Thud: Growing Up With The Bee Gees

My version of the Red Ryder BB Gun: “Bee Gees Gold.”

I was thrilled to receive a gift of a Bee Gees puzzle from my younger sister Lars last month.  This is not a joke: I was thrilled to get a 200 piece puzzle of the Bee Gees.  I love the Bee Gees, and not in the half-assed way that it’s become acceptable to love the Bee Gees, either.  They’re not a “guilty pleasure.”  Nor is “their early stuff actually pretty good” to me.  I love the disco stuff from the 70’s just as much as I love their British Invasion stuff.  They were my first favorite band.  I grew up with them.   My love, like all first loves, is crystalline and perfect: unencumbered by the cloudy complications that attend my “grown up” affections.   (I love Neko Case, for example, but I’ve backed away from her latest work, which seems stiff and agenda-addled to me.)  As a Bee Gees fan, I’ve become accustomed to snide comments and backhanded compliments.  After all, the Bee Gees have been given a bad rap. When called upon to do so, I’ve been their defender and I’ll defend them again in this story.  Like the contents of the box handed to me by my sister, this story is a jumble of pieces of the past: a past as distant as the summer of 1981, when my love for the Bee Gees became a full-tilt obsession and as recent as May 27, 2014, when I attended Barry Gibb’s “Mythology” Tour at the United Center in Chicago.   

On Wisconsin: Fight Songs

There are two kinds of battle anthems: those in the Sousa idiom and the good kind.

“Fight Songs” is the sixth chapter in The Gaytheist Gospel Hour‘s seven part series “On Wisconsin.”

Here in the good ol’ USA, we love our college football fight songs. We like the boastful smack-talk of the lyrics, the militaristic marching band music, the purposeful feeling of “us vs. them” that pumps in our veins when we all sing along.  It could be argued that no other state in the union loves their college football fight song more than Wisconsin, which actually adapted theirs into the official state song.* “On, Wisconsin” is such an epitome of the fight song genre, it was once praised by none other than John Phillip Sousa himself, king of the marching band battle anthem.   It is a pretty rousing tune, if only for the fact it mentions the word “fight” four times in a single line.

But for my money, there’s no better fight song than the one recorded by Pat Benatar in 1979.  “Heartbreaker” dispenses with the jingoistic clap trap of the classic fight song and its attendant arms-forces hoo-hah and focuses directly on the “fuck you” core element of the fight at hand. 

What Is A Gaytheist?

When I read the February, 07 2012 ruling regarding Proposition 8, I knew it was time to finally tell people why I call myself a Gaytheist. There was something in the language of that ruling that seemed to speak directly to me. One moment I was reading the news, the next, I was reading a letter addressed to a self I try to keep quiet inside me; the self that was forged by encounters with people who claim their ignorance and cruelty as God’s will, the self I named “Gaytheist.”

How To Have A Right-On Civil Union

“Purple Gays, all in my brain! Lately, things, they don’t seem the same!” — Jimi Hendrix

On September 30, I entered into a civil union with Kate, my partner of nine years and mother of our four year-old daughter Mabel. We were able to do this not because we love eachother or because we have a demonstrated commitment to one another, but because we were lucky: lucky to live in one of a handful of states that allows some vestige of equality in marriage rights. Not everyone is as lucky as we are. It is my hope that one day, everyone will have the option to do as we did, and celebrate their respective partnerships in a Right-On Civil Union. The following is a list of suggestions compiled from our own Right-On Civil Union (plus money-saving Hard Times Bonus Tips!).  I humbly present the following list to those of you who may wish to follow in our footsteps and/or learn from our mistakes.

A Marriage Of Mass Destruction

It’s been an exciting week.  In a stunning and historical turn of events, the Illinois Legislature has voted to allow civil unions for gay people.  It’s a law that will soon permit me and every other gay person in the state to destroy the institution of marriage…by entering into an institution very similar to marriage.

I know.  It’s crazy, it’s a little hard to follow, but that’s the conservative line on the issue.  Not being a conservative myself, I can’t pretend to understand their ideology.  I just know that they’ve invested in us a power beyond my puny minority-mindset comprehension: the power to destroy everything for everyone by simply doing it.