Cowboy Confessional

Dykes on bikes need to put their shirts back on.

The lead entry in every year’s San Francisco Pride Parade are the dykes — motorcycle riding lesbians, anyone of whom is more of a man than most men I know. A number of the DoBs ride topless. Now I’m not objecting to bare boobs — I’ve always liked those. I’m not offended by the fact that some of the shirtless DoBs have the type of physiques that should remain covered. Nor am I worried about the mammary road rash they might suffer if they had to lay down one of their hogs.

However, riding topless in the freezing June San Francisco weather will make a women’s nipples protrude further than a pair of #2 pencils, and could poke some-body’s eye out. See, it is a public safety issue.

Today was San Francisco’s 38th Pride Parade and clothing optional sexual expression fete with occasional fetishes fostered. Footage from past parades have been broadcast across the country, scaring millions of middle Americans out of their television comas. Nothing like footage of a young, buff and all-but-naked Latino thrusting his sequined g-string into your face to make a Kansas farmer believe the Apocalypse has arrived.

The changing name of the parade says something about the oddity that is an open-air asylum called San Francisco. Back in the 1970’s, the parade was the domain of homosexual males who came out of their closets and immediately filled those closets with evening gowns. In those comparatively quaint times, the parade was called “Gay Freedom Day” and later “Gay Pride Parade”. It was all about being male, gay, unashamed and undressed in public. In San Francisco, ass-less chaps count as “reasonably covered”.

This simply would not do! If San Franciscans believe in nothing else, they believe in tolerant inclusion of all peoples, lifestyles and beliefs … except for conservatives and Republicans who are lynched on sight. A parade devoted to only gay men was completely unacceptable said the gay women of the town. Lesbians insisted on being allowed in the parade, and given that they were bigger, stronger, and a damn sight meaner than the average effete fairy, the gays instantly acquiesced.

Propensity for rapid surrender is why generals don’t want gay men in the military.

So “Gay Pride” became “Gay and Lesbian Pride”. A couple of syllables longer, but you could still fit it on a bumper sticker, which the parade organizers did. These bumper stickers attracted the attention of the transgenders. With great pride they demand their inclusion rights as well, threatening to throw a collective hissy fit until men in dresses, women in work boots, various hermaphrodites and people part-way through surgical conversions were allowed in the parade.

I’ll admit, it is a little disconcerting when for the first time you see a person with bulging boobs and a bulge in their boxers.

Now the event was called the “Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Pride Parade”. Bumper stickers were out. Even the parade billboards were getting a little wordy. Television reporters could not recite the sexual orientation roll call with flubbing a line or laughing out loud. Undeterred, the parade continued each year despite it taking longer to say the name of the parade than the parade itself lasted. Say it loud, say it proud, we are out of time!

All the shouting from the accumulated boinking branches got the bisexuals to look up from whomever they were doing and ask why they were not in the parade.

(Just a brief aside: Not much in this world scares me, but the bisexuals do. I’m one of the most lustful libertines I know. Despite having a sex drive that would make a migrating salmon blush, I’m content having half of the human race as possible bed mates. The bis are not, which means they are actually hornier than I am, wanting to bang everyone they meet. This is truly frightening.)

Since the parade had already become a sexual orientation lexicon, adding yet another group was the simple part. Fitting them onto the marquee was something else. The common abbreviation for the “everything except heterosexuals” community — LGBT — cannot be pronounced in any known human language, and thus lacks marketing appeal. In an inspired move the parade committee abandoned cramming the entire carnal catalog into the press releases, and called it “Pride Parade”. Simple and not straight.

The event has been a “must see” for San Francisco Bay Area citizens and startled visitors. To say that some of pride parade’s participant are “colorful” is akin to saying thermonuclear warfare is noisy. Like legions of oppressed people before them, liberated gays allowed their emotional pendulum to swing far to the other extreme. They didn’t leave their closets, they exploded from them as if their leather harnesses had grown teeth and were chasing them out. The parade was a moment every year where gays were surrounded by people more or less like themselves and in a city where eccentric behavior is mandatory. Thus nothing, including clothing or discretion was necessary. “Pride” gave way to public predilection replete with feathered boas, burly boys in leather, and a growing mob of spectators encouraging ever more flamboyant behavior.

Shame really that the Pride Parade has peaked and is now heading downhill. Gayness now suffers from mainstreaming.

This year’s parade bordered on boring. Most of the parade’s color has been licked off thanks to mass acceptance. When the populace at large accepts you, there is little use in jumping about naked and demanding to be recognized. Gay marriage finally became legal in California, driving the first of the nail into Pride’s coffin. The parade route was littered with the newly wed and the children they had been creating all along. Raunchy and raucous has given way to matrimony and diaper changes. Pride has gone parental. If you never had a chance to see San Francisco at its most flaming flamboyant, well you’re too late. Those days are in decline.

Gay marriage has produced a new class of humor however. A large number of couples walked down the street carrying signs that read something like “Together 12 years, married for nine days.” My thought was “There you go ruining a perfectly good relationship by getting married.”

But my favorite were a lesbian couple who had not yet tied the knot (no, not in their bondage-and-discipline gear … the marital knot). They shyly carried a home-made sign reading “We’re here, we’re queer, and we’re registered at Macy’s!”

click here for more entertaining photography from Pride’08

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Liberalism has been called the politics of wishful thinking.

In actuality it is the politics of hope above reality, which gives and entirely new dimension the Obama brand.

A tragic case in point is the latest squandering of scratch this side of Congressional salaries. In my silly city of San Francisco, the government has sought to house the homeless. A noble ideal and one grounded in the same ruthless, rational logic of any Monty Python skit.

The Mayor — a locally grown Bill Clinton, replete with his own trouser problems — last year predicted his pet project and election gimmick would provide “healthy, affordable housing for 106 formerly homeless individuals.”

Affordable it is given that the bill is footed by people with homes, jobs, incomes, kids to raise, and a larger than ever tax bill. “Healthy” it might be if it weren’t for secondhand crack cocaine smoke in the hallways. In San Francisco’s Plaza Apartments, you don’t even need a “contact high” — respiration is sufficient.

As with Federal public housing projects before, The Mayor was oblivious to the mechanics of crime and poverty. Ignoring decades of research into why people become homeless, Frisco conceptualized a simple (and thus simplistic) solution of giving homes to the homeless. This assumed that homelessness was the cause, and not merely a symptom of another and larger problem.

A government flunky, in a rare moment of lucidity, noted “80 to 90 percent of the people we have are struggling with drug use. We know when we bring those people indoors those issues do not go away.”

He later said the sky was blue, bunnies are cute, and that Gavin Newsom in no way deserved the salary he receives.

Various surveys of homeless hominids claim that between 68% to 90% have become full time sidewalk campers due to drug and alcohol abuse. Interviewing these folks shows that they were born with better options. None started life with a crack pipe in the infant lips and begging for spare change from other babies. They descended the societal ladder one drink or rock at a time.

Much like Paris Hilton’s panties.

This is the norm of criminality as well as self destruction. Crime does not cause criminal behaviour. The poor tend to be victims of criminals because a life of crime leads to poverty and thugs descend into poor neighborhoods. You don’t have to take my word on this. Throughout the rural South are good, decent, hard-working people still farming the forty acres their ancestors were awarded. These people are about as poor as you could fear becoming, and yet are not innately prone to committing crimes. Nor are they routinely victimized since criminals tend to light in cities where their targets are more numerous and thus their trade is more profitable.

Then they run for office.

This why public housing projects are deadly districts of maddening malfeasance. Once the poor were warehoused into centralized locations, criminals drifted into the projects, bringing their life-long habits with them. When the government made single motherhood possible, if not profitable, gang games became even more lucrative. Mobile sperm donors, unshackled from the bonds of marriage and raising their offspring, could continue their felonious existence. Crime became a lifestyle.
The same systematics apply to San Francisco’s Homeless Hilton. Take a population of people — 70% or more of whom cannot keep bottles from their lips and needles out of their veins — and stack them like corpulent cordwood into a central facility. One must expect the root cause of their low lifestyle to follow. Thinking that providing a roof and a stipend would change decade long addictions requires the special insanity reserved for politicians.

“[P]ermanent supportive housing solves homelessness,” is what Mayor Newsom said when the program received federal funding.

Nothing in the known universe (i.e., reality) can make a boozer sober except the discipline to say “no”. The same applies to junkies and loco politicians with taxing authority.

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Cowboys are “live and let live” kinda folk. We appreciate when others leave us alone, and try to reciprocate. A side effect of this a significant tolerance for weirdness, which is why I can survive living i the San Francisco area. In fact I find local critter watching to be rather entertaining.

The well hole of weirdness in the region is Berkeley. People not residing in these parts cannot appreciate the wholesale wackiness that seemingly originates somewhere on the U.C. Berkeley campus, and pathogenically infect most of the town’s population (and all of their city council). Ignore if you can naked people roaming on the streets because they feel clothing is oppressive. Chuckle as you pass city posted “nuclear free zone” road signs despite a couple of nifty reactors on campus.

But don’t ignore these two photos! They may say more about Bezerkly than anything tale I could tell.

This first pic shows a handmade sign from a tree protester. “What is a tree protester?” you ask? They are a bunch of kids who occasionally attend classes that their parents or California taxpayers have funded. More often though, they are perched in one of several oak trees the school intends to chop down. They have been climbing trees, slopping their urine on whatever or whomever was below, and in other ways reversing human evolution for a year.

Their sign communicates volumes about their suspect sanity, or a very least the lack of success the California university system has had in the field of education. The sign reads “Save the oak grove — overthrow government and capitalism.”

Ponder this for a minute … but only a minute, for if you think on it any longer your head will explode. American capitalism created such vast wealth that we can squander large sums of it to pay children to sit in a tree for a year, and these same children call for the overthrow of the source of their leisure. Not content to kill the cow that gives them milk money, they also demand the government that steals that wealth and redistributes it to matriculated meat-heads be disposed of as well.

In an abrupt moment of sanity, the school erected a fence around the oak grove and its neo-apes for the protection of people like me who enjoy visiting the zoo.

One complaint that cannot be leveled at the city of Berkeley is a lack of competitive zeal. Random citizens feeling threatened by the tree twits’ insanity have escalated the dementia wars, and the city government is helping.

The poor picture to the right — hastily snapped on a cell phone while traffic insisted I get out of they way — is of a City of Berkeley community police station (you can see the blue badge in the left window). The red splotch on the right is graffiti that reads “FOE”. This impromptu decoration was present for at least a couple of weeks.

It takes some world class cohones to tag a cop shop, and tell the world that the police are the enemy. It also takes significant moral sterility to leave the offense in plain sight and attest to a lack of law enforcement testes. But knowing Berkeley as I do, the department’s procrastination in cleaning graffiti off their front door was likely a attempt to not cripple the creativity of the artist. It is the nurturing nature of Berkeley to tolerate …. well, damn near everything, including shaved monkeys climbing in the trees.

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I received an intriguing letter from a San Francisco reader who is being dragged to the once mythical intersection of Squalor and Bedlam.

Daniel (I have altered his name to protect him from junkies, politicians, and other undesirables) contacted me after having read my rhetoric concerning San Francisco’s encouragement of doping outside of city hall. Since doping within San Francisco city hall is evidently a recreational affair, my original article dealt with their export policy and encouragement of self-destructive behaviour. Not content with merely supporting the horse habits of the homeless, certain organization are out to encourage the next generation. Daniel reports:

The Homeless Youth Alliance (HYA), which coordinates the needle exchange …

Now isn’t that interesting. Normal people would avoid associating the word “youth” with drug advocacy, but in the Modern Sodom more than just the common language is corruptible.

… and the Department of Public Heath is attempting a move to the Hamilton United Methodist Church, 1/2 block from the Montessori Pre-School …

Allow me to paint the picture in colorful San Franciscan hues. Preschoolers, kids younger than five, who come to this facility every day, will witness a steady stream of under-washed vagrants, semi-pro prostitutes, and world-class dregs queued near their school in order to get implements for shooting dope.

I wonder what parents think of that:

A public hearing was held last night, and as expected virtually 100% of neighbors opposed the move.

Nice to know that sanity prevails in some regions of The City, though this may not be enough to salvage the innocence of the innocents. Daniel claims that the local Homeless Youth Alliance (HYA):

… provides tips on smoking crack, safer prostitution, and more

As contributory evidence, he forwarded a page from a manual being distributed by the San Francisco Needle Exchange (click on the graphic for a PDF) that instructs junkies to:

* Find a clean, safe and well lit place where you will have enough time (shame the book store on Van Ness is no longer available)

* Make sure the tourniquet isn’t too tight (wouldn’t want your arm to turn blue before inserting the poison)

* Inject slowly

* Enjoy your high

This is a new, strange and disturbing angle in the already insane debate concerning public financing of heroin use. The premise of the needle exchange program was that it attempted to reduce disease and would not actually encourage drug use. That claim appears right after “we won’t raise your taxes” and “the police will protect you.”

A central issue is the unsavory connection between the production of doping manuals and the $275,000 the HYA receives from the city Department of Public Health. Indirectly, tax dollars are subsidising would-be dopers, and actively encouraging drug abuse.

Your tax dollars at work.

Now we have an interesting intersection: The government gives money to the morally suspect HYA, who then instructs kids on how to create or worsen their addiction, and then advocates having the newly minted hop heads to come close to your impressionable preschoolers.

And the good people of San Francisco wonder why the rest of America views them as debauched and dangerous.

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