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Genesis 8:19
Every animal, every creeping thing, every bird, and whatever creeps on the earth, according to their families, went out of the ark.

Many lines of evidence support the Bible’s claim that Noah saved two of every kind of creature on the Ark, including dinosaurs. This means that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time rather than separated by millions of years, as evolutionists claim. Long before modern science discovered dinosaurs, many histories offered descriptions of these creatures.

Britain’s history contains hundreds of stories about the large reptiles we now call dinosaurs. Even if many of these accounts are not accurate, it is unlikely that so many similar stories were invented. According to ancient historical accounts, a large reptile killed and ate King Morvidus in about 336 B.C. In 1405, villagers near Sudbury drove what they called a large dragon into a swamp after the creature terrorized the area. It had killed and eaten a shepherd, then proceeded to eat the sheep. It was said that it had a huge body, a crested head with sharp teeth and a long tail. As recently as a hundred years ago, the older Welsh residents of Penllin in Glamorgan reported winged reptiles that lived in a colony in the nearby woods. They were described as brightly colored and reportedly stole the villagers’ chickens.

It would appear that the reason most dinosaurs became extinct after the Flood has as much to do with human expansion as it does with a cooler, dryer Earth. But these widespread stories are just what we would expect if the biblical history is true.

Prayer: Dear Father, I praise You for Your mercy that saved mankind twice. Amen.

References: After the Flood, Bill Cooper, pp.131-135.

More tolerance from the progressives. I hope no one still believes that they are “religiously neutral”.

http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/printerfriendly.html?articleid=09120305

By Patrick B. Craine

LONDON, Ontario, December 3, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A new study released yesterday by the Canadian Centre for Home Education (CCHE) reveals that home-educated adults in Canada excel in all measured areas of adult life, including education level, religious observance, civic and community participation, life satisfaction, and income.

The study, entitled Fifteen Years Later: Home-Educated Canadian Adults, surveyed adults whose parents had responded to a 1994 study on home education.  In total, the researchers collected 226 questionnaires.  Ranging in age from 15 to 34, the respondents answered questions on a variety of topics for which Statistics Canada has comparable data from the wider population.

The results were astounding, says CCHE.

The study found that, when measured against the Canadian average, home-educated adults were more socially engaged and almost twice as likely to have voted in a federal election. Their average income was higher, with more self-reliant sources of income, such as investments and self-employment.  In fact, of all respondents, there were no cases of government support as the primary source of income.

The respondents were happier in their work and about their lives in general.  They also have more varied recreational pursuits.  The study notes, for example, that the respondents “were much more likely than the comparable population to have read books and attended concerts of classical music or theatrical performances.”  Overall, when reflecting on the value of being home-educated, most felt that it was an advantage in their adult life.

“In terms of income, education, entrepreneurial endeavours, involvement in their community, and all the other characteristics measured, home-educated adults not only excel, but also make meaningful contributions to their communities,” stated Paul Faris, president of CCHE.  “They are the type of neighbours we all want.”

The full study and a synopsis are available here.

Copyright © LifeSiteNews.com. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives License. You may republish this article or portions of it without request provided the content is not altered and it is clearly attributed to “LifeSiteNews.com”. Any website publishing of complete or large portions of original LifeSiteNews articles MUST additionally include a live link to www.LifeSiteNews.com. The link is not required for excerpts. Republishing of articles on LifeSiteNews.com from other sources as noted is subject to the conditions of those sources.

By John Jalsevac

July 3, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Michael Glatze, once a rising star in the homosexual movement, having become the editor of the popular Young Gay America magazine in his early 20s, has since left the homosexual lifestyle and is now publicly speaking out against homosexuality, and encouraging other homosexuals to leave the way of life that he says “is by its very nature pornographic.”

In a powerful testimonial printed yesterday on WorldNetDaily, Glatze  publicly reveals his conversion, and chronicles his tumultuous and unhappy journey through homosexuality, to where he is today, a recovered homosexual and a Christian, eager to lead others out of the lifestyle that claimed him for so many years.

“Homosexuality, delivered to young minds, is by its very nature pornographic. It destroys impressionable minds and confuses their developing sexuality; I did not realize this, however, until I was 30 years old,” writes Glatze in the article on WorldNetDaily.

Glatze is the second prominent homosexual rights activist involved with a pro-homosexual magazine to have publicly left the lifestyle in the last year. Charlene Cothran, the founder and publisher of VENUS magazine, formerly a pro-homosexual publication, has since become a Christian, left the homosexual lifestyle, and has radically altered the nature of her magazine, changing it into a forum by which to “encourage, educate and assist those who desire to leave a life of homosexuality.”

“Although I have lived as a lesbian for my entire adult life, it is without a doubt my soul’s purpose to use my gifts to LOVINGLY share the truth about how we got here,” Cothran wrote in the first issue of the magazine dedicated to its new purpose. “How we came to be gay or lesbian, how we came to enjoy our ‘lifestyle’ and how we came to believe that this was OK with God.”

For his part Michael Glatze relates how, after years working at the very forefront of the pro-homosexual movement, he began to have increasing doubts about what he was doing with his life. This feeling heightened, he said, after reviewing his “performance” during  an appearance on the prestigious JFK JR. Forum at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in 2005, in which he appeared as an “expert” on the pro-homosexual side.

“Knowing no one who I could approach with my questions and my doubts, I turned to God.” The young homosexual activist says that he had developed a relationship with God some time before, as a consequence of a painful illness that stemmed from the way he had been living.

“It became clear to me, as I really thought about it–and really prayed about it–that homosexuality prevents us from finding our true self within. We cannot see the truth when we’re blinded by homosexuality.”

“We believe, under that influence of homosexuality, that lust is not just acceptable, but a virtue.”

From that point onward, says Glatze, he simply began to call his homosexual desires what they were–lust–and by focusing on his truest self he was able to begin the long process of healing. “Healing from the wounds caused by homosexuality is not easy,” he says. “There’s little obvious support. What support remains is shamed, ridiculed, silenced by rhetoric or made illegal by twisting of laws…Part of the homosexual agenda is getting people to stop considering that conversion is even a viable question to be asked, let alone whether or not it works.”

Despite the immense difficulties of the transition, however, he says, “In my experience, ‘coming out’ from under the influence of the homosexual mindset was the most liberating, beautiful and astonishing thing I’ve ever experienced in my entire life.”

He concludes, “Healing from the sins of the world will not happen in an instant; but, it will happen–if we don’t pridefully block it. God wins in the end, in case you didn’t know.”

Read the original article and coverage on WorldNetDaily:

http://wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=56481

http://wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=56487

Read related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
Publisher/Founder of Popular Black Lesbian Magazine Leaves Gay Lifestyle to “Give Heart and Soul to God”

http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2007/feb/07022801.html

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OTYxNGY2MzA5MjI0NmJmODg5NmM4YjkwZjViY2ExZjE=

Christians, when they have lived up to the highest ideals of their faith, have defended the weak and vulnerable and worked tirelessly to protect and strengthen vital institutions of civil society, beginning with the family.

We are Orthodox, Catholic, and evangelical Christians who have united at this hour to reaffirm fundamental truths about justice and the common good, and to call upon our fellow citizens, believers and non-believers alike, to join us in defending them. These truths are:

1. the sanctity of human life
2. the dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife
3. the rights of conscience and religious liberty.

Inasmuch as these truths are foundational to human dignity and the well-being of society, they are inviolable and non-negotiable. Because they are increasingly under assault from powerful forces in our culture, we are compelled today to speak out forcefully in their defense, and to commit ourselves to honoring them fully no matter what pressures are brought upon us and our institutions to abandon or compromise them. We make this commitment not as partisans of any political group but as followers of Jesus Christ, the crucified and risen Lord, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

http://www.manhattandeclaration.org/

http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/printerfriendly.html?articleid=09120304

By Hilary White

ROME, December 3, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A leading Vatican cardinal caused a flutter in the secular press yesterday by stating that homosexuals who act on their sexual impulses cannot go to heaven.

“Transsexuals and homosexuals will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven and it is not me who says this, but Saint Paul,” said Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan, a Mexican and the former head of the Vatican’s Council for Pastoral Assistance to Health Care Workers. The cardinal was reiterating the Catholic teaching that states that any sexual activity outside of marriage that is not repented of before death is a mortal sin, and therefore precludes entrance into heaven.

In his comments published on the Italian online news site, Pontifex, the cardinal also pointed out that Catholic Church does not condemn the condition of being a homosexual as such. Instead, it is homosexual acts themselves that are mortally sinful.

“People are not born homosexual,” Cardinal Barragan was quoted as saying. “They become homosexual, for different reasons: education issues or because they did not develop their own identity during adolescence. It may not be their fault, but acting against nature and the dignity of the human body is an insult to God.”

While the cardinal’s statement of Christian sexual ethics was expressed with theological precision, the world’s media and homosexualist groups have reacted with shock and outrage. The Italian homosexualist activist organisation, Arcigay, issued a statement saying, “Yes, it’s true, we won’t ever get into your heaven, which is a murky and unjust place.”

Cardinal Barragan’s reference to St. Paul was mostly likely from the saint’s letter to the Romans, in which he rebuked those who indulge in a variety of sins, one of which is homosexuality. St. Paul wrote, “The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth.” The result of this denial is for these people to be given over to “degrading passions.”

The letter continues: “Their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural. And in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error.” Also condemned in the passage are greed, envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice, gossip, slander and disobedience to parents.

Barragan’s reference to the disorder of homosexuality is reflected in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, published during the pontificate of John Paul II, that says that while the “psychological genesis” of the homosexual inclination “remains largely unexplained,” the acts themselves are “acts of grave depravity,” and are “intrinsically disordered.”

“They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.” The Catechism goes on to say that homosexuals, like all persons who want to live ordered lives, are called to “chastity” and “the virtues of self-mastery.”

Cardinal Barragan also reiterated the section of the Catechism which urges against discriminating against homosexuals, saying that, “This does not justify any form of discrimination.”

“We on earth cannot condemn, and as human beings we all have the same rights.”

Copyright © LifeSiteNews.com. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives License. You may republish this article or portions of it without request provided the content is not altered and it is clearly attributed to “LifeSiteNews.com”. Any website publishing of complete or large portions of original LifeSiteNews articles MUST additionally include a live link to www.LifeSiteNews.com. The link is not required for excerpts. Republishing of articles on LifeSiteNews.com from other sources as noted is subject to the conditions of those sources.

Victory for Democrat Sen. Ruben Diaz, who led tireless campaign to defend natural marriage.

ALBANY, December 2, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – On Wednesday afternoon, the New York State Senate voted overwhelmingly to reject legislation that would have legalized same-sex “marriage,” handing a humiliating defeat to proponents of the legislation who told the Senate that a vote for same-sex “marriage” was a vote to stand on the “right side of history.”

The measure, which would have amended New York State’s Domestic Partnership Law and have made New York the sixth state to legalize same-sex “marriage,” failed by a broad margin of 24 in favor and 38 against.

The Senate vote finally means same-sex “marriage” is dead in New York for this legislative session: a resounding victory for pro-family advocates in the state, and a heavy loss for Gov. David Paterson and Democratic leaders, who were looking to deliver same-sex “marriage” advocates their first victory after their latest defeat in Maine.

Just minutes before the 3 P.M. vote, Sen. Thomas Duane (D-NY 29), the chief sponsor of the same-sex “marriage” bill, confidently told members of the Senate that he was looking forward to not just being “an old gay” but soon a “married gay.”

However, those anticipations were dashed by a coalition of eight Democrats led by Sen. Ruben Diaz, Sr. (D-NY 32), the leader of the Senate fight against same-sex “marriage,” who joined every member of the GOP caucus in a conscience vote against the bill.

Debate began after a short noon recess with Sen. Duane arguing that this “legislation would provide me and tens of thousands of other New Yorkers equal rights in New York State.”

Delivering the final speech before the vote, Duane appeared confident of victory and pressed fellow Senators to vote for the bill since, “It’s always the time to be on the right side of history!”

Only Sen. Diaz spoke on the floor of the Senate against same-sex “marriage.” The Senator and Evangelical minister, indefatigable in his fight against same-sex “marriage,” rallied 20,000 Hispanics over the summer in support of natural marriage, forged a broad religious coalition to oppose the bill, and even sacrificed with his wife a cruise celebrating their wedding anniversary in order to attend a special legislative session called by Gov. Paterson, where same-sex “marriage” could have been called to a vote.

Diaz mentioned that adherents of the world’s major religions – not just Evangelicals – oppose same-sex “marriage,” including Jews, Muslims, and Catholics. Diaz specifically praised those Catholic bishops who signed the Manhattan Declaration as a testament of their opposition to same-sex “marriage.”

He proposed that the Senate instead should let New Yorkers decide on same-sex “marriage” through a referendum. New York has no referendum process like Maine, but the State Legislature could pass a bill that allows voters to decide the question via the ballot box.

However, the supreme “irony,” Diaz told the Senate, was that the same gay lobby, which fought so hard and spent an enormous amount of money to wrest control of the Senate from the GOP in order to get a bill on same-sex “marriage,” now “is depending on them to make this happen.”

“The reality is that it has been the Republican Party and their traditional values, and the Republican Party with their moral values, and the Republican Party with their family values, that has been for years and years what has kept the values in this whole nation alive,” declared Diaz. “And now they are being asked to throw away these values.”

He appealed to the Republicans once again to hold fast to their principles and instead let the people decide the fate of marriage in New York, pointing out that the will of the people has opposed same-sex “marriage” in all thirty-one states where they had an opportunity to vote on it.

“Remember your rules, remember your values: remember your family values, traditional values, moral values,” exhorted Diaz. “Go back to the defense of your traditional values. Join me a Democrat, join me a Hispanic, join me a black, join me a Puerto Rican, and join me in bringing a referendum to the people.”

However the rest of the speeches proceeded from Democrats speaking out in favor of the bill.

Sen. Malcolm Smith (D-NY 14), President Pro Tempore of the Senate, told the Senate that at stake with same-sex “marriage” was “an individual’s right to feel good about themselves.”

“For the first time, all men and women will be created equal,” declaimed Sen. Eric Schneiderman (D-NY 34), Deputy Majority Leader. “This law will expand the central American ideal of equality.”

Sen. Eric Adams (D-NY 20) politely accused Sen. Diaz of not speaking “from his head.” Adams compared banning gay marriage to “reaching back to the most ugliest [sic] period of America,” when states like Virginia had laws banning interracial marriages until the 1967 US Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia.

The senator also told his colleagues that, “When I walk through these doors, my Bible stays out.”

That statement drew a sharp rebuke from Sen. Diaz, who stated that given what he said was the rising scourge of crime in America, “That is the wrong statement to send.” Diaz urged Senators to remember their Bibles before voting. “You should carry your Bible all the time,” he said.

Freed by GOP Minority Leader Sen. Dean Skelos (NY 9) to vote their consciences, every single Republican joined Sen. Diaz in rejecting same-sex “marriage.” The seven other Democrats to vote against the same-sex “marriage” bill were Sens. Carl Kruger (NY 27), Shirley Huntley (NY 10), Darrel Aubertine (NY 48), Joseph Addabbo (NY 15), William Stachowski (NY 58), George Onorato (NY 12), and Hiram Monserrate (NY 13).

Contact information for members of the New York State Senate can be found here.

I don’t remember where I saw this picture (I think it was on Moonbattery) but if anyone knows the autor, please let me know so that I give him credit.

Scott Baker from Breitbart-TV.com and Co-Host of ‘The B-Cast‘ submitted this shocking report today on Obama’s deviant Safe Schools Czar Kevin Jennings.

—-Warning on Content—–

I was recently approached by a team of independent researchers that I have known for some time and have come to trust. They prepared this report involving ‘Safe Schools Czar’ Kevin Jennings and the organization he founded, GLSEN, and asked that I find a way to help draw attention to what they uncovered. Knowing that Gateway Pundit has followed Kevin Jennings since his appointment, as we have on The B-Cast (here, here, and here), and on Breitbart.tv (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here), I felt this would be an appropriate place for this report.

Warning: The following material is very explicit.

Scott Baker

Co-Founder, Breitbart.tv

Co-Host, The B-Cast

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Safe Schools Czar Kevin Jennings was the founder, and for many years, Executive Director of an organization called the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN). GLSEN started essentially as Jennings’ personal project and grew to become the culmination of his life’s work. And he was chosen by President Obama to be the nation’s Safe Schools Czar primarily because he had founded and led GLSEN (scroll for bio).

GLSEN’s stated mission is to empower gay youth in the schools and to stop harassment by other students. It encourages the formation of Gay Student Alliances and condemns the use of hateful words. GLSEN also strives to influence the educational curriculum to include materials which the group believes will increase tolerance of gay students and decrease bullying. To that end, GLSEN maintains a recommended reading list of books that it claims “furthers our mission to ensure safe schools for all students.” In other words, these are the books that GLSEN’s directors think all kids should be reading: gay kids should read them to raise their self-esteem, and straight kids should read them in order to become more aware and tolerant and stop bullying gay kids. Through GLSEN’s online ordering system, called “GLSEN BookLink,” featured prominently on their Web site, teachers can buy the books to use as required classroom assignments, or students can buy them to read on their own.

According to GLSEN’s own press releases from the period during which its recommended reading list was developed, the organization’s three areas of focus were creating “educational resources, public policy agenda, [and] student organizing programs”; in other words, the reading list (chief among its “educational resources”) was of prime importance in GLSEN’s efforts to influence the American educational system.

The list is divided into three main categories: books recommended for grades K-6; books recommended for grades 7-12; and books for teachers. (The books on the list span all genres: fiction, nonfiction, memoirs, even poetry.)

Out of curiosity to see exactly what kind of books Kevin Jennings and his organization think American students should be reading in school, our team chose a handful at random from the over 100 titles on GLSEN’s grades 7-12 list, and began reading through.

What we discovered shocked us. We were flabbergasted. Rendered speechless.

We were unprepared for what we encountered. Book after book after book contained stories and anecdotes that weren’t merely X-rated and pornographic, but which featured explicit descriptions of sex acts between pre-schoolers; stories that seemed to promote and recommend child-adult sexual relationships; stories of public masturbation, anal sex in restrooms, affairs between students and teachers, five-year-olds playing sex games, semen flying through the air. One memoir even praised becoming a prostitute as a way to increase one’s self-esteem. Above all, the books seemed to have less to do with promoting tolerance than with an unabashed attempt to indoctrinate students into a hyper-sexualized worldview.

We knew that unless we carefully documented what we were reading, the public would have a hard time accepting it. Mere descriptions on our part could not convey the emotional gut reaction one gets when seeing what Kevin Jennings wants kids to read as school assignments. So we began scanning pages from each of the books, and then made exact transcriptions of the relevant passages on each page.

Are we exaggerating, or misconstruing quotes that could be interpreted a different way? No: Read the passages below and judge for yourself. There’s no wiggle room. The language is explicit, the intent clear.

To be specific, the books we read were:

Queer 13

Being Different

The Full Spectrum

Revolutionary Voices

Reflections of a Rock Lobster

Passages of Pride

Growing Up Gay/Growing Up Lesbian

The Order of the Poison Oak

In Your Face

Mama’s Boy, Preacher’s Son

Love & Sex: Ten Stories of Truth

We can only vouch for what’s in these 11 books, since these are the only ones we’ve read through. Are there other books on the GLSEN reading list that are similarly outrageous? We can’t say for sure, but it seems very likely. What you see excerpted below is probably only the tip of the iceberg.

Let it be clear: This issue has nothing to do with gayness or straightness, which is irrelevant to this report. The point proven here is that the GLSEN reading list promotes the sexualization of children in general, regardless of the “orientation.”

And this is not about censorship: It’s about deciding what constitutes appropriate reading material for children. We’re perfectly OK with these books existing and being read by adults; we only start to worry when these books are assigned to children. All sorts of books are excluded from school reading lists, for all sorts of reasons. Even many books once considered classics are now considered off-limits due to language or attitudes now deemed inappropriate. And yet, according to Kevin Jennings and GLSEN, books about a 13-year-old getting “my cock sucked and my ass fucked” or about a teenager enjoying the “exquisite bitter taste” of his friend’s semen are not just acceptable, they’re highly recommended. As GLSEN’s own site says, “All BookLink items are reviewed by GLSEN staff for quality and appropriateness of content.” Really? (Note: GLSEN does advise adults to “review content for suitability.”)

Although GLSEN does not address how books get added to its list, it’s hard to imagine that they are chosen by low-level staffers or volunteers, with no oversight. Since the list of recommended books is one of the organization’s primary tools (”The GLSEN BookLink, an online library of recommended resources, along with the Safe Space program remain cornerstones of GLSEN’s education work.” source), it’s likely that the books were chosen carefully. Kevin Jennings stepped down as Executive Director last year after leading GLSEN since its inception, but every single book mentioned in this report was added to the list while Jennings was in charge (dates are given for each title’s addition to the list). Therefore, it’s reasonable to believe he was aware of the addition of these works – especially since most were added when GLSEN was still quite small and the Executive Director had a hands-on role in daily operations.

Below you will find dozens of excerpts taken from books on the GLSEN “Booklink” recommended reading list for grades 7-12 (i.e. for children between the ages of 12 and 17). To prove that these books are indeed recommended by GLSEN for children, click on each book’s title to see its individual listing on the GLSEN Web site. And to prove that each excerpt is transcribed exactly as it appears in each book, click on the page numbers or the small images along the left to see scans taken directly of the book pages in question. (Ellipses ["..."] indicate unrelated passages not included in some of the transcriptions; click on the full-page scans to see the complete extended quotes.) Each passage is preceded by a brief summary, given in italics.

You decide for yourself if you think these are appropriate for kids as young as 12 years old to read. And then decide if you think the man who headed the organization responsible for recommending these books to children should be in charge of school safety in this country.

Content Warning:

Keep in mind that, although the material below has been deemed by Kevin Jennings and GLSEN to be appropriate for children, some of the excerpts contain explicit language and pornographic descriptions, so if you don’t want to see such things, stop reading now.

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Reflections of a Rock Lobster – Page 13

(At the age of six, the author frequently performed fellatio on his fellow first-graders in the school restroom, part of a “busy homosexual childhood.”)

My sexual exploits with my neighborhood playmates continued. I lived a busy homosexual childhood, somehow managing to avoid venereal disease through all my toddler years. By first grade I was sexually active with many friends. In fact, a small group of us regularly met in the grammar school lavatory to perform fellatio on one another. A typical week’s schedule would be Aaron and Michael on Monday during lunch; Michael and Johnny on Tuesday after school; Fred and Timmy at noon Wednesday; Aaron and Timmy after school on Thursday. None of us ever got caught, but we never worried about it anyway. We all understood that what we were doing was not to be discussed freely with adults but we viewed it as a fun sort of confidential activity. None of us had any guilty feelings about it; we figured everyone did it. Why shouldn’t they?

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Queer 13 – Pages 16 + 17

(A man masturbates and explicitly ejaculates as he sits on a hill overlooking his hometown.)

I sit down on the hard ground and cry a little. I fish my aged cock out of my jeans as though I can mark the scene with pleasure so later I can find it and reread it for understanding. Once imagined, it is my responsibility to jack off in front of it all. The air feels funny on my cock, which usually squirms like a larva in the darkness; it’s more sensitive than I am to the prickle of a slight breeze. There is nothing to arouse me except myself. My tract looks so boring, its emptiness so lacks potential, that I can almost believe in reality, since here is appearance spreading out at my feet. It only takes a minute. My crotch rings like an alarm clock, some pump mechanism kicks in, and after short flights my sperm falls on the gray dirt. I feet edgy and shallow, emptied out by the day ahead, and twinges of residual pleasure make me twitch.

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Revolutionary Voices – Page 103

(An illustration about the change from “boy to man,” showing two Boy Scouts pointing at and looking at two adult men engaging in anal sex.)

A Process of Change, etching, 38 x 35.5 cm, 1999

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Queer 13 – Pages 43, 44 + 45

(A 13-year-old boy has a violent sexual encounter with an older man, which causes the boy to become desperate for sex, and he ends up spending the rest of the year promiscuously getting “my cock sucked and my ass fucked” by “a seemingly endless supply of dicks” belonging to older men, concluding with “I really did enjoy those sexual encounters.”)

One day, on the bus to shop class, this ugly fuck of a man sat behind me and put his foot in the crack of my seat. He was skinny, with a patchy, pencil-thin mustache that besotted his oily face. I ignored him for most of the trip. I did notice that he changed buses when I did, but this time he sat beside me. He tried a little small talk, but then he suddenly and very nervously put his hand on my crotch. It never occurred to me to tell him not to. I’m not sure if I agreed to it or not, but he managed to get me to follow him to a nearby rest room at another secondary school “to play.” In the bathroom stall, lit by two scant rows of fluorescent lights, half of them burnt-out or flickering, he tried to kiss me, but I was too nauseated to do that. He sucked my nipples and played with my cock. I had no idea what to do. He then tried to get me to suck his. Somehow I knew this was expected of me, but I just could not put his ugly, foul-smelling penis into my mouth. When he forced it in I gagged so hard I started vomiting. Undaunted, he tried to put his cock in my ass. Thankfully, he came prematurely. He pulled up his trousers and left me in the toilet stall confused, frightened, crying, and praying to God for forgiveness of my horrible sin. I spent a good deal of time locked in the stall, trying to clean up, trying to wipe the smell of that act off with wet toilet paper, but I was doused in the stench of that man and what he had done.

This incident should have soured me on men, but it only made me more confused and needful. One day later, something accidental happened that would change my life. I discovered that at a urinal I could actually see someone else’s penis. I was ecstatic and fearful, but I wanted more. One day, at a local shopping mall, as I was trying to sneak a peek at penises in the rest rooms, a man at the urinal actually turned to me and started playing with himself. He flashed me a gold-toothed smirk and motioned for me to come over. Shocked, I zippered up and ran out, but the seeds had been laid. The whole world of rest-room sex had opened itself up to me.

Soon I was spending a great deal of time hanging out in shopping malls and cruising the rest rooms for sexual encounters. My rest-room exploits started to be a great burden on my mind. The better part of the year was spent making deals with God, asking for a sign, then ignoring and rationalizing everything I perceived to be a sign, praying for forgiveness, and being obsessed with raging hormones and a seemingly endless supply of dicks. I believed that it was all part of a test by God to see if I was a sinner. I was.

I had known before that something was up, and that I was attracted to men, but this toilet thing was a whole new realm of sin and Satan, a new level that I had never before imagined. The following years were spent praying for forgiveness and trying to purge my homosexuality through prayer and Bible study. While my classmates wondered what sex was like, content to masturbate over pinups, I was out there having my cock sucked and my ass fucked. These were grown men I was tricking with. Some were nice, grateful for a young boy to have their way with. Some were harsh and mean. There were a few nasty encounters, brutal and painful experiences, near-rapes, but through it all, I never thought that I had the ability to say no.

I was scared about what I was doing, scared of God’s judgment and of being caught in all those rest rooms and parks, but I really did enjoy those sexual encounters. That feeling of doing it to them and them doing the same for me was just too damn good.

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Queer 13 – Page 13

(The author vividly describes masturbating and ejaculating whenever and wherever possible, at the age of 13.)

Jacking off into the toilet, into the slit between pushed-together beds, into paper-towel tubes (Ugh, my little sister shouts, what’s this stuff?), in the shower, while standing in the crotch of a tree, while standing on my head. What belongs to me except the next orgasm? Even shame is not mine. I can’t afford to fantasize or to connect mind and body. Strip poker with Mike Cogan: Since we’re naked, we might as well masturbate. Don’t look, he keeps whining. His orgasm is like him, a pipsqueak.

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Revolutionary Voices – Page 220

(A writer is unhappy that she was forced to stop masturbating in public when she turned nine years old.)

I learned the truth about Santa Claus and masturbation in the same year. I was 9. I had a hunch about Santa, but I had no clue about masturbation. I mean, I had no clue there was anything wrong with it. As far as I know, I’ve been masturbating my whole life. But it wasn’t until 9 that I realized it was an impulse that you had to turn off. Especially in class. Fourth grade craft time taught me shame.

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Revolutionary Voices – Pages 171, 172 + 176

(An interview with a “sex worker” who praises prostitution as a way to raise one’s self-esteem and have empowering sexual experiences.)

Minal is a young queer from India and has been a sex worker in the S/M scene for a year and a half. He has taken a break from sex work and lives in San Francisco. In this interview Minal talks about his journey into sex work as a way of uplifting his self-esteem around body-image issues, his feeling of empowerment doing sex work in drag…

…

S: How did you get into sex work?

M: Well, before I get into that I have to tell you how I got into S/M generally, since I used to be a complete vanilla bottom. I’m gay, by the way; I’m exploring being transgendered, and I’ve been doing drag for about ten years, on and off. Drag was never a sexual thing for me, I’ve always had sex “as a guy.” Around March of last year a friend asked me about rape fantasies—she wanted to know what my fantasies were. I realized I hadn’t been fantasizing at all. When I did start thinking about it, my fantasies were all about whipping. I started reading up on S/M, and it was making me interested in sex for the first time. Before, I never knew what the big deal was with sex. I put a personal ad in the paper to do scenes with different people, and I realized that for what I was doing, I could be getting good money. I had a lot of friends in the sex industry who were asking me, “Why aren’t you charging for what you’re doing?”

So that summer I did it for free and learned what I needed to do, and by November I started putting out ads in the Bay Area Reporter. My ads were sort of genderfuck: my picture was taken from the neck down in a corset, fishnets and garter belt. It was a dom-type look. I realized there weren’t that many guys into doing S/M professionally, and the ones that were were really butch—so I stood out a lot. It was great. It was the first time I had really good sex, I was getting paid for it, and I felt totally in control. It was good, but I was wondering how many people I was losing by advertising as a fem dom. I started putting ads online without the fem look and got a lot more response, so I switched to just having a nude picture in the paper as opposed to a girlish one. The responses were more than I could handle, which is a good thing. That’s how I got into sex work, as a way of exploring my sexuality.

…

S: How has your self-image improved from doing sex work?

M: I feel a lot more confident and secure with myself. I think that has a lot to do with S/M and coming into my own power.

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In Your Face – Page 150

(The author describes how a sudden and impulsive sexual encounter was the healthiest relationship he’s ever had, then regrets the incestuous relationship he had with his cousin.)

But I know in the immediate future I want a very healthy relationship, because I’ve never really had a healthy relationship. The closest I’ve had was with a guy that I met at the lake when we lived in Davenport. I just met him at the lake, and he already had a boyfriend and stuff. I just walked up to him and said, “Do you want to fuck?” and we did. For a week. And then I went home because I couldn’t handle it anymore. The relationship I had with my cousin was very, very twisted, and I didn’t like hiding it. I mean, he was my cousin, and so it feels rather disgusting. But I think that you’re gonna fall in love with whomever you’re gonna fall in love with.

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Passages of Pride – Pages 33, 34 + 35

(A 15-year-old boy embarks on an intense sexual relationship with a much older adult man.)

Near the end of summer, just before starting his sophomore year in high school, Dan picked up a weekly Twin Cities newspaper. Scanning the classifieds, he came upon an ad for a “Man-2-Man” massage. Home alone one day, he called the telephone number listed in the ad and set up an appointment to meet a man named Tom. Tom offered to drive to Zimmerman. So, over the phone, Dan directed him to a secluded road in his subdivision. “Stop where the pavement ends,” Dan told him.

A couple of nights later, Dan pulled the broken screen from his bedroom window and slipped out of the house while his parents slept. He hurried to the prearranged rendezvous spot, and there, in the dark of night, he met Tom for the first time, man-to-man. In the back of Tom’s van, the two had sex.

“He gave me a little shoulder rub and the next thing I knew his hands were all over me,” Dan remembers. “It wasn’t a bad thing. I didn’t necessarily know it would turn into sex. But I knew what I was doing.”

Dan continued his liaisons with Tom throughout the summer and into the following school year, having sex—usually masturbation and oral sex—with Tom in his van or his Minneapolis apartment.

…

Even though Tom was older, almost twice Dan’s age, Dan felt unthreatened by him. Dan admits Tom was a “troll” in every sense of the word—an older closeted gay man seeking sex with a man much younger. But Dan says he was not intimidated by the discrepancy in their ages. “He kind of had me in a corner in that he knew I didn’t have access to anything I wanted.” says Dan. “But everything was consensual.”

…

“He wasn’t exactly a friend,” Dan says of his relationship with Tom. “He wasn’t exactly a lover. He wasn’t exactly a role model. He wasn’t exactly anything. What I got out of it was sex, and someone who made me feel nice for once. Sex was a totally different way to feel good. It was a very easy way to get away from the pain. I was young. He brought me down to the city, where I wanted to be. And I was very young.”

---

Revolutionary Voices – Page 7

(A poem in which the author fantasizes about amputating his penis in order to become a woman.)

as a little boy growing up, i used ta sit in the bathtub, take the little spikey thing u put soap on, n lay on it, press my little pre-pubescent dick on it hard, impale myself, sometimes until i bled.

then i’d take it, bloodied n bruised, n tuck it between my legs, standing in front of the mirror, pushing the fat that wuz my chest together, seeing what it would b like ta have cleavage, thinking

perhaps i could escape my fate by becoming a woman, i wondered what it’d b like ta have a pussy, what it would b like ta cut it off, ta simply not have it around no more.

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Reflections of a Rock Lobster – Pages 25 + 26

(Two twelve-year-old boys turn up the volume on a Christian song to drown out the noises of them having sex.)

I began sleeping over at Bob’s house again during seventh grade. His mother thought we enjoyed a perfectly platonic relationship in his room upstairs playing games and listening to Jim Nabors records – the only ones she allowed Bob to hear.

Little did she know that every night I slept over we would turn the record player loud and have sex to the beat of “Lord, You Gave Me a Mountain.”

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In Your Face – Pages 58 + 59

(The narrator describes how at the age of 16 he began having sex with a 25-year-old man he met at a gay youth group.)

I don’t remember exactly when I started coming out, but I joined this youth group called Positive Images; it’s the Sonoma County gay/lesbian/bisexual youth group. I got a boyfriend instantly; he picked me up right away, right when I joined the group. He was older; he was twenty-five, I was sixteen. He was just really supportive of me. I went with him to this gay prom in Sonoma County called the Rainbow Prom in the middle of May.

…

So there was one night when I stayed at my boyfriend’s house. I lost my virginity to him a couple weeks before that, and so I stayed at his house, and I was feeling good when I went home the next day. It was the first time that I actually spent the night there and stayed the whole night. So I went home and I was in a great mood.

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Passages of Pride – Page 92

(A woman recalls how as a teenager she had a sexual affair with an adult teacher at her high school, which greatly boosted the girl’s self-esteem.)

While still in high school, she had an affair with a teacher. “She was forty-four and had a daughter who was a year younger than me, who went to my school. Needless to say, it was all very confusing, but exciting as well. The moment right after we kissed for the first time, I ran to the mirror and looked at myself. I was ecstatic. I thought I would look different. I said in a barely audible whisper, ‘I’m a lesbian.’ About six months later, we stopped being physically sexual, at my request. I was racked with guilt feelings and knew that it was out of control. I was terrified of someone finding out….”

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Growing Up Gay/Growing Up Lesbian – Pages 93, 97, 98, 99 + 100

(A gay priest recalls a life-changing incident at the age of ten, when he “felt my penis begin to harden” after meeting a new friend, after which the author “touched the flesh of his cock.”)

One summer when I was about ten, my mother and I spent several weeks at a big resort hotel in the Adirondack Mountains in northern New York State. …

…

Strange how all foreboding vanished when I first caught sight of Jamie checking into the hotel with his mother and father. The desire I felt for him was sudden and electric. …

…

As we changed in the dressing room by the swimming pool, I glanced very quickly to find out what his genitals looked like, but his back was turned to me as he slipped on his trunks. Still I knew I’d find out, somehow. …

…

I remember the fright I felt when there was no more to take off but my underpants, the strange sense of relief when I stood naked by the shadowed pool, the throat-tightening excitement of seeing Jamie’s slight lithe body, as naked as mine.

We tucked our clothes under the embankment. Then, with a whoop, Jamie dived into the pool. I stood on the pool’s edge, watched Jamie’s body squirming beneath the water’s surface, and felt my penis begin to harden.

Jamie broke the surface with a splash and looked at me. A quick grin crossed his face. “Dive in! It’s great!”

I glanced down and saw that my cock was fully erected.

…

“C’mon, we’ll wrestle. that’ll warm you up.” He grabbed me around the neck and pushed me back on the sand. The warmth of his body sent chills through mine. I struggled (although not very convincingly, I’m afraid) against his grip and we rolled on the sand and I finally pinioned him on his back, astride him, my hands holding his arms.

He looked up at me. “Uncle,” he whispered.

I released his arms. They glided around my neck, pulling my head down to his. I stretched full length on top of him, our heads touching. Our heavy breathing from the struggle gradually subsided. I felt my penis grow hard against his body, and, pressed against mine, I felt his grow hard too. I raised my head and looked at his face. He was looking at me. After a long moment I lowered my head till our lips touched. And held.

Then I moved over on my side next to him, and my hand reached down, slowly, until I touched the flesh of his cock. It stiffened still more and Jamie’s hips stirred. I felt a wonder. I had caused this to happen to someone else. Someone else felt as I did. I wasn’t alone. There was Jamie. And now we had our secret.

We shared the wonder of that secret, touching, exploring, responding, till we heard voices—adult voices—calling our names.

---

Queer 13 – Pages 86 + 87

(The author recalls with mixed emotions the sexual relationship he had with his cousin starting at the age of 12.)

Despite my best efforts, someday the artifice of “normality” had to fall away. It did, early one Sunday afternoon when I was twelve. My cousin was sixteen.

I put on my blue velour robe and padded down the rickety stairs. My cousin was watching an old black-and-white movie on our black-and-white TV set. He wore only his Ewing High School J.V. basketball shorts, black with waxy yellow lettering. I sat next to him on the couch, silent. He would occasionally sneak glances at me. The glances grew longer and longer.

I noticed his slightly parted thick lips. Uncomfortable, I stood up and went to the front door. I pretended to look out the window up Field Avenue. The street was empty.

My cousin got up from the couch and stood behind me. He lightly brushed the soft fabric of my robe. “Let’s get gay,” he fawned in a mock faggy tone. “Let’s get gay.” He rubbed his huge hands over the thin fabric that separated them from my behind. He pulled up the robe.

Exposed and naked, my erection to the wind, I wanted to melt into his arms, to be held by him, to desperately answer the questions my soul had been avoiding, but I also wanted to shield my eyes from what was happening.

We went back to the couch, and I felt someone’s hands on my genitals for the first time. They were boiling—his hands and my genitals. I sat back and closed my eyes.

My ecstasy from his touch. My relief from loneliness. Momentarily overcoming fear and shame. Then, the fall. Each of the half-dozen times we did it over the next four years it would be that way. While we were in the act, it was good. His heavy brown body lying against mine, providing the warmth I never thought I would have. He was tender and sweet. But after I came, shame tumbled on top of me, the pleasure buried, suffocated. The disgraceful white goo the physical proof of my spiritual delinquency.

---

Reflections of a Rock Lobster – Pages 13 + 14

(At the age of six, the author played “sex therapist” with a five-year-old friend, and “explored our sexuality to its fullest.”)

One friend I was very close to was Billy Marlen. Billy was a year behind me in school yet we got along well together. In our friendship, a special camaraderie existed that was rare in my other friendships. There was a brotherhood that does not often occur even between brothers. We shared our toys and spent many summer days building sandcastles on the beach. On rainy days I’d walk down to Billy’s house where we spent the day reading books and building racetracks and playing sex therapist in his basement. We were human beings who knew no social inhibitions and were willing to explore our sexuality to its fullest.

---

Reflections of a Rock Lobster – Page 15

(The author describes his promiscuous sex life while in elementary school.)

Sex continued for me but it was not the same as it was with Billy. It was always readily available after school, during school, at cub scouts, at Sunday School or at summer camp, but that certain element that Billy added was gone.

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In Your Face – Page 141

(The narrator describes the sexual relations he had with various adult men when he was 16 years old.)

I was dating this twenty-five-year-old guy. But then we broke up, because I was messing around with this other guy who was a friend of his, this twenty-seven-year-old, and I was only sixteen. It wasn’t really a right thing, I don’t think, because I knew they were only attracted to me because I was young, and it wasn’t even like they were attracted to me because of my personality or anything like that. So I dated the twenty-seven-year-old for a little bit, and then we broke up, and I got back together with my old boyfriend, and then we broke up again.

When I was with my first boyfriend, we went to a rave; I felt like we could dance together and stuff, and we could kiss and it was cool. But I still felt kind of weird. I used him. And when I was with him, I was really out. I would hold hands everywhere, kiss in public. But it wasn’t so much that I wanted to be kissing him as much as I wanted to be able to be that out; I wanted to get comfortable with it.

I met this one guy in the city, and he came up with us, back up to Petaluma, and we hung out that night. We just totally talked. He was this really cool person. We had sex, and it was really good—five hours of foreplay. That was rad, and I just felt like I could talk to him, like we could really relate. So he came back down to the city, and then I called him that night, or I called him the next day or something, and asked him to come up, and so he rode the bus up, stayed at my house that night, and we had sex again.

He was just rad; he had the body type that I like, a little pale and kind of scrawny–kinda skaterish, like a toned-all-over body. Anyway, so then he went back to the city, and I was supposed to come down to the city and stay at his house on Friday. I called his house and his roommate said, “Maddy doesn’t live here anymore; he went back to Michigan.” He never called me and he’s never called me or written me since then. It was really fucked. I even think that I am in love with him because I just think about him every day. I don’t even know if I’ve ever been in love before this.

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Passages of Pride – Page 4

(Beginning at the age of five, a young child has sexual encounters with his playmates.)

Throughout his childhood, from age five on, Derek would sneak off with a friend into someone’s basement or the woods along the back alley, where they would take off their pants and play with each other, usually fondling each other’s genitals. It became habitual.

“At that time, I didn’t quite have a name for it,” says Derek. “It was something that I liked doing, that felt good, that I wanted to do as often as I could. The other kids always recognized it as being something bad and dirty. And all I wanted to know was, When can we do it again?”

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Growing Up Gay/Growing Up Lesbian – Pages 110 + 111

(A man recounts how he had his first sexual experience at age 12, and then recalls fondly the anal sex he had at fifteen with a much older man.)

“I just remember, when I was twelve or so, Derek walking into my room and finding me making out with Timmy Musseo. And he just said excuse me and closed the door.”

Philip’s jaw dropped. “You were making out with boys when you were twelve?”

“Eleven,” Eliot said. “Geoffrey and Derek only found out when I was twelve.”

“Then how old were you when you first had sex?”

Eliot shrugged. “I’m not sure,” he said. “How do you define sex? If orgasm is the criterion, twelve. If anal or oral penetration is necessary, fifteen.”

“And was that with Timmy Musseo?”

“No, no,” Eliot said “Timmy Musseo had a girlfriend by that time. My first experience was with a much older man, a friend of Derek’s. He and Geoffrey never found out about it. Probably they still don’t know.”

“How old is older?”

“Oh, let’s see,” Eliot said. “When I was fifteen, he must have been twenty-nine, thirty. My age now. He came and stayed with me at the house whenever Derek and Geoffrey went away.”

“Did he seduce you?”

“I seduced him,” Eliot said, and laughed. “Oh, he wanted to for as long as I did. But I think he was afraid Derek would send him up for statutory rape or something. I was irresistible at fifteen. I kept asking him to give me massages, playing the little nubile waif. And finally–well, he couldn’t hold back anymore.” He sighed. “It was a wild night. We did everything.”

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Revolutionary Voices – Page 205

(A young activist denounces “this white-supremacist, capitalist heteropatriarchy.”)

On Diversity

(Presented at Pride 1997, Olympia, Wash.)

The term diversity has become more than trite these days. Slap a rainbow flag on your car and you’re well on the way to “diverse” liberalism. A true commitment to diversity, however, requires a closer look at the privileges and oppressions simultaneously affecting each of us and a recognition of both public and private means of resistance. In many ways I have privilege: I am white, middle-class, and attending college. These factors grant me certain societally bestowed benefits. In other ways, I am systemically oppressed: as a woman, as a youth, as a person with cerebral palsy, as a bisexual queer. With these attributes, I fail to meet the optimal requirements for functioning in this white-supremacist, capitalist heteropatriarchy.

If you are not part of the system in the optimal way (i.e., as a straight, white, middle-class or upwardly mobile, Christian male), you pose a threat to that dominant system.

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Queer 13 – Pages 222 + 223

(A 13-year-old boy carefully inspects his friend’s genitals, admiring the size of his penis; then the author describes each of their masturbation techniques.)

“How old are you, twelve? I had pubes when I was twelve,” Donnie said in disbelief.

“I’m thirteen and I do have some pubes,” I said. “Just not a lot.”

Donnie moved toward me. “‘Let’s see. I bet you’ve got more than you think.” I started to unzip my fly to show him when his mom yelled again for us to turn the music down before she came down and did it herself. I nervously zipped my jeans back up.

Donnie said, “It’s weird. I’m only two years older than you, but look at mine.” He sat on the edge of his bed and slid his jeans down to his knees. He pulled on his pubes and showed me how thick his hair was. He wasn’t self-conscious at all. It felt like he was showing me a science project or something. He let me examine his dick and pubes close up. I had never seen that much pubic hair that close before. I only had a few pubic hairs, but I kept a vigilant watch over them. I counted them and watched them grow. I knew whenever a new one appeared. Donnie’s pubes looked so good, so exciting to me. Blood started rushing around me. I felt warm. I felt happy and hopeful at the thought that someday soon I would have that much, too. Donnie was proud of himself. That close, his pubic hair looked like a dense forest. There was a dark moist smell. Kind of familiar, but different from my own. More like a man smell than a boy smell. I was in awe not only of his pubes but because I wanted to have a dick the size of his, with all that hair. Compared to Donnie’s mature dick with that thick bush at its base, mine was a naked pencil. I was surprised that his dick was big. He was kind of overweight, just a big kid really. I told him I thought fat guys had small dicks. He didn’t get upset that I called him fat. He said matter-of-factly, “Some of ‘em do.”

He spread the Playboy open on the bed and showed me how he jacked off. I sat next to him and watched as he spit in his hand and rubbed it on the head of his dick. Then he wrapped his hand around his dick and moved it quickly up and down. He didn’t get very hard. It was just a demonstration. I was too shy to tell him how I did it. When I masturbated I had to be quiet so I wouldn’t wake up my brothers. I lay on my stomach and humped the mattress until I came. My sheets always had yellow crusty stains on them, but my mother never mentioned it even though she was the one who washed them.

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In Your Face – Page 136

(A girl describes how she became “fuck buddies” with another girl while at the same time having a boyfriend.)

The girls I have gone out with have been high school age or a little bit older. I went out with this girl Jennay, and with her, it was just total attractiveness. I got to know her on a different level, and we became lovers. It’s funny to say it, but we didn’t really relate emotionally. So we sort of became fuck buddies. This was actually going on at the same time I was going out with Mark, so it was kinda bad.

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Queer 13 – Page 17

(The author describes various sexualized public restroom incidents.)

The little man in a checked sports jacket stands too close to me at the urinal. Is he subnormal? Doesn’t he understand social distance? He has an accent—British? Cockney? Maybe he’s wearing a bowler? “Excuse me?”

“Xxxx’x x xxxx xxxx xxx xxxx xxxxx.”

“What?”

“That’s a nice cock you have there.” He’s offering his, a prim pink boutonniere; I can see why he likes mine better. A nice cock? Is it separate from my body, which is not nice? Separate, like my beautiful eyes? He’s will-less as a dust bunny, and when I tap him on the shoulder, he drifts away.

Later, in a smelly gas-station toilet, I realize the wad of toilet paper left on top of the dispenser is filled with someone’s sperm. Some pervert left it there, I tell myself wonderingly. To be found, I add. And recognized. As what? An offering, an assertion? I don’t forget to be grossed out. I smell it—sure enough, sperm. Consciousness the predicament, orgasm the escape. I look around for the masturbator as though I’m dreaming, as though I can hear his I’m coming noises.

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Reflections of a Rock Lobster – Page 19

(The author mentions how, while in fifth and sixth grade [age 10 and 11], he often had sex with his male classmates.)

Fortunately, even though being homosexual laid heavily on my conscience during fifth and sixth grades, sex was nevertheless still available. No feelings of guilt entered my mind when having sex with other boys because sex was something spontaneous, and a satisfaction of certain needs.

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Reflections of a Rock Lobster – Page 23

(At the age of 12, the author reports being taken aback when the friend with whom he frequently had gay sex asked him “What would you do if you had some pussy right now?”)

As I entered seventh grade, I noticed that kids were changing physically as well as socially.

…

Interestingly, Bob Cote and I began a sexual relationship. In fact, we had sex together quite frequently. So I was completely taken by surprise one day at the lunch table when he tried to initiate me into the conversation about heterosexuality.

“How about you, Aaron, what would you do if you had some pussy right now?”

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In Your Face – Page 142

(The narrator regrets that as a teenager he was too shy to hook up with an older man.)

I’ve never been with a guy yet. I was tempted once. I was in this store–a clothes shop or something. Well, this guy was looking at me and my friend pointed it out. I was gonna go up and talk to the guy, but the guy was twenty-something. He was good-looking, too. This was like a year and a half ago or something. I was really screwed up—not sure how I felt. I didn’t say anything. I remembered going home and wishing that I had said something.

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Revolutionary Voices – Page 155

(A memoir in which the author begins masturbating at the age of nine, later bemoaning the culture which said it was not OK.)

I discovered masturbation when I was nine. But because of other Christian peers and teachers, I learned it was not OK. According to them, the only time a woman should be sexual was after she got married. My parents did not talk about sex or sexual orientation. The only thing my mother told me was, “Don’t get raped.” She did not describe what it meant to be raped, let alone what it meant to have a healthy relationship, to have sexual intercourse, or the consequences thereof. How was I to know how I could protect myself? How could I protect myself when I wasn’t confident in my own body?

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The Full Spectrum – Pages 227 + 228

(A five-year-old girl and a six-year-old girl engage in sex games.)

I am five and Katie is six. Her birthday is in September. Mine is in June. We are both in kindergarten, she in the p.m. class and me in the a.m., but we go to day care together. We are best friends.

…

Today I am going to Katie’s for a playdate.

…

Katie pulls her shorts off. She is wearing blue and white polka-dotted Hanes underwear, the kind that I have at home. They come in a three-pack with a matching blue pair and a matching white pair. She lies down on her floor and pulls her underwear off over her butt, and tells me to spank her because she’s the baby and I’m the mommy. It seems kind of weird and she yells at me to do it. Then she makes me be the baby and she spanks me, too. She tells me that I should learn how to French-kiss because boys always do that, so she kisses me and puts her tongue in my mouth. I roll my tongue hot-dog style, because that is fun.

Her mommy drives me home, and in the backseat of her white car Katie Frenches me again.

We are in second grade now, and Katie still makes me practice Frenching her.

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Queer 13 – Page 148

(A boy avoids a schoolyard fight in order to engage in “a masturbation marathon” instead, then adds that he prefers teachers’ bodies to students’ bodies.)

My wrestling partner, fellow lightweight, a boy with “skaggy” chin-length hair, called me out—dared me to fight him, tomorrow after school. I agreed to the duel.

His skinny arms were nothing to fear, and yet I stayed home from school the next day and had a masturbation marathon instead.

We’d planned to rendezvous by the locked, parked bikes, near the ecological simulacrum of a habitat, created by the science teacher to show us how to respect the planet.

I preferred teacher to student bodies, with a few exceptions.

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Being Different – Page 36

(A group of 9- and 10-year-old boys all get erections together in a tent.)

Sleep-away camp lent itself to exploration as well. The summer between fourth and fifth grade I learned what an erection was. Six guys in a tent without a parental figure and instructed to go to bed had no intention of falling asleep until our eyelids felt like anvils. At some point, the conversation turned to sex. And that same friend who enjoyed mooning the guys also instructed us, using his own body for visual proof, as to what an erection was. Soon after, we were all erect, with very little inkling that what we were doing would be considered by some to be wrong.

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Reflections of a Rock Lobster – Page 24

(The author discusses the psychological issues his sex partner experienced when they were both 12 years old.)

My school life was becoming lonelier. Most of my former friends ignored me. Bob and I stayed friendly and kept up our sex life together, but many times Bob also talked about fantasies with females and salami. Bob felt guilty about having sex with me and pretended that we never did. It was frustrating because now, more than ever, I wanted to communicate with someone about my sexuality – but there was no one available. Although Bob provided sexual stimulation, there was little other communication between us; he was too inhibited. In fact, one time he refused to have sex unless we first hypnotized each other into being different people: he would be a woman while satisfying me, and then we would switch. I went along with it but felt ridiculous when the two identities he had chosen for us turned out to be Ann-Margret and Jaclyn Smith. My part was Ann-Margret, of course.

Bob and I had sex often yet there was always that suppressive air.

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In Your Face – Page 126

(The narrator describes how the other teens in his social circle “have sex all the time” and “go down to the Castro and pick up guys.”)

With queer kids I meet outside of the youth group, it’s the only thing we have in common is that we’re gay and we’re young. They just go to clubs and get fucked up and have sex all the time. They go down to the Castro and pick up guys. And I know it’s their internalized homophobia and that kind of stuff and they’re dealing with that.

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Passages of Pride – Page 49

(Two second-grade boys engage in sex-play when the adults aren’t looking.)

Troy and Jordan soon discovered they shared a common secret—they both were infatuated with boys. They would compare their affections for boys they knew at their school and tease each other about their latest crushes. Both admired one boy in particular, a second-grader named Kelly. Kelly was exceptionally good-looking. Troy remembers thinking he was the type of boy who surely would grow up to be strikingly handsome. Troy and Jordan vied unabashedly for his attention, pushing and elbowing to sit by his side during lunch, and showing off during recess. It was Jordan who won out, finally capturing Kelly’s interest. He invited Kelly over to his home, where they would roll and tumble together on an old mattress down in the basement, out of sight of any adult, kissing and hugging under blankets and sheets, sometimes without their clothes.

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Revolutionary Voices – Pages 43 + 44

(A girl describes how at the age of 12 she announced to her entire elementary school that she is a lesbian.)

Coming Out in Middle School

I first began to come out when I was 11. In terms of my family, I was fortunate because my parents have always been accepting of my sexual identity. It was really great to have their backing, especially considering that a lot of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people don’t have that kind of family support. I come from a political, staunchly liberal family; I guess you could say I inherited my parents’ socialist genes. However, the school I was going to when I came out was immensely different from my home situation.

I was in sixth grade and attending a Catholic school in San Francisco when I came out to a small group of people. (I was actually raised in an agnostic household, but the Catholic school was three blocks away from where I lived.) My fellow students had already assumed I was a queer because I defended queer people and got angry at folks in my class when they said the word “faggot.” So of course they were making accusations about my sexuality left and right. Still, I didn’t feel comfortable coming out to all of them.

During this time I started attending LYRIC, the Lavender Youth Recreation and Information Center, a wonderful program and hang-out space for LGBT youth in San Francisco. Just hanging out with other queer youth and finding a place where I could get support was incredible. Programs that give queer youth a space to be safe are really important, and I know that finding LYRIC helped me out a lot.

The next year I was in seventh grade. At that point I was tired of being harassed, and I had gotten to a place in my life where I could actually deal with the harassment and stand up to people who hurt me. I realized I could only be happy if I was honest with the people around me. So at the age of 12 1 came out to my entire elementary school, which included grades K-8.

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Reflections of a Rock Lobster – Pages 12 + 13

(As a six-year-old, the author became sexually aroused by Batman and GI Joe, and “messed around” with his playmates.)

One day when I was about six, while watching a Batman episode with Cheryl, I casually commented on the anatomical proportions of Batman. I knew no reason to stifle my aroused sexual feelings, so I just mentioned that I liked what I saw. Cheryl freaked out. It was my first lesson that talking about this subject made people upset.

This was the first time I had spoken of my sexual thoughts although I had been having those thoughts for as long as I could remember. Already I was undressing my GI Joe dolls, and I had messed around with some of my male playmates, but it never crossed my mind to mention my feelings to anyone.

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Queer 13 – Page 228

(Two 11-year-old boys sneak into a school closet to have a sexual encounter, but are interrupted by a teacher before they can begin.)

Something was in the air, and it wasn’t just pot smoke. But at age eleven I was alert to it, sniffing it out like a caged animal keenly sensing freedom. That year was an awakening for me. Puberty struck like violent spring weather. The boys of my new school, East Meadow Elementary in Palo Alto, were sexual boys, and I had never been cast among sexual boys before. It’s not that they were having sex; rather, they radiated sex, its power and allure. We were a school of boys coming into sticky heat. We got hard in our pants, grabbed at one another’s crotches, traded sex drawings we sketched covertly during class. We talked solemnly about the mysterious and exciting changes happening to our bodies, the public hair some of us were beginning to sprout, our nipples that felt strangely sensitive. Overnight we became achingly aware of our penises.

In the school library there was a supplies closet where some of the boys, it was rumored, went when the library wasn’t in use. One spring afternoon, as Lex Bancroft and I, unsupervised, shelved books—an honor bestowed from time to time on A students—he confided to me that he and Brian Freeman had gone to the closet the week before. The window shades were down to indicate the library was closed, but still the afternoon light suffused the room with a tender glow. Lex hooked his thumbs through the belt loops of his jeans and splayed his fingers against his pelvis as if in triumph. Did I want to go? he wondered.

Those of us who had not been to the closet could only speculate about what, exactly, went on in there. I felt a bright spasm of longing–everything in the room seemed at once vague and luminous; we were on the verge, I sensed, of something truly amazing–when the door opened and our teacher, Mr. Bouchner, appeared to tell us the news that Martin Luther King had just been assassinated in that faraway city where I had grown up.

This post was so long that I cut it in half.
Part II is here.

Comments (125)

Scott Baker from Breitbart-TV.com and Co-Host of ‘The B-Cast‘ submitted this shocking report today on Obama’s deviant Safe Schools Czar Kevin Jennings.

—-Warning on Content—–

I was recently approached by a team of independent researchers that I have known for some time and have come to trust. They prepared this report involving ‘Safe Schools Czar’ Kevin Jennings and the organization he founded, GLSEN, and asked that I find a way to help draw attention to what they uncovered. Knowing that Gateway Pundit has followed Kevin Jennings since his appointment, as we have on The B-Cast (here, here, and here), and on Breitbart.tv (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here), I felt this would be an appropriate place for this report.

Warning: The following material is very explicit.

Scott Baker

Co-Founder, Breitbart.tv

Co-Host, The B-Cast

The Full Spectrum – Pages 228 + 229

(The author describes the sexual interactions a group of thirteen-year-old girls has with an 18-year-old boy.)

I am thirteen and my soul bleeds poetry.

…

My best friend is Nicole now. It used to be Kim, but she’s so annoying.

…

Nicole’s dad has this friend named Chris. He’s really cool. He’s eighteen and he comes over to Nicole’s house to play Magic: The Gathering and drink beers with Nicole’s dad. He usually spends the night, because Nicole’s dad doesn’t want him to drive home. Kim is sort of dating him. She thinks they’re engaged. Nicole and I sleep in the basement, and Chris sleeps upstairs in the living room.

…

One night Chris kisses me in the dark on Nicole’s living room floor. It’s after five in the morning, which I know because I watch the clock the whole time. His mouth is huge. I’ve never kissed a boy before. It turns into a habit, and sometimes Nicole and I lie in sleeping bags on either side of him, pretending we don’t know that he has one hand up each of our shirts. Once, Chris has his hand in my pants and asks me if I’m awake.

Kim has sex with Chris on her kitchen floor one night in December, and Nicole and I want her to die.

In Your Face – Page 130

(The narrator discovers to his surprise that many of the stereotypes about gay men which he tried to unlearn ended up being true after all.)

I’ve developed an aversion to bars, from what I’ve heard about the sexualization of gay culture there. The weird thing is that when you finally get some self-esteem about being gay, you have to unlearn all these things about gay men that you’ve been taught. However, you end up growing older and learning that a lot of it was true! A lot of gay men out there just want sex, and that’s not easy for a young hopeless romantic to deal with.

Passages of Pride – Page 54

(Two high-schoolers have a long-term sexual relationship, which one wants to announce defiantly to the world.)

Late one night, Troy sneaked into Michael’s basement bedroom while his parents and sister slept upstairs. For hours, they lay together in Michael’s bed, hugging, kissing, and touching each other. Usually it was the park or Michael’s car where they would make out, masturbating each other and having oral sex. They didn’t use condoms, and instead abstained from sex that they thought would be unsafe, Troy says.

“Michael was the first guy I even messed around with.” Never was he ashamed of what he was doing, Troy maintains. “It was exciting. It was sort of like I just wanted to get on a big loudspeaker and start yelling at the whole town: ‘This is what we’re doing, so fuck you!’”

Revolutionary Voices – Page 104

(A work of art showing a Boy Scout giving a salute behind two men kissing passionately.)

The Promise, etching, 38 x 35.5 cm, 1999

Reflections of a Rock Lobster – Page 16

(During a sleepover at the home of an elementary school classmate, the author as a child touches his friend’s genitals without permission, getting in trouble for it.)

After Billy’s family moved I developed a friendship with a new classmate named Bob Cote and I had feelings for him similar to the ones I had for Billy. Sex, however, was not a part of our relationship. In between catching toads, flying kites and swimming nude in a pond in the woods, sex never came to mind.

One night Bob invited me to sleep over. When I went I expected that we would just sit around and watch TV, but as the evening wore on I found myself becoming attracted to Bob. His mother, Mrs. Cote, had been keeping a close eye on us all evening so I waited until bedtime to make my advance. Before bed, I insisted on bringing my bed within a few feet of his. Once the lights were out I silently reached my left hand over to his bed and slipped it under his sheet and through his pajama bottoms.

Without a word Bob bounded from the bed and hurried out of the room. Where had he gone? Had I done something wrong by touching him? What was going to happen? These fears raced through my head. Soon I heard his Bob’s mother open the door to the bedroom. I’ll never forget the beating she gave me that night.

Reflections of a Rock Lobster – Page 17

(The author reports that a large group of elementary school boys continued to engage in oral sex in the school restrooms, even though he personally had dropped out of the group.)

My sex life did not stop but it slowed down a lot – mostly I just went back to undressing GI Joes and staring at them in privacy of my own room. I dropped out of the lavatory assemblage, which had continued since first grade. It was too risky; my fears kept me from enjoying the lavatory encounters so I just imagined them instead. I lost contact with the group but later heard it had grown considerably and was utilizing the bathroom facilities on the entire first floor including the auditorium and was working on a two-shift rotation schedule. But for me, that luxury had been stolen.

The Full Spectrum – Pages 216 + 217

(A girl moves into a college dorm and describes the sexcapades of her new friends.)

To celebrate, they hold the Dorm Slut Olympics, and I am the torchbearer. The torch is four bananas held together with a hair band, and the first event is the Banana Deep Throat. A girl named Caitlinn goes for the gold, taking the whole banana down. Everyone is awed. Jason is silver, and my roommate gets an honorable mention. I decline, since dick is not my thing, and I have no desire to practice on produce filched from Shively Hall. Then there is the Best Fake Orgasm competition, and again Caitlinn wins hands down. This time Ray gets silver, and while he’s performing, one of the ROTC boys from downstairs keeps touching himself through his pants. I laugh to myself, because it’s so cliché for the faux-soldiers to lust after one of my epicene new friends.

When it’s over, and most people have paired off and disappeared, Ray and Jason and I crawl under the blankets in Ray’s bed, which is a top bunk. I relish the feeling of other people’s legs tangled with mine, my small breasts pillowing Ray’s head. It is all perfectly innocent, but I am glad to be in the middle as we half-watch The Daily Show. I’ve missed having people to be close to, to the point that this simple human connection is bliss. I only met them this afternoon, but after watching them both fellate bananas, it would be hard not to be friends. We pull Ray’s comforter over our heads and say silly things and practice for tomorrow’s Olympic event, which will be Heterosexual Dirty Talk with a Partner. I ask Jason if I can lick every wrinkle in his ball sack, and he laughs and pretends to feel around in my pants, telling me to just let him know when he finds my labia. We decide that we’ll be funny rather than sexy, because it’s already obvious that Caitlinn dominates as the official Dorm Slut.

Then Ray complains that he can’t see the TV because he’s in the back, and I ask him if he wants to be in the middle, because he is the Birthday Boy. It’s not long before he and Jason are no longer spooning, but obviously curled up in each other. Jason keeps taking the comforter away from me so that I am outside the circle, and then Ray keeps fixing it so that I’m back in with them. I don’t know if he’s nervous or just trying to be polite, but I can take a hint. I climb down from the top bunk and collect the few other people still in the room, not so subtly letting them know that Ray will be receiving head whether they stick around or not, but that they might not want to witness it.

Revolutionary Voices – Page 216

(A woman announces that she wants to help bring about “a revolution in this country.”)

I am a 22-year-old Latina trying to become a revolutionary and trying to figure out how cultural work could contribute to a revolution in this country.

In Your Face – Pages 113 + 114

(The narrator describes how she sometimes likes being promiscuous.)

And I realized that I’d always sort of wanted to experience that; I’d read about that older bar scene and I wanted to be just like that when I grew up. I wanted to be like the rad player dyke from Hell–somebody who fucks around just so they can, someone who works the scene and doesn’t particularly care who she’s screwing, no emotional attachment. Of course, I’m incapable of being a player; I have the problem that I wind up falling in love with anybody I sleep with, so that kinda cuts me out of the spectrum.

…

I started working the social scene after I broke up with my third girlfriend. For the past six months, I’ve basically been a slut. I have been serially monogamous–I’m not sure if you could really call it that, because it never lasted long enough to be called monogamy.

Passages of Pride – Page 79

(A woman recalls the “sexploration” she engaged in between the ages of seven and nine.)

When she was seven or eight, the games of the older boys turned sexual. “I was doing a lot of sexploration,” she recalls, “even at those young ages”—playing doctor or Dracula, coming home with hickeys on her neck. “It kind of got carried away in the course of being in contact with those boys.” At age nine, she found herself in a closet with a couple of boys who were trying to talk her into having sex. “They wanted to have intercourse,” she says. “I remember they had their penises out and they wanted to try it. I don’t remember any penetration or anything, but we tried.”

Revolutionary Voices – Page 143

(A woman describes her friend’s rape using explicit language.)

Our Story

I tried to write it, first as a story, then as a poem—what my friend Christine had told me, about the rape.

…

But the violence, the violence was there, the seeds planted many years before, by drunken hands and broken lips; like the man who told her how lucky she was to be with him now that she was gaining weight because most men wouldn’t put up with hips like that. Other stories too. So many other words, entering and entering between her thighs; the cock thrusting without her permission, without my permission, and all the lies we’ve lay under all this time just waiting, waiting…

In Your Face – Page 129

(The narrator recounts the complicated sexual and emotional relationship he had with a teenaged friend.)

Lewis and I fooled around sometime over that summer. The word “bisexual” came up afterward. A few weeks later, I came out to him as gay, which was rather difficult. The funny thing was, Lewis was surprised and disconcerted when I told him. This became increasingly stranger when we ended up in bed together ten minutes after I told him.

After every time we fooled around, he’d sort of punish himself (or me) by not speaking to me for a week or so afterward. Inevitably we’d end up in bed together. The situation was complicated when I told him I was in love with him. For some time Lewis remained the only friend I had who knew about me and we had something of a psychotic relationship, with me being the “other man” he cheated with on all his girlfriends.

…

The Order of the Poison Oak – Pages 127, 128, 129 + 130

(Two boys have a sexual encounter while skinny-dipping.)

So Web was kissing me, and it’s not like I could not kiss him back.

…

I was tingling all over. I could feel every single nerve ending in my entire body, and each one was on red alert (some more alerted than others!). We were still kissing when I felt his arms slip around me, exploring, but also drawing me close, sucking me in. I’d been seduced by a merman or an octopus, and Min or no Min, I was powerless to escape.

Suddenly, my body was pressing against his, slick and warm and hard, and that’s when I really knew we were skinny-dipping. There was absolutely nothing coming between Web and me now.

And then he ducked under the water again. Only this time, he did more than brush me with his hand.

…

Web floated in the gentle ripples, splayed out like a cologne model in some glossy magazine. “That was hot,” he said, eyes lasering into me. “You think that was hot?”

“I guess,” I said, sinking deeper into the water and doing my best to avoid his gaze.

Web sat upright. “Come here.”

“What? No, I don’t think—”

But then the octopus of Lake Serenity was on the move again. And once again, I was powerless to escape.

Reflections of a Rock Lobster – Page 21

(When the author hit puberty at the age of 12, he reports that he became even more hyper-sexual than before.)

When I was twelve, the physical changes we had been told about in health class started to happen. I was getting taller, and growing pubic hair, and my voice was deepening a bit. It may seem impossible in contrast to the busy sex life of my childhood years, but I also developed a heightened sexuality.

Reflections of a Rock Lobster – Page 26

(In junior high, the author had loveless sex with another boy whom he didn’t particularly like.)

The last holdout from my childhood sexual years was David Beamer. Dave was slower than other kids so he went to a special school. He and I never had a close relationship but once Bob was gone I turned to Dave in a desperate search for security and companionship. I began to frequent Dave’s house and to have sex with him, yet our communication only became more diluted. The more I tried, the worse the situation got. It was torture because I wanted more out of these relationships than sexual stimulation.

The Full Spectrum – Page 146

(The author recounts an erotic dream in which she has sex with her friend.)

It is warm. Her hands are everywhere on me, on my thighs, breasts, shoulders. She laughs softly, and it echoes through the room. I’m not sure where we are, but it’s a bed, and the sheets smell like lavender. She leans closer and kisses me, fingers and palm slipping between my legs.

Revolutionary Voices – Pages 97, 98 + 99

(An overweight woman with eating disorders realizes that obesity is caused by “compulsory heterosexuality” forcing women to hide their true lesbian feelings and thus to hate themselves.)

Secret Hungers

I had an eating disorder in high school. Like millions of American girls, I hated my body. I ate compulsively, and believed I could never be normal. I was achingly envious of thin, attractive women.

…

I was fascinated when men liked me. I believed that by controlling my weight, I could ensure a boyfriend’s loyalty. If he drifted away, I knew he had finally noticed my body was too big. If he stayed, I was hungry for sex. His desire made me feel alive.

…

As my eating obsession raged on in college, feminist accounts of eating disorders reassured me. I was suffering from issues of body image and sense of self that affect all women in our society. Because women are treated as sex objects, I learned, we are often alienated from our sexuality and from our desires. That made sense to me. I knew there was something wrong with the way I kept sneaking and stealing food, eating boxes of cookies at a time and hating myself.

…

I learned that I wanted to be big, to take up space, to rage.

…

I had prayed for years for someone to tell me, plainly and simply, what my eating disorder was about. No theory suggested that shame about my body, my needs, and desires might be shame about my queer sexuality. None suggested that envy of women might be a cover for desire. Those suggestions may be too threatening to straight feminists. Most women suffer from similar anxiety, guilt, and food obsession, and all women are constrained by compulsory heterosexuality. Perhaps food and body-image obsession are a secret language for all women. They speak a rebellion, a refusal to fit mind and soul into the role of the perfect straight girl. They speak women’s hunger for more intimate, physical, primary relationships to other women.

…

My residual feelings of guilt about eating evaporated. I would still sit down and eat a box of cookies at a stretch fairly frequently. But I usually let myself shrug off the complex, painful emotions that go with a binge. They seemed like a waste of energy. The guilt and secrecy were unnecessary.

I began to take pride in the fact that I would never be the perfect, pretty, docile straight girl—treasured by my family and by men, celebrated by society.

In Your Face – Page 100

(The narrator recalls with mixed feelings the interactions with online child predators he had when he was a young teenager.)

The first time I told someone that I might be gay I was thirteen- or fourteen-years-old, probably closer to fourteen. It was my freshman year in high school, and I was on Prodigy, the computer service, and I met a guy, and he just started talking to me, and the subject got to being gay, and I told him that I thought I might be gay. And he told me that he was seventeen years old, and so I felt like I could relate to him. And I wrote to him all the time, and we always talked.

Later on, he told me that he was thirty-three, and I was upset, ’cause we had gotten to be good friends, and that bothered me that he lied to me. …

A few months after that, I had the same kind of experience. I was out to a few more people then, but I met another thirty-three-year-old guy on the computer, who subsequently fell in love with me. And it was, not really an emotionally scarring experience but it was kind of a scarring experience, because I had two thirty-three-year-old men that were in love with me. I’m thirteen or fourteen, seriously questioning my sexuality; they were nice people; I’m glad nothing ever happened, and, I don’t know, it just reaffirmed my belief that I needed to stick to who I was and not try to be something that other people wanted me to be.

Passages of Pride – Page 32

(A man recalls a brief sexual encounter he had as a young teenager.)

After the tournament, the boys went back to their room for the night. Dan left the room briefly to go to the bathroom, and when he returned, the lights were out and Richard was in Dan’s bed, waiting. The two boys began “fooling around” under the covers, Dan recalls, kissing, groping, and rolling on top of each other. After ten or fifteen minutes, Richard suddenly pulled away, guilt-ridden and humiliated by what they had been doing.

“I’ll never be able to look at you the same way again,” he angrily told Dan.

The Full Spectrum – Pages 140 + 141

(Two teenaged boys go to the movies and have an erotic encounter in the theater restroom.)

We ended up in the theater—we were supposed to be seeing some lame comedy. It started with hand-holding. Then him showing me the silver charm bracelet his friend Natalie had given him, which I grabbed and challenged him to get back. All innocent and flirty, until I slid the bracelet across my crotch, daring him with my eyes to grab for it now.

Next thing I know we’re on the floor in the unisex bathroom, door locked and lights out, fumbling all over each other. At one point on top of me, he began ramming his tongue in my mouth and swirling it around. When I started laughing, he admitted, in the same casual tone with which he’d later dump me, that he didn’t know what the hell he was doing either. I didn’t need the lights on to see his characteristic shoulder shrug.

Afterward we slid against the wall of the theater’s small arcade, looking at each other and vaguely smiling, miles apart, still processing. We ended the night simply saying goodbye.

Revolutionary Voices – Page 167

(A woman denounces the polarity of cultural assumptions, saying there is no gay or straight, no right or wrong.)

Labels, Names, & Identity

My sexuality is as fluid, infinite, undefinable, and ever-changing as the north-flowing river that runs through the valley where I have spent nearly all my life. The continuum of sexuality is long, and I am always slip-sliding from one side to the other and most often stopping to rest somewhere in the middle. Sexuality is not black or white … it is gray, and gray comes in infinite shades, more than could ever be contained in the biggest box of drawing pencils.

I know who I am. Being unable to fit into a narrow category defined by someone else is not confusion. I know that defining myself is not so simple. If I collect all the labels that apply to me—Jewish-pagan-vegan-bisexual-lesbian-queer-woman-girl-womyn-grrrl—I would quickly fill up a book. Everyone’s sexuality is unique, just as no two maple leaves on the trees surrounding my parents’ house are the same as they transform into fiery red, orange, and yellow each autumn. That is part of what makes us human. The unnatural society we have imposed on the natural world is based on polarity and dichotomy. But we are constantly transforming, developing, and changing. Nothing is as simple as yes or no, right or wrong.

Revolutionary Voices – Page 95

(Erotic poem by a teenage girl, describing an encounter during a sleepover.)

Poems whispered in the dark

by Laura and Lauren, to each other

Untitled

by Laura

in the dim light of my room

after the footsteps have stopped

i sink into you

i bare my body to your eyes

the same body i conceal from the world

your eyes peruse my curves and accept them

only you love my flaws

the heat between our bodies burns my flesh

melts away insecurity

under the covers your fingers perfect my naked body

your skin clothes me

i hover above you and watch you watch me move

your eyes give me strength

your breath—reassurance

in the dim light of my room

after the footsteps have stopped

i accept myself

The Order of the Poison Oak – Pages 155 + 156

(A boy suggests anal sex to another boy, who refuses.)

Then he leaned closer to me still and whispered something.

“Web!” I said, even as my pulse quickened.

“What?” He looked absolutely innocent, which was saying something given what he’d just whispered in my ear.

“We can’t!” I said.

“Why not?”

“Well, for one thing, we don’t have any condoms. And even if we did, that’s just not something I’d do—not for a long, long time.”

The Order of the Poison Oak – Page 162

(A boy suggests mutual masturbation to another boy, who again resists.)

“Are you kidding? It took me all of twenty minutes to get into your pants. Not exactly a challenge. Even Min took longer than that.”

By now, Web had to be able to see how red my face was, even in the dark, even in the orange throb of those distant forest fires.

Web laughed again. “Now you don’t just look serious—now you look shocked! Hey, it’s no big deal.

It’s the way of the world. Guys need sex. You know I’m right.” He held a hand out toward me. “Now come on, let’s get each other off!”

I took a step backward, away from him.

“Oh, please!” he said. “It’s not like you’re Mr. Innocent!”

In Your Face – Pages 37 + 38

(The author describes being molested at age three, and then again starting at age ten.)

Well, the first time I knew I was gay was when I was three. I was molested by two girl cousins—I’m not gay because of that by the way. I remember thinking, even when it was happening, that this shouldn’t be happening because I like boys. And that was my first memory of sexual identity at all. Then after that, it was in the back of my head; I always thought about it.

I messed around with some friends I had and stuff, and then, when I was ten I started talking to my mother’s boyfriend–and I started telling him, that I had feelings toward boys and stuff like that. At the time, I had this friend who was absolutely gorgeous, and I had a total crush on him, and I told my mother’s boyfriend about it. It ended up that he used that to start a sexual relationship with me, and it lasted till I was seventeen.

And then, after what started happening at home, I started losing control of my home life. I didn’t have anything that felt stable; I was living a total lie. I was lying to my mother; I was lying to my friends: I was lying to everybody. I couldn’t be home with my stepfather because he didn’t want a relationship; he just wanted to use me for sex.

…

I told my mom when I was thirteen that my stepfather was molesting me. My mother didn’t do anything.

…

I don’t consider what my stepfather did to me child molestation even though it was really. I consider it to be rape because through that, my mother’s boyfriend totally destroyed my relationship with my mother. That wasn’t my first sexual experience, so I’m not scarred by it or anything. I’m just more upset at the emotional part of it. He was very manipulative and he showed me a lot of attention.

Revolutionary Voices – Page 164

(A teenager describes “coming out” as a lesbian at age 13.)

I began my coming-out process at 13, and my writing and art have helped me through it all. I am 16, Jewish, and queer. Activism, writing, improvisation, hiking, reading, messing with people’s assumptions about gender, and questioning the status quo are all passions of mine. It took me a while to learn to find power in words that have been used to hurt me, such as dyke, butch, and queer, but now I have reclaimed them for myself.

Reflections of a Rock Lobster – Page 28

(A 13-year-old boy becomes sexually attracted to his eighth-grade gym teacher.)

In eighth grade I developed my first crush on a man from afar. It was an adolescent and purely physical attraction, but no less strong for that. The man was my eighth grade phys. ed. teacher. I always thought he treated me differently from the rest of the students: while the others were doing pushups I was allowed to walk the nature trail.

The Full Spectrum – Page 237

(The narrator meets a sexually agressive new man.)

As Simon and Ahmed hadn’t seen each other for a while, Simon asked Ahmed if he had met anyone. Ahmed responded: “Yes, I met someone. But it didn’t work out. He was too small, and you know, I like them big.” With this, Ahmed shot an impish glance in my direction, tilted back his head, and started to humbly chuckle. As the conversation continued, Ahmed continued to stare at me now and then, seeming to have a twinkle in his eye that said “fuck me.”

The Order of the Poison Oak – Page 209

(Two boys have a G-rated sexual encounter in a rowboat.)

Then I was on the seat next to him, holding him and kissing him.

“I’m so glad I met you, Russel Middlebrook,” Otto said. “I think I must be the luckiest guy in the world.”

“Second luckiest,” I said, kissing him again.

You’re not supposed to stand in a rowboat, and we didn’t. But there are other things you can do, and Otto and I definitely did plenty of those.

Revolutionary Voices – Page 108

(A biracial AIDS activist only hands out condoms to people of certain races, but not to others.)

I have joined many different Queer and Asian Pacific American (APA) organizations. I also have become an AIDS activist, and I pass out condoms to people of color. As I walk through the streets doing this, I look for people of color, but sometimes it is difficult to tell whether one is of color. When I’m only supposed to pass them out to APAS, it becomes even more difficult.

“Is he Filipino? Wait, he might be Latino.”

“Is that girl APA, because she might be a mix between Russian

and ethnic-Jewish.”

When I accidentally assume someone’s ethnicity I feel embarrassed. But it happens a lot.

In Your Face – Pages 154 + 155

(A 17-old-years muses about promiscuity in the gay community.)

I’m seventeen….

…

In the 1970s people had sex a lot because there was no AIDS, and I’m really interested in the pre-AIDS era. I want to study that. Our community was really self-destructive in the 1970s. And it still is in a lot of ways. Like in the Castro, the same kind of people who were around in the 1970s are still there. A lot of the young gay people I know who party all the time, they’re just the same as people were in the 1970s; they don’t take care of themselves. I’m worried because I know that a lot of them are gonna get AIDS because they just have sex all the time, and you can’t do that.

I consider myself more promiscuous than I’d like to be, but not as promiscuous, not nearly as promiscuous, as most guys out there. I would never have sex with somebody whom I didn’t want to have sex with and whom I wasn’t attracted to, but a lot of people do. They feel loved when they have sex, and they want to make up for all the hate that they experienced. Especially in school.

The Full Spectrum – Page 221

(A high-school boy becomes popular by dispensing tampons and sanitary pads to girls having their periods.)

“Fucking men. I wish guys would bleed out their asses once a month, goddammit,” my godsister wailed during her heavy flow, looking at me with spite.

Though I couldn’t help that my anatomy was different, I felt remorse for not having an intrusive monthly visitor. It was like surviving a plane crash and living with the guilt that it was someone else, and not you, who had to die. I did the only thing I could to make my girl friends’ lives better: I began carrying feminine hygiene products in my backpack to school. This act alone gained me the importance of a drug dealer, and my lady friends became a horde of dope fiends.

Instead of fishing to find a quarter at the bottom of their purses, girls would come up to me during classes, attempting to discreetly ask for assistance with a hearty, “I’m on the rag—help me!” I would then rapidly pull out everything I had available and showcase them with my hands, like a stage girl on The Price Is Right.

“Do you want a tampon or a pad? I have the pad with or without wings. These overnighters with wings are really absorbent, so if you’re surfing a big crimson wave, this is the one. But if you want a tampon, I have to suggest these superabsorbent ultrathins, because you can barely feel them and they’re made from unbleached cotton, not rayon. If you want to be environmentally friendly, however, I just got the Instead: Alternative Feminine Protection Cup….”

Revolutionary Voices – Page 123

(Erotic poem.)

Further Falling

Self pressed to self, breast reflects breast

as we tense, shedding senses,

pushing our muscled tongues to the edge

of death. Lover, if each touch

is a step to hell, then let

me celebrate your devil neck,

your cleft toes, the red swell

of flesh where you have bled.

ADDENDUM

[When we started researching this report, the following two books—Mama's Boy, Preacher's Son, and Love & Sex: Ten Stories of Truth—were on the GLSEN reading list for grades 7-12, but for some reason were both recently removed from the list. Mama's Boy was shifted to the "Educator Resources" GLSEN reading list, while Love & Sex was deleted from the GLSEN site entirely, undoubtedly because it had drawn strong criticism from those who had seen it. So, although neither of these books are technically being recommended by GLSEN for middle-school and high-school students anymore, we include them here as an addendum because until recently they were being recommended.]

Mama’s Boy, Preacher’s Son – Pages 90, 91 + 92

(Kevin Jennings recounts his early sexual experiences with a boy named Mike.)

Now that I finally had social status, I wanted to make sure I kept it, and a girlfriend seemed the best way of warding off any accusations of faggotry.

But denial was getting harder to pull off, because I had finally acted on my same-sex feelings. Mom became a kind of second mother for many of the teens who worked at McDonald’s, who would often drop by our apartment to talk with her or ask her advice, so I got to know a lot of them. One girl, Tammy became one of the “girlfriends” I took to a school dance my sophomore year. But the one who would have the biggest impact was a kid named Mike.

…

I can’t recall exactly how we ended up in my bedroom, except Mike saying something like, “Wanna try it?” I nodded yes and, like a robot, got up and followed Mike to my room.

I pulled down my shorts and lay on the bed, unmoving. Mike kept his clothes on. While it was happening, I was in heaven. I couldn’t believe how it felt. But as soon as it was over I went to hell, filled with shame at what we had done. Mike obviously thought it was his turn now, but I pulled up my shorts and told him to go—go now. I was filled with disgust at the faggot who had lowered himself to do this “to” me. Confused and probably hurt, Mike left.

Mike and I would have several more encounters during my sophomore year, probably because he didn’t have many other options. The pattern was always the same, although we did take our clothes off eventually. Sexually speaking, it was always a one-way street, a street only Mike traveled down, which allowed me to imagine on some level that I wasn’t gay, only Mike was.

Mama’s Boy, Preacher’s Son – Page 98

(Kevin Jennings recounts another early sexual experience.)

When we got back to my house, we went to bed and a conversation started. Maybe it was the alcohol, maybe it was our teenage hormones, but soon we were admitting our attraction to guys, then our attraction to each other and, soon after that, we were acting on that attraction. Peter rolled over and kissed me passionately (something I had never let Mike do) and said, “Well, I guess we’ve both screwed up our lives now,” and then we went at it. But it didn’t feel like I was screwing anything up. The old cliché “it felt so right” was true: for the first time, I was having a sexual experience with someone I was both attracted to and cared about. This was no one-way street. Peter was so cute and I was so turned on, soon all of our clothes were off and we “did it all,” in a night that I can honestly say, twenty-five years later, was one of the most exciting ones of my life.

Love & Sex: Ten Stories of Truth – Pages 160 + 161

(A groupie describes the mild orgasmic sounds of the musician she’s having sex with.)

The sixth time we had sex—yes, I was counting, because it was important for me to tally my emotions, and because I’d never had sex with anyone before—I almost told him.

Michael sighed very quietly, almost whistling, which was how I knew he came. He was never noisy in bed, and I couldn’t just feel what was happening to him. I had to note little clues like his cum-sigh so I could respond but still keep most of my attention focused on memorizing Michael as he was and also recreating him as my soul mate.

Love & Sex: Ten Stories of Truth – Pages 146, 147 + 149

(Two boys have sex, ejaculating on each other. Afterward, one sucks the other’s sperm from some fabric and enjoys its “exquisite bitter taste.”)

I don’t remember which of us moved first. Maybe both at the same time. My hand met the smooth curve of his forearm, and his met mine. He brushed against me with the tips of his fingernails, up to the ticklish place on the inside of my elbow, then back down to my wrist. I moved my hand to his chest. I couldn’t believe how hard the muscles were.

Matt let his body go limp so I could lift off his T-shirt.

…

In seconds we had each other’s pants off. I’m fuzzy on the logistics, if we each undid our own or if we let the other person wrestle with the buttons. But there we were, exposed, our jeans in a heap on the floor.

We just lay there a minute, getting used to the sheer fact of so much skin. I pressed close, wishing I could touch every inch of him at once. I could be his body-hugging wet suit; he could swim in me. I was so content with our simple proximity that I was startled when Matt reached down to my dick. I must have jumped, because he stopped and went rigid as a corpse. I sighed as obviously as I could to let him know it was okay. Then he started squeezing his fingers, making a circle, tighter and tighter, experimenting with different levels of pressure. Cylinder, I was thinking. Base. Circumference. I recalled the formula for calculating the volume of a solid object.

Matt had one leg locked between mine, so that his dick was smushed between his stomach and my thigh. As his hand jerked up and down on me, his hips humped with the same rhythm. He began murmuring under his breath, the way people talk in their sleep. “Oh my God. This is the best when it’s flattened, and … shit … it feels like it hurts but…”

Matt cried one last word, something like “now” or “no,” and I felt a pool of warmth seeping on my thigh. Acute, I sang to myself. Hyperboloid! And then I came, letting Matt’s hand catch it all.

…

When my mother came in, I told her I had homework to finish. I went back to my room, locked the door, and lay down where Matt and I had been. I could still smell him, still feel his heat in the air. I picked up the T-shirt I had used to clean myself and draped it like a mask over my face. I sucked on the place where Matt’s sperm had stained the fabric and let the exquisite bitter taste of him salt my spit.

Original Link

By Michelle Malkin  •  December 2, 2009 09:54 AM

Graph via Steve McIntyre

My syndicated column today looks at the global warming cultists in the Obama administration who are working overtime to paper over the ClimateGate scandal. Yesterday, Phil Jones, the head of the U.K.’s Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia stepped aside while the university investigates. Penn State prof Michael Mann, purveyor of the infamous hockey stick graph of spiking global temperatures peddled by Al Gore, is also under investigation. GOP Sen. James Inhofe, vigilant watchdog over global warming shenanigans, wants Babs Boxer to investigate. As Obama heads to Copenhagen to crusade for massive interventions to stop global warming, a new Harris Poll shows a significant shift in public opinion away from the cult of climate change. Jonah Goldberg dissects the groupthink that has gripped the global warming industry and its media enablers. Ed Driscoll takes you on a tour through global warming evolution in six and a half minutes. Well now: “Moderate” (liberal) GOP candidates/lawmakers led by GOP cap-and-tax 8′er Mark Kirk are running as fast as they can from the global warming hot mess.

Hide the decline, hide the decline…

Oh, and just a reminder:

Former Vice President Al Gore had four White House meetings in April. The records suggest these were not social calls for Gore, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work to curb global warming. Two of the meetings were with John Holdren, Obama’s top science and technology adviser.

***

All the president’s ClimateGate deniers
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2009

“The science is settled,” we’ve been told for decades by zealous proponents of man-made global warming hysteria. Thanks to an earth-shaking hacking scandal across the pond, we now have mountains of documents from the world’s leading global warming advocacy center that show the science is about as settled as a southeast Asian tsunami. You won’t be surprised by the Obama administration’s response to ClimateGate.

With pursed lips and closed eyes and ears, the White House is clinging to the old eco-mantra: The science is settled.

Never mind all the devastating new information about data manipulation, intimidation, and cult-like cover-ups to “hide the decline” in global temperatures over the last half-century, they say. The science is settled.

Never mind what The Atlantic’s Clive Crook, after wading through the climate science email files of the U.K.’s Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, called the overpowering “stink of intellectual corruption” — combined with mafia-like suppression of dissent, suppression of evidence and methods, and “plain statistical incompetence” exposed by the document trove. The science is settled.

Never mind the expedient disappearance of mounds of raw weather station data that dissenting scientists were seeking through freedom of information requests from the Climatic Research Unit. The science is settled.

In March, President Obama made a grandiose show of putting “science” above “politics” when lifting the ban on government-funded human embryonic stem cell research. “Promoting science isn’t just about providing resources — it’s also about protecting free and open inquiry,” he said during the signing ceremony. “It’s about letting scientists like those who are here today do their jobs, free from manipulation or coercion, and listening to what they tell us, even when it’s inconvenient — especially when it’s inconvenient. It is about ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda — and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology.”

Yet, the pro-sound science president has surrounded himself with radical ClimateGate deniers who have spent their entire professional careers “settling” man-made global warming disaster science through fear-mongering, intimidation, and ridicule of opponents.

*Science czar John Holdren, who will testify on Capitol Hill this week at a hearing on ClimateGate, infamously hyped weather catastrophes and demographic disasters in the 1970s with his population control freak pals Paul and Anne Ehrlich. He made a public bet against free-market economist Julian Simon predicting dire shortages of five natural resources as a result of feared overconsumption. He lost on all counts. No matter.

Holdren’s failure didn’t stop him from writing forcefully about mass sterilization and forced abortion “solutions” to a fizzling, sizzling, overpopulated planet. And it didn’t stop him from making a living making more dire predictions. In 1986, Ehrlich credited Holdren with forecasting that “carbon-dioxide climate-induced famines could kill as many as a billion people before the year 2020.” He went on to Harvard and the White House. On the David Letterman show earlier this year, Holdren fretted that his son “might not see snow!”

Canada Free Press (CFP) columnist Canadian climatologist Dr. Tim Ball notes that Holdren turned up in the ClimateGate files belittling the work of astrophysicists Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the Solar, Stellar, and Planetary Sciences Division. Holdren put “Harvard” in sneer quotes when mocking a research paper Baliunas and Soon published in 2003 showing that “the 20th century is probably not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climatic period of the last millennium.” First, deny. Next, deride.

*Energy Secretary Steven Chu picked derision as his weapon earlier this year when peddling the Obama administration’s greenhouse-gas emission policy. “The American public…just like your teenage kids, aren’t acting in a way that they should act,” the Wall Street Journal quoted Chu. He dismissed dissent by asserting “there’s very little debate” about the impact of “green energy” policy on the economy.

There’s “very little debate,” of course, because dissenters get crushed.

*The Obama team’s chief eco-dissent-crusher is climate czar Carol Browner.

As I’ve reported and reminded over the years, she oversaw the destruction of Environmental Protection Agency computer files in brazen violation of a federal judge’s order requiring the agency to preserve its records during the Clinton years.

Over the past year, the EPA has stifled the dissent of Alan Carlin, a senior research analyst at the Environmental Protection Agency, who questioned the administration’s reliance on outdated research on the health effects of greenhouse gases – and also sought to yank a YouTube video created by EPA lawyers Allan Zabel and Laurie Williams that is critical of cap-and-trade. Browner reportedly threatened auto execs in July by telling them to “put nothing in writing…ever” about their negotiations with her.

And she is now leading the “science is settled” stonewalling in the wake of ClimateGate. “I’m sticking with the 2,500 scientists,” she said. These people have been studying this issue for a very long time and agree this problem is real.” Book-cookers are good at making it seem so.

In any case, last year, more than 31,000 scientists — – including 9,021 PhDs — signed a petition sponsored by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine rejecting claims of human-caused global warming.

But hey, who’s counting? The science is settled.

***

Australia rejects a massive cap-and-tax bill.

Richard Lindzen: No, the science isn’t settled.

Paul Driessen: Time to cancel Copenhagen.

Ron Bailey on the scientific tragedy of ClimateGate:

How can the world of climate science recover? First, carry out independent investigations of the activities of the researchers involved. Pennsylvania State University has announced that it will investigate the activities of researcher Michael Mann who worked closely with the CRU and several times expressed in the leaked emails his desire to stifle the scientific work of researchers with whom he disagreed. In Britain, Nigel Lawson, former Chancellor of the Exchequer, has called for an independent investigation of the CRU. Tireless journalistic global warming scold George Monbiot has declared, “It’s no use pretending this isn’t a major blow…. I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign.”

//


//

Original Article

GENEVA —

Switzerland says the country’s new ban on the building of minarets is not aimed at Muslims but at Islamic fundamentalism.

Swiss Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf says her country supports religious freedoms.

She says Sunday’s referendum, during which voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional ban on minarets, was not “a referendum against Islam … but a vote directed against fundamentalist developments.”

Widmer-Schlumpf spoke on arrival Monday at a meeting with EU justice ministers. Switzerland is not an EU member but has close and regular contacts with the EU.

LIVESHOTS: Swiss Minarets a Tolerance Test for Europe?

Swiss voters support barring construction of the iconic mosque towers in a surprise vote that put Switzerland at the forefront of a European backlash against a growing Muslim population.

Muslim groups in Switzerland and abroad condemned the vote as biased and anti-Islamic. Business groups said the decision hurt Switzerland’s international standing and could damage relations with Muslim nations and wealthy investors who bank, travel and shop there.

“The Swiss have failed to give a clear signal for diversity, freedom of religion and human rights,” said Omar Al-Rawi, integration representative of the Islamic Denomination in Austria, which said its reaction was “grief and deep disappointment.”

The referendum by the nationalist Swiss People’s Party labeled minarets as symbols of rising Muslim political power that could one day transform Switzerland into an Islamic nation. The initiative was approved 57.5 to 42.5 percent by some 2.67 million voters. Only four of the 26 cantons or states opposed the initiative, granting the double approval that makes it part of the Swiss constitution.

Muslims comprise about 6 percent of Switzerland’s 7.5 million people. Many are refugees from the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and about one in 10 actively practices their religion, the government says.

The country’s four standing minarets, which won’t be affected by the ban, do not traditionally broadcast the call to prayer outside their own buildings.

The sponsors of the initiative provoked complaints of bias from local officials and human-rights group with campaign posters that showed minarets rising like missiles from the Swiss flag next to a fully veiled woman. Backers said the growing Muslim population was straining the country “because Muslims don’t just practice religion.”

“The minaret is a sign of political power and demand, comparable with whole-body covering by the burqa, tolerance of forced marriage and genital mutilation of girls,” the sponsors said. They noted that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has compared mosques to Islam’s military barracks and called “the minarets our bayonets.”

Anxieties about growing Muslim minorities have rippled across Europe in recent years, leading to legal changes in some countries. There have been French moves to ban the full-length body covering known as the burqa. Some German states have introduced bans on head scarves for Muslim women teaching in public schools. Mosques and minaret construction projects in Sweden, France, Italy, Austria, Greece, Germany and Slovenia have been met by protests.

But the Swiss ban in minarets, sponsored by the country’s largest political party, was one of the most extreme reactions.

“It’s a sad day for freedom of religion,” said Mohammed Shafiq, the chief executive of the Ramadhan Foundation, a British youth organization. “A constitutional amendment that’s targeted towards one religious community is discriminatory and abhorrent.”

He said he was concerned the decision could have reverberations in other European countries.

Amnesty International said the vote violated freedom of religion and would probably be overturned by the Swiss supreme court or the European Court of Human Rights.

The seven-member Cabinet that heads the Swiss government had spoken out strongly against the initiative but the government said it accepted the vote and would impose an immediate ban on minaret construction.

It said that “Muslims in Switzerland are able to practice their religion alone or in community with others, and live according to their beliefs just as before.” It took the unusual step of issuing its press release in Arabic as well as German, French, Italian and English.

Sunday’s results stood in stark contrast to opinion polls, last taken 10 days ago, that showed 37 percent supporting the proposal. Experts said before the vote that they feared Swiss had pretended during the polling that they opposed the ban because they didn’t want to appear intolerant.

“The sponsors of the ban have achieved something everyone wanted to prevent, and that is to influence and change the relations to Muslims and their social integration in a negative way,” said Taner Hatipoglu, president of the Federation of Islamic Organizations in Zurich. “Muslims indeed will not feel safe anymore.”

The People’s Party has campaigned mainly unsuccessfully in previous years against immigrants with campaign posters showing white sheep kicking a black sheep off the Swiss flag and another with brown hands grabbing eagerly for Swiss passports.

Geneva’s main mosque was vandalized Thursday when someone threw a pot of pink paint at the entrance. Earlier this month, a vehicle with a loudspeaker drove through the area imitating a muezzin’s call to prayer, and vandals damaged a mosaic when they threw cobblestones at the building.

Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with the Climategate whitewash, says Christopher Booker.

By Christopher Booker
Published: 6:10PM GMT 28 Nov 2009

A week after my colleague James Delingpole , on his Telegraph blog, coined the term “Climategate” to describe the scandal revealed by the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, Google was showing that the word now appears across the internet more than nine million times. But in all these acres of electronic coverage, one hugely relevant point about these thousands of documents has largely been missed.

The reason why even the Guardian’s George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Professor Philip Jones, the CRU’s director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC’s key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely – not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.

Dr Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” graph which 10 years ago turned climate history on its head by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history.

Given star billing by the IPCC, not least for the way it appeared to eliminate the long-accepted Mediaeval Warm Period when temperatures were higher they are today, the graph became the central icon of the entire man-made global warming movement.

Since 2003, however, when the statistical methods used to create the “hockey stick” were first exposed as fundamentally flawed by an expert Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre , an increasingly heated battle has been raging between Mann’s supporters, calling themselves “the Hockey Team”, and McIntyre and his own allies, as they have ever more devastatingly called into question the entire statistical basis on which the IPCC and CRU construct their case.

The senders and recipients of the leaked CRU emails constitute a cast list of the IPCC’s scientific elite, including not just the “Hockey Team”, such as Dr Mann himself, Dr Jones and his CRU colleague Keith Briffa, but Ben Santer, responsible for a highly controversial rewriting of key passages in the IPCC’s 1995 report; Kevin Trenberth, who similarly controversially pushed the IPCC into scaremongering over hurricane activity; and Gavin Schmidt, right-hand man to Al Gore’s ally Dr James Hansen, whose own GISS record of surface temperature data is second in importance only to that of the CRU itself.

There are three threads in particular in the leaked documents which have sent a shock wave through informed observers across the world. Perhaps the most obvious, as lucidly put together by Willis Eschenbach (see McIntyre’s blog Climate Audit and Anthony Watt’s blog Watts Up With That ), is the highly disturbing series of emails which show how Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders under freedom of information laws.

They have come up with every possible excuse for concealing the background data on which their findings and temperature records were based.

This in itself has become a major scandal, not least Dr Jones’s refusal to release the basic data from which the CRU derives its hugely influential temperature record, which culminated last summer in his startling claim that much of the data from all over the world had simply got “lost”. Most incriminating of all are the emails in which scientists are advised to delete large chunks of data, which, when this is done after receipt of a freedom of information request, is a criminal offence.

But the question which inevitably arises from this systematic refusal to release their data is – what is it that these scientists seem so anxious to hide? The second and most shocking revelation of the leaked documents is how they show the scientists trying to manipulate data through their tortuous computer programmes, always to point in only the one desired direction – to lower past temperatures and to “adjust” recent temperatures upwards, in order to convey the impression of an accelerated warming. This comes up so often (not least in the documents relating to computer data in the Harry Read Me file) that it becomes the most disturbing single element of the entire story. This is what Mr McIntyre caught Dr Hansen doing with his GISS temperature record last year (after which Hansen was forced to revise his record), and two further shocking examples have now come to light from Australia and New Zealand.

In each of these countries it has been possible for local scientists to compare the official temperature record with the original data on which it was supposedly based. In each case it is clear that the same trick has been played – to turn an essentially flat temperature chart into a graph which shows temperatures steadily rising. And in each case this manipulation was carried out under the influence of the CRU.

What is tragically evident from the Harry Read Me file is the picture it gives of the CRU scientists hopelessly at sea with the complex computer programmes they had devised to contort their data in the approved direction, more than once expressing their own desperation at how difficult it was to get the desired results.

The third shocking revelation of these documents is the ruthless way in which these academics have been determined to silence any expert questioning of the findings they have arrived at by such dubious methods – not just by refusing to disclose their basic data but by discrediting and freezing out any scientific journal which dares to publish their critics’ work. It seems they are prepared to stop at nothing to stifle scientific debate in this way, not least by ensuring that no dissenting research should find its way into the pages of IPCC reports.

Back in 2006, when the eminent US statistician Professor Edward Wegman produced an expert report for the US Congress vindicating Steve McIntyre’s demolition of the “hockey stick”, he excoriated the way in which this same “tightly knit group” of academics seemed only too keen to collaborate with each other and to “peer review” each other’s papers in order to dominate the findings of those IPCC reports on which much of the future of the US and world economy may hang. In light of the latest revelations, it now seems even more evident that these men have been failing to uphold those principles which lie at the heart of genuine scientific enquiry and debate. Already one respected US climate scientist, Dr Eduardo Zorita, has called for Dr Mann and Dr Jones to be barred from any further participation in the IPCC. Even our own George Monbiot, horrified at finding how he has been betrayed by the supposed experts he has been revering and citing for so long, has called for Dr Jones to step down as head of the CRU.

The former Chancellor Lord (Nigel) Lawson, last week launching his new think tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation , rightly called for a proper independent inquiry into the maze of skulduggery revealed by the CRU leaks. But the inquiry mooted on Friday, possibly to be chaired by Lord Rees, President of the Royal Society – itself long a shameless propagandist for the warmist cause – is far from being what Lord Lawson had in mind. Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with a whitewash of what has become the greatest scientific scandal of our age.

Christopher Booker’s The Real Global Warming Disaster: Is the Obsession with ‘Climate Change’ Turning Out to be the Most Costly Scientific Blunder in History? (Continuum, £16.99) is available from Telegraph Books for £14.99 plus £1.25 p & p.

Original Article

//

President Obama’s task last night wasn’t enviable: make a costly and unpopular decision with unpredictable prospects of success sound like something America should have confidence in. It’s like looking for support from your wife and kids after gathering them in the living room to tell them you’re putting the last of the family savings into your dream of opening a restaurant that only serves applesauce — “Just applesauce? Can that actually work?” — except, obviously, way more serious and consequential, since actual human lives and billions upon billions of dollars are at stake. Anyway, judging by the reactions to President Obama’s speech, he has a lot more convincing to do.

• Clive Crook says the speech contradicted itself in multiple places, was “surprisingly unconfident,” and probably just “confused people.” [Atlantic]

• Mattew Yglesias found it “oddly weak on the feasibility point and instead lead [sic] into the weird kinda sorta promise to start winding the war down in 2011 which struck me as a promise vague enough to not reassure the left while also being concrete enough to set the right-wing piranhas in motion.” [Think Progress]

• Fred Barnes “had hoped Obama would declare that nothing will deter him, as commander-in-chief, from prevailing in Afghanistan. But it turns out a lot of things might deter him.” [Blog/Weekly Standard]

• Taeggan Goddard says “it’s hard to feel positive after this one,” which “didn’t do much to change public opinion on an increasingly unpopular war.” [Political Wire]

• Ross Douthat calls the speech “a strange and schizophrenic one, laying its emphasis on two not-necessarily-compatible goals — victory, and a swift withdrawal.” [Ross Douthat/NYT]

• Jennifer Rubin thinks that, owing to “either personal peevishness or political expediency,” Obama “felt compelled to get in his digs” yet again at George W. Bush, “even in a wartime speech in which bipartisanship would have been essential.” [Contentions/Commentary]

• Bill Kristol thinks Obama “spoke as a war president,” though he didn’t appreciate Obama’s “foolish eagerness to tell us he’s as eager as can be to get us out of Afghanistan as soon as he can.” [Post Partisan/WP]

• Nile Gardiner writes that Obama’s “speech was less a rallying cry for victory over barbarism, than a dull professorial-style lecture that sought to justify his confused approach to the US mission in a cold and clinical fashion that simply failed to convince or inspire.” [Telegraph UK]

• Chris Cillizza isn’t sure if the speech will “change any minds.” [Fix/WP]

• Richard Cohen found the speech “well written and spoken with conviction,” but he still doesn’t think the plan will work. [Post Partisan/WP]

• Richard Just “basically liked Obama’s speech” but was “bothered” by how “weirdly inconsistent [it was] with itself.” [Plank/New Republic]

• Michael Crowley notes that Obama’s speech was consistent with his speech on Afghanistan in March, but is unlikely to sway the American people. While Obama’s “tactic of addressing opposing views … was mature and persuasive, and demonstrated the thought he had put into this decision,” he also said “almost nothing that would qualify as the sort of bracing, hard truth that Candidate Obama promised to tell the public.” [Plank/New Republic]

• Kevin Drum was “pretty underwhelmed.” Two main problems were the total lack of discussion about new tactics and that “most of the speech wasn’t even devoted to the war at all.” [Mother Jones]

• Adam Serwer calls it “perhaps his least inspiring speech ever” and “Bush-like in its embrace of platitudes and vagaries.” [Tapped/American Prospect]

• Joan Walsh says that “[a]t the moment he needed all of his persuasive powers, Obama gave the worst major speech of his presidency.” [Salon]

Related: John Heilemann on “Obama’s Afghan War Trade“

Sam Harris wrote a caustic book against all religious faith that he titled, The End of Faith. As with most of the modern atheistic writers, Harris related numerous atrocities committed in the name of religion as evidence that religious faith is inherently flawed. To press his point, he stated:

Whenever you hear that people have begun killing noncombatants intentionally and indiscriminately, ask yourself what dogma stands at their backs. What do these freshly minted killers believe. You will find that it is always—always—preposterous (2004, p. 106, ital. in orig.).

While Harris is wrong to categorize New Testament Christianity with other faiths (see Butt, 2007), he is right to conclude that people today who indiscriminately kill noncombatants are deluded by some type of preposterous belief. Unfortunately, Harris fails to see that by making this statement, he has condemned atheism as a preposterous belief.

The term “noncombatant” is not difficult to understand. It simply means any person who is not actively engaged in a war, riot, or combat situation. Generally speaking, this term describes innocent women and children. For instance, Harris listed several examples of situations in which men, women, and children were killed simply because they belonged to a certain ethnic group. If we were to ask what category of human beings could best be described as “noncombatants,” we would be forced to conclude that babies necessarily fit the category. Thus, any modern belief system that advocates the killing of innocent babies must be backed by a preposterous belief—according to Harris.

When we look into Harris’ writings, we discover that his atheistic philosophy completely justifies the indiscriminant killing of unborn humans. Harris, like his atheistic cohorts, supports abortion. How could Harris miss the connection between his pro-abortion stance and the indiscriminant killing about which he rages? The answer is clear from his own writings, because he posed a very similar question:

How is it, after all, that a Nazi guard could return each day from his labors at the crematoria and be a loving father to his children? The answer is surprisingly straightforward; the Jews he spent the day torturing and killing were not objects of his moral concern. Not only were they outside his moral community; they were antithetical to it. His beliefs about Jews inured him to the natural human sympathies that might have other wise prevented such behavior (2004, p. 176).

Harris correctly concluded that the Nazi soldiers justified their villainous deeds by claiming that Jews were less than human and not worthy to be in the same moral community as the Nazis. Of course, Harris does not believe the Nazis had the right to hold this belief. And he believes that they were guilty of real moral wrong. Yet, shockingly, only one page later he implies that his brand of atheism is in the same position as the Nazi soldier’s belief. He states:

Incidentally, here is where a rational answer to the abortion debate is lurking. Many of us consider human fetuses in the first trimester to be more or less like rabbits: having imputed to them a range of happiness and suffering that does not grant them full status in our moral community. At present, this seems rather reasonable. Only future scientific insights could refute this intuition (p. 177, emp. added).

The Nazi soldier killed Jews all day and justified it by saying they were outside his moral community. The atheistic popularizers like Sam Harris support the indiscriminant slaughter of innocent, unborn children, and justify their belief by concluding that unborn babies do not have “full status in our moral community.”

According to Harris, we must look to see what preposterous dogma undergirds the atheistic community’s support for abortion. When we do, we find the irrational idea that humans are natural organisms that have evolved from lower life forms over billions of years. This outrageous belief strips humanity of the dignity that comes only with belief in a divine Creator. Furthermore, the atheistic assertion establishes humans as the final authority that determines which people should be granted full status in our moral community.

If atheism is true, it would be morally acceptable to redefine humanity’s moral community to include animals, or exclude certain categories of humans. Furthermore, it would be morally justifiable to indiscriminately kill noncombatants based on arbitrarily chosen criteria like age, mental capacity, or physical ability. But Harris has correctly stated that any belief system that allows such actions “is always—always—preposterous.” According to Harris, then, we must conclude that atheism is preposterous.

Butt, Kyle (2007), “All Religion is Bad Because Some Is?” [On-line], URL: http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/3546.

Harris, Sam (2004), The End of Faith (New York: W.W. Norton).

Hell is frozen over. The New York Times has finally come to the realization that the anti-Prop. 8 mob in California is intimidating traditional marriage supporters with its blacklist maps.

What took them so damn long?

FOR the backers of Proposition 8, the state ballot measure to stop single-sex couples from marrying in California, victory has been soured by the ugly specter of intimidation.

Some donors to groups supporting the measure have received death threats and envelopes containing a powdery white substance, and their businesses have been boycotted.

The targets of this harassment blame a controversial and provocative Web site, eightmaps.com.

…The site pits…cherished values against each other: political transparency and untarnished democracy versus privacy and freedom of speech.

“When I see those maps, it does leave me with a bit of a sick feeling in my stomach,” said Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, which has advocated for open democracy.

(link)