Lyin' for the Lard

I have tried to NOT address some of the issues brought up by mormonism in the news but in so doing I find that I just become silent. SO....what the hell.

Most mormons have been told at some time or another that little white lies for the sake of the greater good are acceptable. Sometimes this is expressed in the idea of" milk before meat". As missionaries were trained to address some of the more controversial aspects of church doctrine by ignoring or minimizing it. When astute evangelicals would bring up the mormon doctrine that there are more that just one god, the mormon response was to obscure the mormon church's true teachings. When xians would claim that mormons are not really "christians" in the main-line sort of definition, they would respond "well of course we are...the NAME of our church is the church of jesus christ"... According to this logic, if taco bell were to call their chaulpa a lobster tail you would eat it with drawn butter.

When I was a missionary, one of my assignments was to try to scout out potential property for the church to buy and build a chapel. I was given SPECIFIC instructions that I was not to tell anyone that the property was for the mormon church because then they would "jack up the price". Not telling the truth was justified because after all I was responsible for the lord's money.

Well now old Mitt has his ass in a sling for this very behavior. Most mormons, though not all, are terribly ashamed of the church's history of racism. I can remember a very prominent "apostle" (aka..a representative of the Lard Jesus Christ hisself) state that no person with a drop of black blood would ever hold the priesthood until the second coming of christ. Seems the "black folk" were not as valiant in the war in heaven that happened before the creation of the earth and so they were marked with the mark of Cain. Now if these seems wierder than a chicken on roller skates it is just because you never spent much time among the "saints". The make the scientologists look sane but they tend to keep it under wraps. When the mormon church grew by leaps and bounds in Brazil, that old not one drop of black blood business became impossible. SOoooo a revelation and bada bing bada boom problem solved. The racist past was no longer an issue...unless you wanted to run for president.

The idea that ole Mitt went through the temple to learn secret handshakes (stolen from the Masons for the most part) to get into heaven and made a blood oath to never reveal them....well that is a topic for another time.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/22363300#22363300

Watch old Mitt back peddle and know that all through out Utah the questions are a sure sign that Satan is trying to defeat a righteous man.

Remember that the mormon church STILL teaches that reparative therapy is a cure for homosexuality. Every major mental health organization has dismissed, debunked, and distanced themselves from the very idea. When BYU's clinical psychology program is audited by the APA, they talk just like the folks at Notre Dame. They are clinicians in a university sponsored by a religious organization. But let the site visitors jump in the cars and the knowing winks begin. The fact that the mo' church owns its own social service organization is usually left out of the conversation. If you get sent to LDS Social Services (the old name for it I think) you will be told that your wanting to suck dick can be cured with scripture reading, cold showers, and playing basket ball. Your father was weak your mother was overbearing and you just need to hang out with men and get your gender bearings adjusted. The idea that gay men are attracted to MEN does not enter their little brains. They think that gay me want to be women so that they can be around men to fill some emotional deficit is curable. Facts will never get in the way of dogma. My suggestion is that all the reparative therapists ought to make their daughters marry the cured gay guys....let's just see how that works.

When you put this whole ramble into context (not easy but possible) it is the idea that mormons are RIGHT!!! The believe they are led by men who talk to god. In Utah they are called Prophets. In California they are called schizophrenics. In Utah you follow them and give them 10% of your income. In California you give them injections of Haldol.

Poor Mitt. He is the worse place a mormon can be. He is being asked embarrassing questions by people who can check the facts. I SAW my dad march with MLK. yeah and Joseph Smith SAW god. Probably about with the same visual acuity.

Stephen Lynch - If I Were Gay

For Ron...who also only had one ball but is still one damn sexy guitar player.

Protecting and Maintaining Your Heterosexual House of Cards

Ah too many of my straight friends and family need to be more familiar with their wangs.

Interesting Question....

What's the coolest fetish performance you've ever seen or heard of?

This is NOT a sexual question. I'm looking performance scene scenarios. Performances you might have scene at BDSM, burlesque or similar shows/conferences. Pole dancing or things you saw at a strip club are also NOT what I'm looking for. Fire flogging, stunt whipping and unique improvised bondage are more in line with this question. Specific details would be helpful bonus points if you find footage. Thanks in advance for your help on this oddball question. :)

Best Answer - Chosen by Voters

Not for the faint hearted but if you are interested in serious S&M then look for "suspension" on the internnet. Some participate for spiritual enlightenment, others for sexual pleasure.

The above exchange was sent to me by a friend following an ongoing discussion in our Leather/Fetish community here in Los Angeles. I have been struggling with some of the issues that this topic is helping to illustrate so let me ramble.....

I have been involved in a number of events that have demos of fetish or BDSM activities. This can range to everything from "demonstrating" flogging, participating in panel discussions, or even didactic presentations on the neurobiology of SM. I have begun to question the process though. I do not have answers but the questions keep coming up.

Some of the Tribal Elders tell how when they were first coming into the community, it was a rather arduous process. People back then were subject to arrest and all kinds of other problems. It was quite common to make new-comers "prove" themselves before they were accepted. It was intentionally an exclusionary process, it had to be. It was a gradual step-wise process of acceptance.. You were likely to be invited to a social event before you were ever invited to play with someone. They checked you out. First to make sure you were not an undercover vice cop, but also to determine if you were someone with whom they wanted to share their hard earned knowledge.

Today, we take one of the most important parts of our life, our kinky sexuality, and share it in public for all kinds of reasons. Education, exposure, and entertainment seem to top the list. I am not suggesting that we should not do this, I am just thinking out loud as it were. There is a very different feeling from playing in public at a BDSM party in which most of the people present are experienced and participating (even if their participation is as a voyeur) and an event in which some of the people are on-lookers. For those who talk about the energy in a scene, I wonder what the impact is of some looki-loo tossing their cookies because they are wierded out by what is going on on-stage.

I think on of the most dangerous aspects of "public play", is that it is easy, no matter your motivation, to find yourself encouraged by the audience to realign your priorities from whatever that motivation might have been to theirs. In my experience, the audience is usually interested in being entertained. It seems pretty common for those audience members to encourage more extreme behavior with out much insight to the risks involved. It seems that the communication coming FROM the audience is usually limited to things like: "Tie him tighter", "Hit him harder", or "Do it to his dick". I think some of our educational demonstrations have as much educational value as gladiatorial combat. I am sure the Roman spectators learned anatomy and all kinds of other important topics while attending the Coliseum but I am not sure that was the original intent or the most effect teaching methodology.

Last night I attended an event, part of which was a suspension scene. The troupe of performers was talented, skillful, and did a great job. I have been to other such scenes that were deeply moving and had an almost spiritual air to them. This was different. (please note...that says different not bad) I was listening to people in the audience. Some guy was narrating to his friends. He made them draw up close to the stage and get so close they were in the way as he told them all about what was going on....oh and got it all wrong by the way. The performers were teased and taunted, not in a cruel way but more teasing. It was NOT like the scene I can recall in which a good friend was suspended for his birthday and had invited his friends to be there to support him. Again, that was different.

My fantasy about the question posited at the top of this post, by the way, is that it was posted by some nice little mommy who was trying to do something special for her son's bar mitzvah.

Have you ever noticed that some days just really suck? Today is really trying hard to be one of those days. It started out fine. In fact, parts of it were really pretty terrific. But THEN...well let's just say people are REALLY pissing me off and I am TRYING to be nice.

I gotta ask myself..."are there really somethings I just don't think people should do?" Are there some boundaries I think should not be violated? I resent the fact that my answer is in the affirmative. I really want to be able to say that I am a little more resistant to other people's bullshit than I seem to be. So the consequence is that I will have to wait and see how well I delay what seems like an inevitable confrontation with the fact that I am dealing with what has been referred to as "douchbaggary".

I have learned that permanence is a luxury. It is rare and very expensive. Sometimes it is much better to accept what is functional and in this case it is a clear recognition that because somethings will NOT change...other things will have to.

Tonight's exercise in narcissism is brought to you by my decision to use this forum to explore my personal process and a house full of people who seem to think that my reaction to their behavior is very different than it really is.

Stay tuned...fireworks are always a possibility and a lot more likely to be entertaining that the smoldering going on right now.

Hallow what???

A recent poll in the Advocate while typical of their superficial style of coverage, asked if straight people had ruined some of the traditional gay Halloween celebrations such as the ones in the Castro and WeHo. If I didn't get the damn magazine for free, I would never read it. But this particular edition touched on a topic that some of us here in LA had been discussing.

I remember the years when Halloween was one of the High Holidays. It was both campy and erotic. Now after stumbling over baby strollers and small children dressed in K-mart costumes, you find some poor 5 year old staring a some naked guy's dick decorated with sequins while his mother scowls. It is the process of assimilation.

While we enjoy greater acceptance, some have been willing to pay for it by surrendering our uniqueness. While celebrating our diversity, it might behoove us to ask what purpose it serves. Why are there gay men? What might have been obvious answers in other cultures at other times now seem lost in our assimilation. In the past, gay men served as shaman, medicine man, political and spiritual leader, teacher. They were not encumbered by their own family so they were free to serve the community family. We answered to the tribe rather than to our spouse or children. In leadership, we had no progeny to whom we could pass our accomplishments, we served the collective.

Currently, the fight for equal rights has become corrupted by efforts to assimilate. We tell our straight allies that we are just like them except we choose to have sex with other men. We pretend that we fuck just like they do except both of us have dicks. BULLSHIT!!! This leads to the adoption of the archaic assumption that all receptive partners are somehow the lesser partner. When gay men adopt the wedding traditions of straight couples they often fail to realize that most of those traditions came from a time when women were chattel whose value was immediately diminished when their hymen was penetrated. Dowries were paid because women were considered a burden and fathers had to pay the future husband for the inconvenience.

Many gay men have chosen to surrender their role and their power to mimic their straight counterparts. In the rush to assimilate into "gay marriage" we opted out of a conversation abut marriage as an archaic institution. Rather than debating that domestic partnerships are less but equal to marriage how about a conversation about doing away with marriage altogether and giving EVERYBODY domestic partnerships? How about letting marriage remain a religious rite and domestic partnership being the purview of the state? Instead we tried to assimilate. We are just like straight people and we want marriage.

In my little corner of the world, there seem to be at least a few men who are willing to accept that being in a committed relationship, a domestic partnership, is NOT the same thing as being monogamous. They seem to recognize that the what most people consider traditional family values are usually based more on I Love Lucy re-runs than they are on reality. Ozzie may have gone to work while Harriet kept house but in the real world of today both of them are working outside the home. Monogamy might be important if you have to worry about illegitimate heirs but what if you are pretty sure your sexual activities will not result in "bastard" children?

Rather that celebrating our diversity, we seem to be surrendering it. The perpetual victims in leadership sigh as thugs take over our celebrations and rather than fight back, they cancel. When will learn that another option exists? We really could have told folks that they are on our turf and if they can't act appropriately they should stay home. If you don't want your 5 year old exposed to gay culture and sensibility don't go to Halloween in West Hollywood.

Who knew that Halloween could be this much fun in December?

Cause and Effect

When I was a little mormon kid, the mo-church used to hand out these cheapola copies of the book of momorn. It was illustrated with copies of paintings by Arnold Friberg. The paintings had a certain homoeroticism to them. This one is a scene from the rather boring book but illustrates my point. While we were supposed to be motivated to keep the commandments, fight for the right, and a bunch of other crapola, I had a very different reaction. It was puberty and I was a gay kid. The fact that no one ever considered that some 13 year old kid might find the pictures erotic illustrates one of the fundamental concepts I learned about mormonism. It is a religion for stupid people. Now that does not mean that all of them are stupid, no rather that is is designed and marketed to people who have the intellectual curiosity of the moderately cognitively impaired. If you have ever watched the South Park episode, it is more accurate than any one is willing to admit...dumb da dumb dumb indeed.

What has struck me recently is that the folks who leave mormonism, especially some of the folks who post on one of several websites such as Recovery from Mormonism (www.exmormon.org) tend to be a rather intellectually diminished bunch as well. Far be it from me to poke sticks at the spiritually wounded, but these folks are so busy self inflicting perceived injury that it is hard to hesitate...so I won't.

One of the things I most apprise in my leather brothers is their strength. These are guys who fought the world and won. Not always, but often enough to make my journey through life a lot easier. They are strong and I derive strength from them. They have struggled and been refined in the process. The folks leaving mormonism tend to whine so loudly about their voluntarily inflicted misery that they cannot see that one way to end that misery is to leave and try to be happy. These are folks who seriously need a safe word but seem unable to recognize that STOP or LEAVE ME ALONE might just be sufficient to end the mormon tendency to plague those who try to leave with unwanted attention. Common posts on Recovery from Mormonism question "What do I do when the Bishop calls?" These are people who cannot even imagine that telling these invasive douchebags to get off the porch and leave them alone might just work. They are so used to acting like eunuchs that they can't even find their balls let alone use them. NO WONDER they never figured out that those damn Friberg paintings were giving some us a hard on.

Introduction

When I was a mormon missionary, in between selling jesus door-to-door, we were supposed to do all kinds of things to keep us "spirichul". One of them was journal writing. I HATED journal writing. The idea was to write down a lot of faith promoting rumors, special urban legends, and "testimoney" building crap for your posterity. Things like the fact that you were hornier than a three balled tom-cat and that you were so bored you wanted to die were NOT to be written down. Rather the task was to write down the kind of lies that could convince you that you were happy. It took a long time and a lot of therapy to be able to journal in a way that was actually meaningful for me.

One day as I was looking at the leather bound journals that has accumulated over the years, I thought it might be time to step into the 21st century and take advantage of the blogosphere. I wrestled with my own feelings that blogging was inherently narcissistic and finally decided to jump in and see what happens.

Like my first attempts to journal my efforts were soon aborted. Then one day, I figured it might just be fun t allow myself a space to ramble and not give a rat's ass who might read it. So here I am...at least this time the major damage is only going to be that I annoy some electrons. That seems better than killing all those poor trees to make paper.