Rainbow Guardians
Being Gay can be rough.
Being a Teenager can be agonizing.
Being a Gay Teenager can be both.
Being a Gay Teenager in a High School where homophobic losers are allowed to prowl the halls and attempt to prove their macho-ness by bullying Gay Teenagers is Hell. And it’s been going on for way too long.
The ugliness hit me personally this week. On Tuesday, my brother Alex and a classmate were attacked at school by 3 gay bashers. Fortunately, it ended up being the 3 bullies who got bashed – Alex and Saul are fine. I’ll write about the details of that adventure soon.
While Alex and Saul are okay – partly because they were prepared for this kind of thing happening – millions of other gay kids don’t fare so well. All of which makes me fucking furious. I’m going to rant some about it later in this post. But one of my ways of dealing with my anger is channeling it into some art. One result of doing that this time was to imagine a world where there are magical Rainbow Guardians who stand behind gay kids and help protect them from the shit that gets slung at them in this Land of the Free and Home of the Brave. So here’s my image of a Rainbow Guardian. Below it is my rant, which I hope some of you will read.
Why do we need Rainbow Guardians? Here are some of the reasons why:
The Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, a national organization that helps promote the physical safety and emotional health of GLBT kids in public schools, does a national survey every 2 years about the “School Climate” those kids have to deal with. The results of the 2007 Survey of over 6000 high school and middle school students were released last year. Part of what it found was that:
86.2% of LGBT students reported being verbally harassed, 44.1% reported being physically harassed and 22.1% reported being physically assaulted at school in the past year because of their sexual orientation.
That’s almost fucking half of the kids surveyed who were pushed or shoved, had things “accidentally” spilled on them, or had their belongings damaged - just because they don’t fit into a Straight American Kid box. For our society to allow that kind of regular abuse of some of its most vulnerable citizens to go on and on is a sign of how really sick it is.
And while the harassment itself is awful, the spillover effects are tragic. The survey also found that:
- More than half (60.8%) of students reported that they felt unsafe in school because of their sexual orientation:
- 31.7% of LGBT students missed a class and 32.7% missed a day of school in the past month because of feeling unsafe, compared to only 5.5% and 4.5%, respectively, of a national sample of secondary school students: and
- The reported grade point average of students who were more frequently harassed because of their sexual orientation or gender expression was almost half a grade lower than for students who were less often harassed (2.8 versus 2.4).
That means millions of kids have to wake up every day and make the choice of either skipping school or going there to face a hostile environment in which they don’t feel safe. Sick!!
It’d be nice to at least be able to say that things are getting better in the schools – but it doesn’t look that way. The results from GLSEN’s 2005 survey were that 37.8% of students experienced physical harassment at school and 17.6%of students had been physically assaulted because of their sexual orientation. In GLSEN’s first survey in 1999, 14% of the students reported having been physically assaulted and 40% felt unsafe at school. So the number that had been physically harassed went from 38% in 2005 to 44% in 2007 – and the number who’d been assaulted went from 14% in 1999 to 18% in 2005 and to 22% in 2007.
When you look at those numbers, it’s not surprising the number of GLBT kids who feel unsafe a school has gone from 40% in 1999 to 60% in 2007. If our schools and our country gave a shit, those numbers should be moving, rapidly, in the other direction. But in 2005 only 9 states had Safe Schools laws that specifically address bullying and harassment on the basis of sexual orientation. By 2007, that number had only increased to 11 states (and my state isn’t one of them) and efforts to pass such laws were defeated in several states. Guess why.
Right now there’s a Safe School law covering sexual orientation being considered in North Carolina. A recent poll of N.C voters found about 70% support the bill while only 30% oppose it. You’d think that means the law has a pretty good chance of passing. We’ll see. A similar proposal had about the same public support last year but was narrowly defeated in the legislature. Maybe that’s because the right wing hate group Focus on the Family launched a campaign against the law, spewing out garbage like this:
The Christian Action League is asking people on its mailing list to tell legislators to oppose it, and the N.C. Family Policy Council has written extensively on its view that homosexual rights groups are using school safety issues to promote a social agenda.
“This is a watershed issue, and if ‘sexual orientation’ is enacted into North Carolina law through HB 1366, it will serve as the basis for affirming deviant sexual behaviors throughout our state statutes,”
I wish James Dobson and all his good Christian sheep would try to convince Lawrence King of this. But they can’t – because Lawrence King is dead. Last February, Larry, a 15-year old middle schooler, who was flamboyantly open about being gay or transgendered, was sitting in his computer class with 20 other students. The kid sitting behind him, Brandon McInerney, was a 14 year old who idolized Adolph Hitler, was training to be a Young Marine, and had been the leader of a group of kids who regularly harassed Larry as a “faggott,” etc. The harassment had intensified in the preceding weeks and several students had heard Brandon threaten to kill Larry. Part way through class that day, Adolph Jr. pulled out a pistol and shot Lawrence in the back. When Lawrence fell onto the floor bleeding, McInerney got up from his seat and calmly shot him again – this time fatally in the back of the head. Then he pulled up his hoody, and strutted proudly out of the classroom.
Brandon was quickly picked up by the cops and for the past year has been in jail awaiting trial, as an adult, for murder and the commission of a premeditated hate crime. A pre-trial hearing in the case had been scheduled to take place this week, but had to be postponed – because when someone went to pick up Brandon’s father to drive him to court on the morning of the hearing they found him dead on his living room floor. The father had a history of alcohol abuse (and other abuse – he was convicted of shooting Brandon’s mother back in the 90′s and had recently been arrested for waving around a gun threatening to kill his sister). He apparently got very drunk the night before his son’s hearing, stumbled, and hit his head – real hard – on something.
What a sad story -full of the poison brewed from a lethal mix of domestic violence, alcohol, handguns, homophobia, fear, and hate.
Why can’t more be done to try and create happier stories for us all?
La Escuela
Meet Teo – actually, Teodoro, but he prefers the short version. Teo is 13, and spends most of his waking hours thinking about sex, with other guys. I guess you’d say he’s gay:
Teo has what I think is a pretty interesting life and I’m hoping he’ll be writing some about it here in the near future. Meanwhile, I wanted to introduce you to him and to his work. He’s the Headmaster, and owner, of a very unusual school – La Escuela de Ephebophilia.
You may not be familiar with the word “ephebophilia,” unless you’re a Latin or Greek scholar, which I’d never want to be , a clinical psychologist, which I’m not, or maybe just an accumulator of random knowledge about gay sexuality – that’s me. It means “emotional and/or physical attraction to adolescent boys.” It’s a term that I wish more people knew about, because then our society might start realizing that it’s a whole different thing from the much feared and hated pedophilia. Maybe then society, and the law, might learn that Ephebophiles aren’t pedophiles – and they shouldn’t be labeled or treated as if they are. From a psychological standpoint, a pedophile is someone who’s attracted to pre-pubescent boys or girls – under 12 or so. Pedophilia is viewed as a sexual disorder in the psychologist’s bible – the DSM. Ephebophilia, however, is an attraction to boys that have reached or passed puberty and is not classified as an abnormality.
Far from being abnormal, Ephebophilia, in some form or another, has been an accepted part of hundreds of different cultures all over the world throughout history. In some aboriginal societies it has been an institutionalized part of a boy’s transition into adulthood. In others, like in classical Greece or feudal Japan, it has been an established element in the education of young men. Elsewhere, it’s been accepted, or at least tolerated, as a dalliance indulged in by kings, nobles, and clergy, by the wealthy classes, or by “artistes.”
Case closed – or at least it should be. Ephebophilia might still be accepted as a normal part of human sexual behavior if it weren’t for Christian moralists, who have crusaded for centuries to demonize it and stamp it out. Unfortunately, they’ve mostly won that war. Anyway, that’s enough of my rant. I may do up more of an article about the subject and post it here sometime.
For now, it’s time to get back to Teo and his school. The purpose of La Escuela is to educate adult men in the art of loving (physically and emotionally) and caring for teen boys. And who do you think would be the best teachers for this subject – teen boys, of course. The school is located in a resort area on the Southeast coast of Spain. There’s a lot of background story that I hope Teo will tell us about how it got started and why it’s way over there in Spain. The main reason, though, is that the age of consent in Spain is 13 – so the “hands on” parts of the training at the school are entirely legal. The place isn’t real fancy – here’s a look at the main classroom:
A few things about this scene may have caught your attention. One is that the 2 adult students we see have no clothes on. That’s because the school has an Undress Code, which requires students to be naked 24/7 during the 2 weeks they’re at La Escuela. While this may seem harsh, it’s a necessary part of one element of the training – Adjusting the Balance of Power. The rule’s made easier, though, by the fact that the resort where La Escuela is located is totally Naturist. And it’s almost always warm and sunny there. That means like nude beaches, nude pools, nude streets and sidewalks, nude shops, nude restaurants, nude, nude. So students, when they’re not busy in class learning about fitting in, are able to fit right in when they go walking around town during their free time.
You may also have noticed the 2 other boys at the front of the classroom with Teo. They both are members of the teaching staff. The one holding the WAD (Weapon of Anal Destruction) is Luis. He’s 15 and he’s not really as mean as he sometimes looks – he just likes to make sure the students learn all they need to about the in and outs of anal sex with someone smaller than them:
Then, relaxing on the Demonstration Bed, there’s Trevor. He and his parents are ex-pats from the U.S. We think he had a very healthy childhood there, which allowed him to grow a giant cock for a 14 year old. So, even though Trev only teaches part time, it’s a very big part. He’s known around the school as “Cum Volcano.” I’ll let you figure out why. It looks like he may be starting to work on an eruption here:
Well, now that you’ve gotten a brief look at La Escuela, and a long rant from me, what do you think? Should we ask Teo to take some time away from the rigors of teaching and tell us more about him and his school? If he decides to do it, I promise I’ll do my best to do some illustrations for it.
B.T.W. – A big thanks to Open Flower, a sadly infrequent commenter here. One of his comments prompted me to look around and see if I could find a place like La Escuela. That’s what led me to Teo.
Criminalizing Cartoons?
Y- Gallery beware. The ugly arms of the law that reach out to choke artistic freedom appear to have stretched all the way into the cartoon world. Last week, a United States Court of Appeals ruled that downloading anime depicting “minors” engaged in sexual activity could be a crime under U.S. law. Yes, anime – with pictures of obvious cartoon characters, not real people.
The decision, U.S. v. Whorley, has prompted lots of commentary and concern on the web. It’s also gotten me involved in discussions in some of my communications classes at school and with the Constitutional Law guru I’m friends with at the law firm where I work part-time. (He’s been my “consultant” in the past when I’ve looked at whether the CGI images I post here are legal under child porn laws.)
So, all in all, I think I’ve gotten pretty well informed about the issues involved in the case. A lot of the outcry about the decision is based on a misunderstanding of the difference between “pornography” and “obscenity” under the various laws involved. But, even when the case is put in its proper context, it paints a pretty ugly picture about the future of artistic freedom of expression for those of us involved in the creation and/or consumption of any work – visual or textual – involving fictional “minors” and sex.
Lawyers have a saying: “Bad facts make for bad law.” It’s totally true in this case. The defendant was a previously convicted sex-offender who was caught using a computer at some government office for job hunters to download a bunch of stuff, including: 15 actual photographs of naked children in lascivious poses; 20 Japanese anime pictures graphically showing prepubescent cartoon girls engaging in intercourse, masturbation, and oral sex, some of it coerced, with adults; and 20 e-mails between him and a friend that described “sexually explicit conduct involving children, including incest and molestation by doctors.” Downloading the 15 photographs would probably been enough to get him convicted under the basic U.S. child porn statute. But, it only applies to images with real live minors or figures that are “virtually indistinguishable from” real people, and it expressly doesn’t apply to “drawings, cartoons, sculptures, and paintings.” Not satisfied with nailing him for the photos, in a stunning example of prosecutorial overkill, the government also charged him with separate violations of other U.S. laws for downloading the cartoons and the emails.
Here’s where the “obscenity” distinction comes into play. Generally, under U.S. law the creation, distribution, or possession of “pornographic” pictures and writings depicting sexual activity are protected under the 1st Amendment. But it is illegal to import or distribute “obscene” material – which you can think of as “pornography plus” or something like that – it’s porn that fails a 3 part test developed by the Supreme Court 35 years ago. Under this standard, which has become virtually impossible to apply in the area of adult porn, material is obscene if it appeals “to a prurient interest,” shows “patently offensive sexual conduct” , and lacks “serious artistic, literary, political, or scientific value.” It’s up to a jury, applying local community standards, to decide whether a picture or writing fails this test and violates U.S. obscenity laws. Historically, U.S. law prohibited the production, importation, or distribution of obscene materials – but mere possession of them was not illegal. The internet changed the playing field some on that because the law was amended in 1996 to make it unlawful to “take or receive” obscene material using the internet. Remember, though, were talking here about “obscene” porn, not just everyday stuff.
When it comes to minors, though, U.S. law has been more strict. Pictures of minors engaged in sexual activity don’t have to be obscene to be illegal. The Supreme Court has frequently said that the reason any pornographic pictures of minors are illegal is because of the importance of protecting minors from the “abuse” involved in being the subjects of pornographic pictures. That seems to be a justification that makes sense up to the point where the law arbitrarily defines the “minors” being protected as anyone under 18, despite the fact that the age of consent for minors to engage in sex with each other, or with adults, is 16 or younger in most states.
In 1996, the U.S. tried to respond to cyber porn and toughen up its law by redefining child porn to include not just pictures of actual minors but also images that contained people that “appeared” to be minors engaged in sexual activity. In 2002, the Supreme Court ruled this law unconstitutional. It said that the First Amendment’s protection of mere pornography extended to things like drawings or computer generated 3D images of what just appeared to be minors engaged in sexual activity. Since no children were actually involved in the creation of such images, the rationale used to make pornographic pictures of actual minors illegal didn’t apply.
Orrin Hatch – a powerful, right-wing Mormon Senator from Utah- didn’t like this ruling, so he spearheaded the drive for some new laws to push back against it. One of them added a new section to the obscenity statute with the misleading title saying it applied to “Obscene visual representations of the sexual abuse of children.” In fact, at least according to the court in the Whorley case, it went much further than that. It makes it illegal to knowingly produce, distribute, receive, or possess any “visual depiction of any kind, including a drawing, cartoon, sculpture, or painting”,that depicts a minor, or what appears to be a minor, engaging in sexual activity and is “obscene.” And the statute does not require that the minor depicted actually exists.
So now the question of whether a cartoon or 3D rendering with a character that “appears to be a minor” comes down to whether a jury decides that the image fails the old obscenity test. And the major unknown in that arena is whether images that wouldn’t be considered obscene if they depicted adults can be deemed obscene if they depict characters that are or “appear to be” minors – neither the statute nor the court of appeals specify whether the statute is confined to human minors or extends to various fantasy species that may need to be protected from sexual abuse.
Apparently in the Whorley case the standards were different. Drawings of “coerced” sex among adults normally wouldn’t be considered obscene, but the jury found that the anime drawings of young girls were. And that’s what makes the current state of the law so scary. Who knows where a jury might draw the line between a drawing or CGI that is merely pornographic, and therefore lawful, and one that is “obscene”? How much does that depend on the activity portrayed or the “apparent” age of the characters, or their gender?
I don’t think that the images I do and post here would be considered “obscene” under existing legal standards. I am a little worried about it, though, and it intimidates the hell out of me. But some people probably should be real worried about some drawings and cartoons – like ones at Y-Gallery with pre-pubescent boys getting reamed by big hairy dudes.
And while I continue to be pissed that Y-G banned me for posting pretty tame CGI’s of teens while allowing hard-core shota drawings of little kids, I still think that any law that makes it illegal to create or own fanciful artwork that doesn’t involve any harm to any real people. I’ll be writing more about this soon.
Homo Haters in Hell
Pardon the dark imagery of my idea of the fitting end for all the holier-than-gay God Freaks who pushed Prop 8.
Bittersweet
I’m pretty well recovered now from the election hysteria that had me in its grip for the past month or so. And I’m totally stoked that Obama swamped McPalin – in fact I cried when the networks called it Tuesday night and we got to see the cheering crowds in Grant Park and then around the world. There’s hope now for a better America – and a better world.
For me, though, the rays of hope embodied in Obama’s election are clouded somewhat by the homophobe victories in Arizona, Florida, Arkansas, and, especially, California. Proposition 8 in California actually took away a right that had been recognized by the California Supreme Court earlier this year. Maybe the suit already filed this week by the ACLU can turn that around – maybe not. But either way, the votes in all 4 states show how much work is needed to change the hearts and minds of voters and counter the fear-mongering of the religious right. (The Mormon church pumped $25million into the campaign for passage of Prop 8.)
No church should have the power to outlaw love:
So, while I’m psyched to get back to creating more art and posting it here, I think I’m also going to be posting a good bit of “political” news and comment, especially about GLBT rights.
Obama 08
Sorry that I’ve not been posting as much the past couple of weeks. I got caught up in a MOVEMENT.
[WARNING: POLITICAL RANT TO FOLLOW]
This year is the first time I’ll be able to vote in a U.S. Presidential election and I’ve finally gotten psyched about it. It’s like I’ve known for years that I’d be voting against whoever the Repug crypto-fascists came up with to recycle Bush, but where I live I never really expected it would matter who I’d be voting FOR, cuz the Repugs would win anyway.
All of a sudden, though, this year it looks like my vote might matter. So even though Obama is way short of a radical’s wet dream, I’ve actually gotten excited about his campaign and I’ve been spending lots of time with campaign stuff.
I know, I know, runnin’ around trying to save the world is a pretty lame excuse for not being here at my PC makin’ porn, but that’s the deal. But I do miss messin’ with all the pretty boys here, so from now I’m gonna try to balance my time a little better between Obama and Morphians.
One plus of the campaining sidetrack has been discovering Connor, who we’ll be seing more of in the days ahead:
Why I Got Banned
For those who don’t follow threads of comments on other posts, I want to pass along that the person who reported my piece on Yaoi Gallery, Icehacker, posted a comment to my Banned Again post explaining to me the reasons why the piece was reported – “You could see thigh, for fuck sake” – and why it had to be banned – “under US law 3D images of nude minors are illegal” (I’m paraphrasing that a little). From that. we’ve had an interesting exchange of comments. I pointed out to Icehacker that what US law actually says is that 3D images of characters that are “virtually indistinguishable” from actual minors are illegal if they show the minors engaged in sexual activity. The term “sexual activity” is defined in the law and doesn’t include revealing a thigh – it doesn’t even include just being nude. Nope. To be illegal because of nudity the image would have to show “graphic or simulated lascivious exhibition of the genitals or pubic area.”
Anyway, I pointed that out to Icehacker and then explained that I’d posted questions on GSR several times about what the term “sexually themed” in the TOS about 3D images means. And from the responses I’d gotten, I honestly thought it applied to full frontal nudity, not to a picture of a shirtless elf – even one where you can see thigh for fuck sake. Unfortunately, my comments have now caused me to be labeled as not only a miscreant but a bitcher and whiner as well. So much for honest discourse.
In addition to the comments Icehacker posted here about why I was reported and should be shot at sunrise, he/she also has posted a long fascinating journal entry at YG about their escapade. It’s quite revealing as to their mix of self righteous and sadistic motives:
“If you piss me off, I’ll make a run right over to your gallery and start looking over every piece you have to see if you have something up that violates the ToS. …
I don’t report to make people’s lives harder, I do it if their is a genuine violation and using those cases, I’ll learn what is and what isn’t allowed.
… and now for the why this makes me a BITCH part.
I LOVE to watch what happens next. It appeals to both sides of my nature.
I’ll FOLLOW those people to their other sites and if I’m involved in what has happened (usually I’ll be the person reporting the piece) I’ll usually tell them why their piece was reported!
… okay, I’ll do this if other people I know were the reporters too.
But I do it in the hopes that if the person is suspended, they don’t make the same mistake twice.
… I try to be a saint… but end up being a bitch in a latex nun’s habit…
The other reason I do it… especially in the cases of people that are banned from y!gallery… is to just… torment them if they go from understanding and trying to learn to being well… “YOU’RE JEALOUS OF MY TALENT!”
Interesting glimpses into a truly warped mind. Unfortunately, though, the piece is quite inaccurate in what it says about the way I’ve supposedly responded to being banned. So much for honest reporting.
At least, though, I now know that I’m not alone. Icehacker has filed abuse reports 122 times, which makes me want to say – Get a Life. Also, thanks to a dare Icehacker made in one of his/her comments, I now have a picture of my brother naked from the waist up.
So, that’s pretty much the end of the YG saga for me. I IM’ed Snover last night to try and talk about it, but he ignored me. Now that Icehacker has enlightened me about how I’m completely in the wrong and how the mods agree with him/her, I think I’ll go find some other wall to uselessly bang my head against. (I also know now from Icehacker’s journal entry that when someone responds to one of his/her TOS raids with the “ignore it and go on method” it drives him/her insane.)
Banned Again from Yaoi Gallery
They must have really wanted to get rid of me over there. I’ve just been permanently banned for posting this pic 2 nights ago:
They decided it is “adult in nature” and therefore a violation of their rules. Curiously, those same rules say that “tasteful nude” drawings – ones with full frontal nudity but no sexual activity – don’t need to be flagged as “adult imagery.” Odd, isn’t it?
I’m going out now to get smashed. More later.
