Looks like a nice event. I had a positive impression of Baltimore from the week I spent there awhile back. I went to a Pride parade out in Queens once, but sadly never made the Halloween Day Parade. Did you ever see Jennifer Miller's Circus Amok? That was one of my favorite NYC things. My kids grew up thinking that was the normal circus.
is a wonderfully very specific retort that I challenge all our cohort to plug into a conversation this week. There might not come a perfect time, nor even a right time, but give it a try, and if possible, report back.
I was chatting with an acquaintance at lunch today, and when the question came up "So, was it the job that brought you both here?" I replied "No, but I used to see the bearded lady around".
Yea, if you were at all into the underground (more or less) performance art scene you’d see her around. There were a number of organizations that had fluid lineups with a lot of the same people. Jennifer Miller ran Circus Amok , performed at the sideshow, was always at the Mermaid parade and who knows what else. The acrobats at Circus Amok were also in another troupe, I don’t remember its name but they were regularly at The Kitchen, and the brass band also played with various groups at the Mermaid parade. You would have liked the circus. They were very political and satirically funny. The first act I saw of theirs had Hilary and Rudy jumping through hoops held by their corporate overlords, or something like that.
They did shows in Riverside Park next to our playground when my kids were small in the early 2000s and we'd run over to watch. I had questions but the kids didn't. The world is really becoming a better place. The reactionaries are fighting a losing battle.
I take comfort in knowing that people like Martha-Ann and her Sammy think they are picking on a small, safely scapegoated minority, and are unaware of the numbers and strength of straight allies. All those queers made times change, and they all have relatives and friends.
Last Pride parade I attended was in Asheville, a low key community affair...
That rich lady Martha Ann Alito wants a "veregone"(?spelling)flag because she think the likes of a gay parent should feel shame is so very Christian, as I have known it.
I think her neighbors need to have a rainbow flag with what A. Scalia said to tell his critics in church on it: "Vaffanculo!"(you can look ir up...)
The quisling Log Cabin and MAGAt Gay Republicans are included.
Wouldn't it be great if more of the Alitos' neighbors started flying pride flags? If I lived there, I'd start a little neighborhood movement. Until this ugly kerfluffle came out, I had not idea they were so personally and thoroughly detestable.
I haven't been to a pride event in years, but I put in a lot of time at the back in the day. I came out in 1984, at the age of 19. As a young lesbian, I entered the community just as all the fabulous young men I was meeting were starting to fall ill and die. For the next five or six years I put in my time volunteering for aid service organizations, sitting at bed sides in hospices, performing at fundraisers, riding pieces for the local gay news outlets.
I always thought that the way that the government treated the AIDS crisis was disgusting, as you noted. I had hoped, when COVID happened, that we had learned something. I can't imagine not listening to the CDC. I'm glad, even though it was extremely painful to go through, that my involvement with the AIDS epidemic so many years ago sort of prepared me for dealing with COVID.
"For the next five or six years I put in my time volunteering for aid service organizations, sitting at bed sides in hospices, performing at fundraisers, riding pieces for the local gay news outlets."
My daughter's so gay she's a lead scorer of a highly rated Midwestern Roller Derby team. She skates under the moniker" Punchy Bruiser. She's a great kid. Kind and successful. I had the kids all over for dinner right after Cowboy Carter came out.. it's a terrific album and I was pretty excited about it. My daughter says " with all this Beyoncé talk and seeing how you just bought a Subaru Forester, I think you might be a lesbian!"
I said" Hell yeah, where do you think you get it?"
She said " Bet!" And we did a terrorist fist bump. Then we sat down and made plans to go to the Birkenstock store the next weekend.
I graduated high school in the mid '70s. By the early '80s we pretty much knew exactly who our gay classmates were because they died of AIDS. I went to a small rural school. It was devastating to the community. So many people I knew-People I was in plays with and band and chorus. I got to know them all this people first- that they were gay didn't change anything. I stopped with the stupid jokes somewhere around that time.
Pride is everywhere this year! That's pretty amazing. We're getting better. Everything doesn't suck.
Since it's always the Democrats who are targeted with that tired "Charlie Brown and the football" analogy (please, may it die, thanks) it's only fair to craft a version for the Republicans, where the football is whatever style of bigotry seems to be capturing the professional bigots at the moment. Lining up to kick that football to the MOON, the Republicans think, "Oh, man, THIS is the one that's gonna win BIG for us!" Let some time go by, and they're flat on their backs, saying "Football? What football?"
We need to take that football and Lucy and put them in a middle of the circular firing squad and yell "Fire!" You can put Will Rogers in there too.
Those old cliches drive me crazy. Ain't nobody better call this Democrat Feckless. I've been a Democrat for a long time and I've never seen the party this energized.
(from the OED) Chiefly Scottish and English regional (northern)
Feck, n. = the bulk, the greater part; = effect n. 3c; frequently in the most feck. Also: a (large) amount; number, quantity (us. "the feck").
Feckless, adj. = of a thing: valueless, futile, feeble. In later use chiefly of a person (or a person's actions or attributes): lacking vigour, energy, or capacity; weak, helpless; (now more usually) irresponsible, shiftless
Also, there was a feckful, adj. = Powerful, effective, efficient, vigorous.
I've been pondering this. "Feckless" sees reasonably regular usage, but I've never once heard or read either of the other two. I just find it interesting that one variation of a word is okey dokey, while the rest of them (including what appears to be the base of it!) just go by the wayside.
The first gay person I got to know well was my first housemate in Baltimore. This was 1974: before AIDS, but there was The Closet, for any number of reasons people were in it.
Bob and I had recently become co-workers, and had hit it off enough to have pretty much decided on shopping for a rental to share. That was the point when we were out for pizza and, after downing much of the beer pitcher, Bob looked around, leaned forward, and in a near whisper said: "What would you say if I told you I belong to a subversive group that's taken a vow to not have children?" "Uhhh, you're trying to tell me you're gay?" Still shaken, he said he'd had to test things, because he wasn't sure if the conversation would force him to race home to pack his bags and flee town.
Part of Bob's "subversive group" panic was that the state agency we worked for would identify him as an undesirable, with all the McCarthyesque consequences he expected to follow.
I would learn a lot of background circumstances, including Bob's underage enlistment in the Navy as a working class kid from South Baltimore. This was early in the 1960s, and when he read the enlistment papers he'd asked the recruiter, "What does 'homosexual' mean?" The only answer then was, go ahead and sign. Once he was in uniform, Bob realized what it meant, and that he'd lied on his form. As much as he would love the Navy, it also was his formative experience in secretiveness as a way of life. I left the state agency after a couple years, but Bob made a career of it. It took many years–and the activism of a younger generation–before I heard from him that he'd finally come out to his boss. The reaction had pretty much been, "So?"
I subscribe to a handful of other Substacks, and - at least based on the content they post - I do worry that some of these people never leave the computer. So I always appreciate these posts where our esteemed Host goes out into the real, physical world and reports back on it! Although I am a little weirded out by the discovery that there is a Roy Edroso Safeway, it's a little like being a kid and seeing one of your teachers in the grocery store.
My partner told me of a time when she saw one of her elementary school teachers in a very unexpected to her place: he was running a ride at Great America. She later figured out that he wasn't making enough money as a teacher to survive.
I'm going to have to revise my response above: Sarcastic was not the word I should have used. "The *snarkiest* checker ever" seems more apt a description to me.
My brother was the summer drummer in the house band at GA's big concert space. He loved the job, with all his friends from straight outta high school. The band was big and bad and owned the joint. One of his favorite gigs.
For some reason, Rochester has our Pride events in July, but I'm planning on going this year. Having been alienated, abused, bullied and marginalized for years, sometimes for being assumed to be gay myself, I think in a tiny way I understand what LGBTQ folks go through, and I've made the long trip through dislike to mere tolerance to allyship. I'm still nervous about the local environment being so conservative Catholic and the Red enclaves around me, but my worst expectations for Pride this year haven't come to pass (fingers firmly crossed 🤞).
Meanwhile, in the world of straight, White, fundamentalist Trump-lovin' Christians:
"Robert Morris, a founding pastor of Dallas-based Gateway megachurch, was accused by an Oklahoma woman of sexual abuse in the 1980s, beginning when she was 12 and continuing until the age of 16."
Years ago, I had a theory, which seems to be proving itself out: You know why they (people like Morris) spend so much time thinking that other people are chasing after kids who are underage? Because they do it, and just assume others think like them.
I struggle to believe that the people around guys like Morris aren't aware of his vile behavior, and find ways to rationalize it, or skirt it by way of squawking about someone else who's in a group they hate "doing it too" (never with any evidence, of course).
I think that's true in many cases, but there are some in which I think it gets down to "haven't been caught by the an *outside agency* (like the cops)". It may be an open secret in their community that gets ignored until it gets out.
So much of conservative culture is about pretending problems don't exist (A hundred degrees in June? IT'S PERFECTLY NORMAL!) Maybe this is where they get all the practice. Start with denial about how the pastor is molesting the kids, move on to election denial when you're older.
Happy Frank Wills Day.
Thanks for the reminder! Think I'll watch All the Presidents Men again tonight, so I can see Frank play Frank.
"All the President's Men! You know, that movie with Dustin Hoffman and Frank Wills."
"Uh... isn't Robert Redford in that?"
"Oh, yeah, him too."
Security Guards For Democracy
How many years will it be before Hollywood finally does a movie about Jan. 6? Will Harry Dunn be too old to play himself when they finally do?
"A Gay Old Romp!"
"Except for the excrement, it was fine!"
"Escapades of MAMIC*s!"
*Middle Aged Men In Camo
Gravediggers of 2021
Big Busby Berkely musical number, "Putschin' in the Park"
The first one will likely focus on Ashli Babbitt :(
Looks like a nice event. I had a positive impression of Baltimore from the week I spent there awhile back. I went to a Pride parade out in Queens once, but sadly never made the Halloween Day Parade. Did you ever see Jennifer Miller's Circus Amok? That was one of my favorite NYC things. My kids grew up thinking that was the normal circus.
No, but I used to see the bearded lady around
"No, but I used to see the bearded lady around"
is a wonderfully very specific retort that I challenge all our cohort to plug into a conversation this week. There might not come a perfect time, nor even a right time, but give it a try, and if possible, report back.
I was chatting with an acquaintance at lunch today, and when the question came up "So, was it the job that brought you both here?" I replied "No, but I used to see the bearded lady around".
See? It's easy!
"Does Kristi Noem still have a shot at being Trump's VP?"
"No, but... etc."
Kristi Or The Beard is one of the least-appreciated sitcoms of the 70's.
Theme song by Jose Feliciano: "Kristi, don't get discouraged, the beard he ain't so hard to understand. . ."
Deep Cut.
Respect.
Yea, if you were at all into the underground (more or less) performance art scene you’d see her around. There were a number of organizations that had fluid lineups with a lot of the same people. Jennifer Miller ran Circus Amok , performed at the sideshow, was always at the Mermaid parade and who knows what else. The acrobats at Circus Amok were also in another troupe, I don’t remember its name but they were regularly at The Kitchen, and the brass band also played with various groups at the Mermaid parade. You would have liked the circus. They were very political and satirically funny. The first act I saw of theirs had Hilary and Rudy jumping through hoops held by their corporate overlords, or something like that.
They did shows in Riverside Park next to our playground when my kids were small in the early 2000s and we'd run over to watch. I had questions but the kids didn't. The world is really becoming a better place. The reactionaries are fighting a losing battle.
I take comfort in knowing that people like Martha-Ann and her Sammy think they are picking on a small, safely scapegoated minority, and are unaware of the numbers and strength of straight allies. All those queers made times change, and they all have relatives and friends.
Last Pride parade I attended was in Asheville, a low key community affair...
That rich lady Martha Ann Alito wants a "veregone"(?spelling)flag because she think the likes of a gay parent should feel shame is so very Christian, as I have known it.
I think her neighbors need to have a rainbow flag with what A. Scalia said to tell his critics in church on it: "Vaffanculo!"(you can look ir up...)
The quisling Log Cabin and MAGAt Gay Republicans are included.
Technically, the rainbow flag is everyone.
But how come there's no plain-vanilla-colored stripe then, for cishet couples who like to do it missionary-style, huh?
Chocolate, Shirley.
vergogna
TWO GENTEMEN OF VERGOGNA! Love that play
Oh, just wait til you see what these two gentlemen are up to!
One Gentleman of Bologna: The Oscar Mayer Story
Il Bologna di Tutti Bologni
Ima make you a sandwich you cannot refuse.
"I believe in Bologna!"
Wouldn't it be great if more of the Alitos' neighbors started flying pride flags? If I lived there, I'd start a little neighborhood movement. Until this ugly kerfluffle came out, I had not idea they were so personally and thoroughly detestable.
I haven't been to a pride event in years, but I put in a lot of time at the back in the day. I came out in 1984, at the age of 19. As a young lesbian, I entered the community just as all the fabulous young men I was meeting were starting to fall ill and die. For the next five or six years I put in my time volunteering for aid service organizations, sitting at bed sides in hospices, performing at fundraisers, riding pieces for the local gay news outlets.
I always thought that the way that the government treated the AIDS crisis was disgusting, as you noted. I had hoped, when COVID happened, that we had learned something. I can't imagine not listening to the CDC. I'm glad, even though it was extremely painful to go through, that my involvement with the AIDS epidemic so many years ago sort of prepared me for dealing with COVID.
"For the next five or six years I put in my time volunteering for aid service organizations, sitting at bed sides in hospices, performing at fundraisers, riding pieces for the local gay news outlets."
Big respect to you for doing that.
Sounds great but I bet your Pride parade didn’t have a lawnmower section, push and riding (sorry, no photos).
Well shit
Ain't no Pride like Midwestern Pride.
Hand-trimmed, no doubt.
The lawn, I mean...sheesh...
I'm getting a Brazilian. TO DO MY LAWN, SHEESH.
The Amazin' Amazonian!
My daughter's so gay she's a lead scorer of a highly rated Midwestern Roller Derby team. She skates under the moniker" Punchy Bruiser. She's a great kid. Kind and successful. I had the kids all over for dinner right after Cowboy Carter came out.. it's a terrific album and I was pretty excited about it. My daughter says " with all this Beyoncé talk and seeing how you just bought a Subaru Forester, I think you might be a lesbian!"
I said" Hell yeah, where do you think you get it?"
She said " Bet!" And we did a terrorist fist bump. Then we sat down and made plans to go to the Birkenstock store the next weekend.
I graduated high school in the mid '70s. By the early '80s we pretty much knew exactly who our gay classmates were because they died of AIDS. I went to a small rural school. It was devastating to the community. So many people I knew-People I was in plays with and band and chorus. I got to know them all this people first- that they were gay didn't change anything. I stopped with the stupid jokes somewhere around that time.
Pride is everywhere this year! That's pretty amazing. We're getting better. Everything doesn't suck.
"
Since it's always the Democrats who are targeted with that tired "Charlie Brown and the football" analogy (please, may it die, thanks) it's only fair to craft a version for the Republicans, where the football is whatever style of bigotry seems to be capturing the professional bigots at the moment. Lining up to kick that football to the MOON, the Republicans think, "Oh, man, THIS is the one that's gonna win BIG for us!" Let some time go by, and they're flat on their backs, saying "Football? What football?"
We need to take that football and Lucy and put them in a middle of the circular firing squad and yell "Fire!" You can put Will Rogers in there too.
Those old cliches drive me crazy. Ain't nobody better call this Democrat Feckless. I've been a Democrat for a long time and I've never seen the party this energized.
Meanwhile, "Republican incites mob to murder other Republican" results in nothing but stories about how UNIFIED the Republicans are.
WM clearly does not give a flying feck.
Whenever I see the word "feckless" I always wonder, "Is feck really something you'd rather be full of"?
That's my George Carlin impersonation.
Oh sure – blame it on the guy who's not around to defend himself.
U ask, I offer —
(from the OED) Chiefly Scottish and English regional (northern)
Feck, n. = the bulk, the greater part; = effect n. 3c; frequently in the most feck. Also: a (large) amount; number, quantity (us. "the feck").
Feckless, adj. = of a thing: valueless, futile, feeble. In later use chiefly of a person (or a person's actions or attributes): lacking vigour, energy, or capacity; weak, helpless; (now more usually) irresponsible, shiftless
Also, there was a feckful, adj. = Powerful, effective, efficient, vigorous.
You're welcome! :)
We need to bring back feckful. Make it so!
I've been pondering this. "Feckless" sees reasonably regular usage, but I've never once heard or read either of the other two. I just find it interesting that one variation of a word is okey dokey, while the rest of them (including what appears to be the base of it!) just go by the wayside.
This comment was feckful
The first gay person I got to know well was my first housemate in Baltimore. This was 1974: before AIDS, but there was The Closet, for any number of reasons people were in it.
Bob and I had recently become co-workers, and had hit it off enough to have pretty much decided on shopping for a rental to share. That was the point when we were out for pizza and, after downing much of the beer pitcher, Bob looked around, leaned forward, and in a near whisper said: "What would you say if I told you I belong to a subversive group that's taken a vow to not have children?" "Uhhh, you're trying to tell me you're gay?" Still shaken, he said he'd had to test things, because he wasn't sure if the conversation would force him to race home to pack his bags and flee town.
Part of Bob's "subversive group" panic was that the state agency we worked for would identify him as an undesirable, with all the McCarthyesque consequences he expected to follow.
I would learn a lot of background circumstances, including Bob's underage enlistment in the Navy as a working class kid from South Baltimore. This was early in the 1960s, and when he read the enlistment papers he'd asked the recruiter, "What does 'homosexual' mean?" The only answer then was, go ahead and sign. Once he was in uniform, Bob realized what it meant, and that he'd lied on his form. As much as he would love the Navy, it also was his formative experience in secretiveness as a way of life. I left the state agency after a couple years, but Bob made a career of it. It took many years–and the activism of a younger generation–before I heard from him that he'd finally come out to his boss. The reaction had pretty much been, "So?"
There is no going back.
Thanks for this.
There's everything to be learned from survivors of any sort of discrimination. An injury to one is an injury to all.
I subscribe to a handful of other Substacks, and - at least based on the content they post - I do worry that some of these people never leave the computer. So I always appreciate these posts where our esteemed Host goes out into the real, physical world and reports back on it! Although I am a little weirded out by the discovery that there is a Roy Edroso Safeway, it's a little like being a kid and seeing one of your teachers in the grocery store.
2 marks, and hand one a them to Roy when you see him...? Thanks.
In the frozen-food aisle! He was buying Hot Pockets!
I always thought hot pockets were what you got a couple hours after the blue crabs...
Cheasapeake!
Old Bay flavored Hot Pockets perchance?
Don't ask me, I'm vegetarian...
My partner told me of a time when she saw one of her elementary school teachers in a very unexpected to her place: he was running a ride at Great America. She later figured out that he wasn't making enough money as a teacher to survive.
When Roy said "My Safeway" I assumed he was a customer, but this suggests other possibilities.
Hahaha! The most sarcastic checker, ever... But always right.
I'm going to have to revise my response above: Sarcastic was not the word I should have used. "The *snarkiest* checker ever" seems more apt a description to me.
My brother was the summer drummer in the house band at GA's big concert space. He loved the job, with all his friends from straight outta high school. The band was big and bad and owned the joint. One of his favorite gigs.
For some reason, Rochester has our Pride events in July, but I'm planning on going this year. Having been alienated, abused, bullied and marginalized for years, sometimes for being assumed to be gay myself, I think in a tiny way I understand what LGBTQ folks go through, and I've made the long trip through dislike to mere tolerance to allyship. I'm still nervous about the local environment being so conservative Catholic and the Red enclaves around me, but my worst expectations for Pride this year haven't come to pass (fingers firmly crossed 🤞).
Just remembered a thing Roy noted in the other place a while ago. Here are some eminent Baltimoreans of yesteryear: https://x.com/FluffyRuffles25/status/1560643401103589377
Once again FluffyRuffles delivers!
Meanwhile, in the world of straight, White, fundamentalist Trump-lovin' Christians:
"Robert Morris, a founding pastor of Dallas-based Gateway megachurch, was accused by an Oklahoma woman of sexual abuse in the 1980s, beginning when she was 12 and continuing until the age of 16."
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jun/17/pastor-robert-morris-sexual-abuse-trump-adviser
Years ago, I had a theory, which seems to be proving itself out: You know why they (people like Morris) spend so much time thinking that other people are chasing after kids who are underage? Because they do it, and just assume others think like them.
"Hey, if I point at that other guy and shout 'groomer!' maybe no one will notice my own proclivities"
I struggle to believe that the people around guys like Morris aren't aware of his vile behavior, and find ways to rationalize it, or skirt it by way of squawking about someone else who's in a group they hate "doing it too" (never with any evidence, of course).
"Aware" = "not been caught yet"
I think that's true in many cases, but there are some in which I think it gets down to "haven't been caught by the an *outside agency* (like the cops)". It may be an open secret in their community that gets ignored until it gets out.
So much of conservative culture is about pretending problems don't exist (A hundred degrees in June? IT'S PERFECTLY NORMAL!) Maybe this is where they get all the practice. Start with denial about how the pastor is molesting the kids, move on to election denial when you're older.
Every accusation is a confession
Dog bites man!
“The cruddy charm for which Baltimore is famous”
Chef’s kiss!