doubting thom

According to the new director of the Office of Special Counsel, which oversees complaints of discrimination in hiring and firing in the federal government, while I still can’t be fired or demoted for gay behaviors, I can now be fired or demoted simply for being gay, and there’s no one to whom I can appeal.

Gene and Mac both refer today to the unbelievable (my boss, a straight woman, actually called it “unfuckingbelievable” when I showed her the article) position taken by Scott Bloch of the OSC that the list of prohibited personnel actions of the Civil Service Reform Act does not, in fact, cover discrimination based on sexual orientation. I first blogged about the OSC’s planned review of this policy, and its removal of all references to sexual orientation as a protected class from its website and written materials, several weeks ago.

More bizarrely, though, Bloch goes on to say that conduct and sexual orientation are not the same thing (ok, I’ll buy that, but look at where he goes with it next…), but that conduct potentially is covered while orientation is not; you cannot be fired for being in a gay pride parade, but you can be fired for being gay. This twisted premise, though, seems to suggest that he also should be forced to interpret the Act as protecting those who exhibit womanly or Black behavior, but not those who are, in fact, women or Black.

Jeff, dear, I know you’re itching to head back to California, but I tell you, in all seriousness, Canada just is looking better on a daily basis.

Despite the fact that my family tree has been firmly rooted in the U.S. for many generations, and that I’m clearly a mongrel descended, at a minimum, from English, Irish, Welsh, Scot, German and Dutch forebears, I’ve always identified more closely with my Irish ancestry than any other. To be more accurate, I’ve identified with a mythologized, pan-Celtic Irishness, and its in this identification that my sometime nickname–“elflad”–and lifelong attraction to elf and fairy lore have their roots.

As early as first grade, for example, I can remember the other kids calling me a “leprechaun” and, over the years, this eventually morphed into “elflad”; the “elf” moniker has maintained an influence even now in several of my web domains as well as the name of the blog itself.

I’m also a huge fan of Celtic music, from traditional Celtic folk to more contemporary New Age and x-Celtic fusion. In fact, Celtic and Celtic-inspired folk and New Age make up the single largest genre in my CD and MP3 collection.

I’ve never been a big fan of the excesses of St. Patrick’s Day–the drunken revelry, the homophobic parades–but when I lived in Cambridge and Boston, I particularly enjoyed St. Patrick’s Day “Evacuation Day”, especially since there it offered an additional holiday from work.

Today started out fairly positively. I was actually looking pretty good in my green A&F sweater and one of Jeff’s black leather jackets. My boss’s boss–a McMahon–complimented me on my wearing of the green, and poured me a strong Irish coffee–a tradition he maintains in his office every March 17th, complete with Jameson, brown sugar, and whipped cream. But the day went largely downhill from there. Meetings from noon straight through to 2:30, the same time both the cafeteria and sundries shop close, meant that I’d had to forego lunch, again, while crisis after crisis kept me stressed until close of business. Then I walked outside to discover that it was sleeting.

Jeff had suggested that we might get a drink after work, and I had replied by email that it depended on the level of misanthropy I was still feeling by then, and contingent on my getting something to eat beforehand. Later, though, I decided it was a very good idea after all, so after I picked him up at the Metro, we went for a few drinks and a bite at Arlington’s one gay bar, the gloriously tacky Freddie’s Beach Bar. The calamari was only so-so, and the turkey wrap and pasta were pretty dreadful, but the chocolate martini and cosmo follow-up were tasty and fun (even if the bartender did end up briefly drawing attention to me with his “Sir?! Hey, sir? Did you want that martini made with white or dark chocolate?” I might as well have been sitting there with a pink parasol and a big beehive drag wig.), and the coconut ice cream was very yummy.

OK, so none of that was particularly Irish, but still it was a nice relaxing end to an otherwise horrible day.

Today on Rebel Prince, Jeff writes about cartoonist William Haefeli, pointing out some of his gay-themed ‘toons available at the New Yorker‘s Cartoon Bank, a great resource for framed and matted prints, original art and other gifts based on the cover art and cartoons from the magazine.

I’m a fan of Haefeli as well, but my very favorite New Yorker cartoonist of all time has to be Roz Chast, whose shaky drawings based on wry and witty plays on word and turns of phrase, along with the occasional trigonometric alien mother, grim reaper or scary blank-eyed circus clown, often find me very nearly literally rolling on the floor laughing. I have, in fact, fallen out of bed from laughing so hard at some collected Chast cartoons.

One recent cartoon that had both of us chuckling was “The Pessimist and the Paranoid,” in which the pessimist unsurprisingly suggests that the glass is half-empty, while the paranoid, wringing her hands, worries that “That glass is too close to the edge of the table! It’s going to fall and break and somebody’s going to step on the shards and get hurt! What is that liquid, anyway? Something hideously caustic, no doubt.”

Every now and then I get a piece of spam that actually makes me smile. The ones that seemingly have been run through a translation engine from an Asian language into English, like the one I received today, occasionally can be mildly amusing:

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To suspend from this great, Implausible and Amazing mails send any email here lovely and love Burlen: mailto:[email deleted].

It’s like an advertisement for a circus–well, maybe an erotic circus like Cirque du Soleil’s new adult show, Zumanity. Step right up and see the great, Implausible and Amazing mails! Expect I have wonderful intelligence and superb show for you at the moment! Bring all your sweetheart lacivious friends! Experience the thrill of salacious sugar!

Both Jeff and Cornelia already have reported on our dinner together last night, though I did at least beat them to the punch in getting a few pictures from the evening uploaded before I went to bed.

Dinner was great. Annie’s is loud, crowded and smoky, yes, and the music selection last night was a little strange, but I haven’t had as good a filet mignon in quite a while. “Medium,” “medium” and “medium-well” (I guess I love you anyway, dear, despite the sacrilege) were the first three responses as our server, “211 Scott,” asked around the table before getting to me–Tre being oddly mute all evening–when I exclaimed “just as rare as you’re willing to let it go,” whereupon Jeff added on my behalf “as rare as legally possible.” And it was deliciously red throughout (if not, unfortunately, as rare as I’d cook it on my own) yet simultaneously melting–like buttah–in my mouth. Really, really superb.

And since the restaurant was observing the Dining Out for Life event, we did good while eating well, since the restaurant would be contributing half of our total bill to Food and Friends, to help feed people living with life-challenging illnesses.

And Cornelia and Kat. Wow, what a cute, lovable, sweet pair. As I noted in a comment on Cornelia’s post, while Jeff and I are relative newlycan’tbeweds, the two of them have been together over 6 years, yet are still openly affectionate. It’s so wonderful to see. Moreover, conversation was easy and fun (though I suspect we irritated the hell out of the surrounding tables as we got a little flash-happy with the cameras), and the evening was a wonderful success. I really want to spend more time with the two of them.

The guy at the urinal next to mine just a few minutes ago was talking away merrily on his cell phone the whole time.

I keep imagining what the person on the other end of that conversation must have been thinking.

It’s been a while since I participated in a blog meme, but I do like the one that I’ve seen circulating on a number of LiveJournals: Type your first name into Google, click on the “Images” tab, and then “Google Search.” Choose an image from the first page of results.

For the name I generally go by, I got a couple of intriguing choices from a site with pictures of Angkor Thom in Cambodia. Because the site explicitly notes a copyright on the photos, I won’t reproduce them here in my journal, so here is my favorite.

“Thom” is actually from my middle name, “Thomas.” For my real first name, which I only use on official forms, the Google image search offered me a bizarre selection of images, many of burping wild deer (apparently my first name is the Dutch word for either the sound of these burps or the act of burping!), and one of Jaguar’s triple carb system, but the scariest result of all was a photo of Celine Dion. Yikes!

And a search for my last name, in a cool coincidence, returns as its third image a photo of a Maine Coon cat who is not my own Alex yet looks remarkably like him.

Tonight after dinner with Cornelia and Kat (an adorable, delightful couple, but more on that later), the four of us were standing outside Annie’s near a psychic who had set up a couple of chairs on the sidewalk, where she was inviting people to have their cards read. A man walking near them apparently tripped or fell on them and a little drama ensued.

After things had quieted down, I mused, “Shouldn’t she have seen that coming?”

Earlier today I added a quicklink about MyStacks.com, a site that lets you create auto-refreshing lists of links generated from the results of searches in blogs and other syndicated resources on terms that you select. For now I’ve added a stack containing the ten most recent search results for the phrase “gay marriage” to the right sidebar of the elf-reflection main page; it’s amazing how many items are being posted that contain the phrase and how quickly, then, items are dropping off the bottom of the stack.

[Update: The code for the stack was screwing up the page validation, so for now I’ve moved it to a page of its own, where I’m pulling the most recent fifty results rather than just ten.]

Last June, I posted an entry about the depressingly ultraconservative politics of Virginia, the state in which I was born and where I now live, with only a 7-8 year gap during and after college. I think it’s not hyperbole to suggest that Virginia, for whatever possible reason I cannot fathom, may be the most anti-gay state in the union, beating out even those of the deep south.

In the Washington Post today, for example, columnist Marc Fisher describes Virginia as “a state where gay marriage is a topic for a future century (on another planet), legislators trade openly gay slurs, and the state attorney general resists relaxing the anti-sodomy law even after the U.S. Supreme Court orders up a change.” Every year sees a steady stream of anti-gay bills introduced in the state legislature. This year our lawmakers already have passed two resolutions urging the federal government to amend the U.S. Constitution to ban gay marriage; of course, the latter already is rather busy engaged in the really important issues facing America today: steroid use in professional baseball and the protection of fast food franchises.

The latest news from Virginia is that the state Senate voted yesterday, by a 28-10 margin, to broaden the state’s already existing ban on gay marriage by stripping same-sex couples of legal rights they might gain from unions in other states. As Queer Day notes, in reporting on a story in The Virginian Pilot, “In fact Virginia is poised to become among the first in the nation to deprive gay couples of the right to share health insurance, visit their partners in hospitals and even keep custody of their children.” Just in the last couple of weeks, the legislature here voted not to overturn a law prohibiting private employers–private employers–from being able to extend health insurance to their employees’ unmarried partners. Yes, in Virginia the social conservative animosity towards homosexuals trumps the true conservative principle of less government intrusion in the lives of private citizens and in the business decisions of corporations. In Virginia, the government tells private employers to whom they may and may not offer insurance; it is the only state in the country that has so restrictive a law.

Last month, a man in Virginia was sentenced to three years in prison after an undercover police officer met the man in an online chat room and then persuaded him to meet him in a public restroom, where the man then allegedly propositioned the police officer, for which he was arrested for “solicitation to commit a felony.” In Virginia, actual public fornication among heterosexuals, a misdemeanor, has a maximum 12-month sentence (and prostitution is just a misdemeanor in Virginia as well), yet a gay man will be jailed for three years for propositioning a police officer, a police officer, moreover, who initiated the encounter and was the one who suggested that they go to a public place! Unless an appellate court overturns the sentence, this gay man will spend three years in prison just for something he said.

It sickens me.

In June, I wrote that I didn’t want to give up the state of my birth, and to some degree of my self-identity, to the radical right. But more and more I’m reconsidering that position. San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver and Toronto are looking better and better every day.