You made my neck hurt.

Thanks for turning the image around the right way.

Cool retro punk photocopy flier. Outdated graphics for an outdated philosophy.

I've been hearing a lot about Alec or ALEC. It's a sort of corporate fascist organization that supports "stand your ground" laws and other right wing insanity. It's as if they didn't already run our lives and corrupt our government.

Seriously? Fifty fucking dollars for a fucking tshirt?

HA! Resistance is futile. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own.

@1 ROFL, ATKUTS (used to say).

OK Dan, I agree with you. But it is true that there's a lot less fucking now that there's gay marriage and heteronormativity. New study just came out and the average number of sex partners for younger gay men was 50% higher in early 2000s than now. It went down from 3 to 2. A YEAR. WTF! Kids these days. Where are the role models? Queer Duck had more partners on his lunch break.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23466…
(it's a national probability sample, which is geek speak for exceptionally representative)

For those who don't have a med school library access, some additional stats from the full paper that aren't in the free abstract:

The comparison was a single year vs. a 4 year avg, 2002 vs. 2006-2010.

The 15-24 yr olds had fewer partners than the older ones. WTF^2 -- 15-24 is peak horn:

2.1 for 15-24 year olds, 2.7 for 25-34, and 2.2 for 35-44; biggest decline from 2002 was for the youngest guys (so much for all of them being on Grindr -- maybe they really are just chatting).

Even the adults (all ages 15-44) in central city areas were just 2.6 partners a year avg. 2006-2010, unchanged from 2002 (the big average decline was that the non-central city people went from 3.2 partners to 2.1).

If you see the paper cited in the MSM, or the MSM media (men who have sex with men media, aka gay press), don't be freaked out by the fact that most gay men didn't use condoms at last sex in this study -- they didn't ask about whether the relationship was monogamous and known HIV status / sero-concordant, and they didn't ask about condom use for diff. types sex -- hand jobs / oral / anal, so the condom use question doesn't tell us much about changes in HIV risk. I'd be willing to bet you $100 that the MSM will get this wrong and say that gay men are having risky sex.

Also weird -- 5.7% of their MSM sample spent time in jail in the last 12 months. Is that really possible for a national probability sample? That's a freakin high incarceration rate for MSM.

@2 yeah, having a discussion about what liberation and assimilation mean is so some other time than now. Lets just call it victory so we can call it quits.

I know I'm just some old person, but WHAT.

Hot pink copy paper provided by the Weyerhauser Corporation.

Oh to be 22 and a super-genius again.

Hah! Dan, I have one of those exact same tee shirts. I think it is probably about 25 years old now. That means I have a tee shirt that is older than some Slog readers.

*sigh*

@6: "there's a lot less fucking now that there's gay marriage and heteronormativity. New study just came out and the average number of sex partners for younger gay men was 50% higher in early 2000s than now. It went down from 3 to 2. A YEAR. WTF! Kids these days."

Less partners != less fuckin'.

What @14 said.

I have had 1 partner for the past 17 years, and on average I have fucked more per year during that time than I did prior when I had more partners, but less actual fucking.

The number of different people you have slept with doesn't say anything about the number of times you have actually fucked each one.

Yes, these young people can't quite see the noses in front of their faces, but after Full Assimilation comes Erasure. Now, Erasure will confer various benefits upon certain people, but it would be more honest to argue openly in favour of Erasure than to pretend it won't happen.

We could take women tennis players as an example. At Wimbledon, thanks to the efforts of Mrs King and Miss Williams (V more than S, apparently), the ladies shall receive prize money equal to that of the gentlemen (and it will probably be this time next year before I use either the L word or the G word again). Now, we could have an interesting debate about whether the ladies ought to play best-of-five matches (or the gentlemen best-of-three). There are feminists who argue in all apparent sincerity that women are prevented from playing longer matches by misogynists who don't want to give them equal time on court. There are those who argue that changes to the game and longer match times make a full seven-round best-of-five outdated for men. [My own highly equal solution, designed to resolve the situation that majors are actually easier for women than ordinary tour events in which they rarely have a day off between matches, would be to have both men and women play best-of-three but revive the Pro Set, won by winning eight games instead of six.] Playing identical matches might or might not constitute Over-Assimilation. But Full Assimilation would be to play only two draws - singles and doubles for all comers.

This was not intended as a perfect analogy, but it at least adequately conveys my general way of thinking here.

Oh good. These lil shits are always good helpers for the cause.

Access does not mean obligation. And civil rights do not equal complete assimilation. And there's a difference between full citizenship and erasure of identity. Any argument to the contrary calls for the active resistance that's being wasted here.

"We don't wanna marry, we just wanna fuck."

This sentiment isn't about being gay, it's about being young.

Anarchists: irrelevant since the 19th Century.

I think not marrying is a stronger statement if you have the right to do it.

That said, I'm a 40 year old with serious gay envy who finds some gays rushing to the picket fences a bit strange.

Gosh I'm glad I still have my old shirt. (And it's ACT-UP, not ACT-OUT, kiddies)

Well my heart kinda bleeds for the "so darn revolutionary it hurts" kids and I kinda enjoy the idea of the inclusiveness in any event where there are people who both oppose and agree with any one opinion in the same march.

@21 ... meeeh "American Anarchists" is to anarchism what "American LARP" is to Live action roleplaying (actually I have no idea what the North American anarchist movement is up to but it seems to be stuck in the posing and grandstanding 1990's where as it has changed constantly in the rest of the world just like most movements).
But I'd have to disagree with you anyway ...

Oh what a radical and pseudo-intellectual post. Yes it is always superior to dampen any joy, to deflate any levity that might carry a cause forward. You self aggrandizing ass. I support you 85% of the time but pretty much say "fuck you" on this one.

Woo fight the power! Radical fucking!!!!111

Guys, you can fuck all you want without it being a political statement.

@ 7, if you see graphics calling for discussion, and not a strident rejection of those things, you're probably already close minded. Discussion is for those who aren't afraid to change their minds.

@25: What exactly is the cause these people are trying to move forward? Their poster doesn't make it very clear, it's just a bunch of generalized statements.

@19: "'We don't wanna marry, we just wanna fuck.'

This sentiment isn't about being gay, it's about being young."

Exactly right. Straight couples are now waiting until their 30s to marry and fucking like rabbits, with protection, in their 20s. These queers already won and they don't know it.

Isn't this just an ad for the Communist League or something? Their message has gotten a lot confused over the past 20 years. What the fuck does the right to marry (or not) have to do with "banks and corporations"?

@18: And there's a difference between what this group is trying to achieve (which is what, exactly?), and sanity.

@33 My guess:
"corporations" -> corporate sponsorship of pride parades
"banks" -> Occupy Something

Their message is disjointed.

Did you know that nearly all the big banks provide trans benefits including full treatment for employees and nondiscrimination policies for customers?

The thing folks like these seem to forget is that "people" work at corporations. They are called employees. Real actual people who get on committees and make decisions. While the corporate benefits to being inclusive are good for the corporation, the idea and implementation comes from real people who get real benefits.

This shit is hilarious. It's like a Second City parody sketch of angst-y teenagers rebelling against capitalism while simultaneously demanding an increase in their allowance.

What's next?

I got it:

I'm rebelling against your so called "progress." You can't make me use your invisible "electricity! " You can't make me use your fascist roads or your racist currency!

Down with indoor plumbing and the mythical number zero!

BTW can I get ride to the mall?

I understand there was a time when the Stranger was for young people, instead of for middle-aged people making fun of young people.

Does this poster really bother you that much? It seems pretty harmless.

lame. although it might be a good event to pick up some earnest horny twinks at.

"Let's go engage in an act of rebellion. Than I'll rebel further with your best friend, there."

Assimilation is the price of success for every subculture into the mainstream and frankly the least of your worries.

Ugh. Damn, I hate the "You can't understand what I am feeling unless you have experienced it firsthand" aristocracy of victimhood and its self-righteously stupid denial of the powerful attributes of empathy and imagination. Other people can understand what it's like to be you. That's part of what makes us uniquely and wonderfully human. Stop being a tool.

Mr Rhone - I didn't say "full citizenship", which is quite different from full assimilation. And I have no particular quarrel (perhaps outside of the range of taste, which isn't really a quarrel) with *individual* full assimilation. It is a person's right, and the worst thing I shall ever have to say about such is FTWL...

There are so few of us that Erasure is just a numeric inevitability. Take my bookstore example. We assimilated enough to have a presence in mainstream stores - not entirely without risk, but an overall plus. And then, by the time bookstores died or morphed into restaurants for readers, they had already broken up the non-hetero section and dispersed all the books under the guise of respect, though that was really over-assimilation. Except for the odd author or two such as Mr Savage Himself who could give straight authors the handicap we always have imposed upon us and still beat them hollow, we were essentially invisible again, and it was almost impossible to tell that our overall presence had been whittled away to almost nothing because the presence of the prominent 1%, if I may so frame it, made them look inclusive enough to purge about half of us and hide almost all the rest.

@48: You calling out anyone as an attention whore is so exquisitely hypocritical I'm almost speechless.

Oh yes you do.

Mr. Ven @46: My comment was directed at the overly-enthused-to-be-marginalized folks at Pink Bloc 2013. While I agree that there's no such thing as corporate empathy, I also think there's nothing dumber (or lazier) than people who need "outlaw" status (bestowed by someone else!) to define themselves. The fight for marriage equality is about the full recognition of the inalienable rights of citizens- which gay people already are and should already have. This is about losing our "edge" by virtue of commitment. In other words, this is bad bachelor comedy disguised as identity politics.

If what they want is AIDS they could just fuck Andrew Sullivan.

@52: That's exhibitionism. Attention whoring comes in many forms- including trolling.

@53: I don't like Sullivan either, but was that really necessary?

@53 & @55: Isn't it wonderful that there are columnists and ideas that you don't like? Think of the nightmare life would be if you liked everyone's ideas. It would be a Twilight Zone horror!

@56: I can't tell if you're being random, facetious, condescending, or all three at once.

Assimilation changes both cultures.

@43 climb down off the cross already. Nobody is forcing you to worry about anything.

There is, however, a thing called objective reality. And that reality is Culture changes every day. that reality is Culture is transient. If you want to trade your ideas of maintaining "culture" for actual real rights you are fighting a losing battle right off the bock and accepting a bad trade.

But please. Go ahead. Worry your pretty little head off about it. The world will keep turing with out you. You can go out on your lawn and shake your cane at the kids who will be getting married while Bronski Beat blasts out of your 8 track and you lament the good old days.

You don't have to get married, but doing so carries privileges over being not married, which is the problem (and why the gay marriage movement started in the first place). Now socially-/legally-exclusive gay couples are entitled to most of the same privileges previously reserved for socially-/legally-exclusive straight couples in states that allow same-sex marriage, but both groups are still privileged over single people, relative-household families (including multi-generational families and sibling households), plural-marriage families, and every other possible household/family arrangement. That's unjust. Marriage equality will only exist when marriage provides no legal privileges at all.