How I Always Saw Them

3D animated version
Original photograph
BEFORE AFTER
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(L-R) Kent Kelly, Chas Dooley, Don Hines, summer 1977. None of them are still with us, so I don’t think they’ll mind.

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Me Likey

3D animated version
Original photograph
BEFORE AFTER
◀ ▶

I think of all the image manipulations, I like the Disneyfied and Muppeted stuff the most.

This is a photo of me from 1975. I think my sister caught me unawares, or nearly so.

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Oh HELL No!

I got this email today:


So why not just put money directly into his grift, amirite?

Do you honestly think a penny of this money is ever going to be distributed to anyone other than Donald J. Trump?

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A Followup to Tiedrich’s Post Below…

I don’t want the Malignant Orange Narcissist to be gay, even closeted. I really don’t.


I’ve known I was gay since 4th grade—fascinated by my PE coach’s hairy armpits, stubble, and the way his prominent nips showed through every shirt he wore (so that’s where it all came from, amirite?), but I didn’t have a name for it until high school. And along with the name, came the very real knowledge that society didn’t look kindly upon boys who liked boys, or girls who liked girls. So I shoved it down deep and plastered over it with the type of devotion to religion that adolescents often do.

But that didn’t make it go away.

Tom, my first high school crush (summer 1973)

Tom was my first real crush. And Tom was the boy who taught me that if you’re gay in 1973, you never confess your love to another boy—especially if you don’t know if it will be returned. It will end the friendship and leave you heartbroken.

Did that stop me from falling in love again? Of course not. I met Mike at church. My mom was obsessed that I had not yet been Confirmed in the Lutheran faith and sent me in for the ridiculous religious studies that would allow me to have a sip of wine and eat a dry cracker upon graduation. (Of course, with my mindset at the time it was all very necessary and I welcomed it with open arms.) Among the other teenagers in attendance for this training was Mike.

Mike, winter 1974

I was immediately smitten. He was a year younger; I was a Junior, he was a sophomore. There was a mutual spark there—although not that kind of spark (at least not from him; I wanted to jump his bones even if I wasn’t completely sure what do actually do in that situation), unfortunately—and we became friends. I have no memory of the circumstances that caused us to crash and burn, but I undoubtedly pushed the boundaries of our friendship in a way unacceptable to a straight teenage boy, and did something stupid.

By the time senior year rolled around—and while developing a great friendship that lasted until I went off to college with a girl named Jean the year before—I knew I was gay. Not bisexual. Not “questioning.” I was a full-on fag. I was sexually and romantically attracted to men. And then along came Daniel.

Daniel, Daniel, Daniel… I may have written about my senior year crush before so if any of this sounds familiar forgive me. I’m an old man and too lazy to go searching through all my previous posts to verify this one way or another.

In the summer of ’75, the company who built our house finally got around to finishing up the rest of the subdivision just to the west of us. At this point I had decided to go into architecture, so every afternoon after school I would head over there and wander through the homes under construction as they were going up.* Daniel’s family moved into one of those homes that fall.

I don’t remember the circumstances of our meeting, but it was only afterward we realized that we lived only a few doors down from each other and started hanging out. Daniel was a bad boy. He smoked, he enjoyed a beer or two when he could get them, and he unabashedly drove a pink ’69 Mustang. I mean any guy who drives a pink car has to be gay, right? Well, no. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Daniel, senior year, 1976

I still wasn’t anywhere near ready to come out, and based upon past experience, after my heart started fluttering and I saw stars when we were together, I knew better than to outright confess my love to this boy lest it be a repeat of what happened with Tom. So I kept it bottled up until one afternoon my body said, “Fuck that!” and it became a little too obvious how I felt.

After school we’d often retreat to my bedroom to do homework or just lay on the bed and watch television. He would often get rowdy and initiate some harmless horseplay. He usually pinned me (okay, so I often let him), but one day I turned the tables and we found ourselves on the floor, with me on top. At this point I was fully hard and grinding my crotch into his until he realized what was going on and he pushed me off. That was the end of our little wrestling matches. It wasn’t enough to kill the friendship immediately, but there was a definite change. He slowly started drifting away (always “busy” when I suggested we do something) and when it came time for me to leave for Tucson in August to attend the University of Arizona, we were barely speaking.

Even after starting college, I still wasn’t out but I had a plan. And choosing UofA over the much closer ASU had been a part of it. I knew coming out while still living at home would be…problematic (this was years before I knew my dad was—at least—bisexual), and I figured if I were 100 miles away it would give me a chance to get to really know what being gay meant for me, far from my family.

The point of this long-winded story is to confess that as Mr. Romano pointed out in his video above, prior to coming out, I too was full of jealousy toward men who were out and it manifested in a lot of anger. While I never got physical with anyone (that just wasn’t me; I’m essentially a pacifist), I was quite vocal. And as Mr. Romano points out, it was all projection of my own insecurities.

Finally, a month or so after the start of the fall semester and I had settled into my dorm, a guy at the end of the hall—Andy—a tall, blond, out-and-proud flaming homosexual if there ever was one, sat me down one day and said, “Honey, I am sick of your constant bad-mouthing of gays. When are you going to admit it?” Of course I played dumb and asked, “Admit what?” He said, “Oh girl…that you’re as queer as I am.” While it was true, of course I immediately denied it and stormed off, quite offended that he could so easily see through my facade. I didn’t speak to him again for weeks afterward. But that brief conversation did end my hateful rhetoric and realized that coming out was going to be “now or never.”

The situation with my roommate—Karl—was deteriorating for a variety of unrelated reasons, so at the start of the spring semester I switched dorms. And it was that January that I finally got up the nerve to attend my first GSO (Gay Students Organization) meeting at the Student Union.

The first person I came out to—other than the folks in that meeting—was my new roommate, who—after I came out to him—offered up his own confession: he wasn’t gay, but he was Christine Jorgensen‘s nephew. “We don’t talk about Uncle George any more.”


Let me know if you’d like to hear the rest of this sad, sordid story. Before Ben and I moved to Denver I’d documented the entire thing in the old blog that I wiped out after realizing the link to it was in the signature of the emails I’d been sending out to recruiters—one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done (wiping the blog out, not necessarily failing to remove the link). I’ve been meaning to record the story for posterity again, so if I get enough interest it may actually be the impetus I need to do something other than spend my online time obsessing over the decline and fall of civilization.

*There’s an interesting story of what happened one afternoon in one of those houses.

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And The Bullshit Continues

WHERE IS OUR BIG BEAUTIFUL HEADLINE?!



Folks, you can say what you want about Preznit Fuckwit, but you can’t deny that the dude is a bottomless well of super-awesome ideas.

Let’s threaten and alienate all our allies. Let’s throw Ukraine to the wolves, and give Putin everything he wants. Let’s bomb the shit out of Venezuelan fishermen.

Let’s allow masked federal thugs to roam the streets of our cities, and look the other way when they gun down anyone they want. Let’s smash half the White House to rubble, and put up a vulgar, heavily-militarized Epstein Dance Hall in its place. Let’s clownfuck ourselves into an unwinnable war that ends up making everything unaffordable.

Let’s encourage Americans to rat each other out for fun and profit.

Wait, what was that last one? Americans should do what?

Oh, you heard me right.

“So today, I’m thrilled to announce the— Fraud Whistle— Blower Incentive— Program. Fraud— Whistle— Blower Incentive Program. Annnnnnd— mark those words. Independent journalists and every— body and all Americans will now be able to go to the— fraud dot gov and report cases of corruption and theft of taxpayer dollars in their communities … if you turn somebody in and you find $1 billion, we’re giving a commission of 1%. That’s a lot of money,”

Really? We’re paying bounties on fraudsters now? Because I know a guy who sleep-farted his way through an entire trial, and then got convicted on 34 counts of fraud. He’s still walking the streets, and he’s still criming. Can I turn this narcoleptic fuckface in, and glom some reward?

Silly rabbit. The Donnyverse doesn’t intend for this new whistleblower thingumbob to be used against actual fraudsters — and certainly not against white people.

Here comes undead White House advisor Nosferatu McGoebbels, to explain that this is actually just another handy way for the administration to commit a racism against those they deem undesirable.

They came here from Somalia, they’re living here for a year or two, they say ‘I’m going to open up a fake daycare. I’ll tell Keith Ellison, I’ll tell Governor Walz, I’m taking care of 200 kids. Send me a check for thirty million dollars. What do they do? They buy Mercedes, they buy BMWs. They buy a mansion, they buy a nice house. All their kids fly first class all over the world. They are living the high life.”

Wait, is that true? Let’s do a quick fact check:

Of course this isn’t happening. It’s a fever-swamp fairy tale cooked up by white supremacists. 

The reality is that every accusation Nosferatu just shat our of his undead mouth is actually being perpetrated right now by Preznit Fuckwit’s two felonious failsons — Cokey McSniffles, and the dumb one.

A report released Thursday details how the family of President Donald Trump “pocketed more than $2.9 billion”—including “in cash and gifts from crypto ventures, legal settlements, a luxury jet from a foreign government, and corporate deals”—while Republican cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program left millions of Americans without critical food aid.

Can I turn them in? Pretty please, can I?

Pick a lane, racists — are these Somalis all on welfare, or are they all buying luxury items? Because — spoiler alert — it can’t be both.

Folks, this is straight up Nazi bullshit — because you know who else used to pay people to rat out the undesirables in their midst, don’t you? Of course you do.

“The Dutch Department,” as the Nazis called it, was also known as the “Colonne Henneicke,” after its leader, Wim Henneicke. He had been trafficking in stolen Jewish property until the Nazis began offering cash for Jewish prisoners.

Workers were paid about 15 guilders a week, or $75 at today’s exchange rate, plus 7.50 guilders or $37.50 per captured Jew, van Liempt writes.

Pretty weird how every atrocity this administration is committing right now, was first dreamed up by the Nazis, 90 years ago. What a bizarre set of coincidences, am I right?


There was a time when arriving at our shores with five dollars in your pocket, and then going on to make a success of yourself was called ‘living the American dream.’

We celebrated such people, and wrote books and made movies about them.

Okay, that’s probably not the best example, but you get my drift.

The American dream isn’t a thing any more. The oligarchy doesn’t want some nasty immigrant coming here and succeeding — and certainly not any non-white immigrant. They want to keep all that money for themselves. (They made an exception for the Space Nazi — because, as a white child of privilege, he was already one of them.)

Look, let’s run some numbers. The entire number of Somalis in Minnesota is thought to be around a hundred thousand. Of that hundred grand, 85 people of Somali descent have charged with fraud. Of that 85, around 60 have been convicted and sent to prison.

Sixty out of a hundred thousand is 0.06 percent — a rounding error away from zero.

Fraud in Minnesota is almost nonexistent, and the culprits have already been rounded up and dealt with — but racist shit-kadoodles like Nosferatu McGoebbels want you to believe that every Somali is guilty of something, and that the America people won’t be safe until every single one of them has been deported to who the fuck even cares, just get them out of Dear Leader’s sight.

All this is by design. It’s a distraction from the real problem in our country.

‘Keep the people ignorant and fighting each other, and they won’t notice the plutocrats picking their pockets’ is right there on page one of the oligarch’s playbook.

And MAGA falls for this shit, every time — because stupid doesn’t magically cure itself overnight.


Now, listen — I’m not saying that folks should prank this new anti-fraud hotline, but I’m not saying they shouldn’t.

Here’s a fun thing that We the People did back in 2023.

You see, the government of Missouri had themselves a bright idea: transgendered people aren’t being persecuted enough, so let’s make it easier to single them out for abuse. And so they created a web form where concerned people complete fucking busybodies could rat on their neighbors.

Decent citizens everywhere had a better idea: let’s fuck this war crime right into the ground — and so they flooded the hotline with bogus reports. 

It was fucking glorious.

Pranksters flooded the snitch form with so much hilarious garbage that it had to be shut down.


Now, I know what you’re going to say next. “But Uncle Jeff, you’ve already written over eleven hundred words, and you still haven’t told us what we really want to know: at any point during yesterday’s Oval Bordello dog-and-pony show, did Donny melt down at a reporter’s question and throw an infantile shit-fit?”

Do you even have to ask? Of fucking course he did.

“Listen to you. Hey. Hey! I’m not— You better, you better — I don’t know the hell you are, but you better be careful.”

And then the colicky piss-baby did it a second time.

“Wait. Wait. Quiet. QUIET! What’s wrong with you? Are you a sick person? I actually think there’s something wrong with you.”

What a fucking child. Tell me again how women don’t have the temperament to be president. That’s such a cool story.

Donny actually did it a third time, but some idiot forgot to bookmark it last night when he was making notes for this post.


Dear Leader held another hate-rally last night, in who the fuck even cares where. The demented old shitbag rambled incoherently for a merciless hour and fifty-four minutes. I’m not even going to bother to write about it. It was virtually identical to all the hate-rallies I’ve been covering for weeks now. Same shit, different day.

Let me just leave you with this one clip from last night.

“So, he’s over here, I’m over here. And— I’m studying his body. I’ve never studied the body of a man before. It’s not my thing. Nothing wrong with it, of course. Heh heh. Nothing— I always proceed it by saying ‘nothing wrong.’ But it’s never been my thing, to be honest with you. But I looked at his ass. And then I looked at his legs. And I said it might— and I said, ‘his ass is shit.’ It’s like— it’s like a pile of muscle. Then I looked at his legs. And I said, ‘man, his feet are big.’ Then I looked at his shoulders and I tapped him on the shoulder, and it actually hurt my hand. It was like a piece of steel.”

You have to love that Donny stuck a ‘not that there’s anything wrong with that’ in there. No, of course not.

Congratulations, MAGA. You elected a gay president — and you didn’t even know it.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.


this is going to be my closing message for the foreseeable future:

practice self-care. do what you need to do to keep sane. if that means you need to disengage with my daily posts for a while, I get it. this community of ours will still be here when you return.

to all the people who have signed on in the days since the election, welcome aboard. settle in as we all try to deal with the shitfuckery that’s ahead of us.

we are all in this together, and we are all here for each other.

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Tuesday Evening Enigma

Enigma – The Greatest Hits (2001)

Y’know how if you haven’t heard some music in years, and you put it on and you’re immediately taken away to another place and time? Yeah, it’s like that.


I have a love/hate relationship with this player. On one hand, I think its classic mid-80s design is unmatched and it has a certain amount of nostalgic affection, the D-10 being the first second portable player I ever owned. On the other hand—and I’ve written about this ad nauseam—the damn thing skips if you so much as look at it funny. How I lived with this behavior back in the day is beyond me. Maybe it’s because the technology was still so new and borderline magic (when it worked) that its sensitivity to knocks and jolts was just something I lived with. I suppose that also explains why I went back to a cassette Walkman in 1990—at least for my commutes. I know I still loved it for stationary listening at work.

It also refuses to play certain discs without error all the way through. CDRs produce a constant hissing sound, and even commercial discs have to be pristine; no dust or—gods forbid—fingerprints, or they’ll glitch.

So why do I keep using it? The sound. It has one of the best, if not the best headphone amplifier of all my players. And it—along with my D-15—can easily drive my Sennheisers to a satisfying volume without having to be cranked up to 9 to get there.

Some of the sensitivity to dust and dirt no doubt is attributable to the unit needing routine service and a tuneup. The grease on the laser sled’s wormgear looks okay, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t dried bits of grease that require more disassembly and cleaning than I’m comfortable with. Fortunately, “I know a guy” who’s worked on this era of machines for me in the past and everything works like new after he’s worked his magic on it, but I don’t have the money right now. Maybe after the first of the month since there’s really no urgency since I have several other players I can use.

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Absolutely True

“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

I voted the other day and physically dropped off the ballot in a drop box at the Maricopa County Elections Center downtown yesterday. Even though we’re still two weeks out from Election Day, I wasn’t going to take any chances with possible USPS shenanigans. I got text notification today that my ballot had been received and the signature verified.

Source: The Resistance

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Protesters hold signs that say "no king for us"
Photo by Barbara Burgess on Unsplash

No King’s Day Episode 4 went off pretty much as predicted.

Cities all over America were filled with a massive, ebullient mob of families, schoolteachers, ministers, parents, grocery store clerks, college students, business owners, grandparents, and toddlers on shoulders.

Highways and overpasses were lined with exuberant, sign-waving throngs of joyfully defiant human beings loudly declaring their shared disdain for a wannabe dictator.

Local parks exploded in a kaleidoscopic display of disparate humanity, converging to declare their solidarity and their collective rejection of authoritarianism.

Republican lawmakers’ offices were surrounded by a spirited show of resistance from pissed-off, fed-up constituents demanding accountability.

The vibes were positive.

The chants were spirited.

The dance lines were jubilant.

The sign game was strong.

And it was all, well… really nice.

We gathered together. We made some noise. We gave speeches. We raised our fists. We encouraged one another. We put the Republican Party on notice.

And when it was over, we all felt the emotional intoxication that events like these usually yield.

But if we’re honest with ourselves, was it all the equivalent of a strongly-worded letter to powerful, corrupt people who threw it directly in the trash the moment it arrived?

Here we are after the fourth of these gatherings.

The Constitutional crises are still piling up.
We’re still immersed in an unnecessary, unwinnable war halfway across the world.
This Administration’s disregard for legality and morality is still escalating.
The complete Epstein files are still concealed, the monsters within them still evading their reckoning.
ICE is still ravaging our communities with impunity and with taxpayer funding.
Our traitorous, cognitively-decimated, sociopathic Predator-In-Chief is still unstable and violent.
We’re still a hair’s breadth from full-on fascism.

And in the aftermath of Saturday’s protests, the United States is less than three weeks away from a nation-altering election that the current Administration is clearly doing everything to rig and disrupt, and has no intention of honoring, should the votes of the people not be in their favor.

Regardless of the results at the polls, we are almost certainly going to be thrust into chaos by this sitting president; one that we have never experienced in our 250-year-history. I wonder if we have it in us to do what we might be required to do to ensure the will of the voters is honored, and the directives of the Constitution are followed.

Though I want more than anything to be wrong, as I look at the fierce, fiery protests that have shut down France and those we’ve seen in Spain and Italy and elsewhere, I’m terribly worried that Americans may be too soft and too polite to meet the moment that is likely coming.

The last three No Kings Day protests didn’t stave off the chaos that is now here, and it won’t prevent what this regime has planned. We’re going to need a mass display of sustained civil disobedience that we haven’t seen since the 1960s, and that isn’t something we seem capable of.

The painful truth is that fascist dictators are rarely voted out, and monstrous authoritarian regimes don’t leave simply because they’re politely asked to.

Practically speaking, as meaningful and uplifting as our collective efforts on Saturday were to us, they didn’t matter even a little bit to Trump and his sycophantic gaggle of ghouls. Like so many times before, they allowed us to have an afternoon where we all felt a false sense of power, blew off steam, and then largely returned to our lives currently in progress, while they continued to dismantle our Republic largely unabated.

Yes, we registered people to vote, we equipped them with the tools to make their voices heard, and we implored them to show up in numbers too big to manipulate, at least in theory.

But what happens if we wake up on November 4th and we find ourselves with a presidential administration that refuses to release the stranglehold on this nation?

I’m not advocating for violence or inciting wide-scale property damage, but I sure as hell know that if the American people are the only thing standing between our Republic and a cadre of lawless, violent, deranged traitors who show every sign that they’re not leaving voluntarily, signs and chants aren’t gonna cut it.

We need to remember that transformative activism is found in sustained and forceful movements, not in soothing moments, and unless we actually strike fear into the oppressors and oligarchs, we may get the very king we claimed for four times in two years that we’d never tolerate.


John and I both would really like to hear your honest thoughts on all of this. 

Do you share the same concerns that we have about our willingness to make a more sustained and disruptive response should this Administration do what has been unthinkable?

Do you worry that we are too passive and polite a people to push back the way that people in Europe and Central and South America have?

Is a post-election No King’s Day going to need to be different, and are we capable of it?

Let me know in the comments.

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