then you are just asking for it.  What makes this worse is that there are people on the internet that will come across her YouTube video, watch it and who will find some resonance with what she said.  In so doing, homophobia will spread and there will be people who believe these lies.  Let’s just hope that Jane gets the help that she so clearly needs and that there are people out there who are smart and psychologically stable enough to know the difference between truth and fiction.

Till next time.

Camping When Nature Hates You.

Camping is a queer concept to me.  I mean really, who in their right mind would willingly submit themselves to the elements if they are not homeless, raised by wolves or competing for a million dollars?  If humans were intended to live in the bush or mountains we would not have evolved to be able to build houses, nice hotels or invented electricity and room service.  Don’t get me wrong.  I do love to do quad biking, horse riding and now mountain biking in nature and I do appreciate nature’s absolute splendor.  But this doesn’t mean I want to spend a night in nature, sleep in a sleeping bag in a tent with God knows what crawling over me.  I have been camping twice in my life and this was enough times for me to realize two things:  One, I don’t like “roughing it” and two, I do NOT do camping.

About eight years ago hubby and I decided to go hiking with my sister, brother-in-law and some friends.  It seemed like a good idea at the time.  We would spend two days hiking up a mountain, walking about ten kilometers a day.  The selling point for me was that we would not need tents as we would be sleeping in what they called “chalets” and they said there was electricity at both “camping sites”.  The only down side, I thought, was that we would need to carry everything we needed in backpacks with us.  Optimism never served well, and in this case optimism would once again dismally fail me.

On arriving on the Friday, the first “camping site” was basically a room with a questionable roof on it, holes in the walls that you could literally see through and stretchers to sleep on.  No electricity.  No indoor toilet.  That was the very first time I in my life that I saw an outhouse or as they called it - a “long drop”.  I was mortified!  It was nothing more than a hole in the ground with a toilet seat on top of it, smelled like shit and there were steam billowing out of it the following morning.  All I could do, when I eventually had to number two, was to go in there, hold my breath and pray that the whole thing didn’t cave in while I was in there.  In retrospect, I think that’s where my fear of public toilets comes from.

The following day we started with the hike.  Ten kilometers is fucking far, especially if you are carrying 5kg on your back.  Needless to say I cursed a lot that first day.  My sister, the drama queen that she is, also had a complete dramatic melt down three quarters through when she had a cramp in her ass, literally.  She was a whimpering mess and wanted to be medically evacuated off the mountain.  Needless to say that didn’t happen.  The rest of the hike she was whimpering out loud and I was crying and cursing on the inside.  Eventually, what felt like an eternity, we made it to the second camp and things only got worse from there.

Again the “camp site” was no Hilton Hotel and by all means worse than the first one, again with the outhouse, cracked walls and stretchers.  With blusters the size of plums on my feet and smelling like a funky monkey, I realized hiking was probably the worst idea I ever had.  All I wanted was to take a long hot relaxing shower.  Then came another shock.

The “camp site” had a shower but it was outside in the bush and if I wanted a hot shower I had to heat the water in a thing they called a donkey on the fire.  “No hot water, no indoor toilet, no indoor shower, no electricity.  Why the fuck did I do this to myself?” I remember screaming.  I wanted to get clean so I heated the water, carried the donkey to the outside shower and hubby and I got in and opened the release valve.  First came the searing hot water then in came a snake.  I literally peed myself and that was the shortest and most traumatizing shower I ever had.  They said it was a harmless snake, but at almost a meter long it didn’t look harmless at all.

On day two we hiked back, completely paranoid about snakes, to the first “camp site” but this time I was motivated by one thing and one thing only - I wanted to get the hell out of there!  It took us about six hours to reach the “camp site” and we left immediately.  I have never gone hiking again since but I did end up going camping a couple of years later.

My parents’-in-law are avid campers.  They own a caravan and all the camping equipment one would need to survive in the event that the apocalypse should destroy all manmade structures.  They go camping often and they invite us along often.  I have always found creative ways to avoid camping and declining their invitations.  That was until the one day about three years ago when I couldn’t get out of it.

My in-laws got me to agree to go camping and until this day I can’t remember how they did it.  They promised me that we will have our own fully equipped bathroom and that we would not have to share it with other people.  They also said there would be electricity.  The only down side was that hubby and I would have to sleep in a tent.  How bad could it be, I thought?  What is the worst that can happen, I thought?

On arriving at the camping spot I was delighted to find that my in-laws didn’t lie to me.  We did indeed have our own bathroom, kitchen and there was electricity.  I needed electricity for my portable air-conditioned, inflating our double bed, electric mosquito repellent, ice machine and emergency light.  We helped the in-laws unpack and then set about pitching our tent.  Pitching a tent in your pants is one thing but pitching an actual tent is a whole different story.

Tents are complicated things and the instruction manuals that come with them, I firmly believe, are written by people who are high on drugs or drunk.  They make no sense.  After a struggle, some sweat and an averted mental breakdown the tent was semi decently erected.  Our bed was inflated, the air-conditioner was running and mosquitoes were fleeing.  The whole camping spot was set up and I must admit I was rather proud of myself.  Everything was done and as I was standing there admiring our handy work, I thought to myself “So now what.  We are here; we are set up, so what exactly does one do when you are camping?”  As it turns out – not much!

The only things we had to do were to go down a waterslide and drink.  I broke my rib on the waterslide that day and later that evening I got drunk on vodka jelly shots.  I would have broken my nose too had it not been for the emergency light outside our tent.  You see, vodka jelly shot, darkness and tent ropes don’t mix.  Much later that evening, I sobered up a little and we went to bed and that’s when it happened.  Back then my father-in-law use to snore, the sound of which could scare away wildlife in a five kilometer radius.  His snoring sounded a lot like a mixture between a diesel engine coming apart and a pig choking on its own esophagus.  It kept me awake for a long time.

After eventually falling asleep I was roused from my not so peaceful slumber by something tickling my face.  I brushed it away and dosed off again.  Then it happened again.  “Stop it honey” I mumbled to which hubby mumbled back “Stop what?”

Just then the tickling went down my chin, down my neck and into my shirt.  I woke up, reached for my flash light opened my shirt and let out a petrified scream as only a twelve year old school girl can do.  There was a big hairy spider on my chest!  As I stared down at it in utter terror, its beady eight eyes stared back at me while its front feet were touching my nipple.  I felt sexually violated and petrified that it would bite off my nipple after it had finished molesting it.  Pandemonium broke out.  I survived.  The spider did not.  I lost three years of my life that morning and inhaled a whole can of Raid in the scuffle.  I still get nightmares.  We never went camping again after this.

Until such time as North Korea and Iran starts nuking the shit out of the world and we are all forced to flee the city and find refuge in the mountains, I do not see any good reason why I should ever voluntarily go camping or hiking again.  No amount of bug repellent, vodka or inflatable and portable luxuries will see me leave the comfort of my home, or that of a hotel, to go and spent a night under the stars with the wild life, spiders, snakes and other hideous and possibly dangerous insect and animals.  Sure Broke Back Mountain made it look sexy, but in reality I would have had no problem quitting Ennis Del Mar as no high altitude fuck can be worth being dragged up a mountain to sleep in a tent and being crawled over and molested by spiders and snakes.

Till next time.

Queers on Wheels

Exercise is something I view in the same light as tofu, diet coke and rice cakes.  It’s not natural.  It’s not appealing and it makes me want to vomit.  I don’t like to starve and I don’t like to sweat.  But when you have to bring a certain pair of cargo pants out of retirement from the closet and a sense of shame and guilt overwhelms you as you stare at the flab where your abs of steel once were, a certain rude awakening happens.  Yes people, my Chinese Diet Pills are not working and I have not lost some of my circumference.  I am the gay version of obese and I do not intend to celebrate a certain thirty something birthday (which is just over two months away) looking like the Michelin Man.  So, I did what any self-respecting gay man would do, I sobbed and then I went out and I bought myself a bike.

This month is our 14^th anniversary.  On 21 May hubby and I would have outlasted 40% of all straight marriages and what a better way to celebrate this anniversary month than for me to try to lose 8kg and get back into shape before my birthday.  After all it is as much a gift for hubby as it is a gift for me.  Both hubby and I deserve for my body to be close to the shape it was in when we first met.  Albeit that back then I looked semi anorexic.  I mean you could seriously see my hip bone back then. So this time around my aim will be for the healthier looking version of me 14 years ago, not anorexic looking me.

So on Monday hubby and I went shopping.  Initially I decided to buy a treadmill.  Sure, it’s nothing more than a hamster wheel but I do prefer sweating, heaving and being red faced in private while watching Chelsea Lately or listening to music.  The treadmill seemed like a much better option than jogging through the neighborhood or running on a treadmill all lined up like a Nazi concentration camp's fitness experiment in the gym. Then I saw how much treadmills cost.

Treadmills are fucking expensive.  A whole month’s salary expensive!  For a brief moment while standing in the fitness shop, with a dropped jaw, I thought maybe I wasn’t really that fat.  Love handles are just more of me to love, right?  Then I remembered the reflection of my flab in the mirror that morning.  Remembered that cellulite is not my friend.  Remembered that even though chubby people have great personalities, nobody wants to see them naked, people get nervous at the pool if it looks like they are going to dive in and realized that economy class seats (the class that I now have to fly due to the economy) are small and very narrow.  I realized that I am chubby and I needed a Plan B.

On the other side of the fitness shop I spotted my Plan B – mountain bikes!  Interesting, I thought.  The last time I was on a bike was when I was 13.  I have fond memories of my red BMX bike and I knew that a mountain bike was my salvation from my every growing circumference, as my Chinese pills so blatantly calls it.  Mountain bikes are expensive too, but not as expensive as hamster wheels.  Besides, at least with a bike we will save money on the power bill, as I think hamster wheels can be heavy on electricity.  And bikes are greener and it will give hubby and I something to do as a couple, let us get out of the house, get some fresh air and get me into shape.  So we went shopping for the right bikes for us.

In a specialty bike shop I spotted the most amazing tandem bike.  It exited me in my loins and as I was pointing it out to hubby all vivaciously, his expression was one of “Yea right.  As if we are not gay enough as it is.  Why don’t we just hang pink tassels on the handle bars, besides I would have to do all of the peddling anyway"  It may surprise you, but yes, my husband can convey all of this in just one look, it’s a skill.  With a tandem bike clearly not being a realistic option we eventually bought two bikes that we both liked, bought pumps, helmets and all the paraphernalia one would need to get started.

My brother-in-law graciously offered to pick the bikes up for us as the boxes they came in would not fit in either of our cars.  For some odd reason I thought that if you buy a bike it comes fully assembled, but they don’t.  You have to do it yourself and for that you need tools.  Fortunately for us, brother-in-law has tools, lots of them and in no time at all, both our bikes were assembled and ready to go.  For the first time in almost two decades I was about to get on a bike, and I did not know what to expect.

Not being in any kind of shape at all, hubby and I decided to ride around the block.  It’s not a massive distance, but we thought it would be a gentle way to ease us into things.  Little did we know, but our block has hills and no matter which way around you go you will have an uphill and downhill.  To make matters worse is the fact that my bike was squeaking and it sounded a lot like it was saying “you’re fat” when it squeaked.  As these Queers on Wheels made our way around the block, people stared and I was dripping with sweat, out of breath and praying that no one recognizes me from under the helmet and from behind my sunglasses.  But we made it!  Eventually. I survived and it wasn’t really a completely unpleasant experience.  So later in the afternoon, we did it again.

The squeaking was later discovered to be the rear brake pads and our hairstylist, who had to see the bikes for himself, quickly identified the problem and the bike now no longer squeaks and calls me fat.  Hubby and I decided to ride around the block every day, each day venturing a little further as our fitness levels increases.  There are a lot of bike trails in and around our town and when we feel ready and know that we will not risk a heart attack we will start exploring them too.  It’s something constructive to do on a Sunday and much healthier than lying on the couch in front of the television eating crisps.

Exercise is never fun, but in the absence of a miracle pill that burns fat and turns chocolate or Hägan-Dazs ice cream into cellulite burning treats, it is unfortunately something I will have to do.  I know many people buy bikes with the full intention of exercising and that many of these bikes either end up as clothing racks or dust collectors in their garages, and many people think this is exactly what’s going to happen to ours.  But I do like a challenge and I do like proving people wrong.  So take that flab, I will paddle my little gay legs off around my little neighborhood and by the 1^st of July, I will have shed those excess 8kgs and be able to retire those pair of cargo pants back to its spot of shame in the closet!

Till next time