NO BOYS KISSING! A GUT-CHECK TO THE LGBT COMMUNITY, BROUGHT TO YOU BY YOUTUBE.

Summary: after YouTube pulled a video from gay GOP presidential hopeful Fred Karger, for allegedly inappropriate content in the form of same-sex kiss, Mr. Karger was apparently able to intervene to have the video put back up.  But in 2012, an anodyne same-sex kiss should not be so outré as to warrant being censored.  When the lives of LGBT Americans are censored, it creates an impression that we are somehow too dangerous for the body politic.  Such an impression enables bullying, violence, and a climate in which GLBT youth suicide has become endemic.  YouTube owes queer Americans an apology.

By: Paul S. Marchand

You may remember Fred Karger.

He’s the openly gay Republican running an impossibly long-shot campaign for president.  He hasn’t got a snowball’s chance in the Sahara of actually getting the nomination, let alone winning the Presidency, but his campaign has given us a few amusing moments, and more recently, a gut-check about just how much work remains before American queerfolk can be counted as first class citizens in the commonwealth.

A few days ago, Karger’s campaign released a video entitled “Sexy Frisbee.”  Like a previous campaign video, entitled “Demon Frisbee,” this one involved good-looking young people tossing a frisbee.

While “Demon Frisbee” was set in New Hampshire, the new video is set at Venice Beach, with a bunch of generically good-looking southern California young people (of the actor/model/server/rent-person variety).  What made the “Sexy Frisbee” video a little “risqué” was that it contained (OMG!) a rather chaste same-sex kiss.

Apparently, the existence and depiction of a same sex kiss in a political campaign video offended or frightened somebody in the bureaucracy at YouTube, which pulled the video for alleged “inappropriate content.”  Without a considerably greater degree of transparency at YouTube, we may never know whether the decision to pull Karger’s “Sexy Frisbee” video was the result of some management level YouTube employee’s personal discomfort, or (possibly more likely) the result of an organized campaign by homophobes to flag the video as “inappropriate.”

Apparently, Fred Karger has enough juice at Google (the corporate owner of YouTube) that the video has been put back up after he intervened with Google’s lobbyists in Sacramento.  Nonetheless, while we may celebrate a small victory for free queer speech, the fact that someone, somewhere, was able to cause a relatively anodyne political video to be pulled on account of something as minor (for 2012) is a brief, no-tongue, same-sex kiss is still deeply disturbing.

For YouTube and Google, the episode should be more than a little bit embarrassing.  Headquartered as they are in California, which --- Proposition 8 notwithstanding --- is the most diverse and inclusive State in the Union, both YouTube and Google seem not to have understood ab initio how poor the optics were of pulling a video on account of a single, transitory, depiction of same-sex affection.

Certainly, neither the LGBT community nor our straight allies would have expected either Google or YouTube to be so skittish, especially given the presence of numerous YouTube videos depicting rather more intensive same-sex interactions than anything depicted in the Karger video.

For, if nothing else, the episode reminds us that, even in 2012, the existence of queerfolk, and our participation as out people in the body politic, apparently still scares an awful lot of people.  Who would have imagined, with support for marriage equality on the rise, with LGBT people now able to serve openly in the armed forces, and with a new generation of GLBT politicians beginning to pick up the mantle of leadership from such pioneers as Barney Frank, that a simple little kiss could have been so radioactive?  Apparently, we still have a great deal more work ahead of us before we can even begin to imagine ourselves first class citizens in our own commonwealth.

With a little bit more than six months left before the general election, it is not unreasonable to foresee that as much as we have seen women, working people, people of color, the poor, the very young and the very old, and college students, among others, become the targets of right-wing rage, GLBT people will inevitably be targeted in our turn, as we were in the presidential election cycles of 2004 and 2008.

History teaches us that it is always easier to make scapegoats of groups whose existence, history, and narrative are not well known to the larger community.  Integral to much of the effort of the American right to demonize queerfolk is a concomitant effort to prevent people from knowing of our existence, or understanding that we live among our straight neighbors, and share many of the same hopes, fears, dreams, nightmares, tragedies, and triumphs.

By shunting us into a collective closet, it is easy for right wing homophobes to tar us as some kind of highly dangerous Other, engaged in all manner of secret, nameless, obscene activity.  But where there is an obvious and visible LGBT community, where our straight neighbors get to know us, it becomes much more difficult for those right wing homophobes to implant or play to fears that exist only in the imagination.

After all, proximity breeds knowledge; knowledge breeds understanding; understanding drives out bigotry.  When you get to know the two women living next door who brought you cookies when you moved in, it becomes virtually impossible to imagine them as Vampire Lesbians of Sodom.  By the same token, it’s hard to see in the gay couple who kept an eye on your house for you while you were on vacation the kind of over-the-top perverts right wing megachurch preachers dwell on so lovingly -- nay obsessionally-- in their sermons, lobbying, and radio appeals.

So, when YouTube --- and by extension, Google --- let themselves get pulled into a “don’t say gay” mindset with respect to the Karger video, they seem not to have considered that “don’t say gay” merely perpetuates a climate in which the vilest libels, calumnies, slanders, and hate speech come together to create a climate in which queerfolk are targeted, in which long-term GLBT relationships are devalued, and in which the lives of queer teens are often considered of such insignificant value that bullying and queer youth suicide have become endemic problems in school districts all over America.

Because our queer lives matter, and because in a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all persons are created equal, no one should be forced to live in the shadows on account of who she or he loves, YouTube was wrong to have pulled the Karger video, and should not have taken Fred Karger’s personal intervention to get the video back up.  

YouTube not only has some explaining to do, it also owes Fred Karger and every LGBT American an apology.
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PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney in Cathedral City, California, where he lives and works.  He has been involved in LGBT activism for more than 25 years.  The views contained herein are his own, and not necessarily those of any entity or organization with which he is associated.  He was not scandalized by Fred Karger’s YouTube video, so there.  The contents of this column are not intended as and should not be construed as legal advice, though he does counsel those who don’t like the sight of two boys bussing to avert their eyes.

EARTH DAY AT MIDDLE AGE: RESPECTABLE BUT MORE NECESSARY THAN EVER

 (SUMMARY:  After two generations, Earth Day has become as respectable as sensible shoes and droopy cardigans.  Still, at a time when extremists on the right are seeking to undo all the progress we have made on environmental protection and sustainability in the last half century, Earth Day remains as important as ever.)


By:  Paul S. Marchand

It’s funny how something that started almost as a countercultural act of defiance has become a staid, establishment event.

Today is Earth Day.

Time was, Earth Day was associated with hippies, love beads, and the whole exploratory ethos of the latter part of the 1960s.

Of course it’s also funny how so many of the cultural references of the 60s have themselves become almost hopelessly respectable.  You know the 60s have become well and truly domesticated when the music of our youth that our parents yelled at us to turn down or turn off has become the elevator music of our middle age.  The love beads of yesteryear have become museum pieces, and many in my own Boomer generation now gravitate toward sensible flats and slightly droopy cardigans.

But if Earth Day has settled into its own kind of middle-aged respectability, it has not been because the Earth Day ethos failed, but perhaps ironically because it has been altogether successful.

40 years ago, for example, the idea of separating one’s household refuse was regarded as coming close to communism.  When he ran for mayor  in 1961, Los Angeles's Sam Yorty railed against requiring households to separate out their garbage, as had been the case under prior Los Angeles mayors.  While political wags joked that Sam Yorty had been “swept into office on a wave of garbage,” his appeal garnered him landslide support among San Fernando Valley housewives.

Today, the idea of not segregating one’s household waste has come to be well-nigh universally regarded as environmentally unsound.  We recycle almost as second nature; aluminum cans in one container, glass in another, plastic in a third, and paper in a fourth.  More and more of us have replaced incandescent light bulbs with the squiggly, spaghettilike compact fluorescent numbers that, mirabile dictu, actually do last longer (at least in my house).

Yet if many of us have internalized large parts of the Earth Day ethos, and have become more sensitive over the years to the importance of such things as sustainability, recycling, and mitigating the carbon footprint, it appears as if an ever-growing number of our neighbors would like nothing more than to return to those halcyon days when nobody worried about sustainability, recycling, or climate change.

Sadly, the American right has been astonishingly successful in fabricating a narrative in which environmentalism is a dirty word, recycling is for Commies, climate change is a socialist hoax, and the very idea of trying to walk more lightly in the world smacks of the dangerous seductions of Antichrist.  To hear some of our friends on the other side of the aisle tell it, recycling your aluminum cans is almost the equivalent, so to speak, of a comprehensive blasphemy that both denies the existence of God and the virginity of His mother.

Indeed, in the overheated climate of Obamanation that has come to dominate our political discourse, we seem to reach a point at which anything the President or First Lady may say calls forth reflexive disagreement from the GOP.  If President Obama expresses concern about fracking, right-wing columnists and bloggers immediately gush forth with paeans of praise for the process. 

If Michelle Obama takes up the cudgels against childhood obesity, and encourages parents and children to make better food choices, people like Sarah Palin wax wroth, as if to say “you’re not the boss of me; just to spite you I’m going to go and eat an entire can of Crisco, right now.”

And so it is on Earth Day.  As with such issues as contraception, the American right seems engaged in a frantic, if futile, effort to undo all the progress that has been made in terms of environmental consciousness in the last two generations, as if to repeal the 1960s.  It is as if, by trying to deny self-evident truth, or to relitigate matters that had already been considered settled and closed, America’s right wing might avoid having to face the very real challenges confronting the world at the beginning of the 21st century.

But you cannot avoid facing the realities of the 21st century by trying to retreat into the 19th.  As long as long as a large portion of America’s body politic doesn’t get that basic and simple truth, we will still need Earth Day more than ever, even if it has begun to show signs of staid, middle-aged respectability.

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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California.   The views expressed herein are his own, and not those of any entity or organization with which he is associated, and are not intended as, and should not be construed as, legal advice. And yes, he does separate out his trash.