Longreads Pick
A writer goes through “the most invasive process in politics”—being vetted as a running mate by the same person who vetted Sarah Palin in 2008:
“It starts unobtrusively enough. ‘So you’re the vice president, and the president is visiting Seoul,’ Frank begins, unspooling an elaborate scenario in which the president’s hotel gets decimated by a car bomb, 200,000 North Korean troops cross the DMZ, and the Joint Chiefs urge me to take out Pyongyang with a tactical nuclear weapon. ‘Do you authorize the strike?’ he asks, trying to get a sense of my political judgment (as much a part of the vet now as excavating secrets). I wonder if the question is also a reaction to Frank’s Palin experience, recalling the scene in Game Change in which Palin reveals that she doesn’t even know that there are two Koreas. But I push those thoughts aside and dodge the question by asking for more military options, trying to cover my fecklessness by name-dropping Seal Team Six. Next, Frank hits me with an easier hypothetical, about a deadlocked Senate and a Supreme Court nominee who appears to be against gay marriage. ‘Do you support the president and cast the tiebreaker in favor of the president’s nominee?’ he asks. Of course I do, I respond. I’m a team player. The president can always count on me.“
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Published: Jul 17, 2012
Length: 19 minutes (4,870 words)
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Steven Thrasher has been named the 2012 National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association journalist of the year. After gay marriage was legalized in New York last year, he followed two same-sex couples who finally earned the right to consider whether or not they wanted to get married:
‘We never did this saying, “We’re going to go out and marry right away,” ‘ Howard says. ‘We won the right. Now, we have the choice.’
Besides: ‘I was waiting for Kevin to bring it up.’
Kevin hears this and replies, ‘Really? That’s interesting,’ without adding more.
It turns out that although same-sex couples now have 1,324 new legal benefits in New York State, there are actually some big economic incentives for Kevin and Howard not to wed. Kevin receives state insurance for his disabilities, and marrying Howard would end that. While it would allow Kevin to go onto Howard’s insurance plan, the co-payments for the drugs and procedures he needs could be prohibitive.
This is exactly the kind of conundrum cohabitating straight couples of certain means have had to face from time to time.
“Maybe I Do And Maybe I Don’t.” — Steven Thrasher, Village Voice
More from Thrasher
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Longreads Pick
Steven Thrasher has been named the 2012 National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association journalist of the year. After gay marriage was legalized in New York last year, he followed two same-sex couples who finally earned the right to consider whether or not they wanted to get married:
“‘We never did this saying, “We’re going to go out and marry right away,” ‘ Howard says. ‘We won the right. Now, we have the choice.’
“Besides: ‘I was waiting for Kevin to bring it up.’
“Kevin hears this and replies, ‘Really? That’s interesting,’ without adding more.
“It turns out that although same-sex couples now have 1,324 new legal benefits in New York State, there are actually some big economic incentives for Kevin and Howard not to wed. Kevin receives state insurance for his disabilities, and marrying Howard would end that. While it would allow Kevin to go onto Howard’s insurance plan, the co-payments for the drugs and procedures he needs could be prohibitive.
“This is exactly the kind of conundrum cohabitating straight couples of certain means have had to face from time to time.”
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Published: Aug 10, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,542 words)
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On Manny Pacquiao and gay marriage:
It’s here at this church that Manny Pacquiao comes to pray after his fights. He kneels down and gives thanks. In that same way we knelt with a rosary all day when my kuya died of AIDS. All day for seven days, with lots of food, and lots of prayers, on your knees everyday. It’s what we do when someone dies. I heard that a woman had a pin in one of her knees and couldn’t kneel and I pictured a sewing needle stuck there and I silently wished to get pricked by that same needle— because I couldn’t see how what I was doing there in that church was helping any of us out there on the dirt—in the land, on the fields with the farmers, and the trash heaps, and the kids with the little blue-brown faces left by the chapel, or the boys, with their bloodied underpants and soiled shorts, and all the musk from all the work, and the distant gaze from all the glue. How was this rosary tending to this life?
“Here We Are Becoming Champs.” — Melissa Chadburn, The Rumpus
More from The Rumpus
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Longreads Pick
On boxer Manny Pacquiao and gay marriage:
“It’s here at this church that Manny Pacquiao comes to pray after his fights. He kneels down and gives thanks. In that same way we knelt with a rosary all day when my kuya died of AIDS. All day for seven days, with lots of food, and lots of prayers, on your knees everyday. It’s what we do when someone dies. I heard that a woman had a pin in one of her knees and couldn’t kneel and I pictured a sewing needle stuck there and I silently wished to get pricked by that same needle— because I couldn’t see how what I was doing there in that church was helping any of us out there on the dirt—in the land, on the fields with the farmers, and the trash heaps, and the kids with the little blue-brown faces left by the chapel, or the boys, with their bloodied underpants and soiled shorts, and all the musk from all the work, and the distant gaze from all the glue. How was this rosary tending to this life?”
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Published: Jun 11, 2012
Length: 7 minutes (1,951 words)
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The true story of the case that helped change the legal landscape for gay rights in the U.S.:
The story told in Lawrence v. Texas was a story of sexual privacy, personal dignity, intimate relationships, and shifting notions of family in America. By the time the tale poured from Justice Anthony Kennedy’s pen, in his decisive majority opinion, it was even about the physical dimension of love: “When sexuality finds overt expression in intimate conduct with another person, the conduct can be but one element in a personal bond that is more enduring.” The opinion used the word ‘relationship’ eleven times.
That is the story that Dale Carpenter, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, seeks to untell in his important new book, “Flagrant Conduct” (Norton), a chronicle that peels the Lawrence case back through layers of carefully choreographed litigation and tactical appeals, back to the human protagonists we never really got to know, and back again through centuries of laws criminalizing “unnatural” sexual activity. What if, Carpenter asks, this weren’t a story about love, or even sex?
“Lawrence v. Texas: How Laws Against Sodomy Became Unconstitutional.” — Dahlia Lithwick, The New Yorker
Previously: “The Making of Gay Marriage’s Top Foe.” — Mark Oppenheimer, Salon, Feb. 8, 2012
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Liberals’ history with regard to gay rights is not as progressive as some would like you to remember:
It was, after all, the trustees of the Smithsonian Institution, not a Bible Belt cultural outpost, who bowed to pressure from the militant Catholic League just fifteen months ago to censor the work of a gay American artist who had already been silenced, long ago, by AIDS. It was a Democratic president, with wide support from Democrats on Capitol Hill, who in 1996 signed the Defense of Marriage Act, one of the most discriminatory laws ever to come out of Washington. It’s precisely because of DOMA that to this day same-sex marriages cannot be more than what you might call placebo marriages in the eight states (plus the District of Columbia) that have legalized them. DOMA denies wedded same-sex couples all federal benefits—some 1,000, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and veterans’ programs—and allows the other 42 states to ignore their marriages altogether.
“Whitewashing Gay History.” — Frank Rich, New York magazine
See also: “The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage.” — Theodore B. Olson, Newsweek, Jan. 9, 2010
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What it’s like to be a bisexual man in a world that wants you to choose between being either gay or straight:
Recently, on OKCupid, a woman messaged me: “Are you truly into ladies, and if so, what type? Finding a truly bi man is like finding a unicorn.”
If I’m a unicorn where I live now, in L.A., then I was a unicorn rocky mountain oyster when I moved to the old rustbelt city of Syracuse, New York to go to grad school and live for the first time as a fully out bi man. There was one other mythical bi man in the entire city, but try as I might, I never found him. At the gay bar, I sometimes got called a “half-breeder.” Straight people treated me just as shittily as they treat gay people. Three times, gay men hit me in the back of the head when they saw my head turn for a women. For the most part, straight women wouldn’t date me because, as one said, “You’re just gonna leave me to go suck a dick.” For the first time in my life, frat boys called me fag. My professor said, “The world just isn’t ready for gay marriage.” I emailed him “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” Then I went out with friends and my gay friends didn’t know what to do because I got drunk and flirted with a lesbian. A friend said she thought bi people didn’t exist. I said, “I’m sitting right here,” because that was my answer, but I was starting to believe her. I stopped telling people what I was. I let people think what they wanted, which was usually that I was like them.
“Notes From a Unicorn.” — Seth Fischer, The Rumpus
See also: “Teaching Good Sex.” — Laurie Abraham, The New York Times Magazine, Nov. 16, 2011
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Longreads Pick
What it’s like to be a bisexual man in a world that wants you to choose between being either gay or straight:
“Recently, on OKCupid, a woman messaged me: ‘Are you truly into ladies, and if so, what type? Finding a truly bi man is like finding a unicorn.’
“If I’m a unicorn where I live now, in L.A., then I was a unicorn rocky mountain oyster when I moved to the old rustbelt city of Syracuse, New York to go to grad school and live for the first time as a fully out bi man. There was one other mythical bi man in the entire city, but try as I might, I never found him. At the gay bar, I sometimes got called a ‘half-breeder.’ Straight people treated me just as shittily as they treat gay people. Three times, gay men hit me in the back of the head when they saw my head turn for a women. For the most part, straight women wouldn’t date me because, as one said, ‘You’re just gonna leave me to go suck a dick.’ For the first time in my life, frat boys called me fag. My professor said, ‘The world just isn’t ready for gay marriage.’ I emailed him ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail.'”
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Published: Feb 24, 2012
Length: 15 minutes (3,945 words)
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How an unplanned pregnancy during college changed the life and worldview of Maggie Gallagher, now one of the leading voices against gay marriage:
On a mild November day, Gallagher and I are upstairs at City Bakery, near Union Square in Manhattan, where after months of requests she has agreed to meet me. As Gallagher tells it, she and the baby’s father were close; they had been together “on the order of one year,” she says, so he might have been expected to stand by her. “My son’s father was my boyfriend at Yale,” is how she describes their relationship. But when she told him she was pregnant, right before spring break in 1982, he vanished on her. “I was in his room and he had to go do something, and I was going to fly out in a couple of hours, had to get to the airport. And the last thing he said to me was, ‘I’ll be back in 30 minutes.’ And then he wasn’t.”
He just left her sitting in his room. And that was the end of them. When summer came, Gallagher moved home to Oregon and took some classes to finish her degree. In the fall, she gave birth to a baby boy, Patrick.
“The Making of Gay Marriage’s Top Foe.” — Mark Oppenheimer, Salon
See more #longreads about gay marriage
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