By Ann Rostow–
Some Governor!
Hello, dear Readers. As I write, I’m watching the TV on mute and I just saw Tim Walz cuddling a little piglet in his arms. I approve! Adorable scene. (Small voice in my head whispers: “Bacon, bacon, bacon.” Louder voice screams, “No, no, no, no!” Medium voice tries to remember what Charlotte the spider wrote on her web. I looked it up: “Some Pig.”)
Inappropriate!
Moving on, we have seen a few interesting court rulings, but I’m not in a legal mood so let’s take a week off from litigation, shall we? After all, it’s Summer Olympics time and I have a couple of GLBT Olympic stories beginning with a gay broadcaster, Bob Ballard, who was pulled out of his job on Eurosport after sexist comments at the expense of the winning Australian women’s relay swim team.
“Well, the women are just finishing up,” he said. “You know what women are like … hanging around, doing their makeup.”
In the rankings of sexist comments, it’s pretty low on the hurtful scale. On the other hand, it’s pretty high on “things your demented grandfather says after two bourbon and sodas.” At any rate, it was too much for the brass at Eurosports. “During a segment of Eurosport’s coverage last night,” they intoned, “commentator Bob Ballard made an inappropriate comment. To that end, he has been removed from our commentary roster with immediate effect.” (It was a written statement to The Independent, but in my head, I hear it being “intoned” in a deep male voice.)
And this isn’t a gay question, but what the hell is going on in the Nike ad that concludes “winning isn’t for everyone?” If you’ve been faithfully watching, you may have encountered this ugly and unsportsmanlike commercial, showcasing hostile athletes who exclaim that they “don’t respect you,” they are “obsessive,” have “zero remorse,” and “want to take what’s yours and never give it back.”
“Am I a bad person?” the narrator asks in a deep raspy voice that one can imagine hearing during recess in the back end of the prison yard. Um, yes, you are. Your view of competition is antithetical to the Olympic spirit and it is belied by the sight of top-level athletes congratulating their rivals after the event whether or not they themselves are on the winning or losing side.
Who on Earth thought of this concept, and who in the Nike marketing department gave it the green light? Some one-dimensional 20-something bros, perhaps? I don’t know, but it’s an unattractive look, particularly for an athletic outfitter who, one assumes, wants to champion the exact opposite characteristics; grace, generosity of spirit, and hello—being a good sport.
Fisticuffs
But at the top of our Olympic news list must be the boxer who smacked her opponent so hard the woman left the ring after 46 seconds. I’ve never been a fan of boxing, but aren’t you supposed to be prepared for punches and the like? The boxer, Algerian Imane Khelif, was banned from the 2023 Woman’s World Boxing Championships by an unaccredited Russian-led group that refused to release evidence or explain its decisions. The group also banned a Taiwanese boxer, Lin Yu-ting, with the same lack of transparency.
This year, the Olympic mucky mucks confirmed that both boxers were born female and met all the qualifications for fighting in the women’s events. On Tuesday, Khelif told an interviewer from SNTV:
“I send a message to all the people of the world to uphold the Olympic principles and the Olympic Charter, to refrain from bullying all athletes, because this has effects, massive effects. It can destroy people, it can kill people’s thoughts, spirit, and mind. It can divide people. And because of that, I ask them to refrain from bullying.”
I read that JD Vance condemned Kamala Harris for somehow contributing towards what he, JD, erroneously felt was an unfair fight. “This is where Kamala Harris’ ideas about gender lead,” he wrote on X, “to a grown man pummeling a woman in a boxing match. This is disgusting, and all of our leaders should condemn it.”
All of our “leaders” might start with condemning a national figure who jumps to conclusions fed to him by social media, spouts off based on unverified and false information, and never bothers to correct the record.
Speaking of trans-athletes, I was struck by the well-deserved awe reserved for Katie Ledecky, who beat her fellow Olympic distance swimmers by astonishing margins. In one of her swims, a competitor was just starting her last 100 meters as Ledecky touched the wall for her win. I couldn’t help wondering what they’d be saying if we were watching NCAA champion, Lea Thomas, the trans swimmer who was not allowed to compete in the Olympics. I have no doubt that if Thomas produced the same victory margins, we’d be hearing whines and protests from JD Vance and company.
My point is not that trans athletes should compete as women without restrictions. It’s that our reactions and judgments are skewed by prejudice and assumptions. Transgender athletes like Thomas can be talented sportswomen through merit; masculine women like Khelif can pack a punch without being sent to the men’s division.
Criminal Minds
Now, would you like to hear about how lesbians commit more crimes? Would you like to debate whether or not straight women should have the right to use the word “girlfriend” to describe their relationships? Have you heard about the Indian man in Vietnam who inserted a live eel into his anus? Or shall we delve into the overruns on the expense account of the top executive at the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation?
I know. It’s like approaching a buffet with East Coast oysters, beluga caviar, fresh lobster claws, and rack of lamb. Where to start? Can we have it all?
Let’s give it a whirl.
I have a loyal reader to thank for the link to “Same-Sex Relationships and Criminal Behavior: A Total Population Study in The Netherlands,” a scholarly paper in the Archives of Sexual Behavior. According to the Dutch boffins, women in same-sex relationships are more likely than straight women to be involved in criminal acts, while men in same-sex relationships were less likely to be so involved compared to their straight male counterparts.
The crimes included “property offenses, violence, vandalism, and public order offenses, traffic offenses, drugs offenses, and other offenses.” I guess the addition of “other offenses” at the end sort of undermines the whole point of providing a list, but let’s just roll with it. Lots of offenses!
Without reading much of the dense, impenetrable, academic monograph, I gleaned that the lesbians’ masculine proclivities and the guys’ feminine sides might explain the discrepancy. I’m not sure if the gay guys are less involved in crime than the gay women, because the comparisons seem to be with the straight men and women respectively. But I’m sure I could find out if I were to read more of this study. Indeed, I encourage interested readers to explore the question for themselves.
As my source pointed out, the higher level of lawlessness could explain why “lesbians behaving badly” is a more entertaining and complex rubric than “gay guys being weird.” We do have the occasional gay male cannibal, (we never have lesbian cannibals), but on the whole, the lesbians win most of the prizes for skirting the law with their shambolic antics.
Is That an Eel in Your Pocket?
And hey, speaking of gay men behaving weirdly, I’m assuming our (Indian) Vietnamese hospital patient is a gay guy, or at the very least he exists somewhere on the spectrum of people with uncommon sexual proclivities. In his case, the proclivities are not just uncommon; they’re disturbing. The doctors who extracted a two-foot live eel from his abdomen also found a lime tucked away in his nether regions.
The eel, which he had introduced into his body earlier that day, had eaten through his rectum and colon in order to reach the “abdominal cavity.” Attempts to extract it the same way it entered failed due to the aforementioned lime that blocked the pathway.
Oh, and did I mention that the eel was four inches in diameter? I just read that. I had been assuming that the creature was a little skinny worm-like thing, but it was like a snake! The doctors removed it through surgery, along with the lime.
According to whatever it is I’m reading (Headlinesmart), a few months ago, there was another eel removed at a different medical center in Vietnam. Really, guys?
Le Nhat Huy, the Vice Director of the Department of Colorectal and Perineal Surgery at the Viet Due hospital where the eel/lime case took place in late July, warned men against the dangers of inserting live animals into the rectum, due to the “unpredictable consequences.” Wise words.
Combatting Defamation at Davos
I’m going to skip The New York Times Ethicist question from the lesbian who wants straight women to stop using the word “girlfriend” because it should be reserved for lesbians who want to refer to their dates.
Let’s talk about the CEO of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation who reportedly rescued the advocates from disarray and financial crisis and turned it into a PR powerhouse with lots of cash in the bank. Well, maybe not as much cash as it might have had given the first-class air fares, fancy hotels, and car services she expensed to the nonprofit. According to The New York Times, Sarah Kate Ellis had GLAAD pay thousands for her summer house in Provincetown and refurbish her home office to the tune of nearly $20,000.
It’s easier if I just quote the evocative lead sentence of the article:
“A light rain fell at the Zurich airport one Sunday morning in January 2023 as Sarah Kate Ellis made her way from a seat in Delta’s most exclusive cabin to a waiting Mercedes. It was there to chauffeur her to the Swiss Alps, where she and her colleagues would stay at the Tivoli Lodge, a seven-bedroom chalet that cost nearly half a million dollars to rent for the week.” This, dear Readers, was for the Davos conference, and the trip included some skiing on GLAAD’s bill, which was described to the Times as an oversight that Ellis repaid. Okay then!
When I first saw the headline, I thought that I’d be reading a straightforward piece about a grasping narcissist who exploited her access to power and money. But it sounds to me as if Ellis is a real talent, who may have deserved some of the largess she appropriated.
That said, there’s an extremely unattractive side to the story told in this exposé, and it’s written in the donors who presumably had no idea that so much of their money was going to perks and pleasures. It’s also written in the GLAAD staff who reportedly operated under completely different rules, urged to be cost conscious, and in one case, chastised for expensing a cup of coffee.
And look, I have written about the GLBT community’s ups and downs for over a quarter of a century. When I started, GLAAD was an important watchdog, calling attention to lots of otherwise overlooked antigay activities and comments. Shining a light into dark corners, the organization was instrumental in our gradual progress as we moved from the shadows into the full glare of American society. Over time, GLAAD’s original mandate became less important, which I’m guessing may have led to the downturn that, according to the Times, hit bottom in 2013 when GLAAD was broke and flailing for relevance.
Into that mess came Ellis in 2014. Ten years later, the group is said to be considered a “prominent proponent” of GLBT equality, and a consultant to corporations who aim to position themselves on the right side of history. The annual budget is around $20 million, which sounds like they are bringing in more than that in donations and corporate payments. Not bad, GLAAD.
But they don’t sound quite like a nonprofit anymore. They sound more like a gay version of a management consultancy, which should operate on fees, leave the donors free to contribute to Lambda or the NCLR, and let the staff go out for coffee whenever. Am I missing something?
arostow@aol.com
GLBT Fortnight in Review
Published on August 8, 2024
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