EDGE Atlanta

Whenever I’ve heard that a certain male porn star is, given his druthers, straight as an arrow but is happy to do gay porn for the money, something strange happens in my brain. It shuts down. Immediately. It absolutely refuses to think about it because it knows this is a thing it will not ever understand, like quantum physics, and because it is too ridiculous a concept to which to allow brain space.

What with California’s May ruling to light a match to its ban on gay marriage, whooping and hollering from that redoubtable coast carries all the way here, to Georgia. Sleeping itself has become labor-intensive in midtown Atlanta - outside my window on 11th Street, squirrels take their rodent cue from the gay guys dancing on the asphalt at two in the morning. I peer out of my blinds and it’s like a hybrid Falcon/Disney film.

I watch too much TV, specifically the Reality-style shows I once swore I’d never view. I would not be watching too much TV had I no other calling, of course; I’d be a normal citizen. But I got this other calling, I got a book I need to write, so the TV watching is all the more reprehensible. Even minus the reality factor.

I suppose it was inevitable. I should’ve seen it coming but, thankfully, I think it’ll pass (see below). Nonetheless: I’m suffering from it. It has me double-locking my door these days. It has me scurrying, eyes down and pace very fast indeed, from the local market. It has me suspicious of the kindliest remark made by the most well-meaning, semi-hot neighbor. I call it Gay Burn Out, or GBO.

Perhaps it’s a mid-life crisis. Yes, that may well be it. Because, based on my history of having lived in a somewhat specific way - at least regarding gay affairs - there’s no other logical way to account for my impending move to Atlanta. Not just Atlanta, either, but one of its hearts of gay interaction.

As gay guys continue to famously revere that monolithic strip of insatiable ambition wrapped around a teensy bit of talent named ’Madonna’, it was my sincere wish that we wouldn’t, as a group, do anything else especially stupid. Fer a while, anyway.

June marches on. Here in the South, it trudges more, weighed down with moist air and premature July oppression. But the Pride Days spring up like dogwoods from city to city, nevertheless. One weekend here, another weekend there, they commandeer parks and avenues, set up arches of rainbow-esque balloons, offer tattooing and lots of ’Fuck Bush’ pins, and invariably broadcast a scratchy recording of ’It’s Raining Men’.

There’s a towel on my mind. I didn’t mean for it to be there. There’s no reason, even, for me to dwell on it. But it won’t go away, and I think I’d like to talk about it.

It led the recent parade of Edge news stories, the article about the high school boy in New Jersey. Bashed, insulted, and ultimately harassed physically for being gay, he left the school system. And, by way of response, the New Jersey Supreme Court did some ass-kicking of its own. It widened the scope of the state’s anti-discrimination rulings of the past to protect students thusly put upon, and it did so unanimously. Which made me wonder how many New Jersey Supreme Court justices have children who are gay, or whom they think just might be gay.

John is in love with JD. To be precise, John is very fond of JD, and John is in love with JD’s ass.