For those of you who read Badsnake's diary, we are not having spaghetti for supper. We are having either a chicken/pasta thing or a chicken thing with risotto on the side. Haven't decided yet. I'm looking forward to everyone's company tonight. There will be a German wine available in honor of my upcoming trip. I brought home the Weingut Eugen Wehreim (one of the wineries I'll be visiting) instead of the Dickensheid (another on the itinerary) that the boys were having so much fun pronouncing yesterday.

Love,
Deb

One of my buddies from the courtyard below, Tony, is one of the nice folks who sweeps up after all us disgusting smokers and slobby business people. I keep wishing I had my camera with me when I see him, because I'd like to post his photo here. This is going to sound weird, but Tony is the cutest man with a missing front tooth I've ever run across.

You have to understand that nice teeth are really important to me in the attractiveness category. And, except for the missing one, Tony's teeth are quite nice. He's built, too. He's not much taller than me, but he's got that lean-but-not-skinny, muscular build. Nice arms. I guess he's in his forties. He's a medium brown, with very short hair that has a smattering of grey, and barely-there moustache and goatee. And he wears cute wire-rim glasses. In short, he's a cutie patootie.

We talk about books and movies. He's into the horror stuff that I usually like, too. Right now he's reading the copy of "Hannibal" that I loaned him and getting dragged down in all the art-history-of-Florence parts that slowed me down as well. I told him I thought it was just Thomas Harris trying to show off what a thorough research job he'd done in making Lecter sound like an incalculably brilliant man. Whatever, I know he's way smart, just get on with the story, Tom.

We were talking about hawks in the city the other day. I've heard them but never seen one here downtown. He said some of the window washers had to be careful when they got to a certain nest on the building. I think that might have been a peregrine falcon, though. I don't think regular hawks, like the red tails around here, nest on building ledges. He also said he knows they're still hunting downtown because he gets to clean up after the hawks when they bag a pigeon. Heh. Just like Marn's backyard, right here in the city.

I've been having fun reading up in Dichroic's diary today and learning more about rowing. Check out my guestbook to see what she said about how the D/S scene I described Tuesday reminds her not of rock climbing, but coxing a four- or eight-man shell in a race. Cool. Takes me back to my Olympic development team days.

I'd like to address a story lots of you will be seeing or hearing about in the lifestyle/human interest section of the newspaper and on the news. Dr. Robert L. Spitzer, a psychiatry professor at Columbia University, is presenting findings to the APA from a study that says "highly motivated" gay people can turn straight.

You know what? He's right. If you're motivated enough, you can pretty much do anything. Now these test subjects were all people who really, really didn't want to be gay. People who, on average, have been working on not being gay for 12 or more years. Another psychologist said the sampling was very skewed to religious conservatives and people who had been treated by psychotherapists with a heavily anti-gay bias.

Now those would be the people who didn't want to be gay, right? The people who were okay with being gay wouldn't want to change. So, I say, the sampling has to be tainted and "unrepresentative of the gay and lesbian community" (as David Elliot of the NGLTF says it is) in order to see if the hypothesis works. What are you going to do? Ask a bunch of happily gay people to try to become straight just to see if they can? "Hey, honey, it's been great, and I love you, but my going-straight experiment starts tomorrow and I have to go meet my new boyfriend."

If someone held a gun to Deb's head and said to me, be straight or we'll shoot, I'd say, "Hey, gimme cock and lots of it." Similarly, you take someone who thinks homosexuality is bad, a Christian (or other fill-in-the-blank not-so-happy-about-queers religion here) that he or she will go to hell if they don't change, and you've got a motivated individual.

And with the way religious beliefs and guilt work, if they have trouble changing their behavior, they feel worse than ever. They must not be trusting in God enough, or praying sincerely enough, or they aren't afraid of hell enough.

You tell me that I'm going to hell and I'll be all, "yeah, with yo mama." It's not a big threat since I don't buy into the eternal flames and damnation thing. But for someone whose core values and belief system is built around God and the devil and heaven and hell, that's a real threat. They have a right to try to avoid that perceived fate if they want to.

Now, that's fine for the unhappy queer who doesn't want to be queer. We can tell them that it's okay to be gay only so many times before we just have to leave 'em alone and let them make their own decisions. Maybe they will succeed in being straight. Nothing wrong with that. Some of my best friends are straight people (that's a lie; all of my best friends are queer). Maybe being bisexual would get them into a somewhat cooler section of hell if they didn't flaunt it and tithed regularly, who knows?

My point is, the current news stories on this study presentation are mostly based on hype. It's not anything revolutionary or some doctor trying to say that all queers should switch teams right now. The gay organizations will probably be all over-reactionary all over the place. The Ex-Gays will respond in kind. The conservative Christian right will have its big, loud say in the matter. But it's nothing to get excited about.

Nothing to see here, folks. Move along. Go on home now.