I'd also like to know what Act/Up has actually accomplished other than be annoying.

But sometimes those Act/Up guys can be real turds.

In the offending paragraph, he's saying that the country has come to a qualified acceptance of homosexuality, but only if gay people are willing to live within the confines of the stereotypes and roles that mainstream culture thrusts upon us. But that stereotyped role remains at odds with America's collective notions about what a "parent" looks like. (This is why he engages those stereotypes--as a gentle critique of Middle America's affinity for those same stereotypes--not in a mean-spirited mocking way. Middle America is cool with Will and Grace (remember that Republican women are that show's #1 audience). They're not comfortable with gay marriage and parenting yet because they don't really know what gay people's ACTUAL LIVES are like.

Keillor's not attacking you. How much of his work are you familiar with? Maybe you just don't understand his tone. I understand when attacks on gay families are coming so constantly that it's easy to be hyperdefensive about it, but Keillor's on our side. Maybe before wasting our activist energies on a protest campaign against someone who is an ally, you should ask him to clarify his remarks? Give his publicist a call.

Sounds entirely reasonable. Could also help avoid a lot of unnecessary embarassment.

Being the good little boys and girls playing politics is "nice" but is that really all we want? Until we are FULLY equal in the eyes of the law we are still at war people.

He is an anti-federalist on the marriage issue, i.e. he thinks it should be argued at the state level rather than the federal level. This isn't a position I personally share. But ironically, his argument sounds not unlike the "urban archipelago" line of thought that The Stranger was spouting in 2004. He writes: "I think that gay marriage/union/benefits must be a state and city matter. Gays have tended to migrate from hostile places to friendlier places — San Francisco, New York, New Orleans — and this migration has been a boon to the friendlier places. Gay-friendly areas are the richer for it, in all sorts of ways. Tolerance has economic and cultural benefits. And so we can allow Missouri or South Carolina or South Dakota to be hostile to gay marriage and suffer the consequences.”

"What are we doing in Seattle?"

Not enough unfortunately. I was at the Equality Day rally in Olympia on Feb 26 where we asked our legislators to pass the marriage equality, domestic partnership and sex ed bills.

This revolution wasn't televised or even covered in the major papers including the Strangler. Only the SGN covered it.

There were about 1,500 people at the rally, not a bad turn out, but imagine if all of the 200,000 or so people who enjoy Pride were there. If that many people had shown up, we would have equality today - case closed.

The biggest problem is that the GLBT community is just as shallow and apathetic as Americans in general. I've spoken with quite a few people and everyone's just too busy to get involved or even e-mail their legislator, blah blah blah.

If all of the thousands of gays & lesbians in the military told they're CO they're gay and General Pace can go fuck himself, then DADT would be history.

We don't have equality because most people don't care.

Keillor makes his living making wise-cracks that play off stereotypes: about stereotypical Democrats and Republicans, about stereotypical Norwegians and Lutherans, about stereotypical midwestern and coastal values and lifestyles. Now he's made a thoroughly in-character wise-crack about the confused modern family that plays off stereotypes of traditional families and gay men.

He hasn't come out against homosexuality, same-sex marriage, gay adoption, HIV/AIDS funding, or any other political sacred cow. He has just offended the hyper-vigilant PC language police, of whom Dan is unfortunately becomming increasing representative.

This isn't an issue for ACT UP, it's an issue for the Weekly's "Uptight Seattleite" column.

fast-track approval of AZT

Yeah, so annoying with the saving lives and all...

I wouldn't take AZT, protease inhibitors, or any of the pharmaceutical witches' brew prescribed for "AIDS", even if I tested "positive". It's your choice though, and I'm glad it helped you. It killed my friends though. Oh well.

I semi-jokingly suggested people go up and protest Club Lagoon this past weekend since a lot of the patrons are harrassing people on the hill. One other person on Slog thought it was worth doing. Yeah, we get exactly what we work for in the end.

Unfortunately, I still think GK has really said something at odds with what we thought his values were. The key for me is in the title and first five paragraphs, especially this one:

"Nature is about continuation of the species--in other words, children. Nature does not care about the emotional well-being of older people."

Cast this statement with two from the first paragraph in the following form: Is art good for children? Is a drama-free childhood with boring, average parents good for children? Do bears shit in the woods?

The art thing is offered as unassailable by the bears-shit-in-the-woods comparison. The rest of the piece reads to me like an argument that a drama-free childhood is also an obvious good. GK therefore says that our modern ways, with divorces, hyphenated names, many-branched family trees, and gay parents is hard on children.

There may or may not be a valid psychological argument for this idea, but IMHO, GK has gratuitously and speciously dragged in gay parents here as an example of both too much drama and too many relatives. To state the truly obvious, there is plenty of family drama to go around; nobody in my family is gay, but some of them are into drugs, booze, and multiple marriages. And, of course, paired-up gay people don't complicate the family tree any more than their married and shacked-up siblings do. It's the unexamined assertion that uncomplicated families are best for children and the gratuitous use of gay couples as an example of too much drama that got my back up.

This isn't the news from Lake Wobegon; this is an opinion piece. I've seen satire in GK's opinion pieces before, but it's always pretty easy to spot. In this case, I think he wrote something straightforward but ill expressed and badly argued off the top of his head, and he deserves to be called on it.

I mean, the premise of this piece is "parents aren't supposed to care about their emotional well-being," which you really ought to find hilarious. He's pushing the "children must come first" argument to its logical endpoint, for comedic effect.

You can not read The Onion as satire either, if you want. Doesn't make it so.

This was a complete Emily Litella moment, and as one of your fans it's almost impossible to read. I wish you would just delete it.

You're positively ugly when you get bitchy, duchess.

You're positively ugly when you get bitchy, duchess.