It Finally Hit Slog

[Prop 8 Fallout] I'm a faithful reader of Slog, the Seattle Stranger's news & arts blog. So I've been anticipating this Slog entry about City Weekly's discontinuation of Savage Love.

If you're not familiar with the matter, here's a brief rundown. (If you already know what's going on, might as well skip the green section.)

This executive decision was made in response to Dan Savage's call for a general boycott of Utah which, itself, was an (understandably) angry and disappointed reaction to California's deplorable approval of Proposition 8, funded mainly by the LDS Church and its members. (Whew! Diagram available upon request.)

As punishment for this action, City Weekly subsequently received a sound scolding from The Village Voice's Roy Edroso--who apparently assumed that, as Utahns, we must obviously be so backward, conservative and homophobic that we had to "defenestrate" Savage for holding such strident pro-gay views.*

(Such a butch, active verb: to defenestrate. It seems to imply that Saltas, like all us red-state yahoos, is prone to violence.)

In fact, pro-gay views are not unknown among City Weekly staff (from what I can tell, such views may be pretty much universal, if I can gauge by my co-workers' considerate treatment of me), and it became evident that blue-staters such as Savage and Edroso may sometimes fail to recognize just how scrappy we red-state lefties and liberals really are.

Later, everybody pretended to misunderstand Saltas' MLK reference. (It was meant to imply that, traditionally, civil-rights leaders never abandon battleground states.)

I'm starting to recognize this whole thing as an example of how the left continues to devour itself.

Let me offer that we're all well and duly pissed off by the California vote. I know that, for me, the passage of Proposition 8 has made it difficult to fully celebrate the Obama victory--which, along with 2008's huge Democratic wins in Congress and the implosion of the Gingrich revolution, represents the greatest, most decisive political victory the Left has had in my lifetime. I'm sad that so much of my mental energy must be expended on resenting the Mormons and the California voters who were so easily swayed by lies.

I want to focus on the good. Because, disregarding for a moment Proposition 8--which will most likely be overturned by the courts anyway--this election was so fucking good I can hardly stand it.

Dave and I will get married someday--and it will be fully legal, and no out-of-state idiots will have any say about it. Until then, I'm going to remember that this election was good news, and it can only bode well for gays and lesbians--as well as for:

• blacks
• women
• the troops
• Latinos
• workers
• average taxpayers
• responsible media
• privacy rights
• young people
• intellectuals
• the middle class
• the environment
• community organizers
• public schools

... and everybody else who has been mocked and villified for the past eight years for not toeing the rich, heterosexual, elitist, neocon, evangelical Christian line. That is, this election will be good for the country in general.

And we'll get California back.

Here's the response I left on Slog.

(Brandon Burt)


* Meanwhile, I was quietly dying inside. Dave and I chose to wait until Proposition 8 was soundly defeated before getting married, reasoning that our relationship's legal status is too important to be subject to the vagaries of unreliable California voters. I'm glad now that our family has not been reduced to a political chit--but I'm sad, and I wonder, in the words of Laura Nyro via Marilyn McCoo, if I'm ever gonna see my wedding day:

(Will there ever be a band as simply sweet as the Fifth Dimension?)