Random Musings

The bathroom is coming along … slo-o-o-wly. It seems we can really only work on it over the weekends and every weekend we have something else that needs doing, or we have plans, or, well, we’re just lazy. But I have done the pin-striping along the walls and, if I do say so myself, it looks darn nice.

Here’s my tutorial [click to emBIGGERate:

Paint the walls the color of choice; mine was a dark gray, almost black. Then, lay out where the stripes should be drawn. This involves math and calculators and pencils and try-and-error. But I figured it out so that each of the four corners would be a space between stripes and then the walls would have equally spaced stripes on them.

Next comes the chalk-line, with Carlos holding on a mark near the floor and me, on a ladder — we have nine-foot ceiling so it’s hard — holding the line to the mark near the ceiling. Snap the line and voila!

Next came taping the lines, which I wanted to eyeball at about 1/8-inch wide, but I wanted them to not be perfect all though the room. I liked the more fluid nature of the lines that were 1/8-inch, then maybe narrowed a hair, and then came back to the original width.

After taping all the lines, you go back over the tape with the original wall color. This is done to prevent the lighter stripe color from bleeding under the tape; no matter how you press the tape down, you might get some bleed-through and this step solves that problem.

Finally, you apply the stripe color — I wanted a lighter gray — and paint the lines from floor to ceiling. Remove the tape and you have …

Pin stripes!

Carlos gave the “It’s too dark” speech and I told him I had a vision and we’d have to see it through before he played that card again.

The National organization for Marriage [NOM] got yet another smackdown this week, this time from the United Sates Supreme Court.

It seems NOM wanted to halt the recently legalized same-sex marriages in Oregon and had asked Justice Kennedy to do so. Kennedy, though, referred the issue to the entire court, and they all agreed to not get involved.

Snap! Smack.

Speaking of same-sex marriages, Melissa Etheridge had another one last weekend.

Etheridge married her partner of four years, Nurse Jackie creator Linda Wallem, and Tweeted that image of their happy day with this message:

“True love…so blessed. ‘By the power invested in me by the state of California…’ Thanks‘ “

This Etheridge’s second wedding but her first legal marriage. She previously had a commitment ceremony with Tammy Lynn Michaels back in ’03, and that ceremony took place when same sex marriage was not yet legal in California.

Now, Etheridge is fully, legally married, and let’s hope this one sticks.

Juts sayin’, marriage is hard, gay or straight.

Bianca Del Rio is the Drag Superstar, thanks to her victory on RuPaul’s Drag Race, but her next step might just be movie star!

Bianca — AKA Roy Haylock — has begun crowd-funding a new film, Hurricane Bianca, teaming up with director Matt Kugelman for the new comedy, and wants our help to fund the movie.

Hurricane Bianca is a feature-length comedy about a New York teacher [Haylock] who moves to a small town in Texas, gets fired for being gay, and returns disguised as a mean "lady"[Bianca] to get revenge on the people who were nasty to him.

I think this could be truly hilarious, and, if you decide to donate to the film’s expenses, in return for your donation, Bianca and Matt are giving away some prizes, including the chance for an appearance on a web series called "Bianca Hates You."

OMG! Bianca could read you! Loving it, and hoping the film gets made.

In discrimination news this week, for the 17th time, Exxon Mobil shareholders have rejected a resolution that would have instituted new policy within the company to prohibit discrimination against LGBT workers.

Yeah, seventeen times they’ve voted for discrimination, with just 19% of shareholders voting against discrimination.

Just the reason I need to never get gas at Exxon, for the seventeenth year in a row, I might add.

When the previews for Maleficent came out a few months back, and I saw La Jolie done up as the evil one, I told Carlos we were seeing the film; and I told him every time I saw an ad after that until the film finally opened, and then I said we’d see it last weekend.

I.Loved.It.

Carlos.Hated.It.

I’ve buried him under the house. Sssssh.

I kid. He did hate it, because he wanted her to be more evil, and I explained that she ::::Spoiler Alert:::: wasn’t supposed to be evil, and that the film explained why she did what she did.

He still wasn’t having it; he wanted an unrepentant Maleficent a la Joan Crawford, I think.

In fact, he hated the movie so much he didn’t even comment once on the cute Prince Phillip, played by the totes adorbs Brenton Thwaites.

Someday my prince will come and … oh hell, who am I kidding? My prince came along fourteen years ago.

Last week I praised Justin Bieber for his $500,000 donation to amfAR, and then I heard that he made some kind of racist joke, using the N-word. I was not surprised, thinking the little turd is just that, a little racist turd, but then I heard that he made the stupid “joke” back when he was sixteen or seventeen, and so I kinda wanted to give him a pass because he was even dumber then, you know.

But now another video has surfaced where he’s changed the lyrics to one of his own songs, and sings about “lonely n*****s” and killing one so he can join the KKK.

His people say he was just reciting what he’d seen a comedian do onstage, but he can’t remember that comedian’s name or where he saw him.

I’d say these last two instances are just some extra nails in the coffin that was his career.

Here’s hoping.

Former presidential and senatorial candidate, and major asshat, Alan Keyes, who once compared same-sex marriage to nose-picking … huh… and claimed that it leads to totalitarian regimes … what? … is back and locked and loaded again.

He is now saying that gay sex "is not 'sexual' activity at all." 

I’m saying he’s probably not doing it right.

Need another celebrity, a la Alec Baldwin, shouting homophobic slurs at paparazzi? Well, Jonah Hill is your man! After, he says, being followed and harassed by a TMZ paparazzo all day long, Hill finally shouted to the man:

"Suck my dick you faggot!"

You know the drill; it’s the worst thing you can call someone, the biggest insult. Gay = bad. But, and there’s almost always a but, Hill came out almost immediately and apologized, unlike Baldwin who played the ‘I’ve got gay friends’ card and the ‘I never said that’ card.

Jonah Hill:

"This is a heartbreaking situation for me...I'm upset...From the day I was born, and publicly, I've been a gay rights activist...This person had been following me around all day saying hurtful things. I played into exactly what he wanted and I said a disgusting word...It's bulls--t and I shouldn't have said that. I'm happy to take the heat for using this disgusting word. What I won't allow is for anyone - it would break my heart to think that anyone - especially with all the work that I've done and all the loved ones that I have - that I would be against anyone for their sexuality."

Well, that was more a Poor me, I’m really a nice guy speech and not really an apology, but then Hill apologized again:

"There was a paparazzi guy and he was antagonizing me and calling me names, attacking me personally, and my family personally, and I was genuinely hurt by this, and made angry by this, and in response, I wanted to hurt him back, and I said the most hurtful word that I could think of at that moment.

 “You know, I didn't mean this in the sense of the word, you know? I didn't mean it in a homophobic way And I think that, um, that doesn't matter. How you mean things doesn't matter. Words have weight and meaning, and the word I chose was grotesque. And, you know...no one deserves to say or hear words like that. I've been a supporter of the LGBT community my entire life and I completely let the members of that community and everybody else down when I used a word like that...I'm genuinely and deeply sorry to anyone who has ever been affected by that term in their life.

“I don't deserve or expect your forgiveness, but what I ask is that at home, if you're watching this, and you're a young person especially; if someone says something that hurts you or angers you, use me as an example of what not to do, and don't respond with hatred or anger. Because you're just adding more ugliness to the world. I'm so sorry."

He could have stopped with I’m so sorry because that’s all we want; oh, and to never hear him say those things again.

I’m hoping Hill opens up a Celebrity Apology Center, offering free admission to Baldwin and Bieber to show them how you really, sincerely apologize.

The documentary How To Survive A Plague, detailing the early days of the AIDS crisis in America and the rise of militant gay groups like ACT UP, hit theaters last year but came nowhere near Smallville.

Luckily, though, it played on PBS this week and Carlos and I watched it. An amazing documentary that reminded me of things I’d seen, and of things I hadn’t—like AIDS activists throwing the ashes of their loved ones who’d died from complications of AIDS onto the White House lawn.

Powerful stuff.

Powerful stuff, seeing those men who have been given a death sentence and didn’t dare crawl away and hide, but rather stood up and demanded respect and treatment and fair access to medications.

Powerful stuff, watching these men being told they have AIDS and will soon be dead, not giving up, and then, years into the plague, finding relief in AIDS drug cocktails that helped them survive, though didn’t cure them.

I kept thinking what it must have been like to be told that you have AIDS and that you will die, and you reevaluate your life, reassess your choices, and become a fighter, knowing you are dying, only to have a reprieve in the form of new drugs How hard it must have been to go from living to dying back to living, with AIDS.

Heroes all; and all of us, infected or otherwise, owe those men, and women, gay and straight, a huge debt of gratitude for not just lying down and dying.

And then on the reverse side of the coin comes this …

In a discussion about a recent incident involving Brad Pitt where a crazed “fan” latched onto his groin, HLN host Nancy Grace regurgitated the 1977 pie attack on Anita Bryant, calling Bryant a "sweet lady" that reminded Grace of her mother.

Grace made no mention of Bryant’s voracious anti-gay crusades in Miami that spurred on the pie toss, and a guest on Grace’s show actually says maybe the pie thrower was jealous of Bryant’s beautiful voice.

Nancy Grace is a moron, I’ve always known that; a media whore who says anything if it gets her a shot on TV, but to call, a woman who clearly wanted gay people out of way, by whatever means, I might add, out of jobs, and homes, and out of Miami, sweet is the height of stupidity.