Punch Card for Porn

A friend and I were recently talking about pornography. "I'm not really a fan", he said. "A fan?" I responded. "It's not like baseball or Tom Cruise films." Immediately the idea of pitching for Tom Cruise made this a bad analogy. "But you do watch porn." We both agreed that, with rare exception, all gay men watch or have watched pornography. And we both agreed that any gay man who says that he doesn't is probably lying.

I rent porn. I admit it. Every now and again I walk down to the local video store and pick up a movie. I gravitate to a few regular studios and have my favorite "talent" which, according to my friends and despite my demure, tips me from the amateur to the afficionado. And I suppose the employees would probably be able to identify me as a customer in a lineup. But I would hardly call myself a regular. I don't have a library at home, I own very little. In fact, many years ago when my mother was helping me clean my apartment, she completely bypassed my meager stash to instead ask me if I still wanted the bottle of pina colada "suntan lotion" at the bedside. Bless her heart.

I don't see anything wrong with occasional pornography. While I have no Constitutional right to watch porn, I don't believe that I am harming anyone by supporting the industry. I don't use porn as a substitute for intimacy and I don't need to watch porn to get the juices flowing - if you know what I mean. My straight brother once told me that he believes that watching pornography creates false expectations for sexual relationships. C'mon, I live in the real world. I am fairly sure that if two hot Mormons knocked on my door, asking them to get on their knees in prayer would not advance my standing with them. And if I started rubbing my crotch in front of my plumber, the only thing I would get up my ass is a monkey wrench - and not in the good way. Maybe in San Francisco (where of course all good porn happens), but not in Wisconsin.

I've gotten over a few "humps" on my road to being an admitted porn watcher. In the beginning, I would walk into the video store and look at all of the mainstream selections first before sheepishly ascending the stairs to the second floor. As if to say "hey, there wasn't anything good down there, I am forced to rent porn." I'm beyond projecting my own judgement of myself upon the staff wondering if they think that I rent too often. If it's been quite a while, I no longer have the urge to blurt out "I've been having real sex with another real person, that's why you haven't seen me." I got over my hesitation renting videos with explicit titles like Taking It From Behind 4. I mean, I didn't want the employee to get the wrong idea of me and I surely wouldn't want him to think that I had seen volumes 1 through 3. I mastered the awkward moment when someone I knew would walk in. "I've always wondered what it looked like up here."

But despite my comfort, I had to draw the line somewhere. At my last rental, I was asked if I wanted a punch card. Rent 10, get the next one free. Now, I have a punch card for the local coffee shop, and if someone ever saw the card or if I redeemed the thing, it isn't a leap to say that I like coffee. "Damn, you drink alot of that stuff" one might say. To which I might reply, "Guilty!" But to walk into the video store with my punch card for porn and say "I have rented so much porn that you now have to give me a freebie", is a badge I just don't want to sew. The card stamps me a valued porn customer, a porn frequent shopper. Truth be told, I am likely already in the club. I just don't want to be a punch card carrying member.

Rembrandt, My Mom, and Me

I had been meaning to see the exhibit of Rembrandt's early drawings at the Milwaukee Art Museum ever since it opened. But lately it seems that my days off have been spent catching up with work and so I hadn't mosied to the Brise Soleil to catch my own glimpse. When my parents offered to visit, I suggested the museum among some other choices and to my surprise and delight they opted in. I love killing two birds with one proverbial stone.

I like art museums and I pondered this for the first time during my stroll through the special gallery. As I have mentioned in this blog before, my parents generally supported the arts, but not in terms of specific art. I grew up very simply in a household that budgeted its resources more importantly for food then for fresco. In fact, I realized that the first time I had ever been to an art museum that I can recall was the Museum of Modern Art in NYC during medical school. There, I was giddy and incredulous, standing mere inches from an exhibit of Picasso's Dora Mar paintings. I had studied Picasso's work in high school Spanish class, could name each work and tell you what period it was from. But I had only seen it in 2D on a slide projector screen. This was the real thing, man.

Art galleries became a social preoccupation. Moving to the boho East Side of Milwaukee and befriending "actual artists", I went to openings and gallery nights. I drank cheap wine and cheesy hors d'oeuvres reveling in an evening that took me far away from my world as a scientist. When I would purchase a piece of art from a local artist I would imagine that someday I would claim to have one of their first. Naturally, I would be the only friend who had kept the work in the dusty attic.

An art musuem was the scene of the blind date I scheduled with the stranger who would turn out to be my BF. Much later he would tell me that he wanted to see that Brooks Stevens exhibit anyway and figured if the date turned out to be a bust, at least it wouldn't have been a complete waste of time. It seems that a proclivity for killing two birds with one stone is something we both have in common.

I've been to national standards - MOMA, the Met, The Frick (love the Frick). I've done San Fran, LA, Chicago - all alone. And through them I adopted the quiet etiquette, the slow saunter with hands clasped behind my back, the polite nose wrinkle at something that doesn't turn me. And so, meandering through the 1600's with Rembrandt and my mother was a bit of a change for me. She was incredibly excited. The last time she was in an art museum was when I took her and my sisters to see the Quilts of Gee's Bend for my birthday over four years ago. She commented on little things, asking questions like "why do you think someone would draw a person getting flogged?" to which I had no true response. She would talk to stiff lipped strangers, interrupting their audio tour by lifting up their headphones to tell them that she thinks Rembrandt's Joseph has a quizzical look on his face, as if to ask 'who's child is this?' And as many times as I would admonish her simple country girl ways, she couldn't stop touching all the paintings protected by glass for just such an onlooker. I couldn't be embarrassed by her. I was too busy remembering how, while intensely peering at Picasso at the Museum of Modern Art, I was gently reminded by a security guard to keep my nose at a safe distance.

Democrats with balls

OK, this stuff never happens to me but I happened to be touring the senate floor when Senator Reid called for the closed session. As a dutiful American, I left as instructed, but then realized I forgot my chapstick and so I quickly ran back inside. Devil, they closed and locked the doors and so I was stuck in that room for the whole 3 1/2 hours listening to what those lawmakers had to say. I am reporting it to you, my blog readers (all 4 of you) this secret conversation for the first time here.

Democrats: Fuck you!
Republicans: Fuck you!

At the end, Senator Frist agreed to create a bipartisan committee or task force or some other useless piece of government hoohah to figure out how they were going to all fuck each other. In the mean time, Karl Rove has figured out a way to rotate the following topics in the news in such a way to deflect negative press from any one of them for very long:

War in Iraq (to be kept to a minimum)
Any natural disaster
Indictment of Libby (more Libby, less Rove)
Bird flu (when in doubt, go with bird flu)

Ugh, this is so exhausting. But at least the democrats are doing something.

The Road Less Travelled

I love Margaret Cho. No comedian can practically make me pee my pants easier than she can. I can quote more lines from her tours than lines from the movie Legally Blonde. Such wit, such a voice, such an awesome ass-kicker when it comes to things that aren't right in this world. Her blog is no different and I enjoy reading it from time to time to hear what she has to say about this world I have a love/hate relationship with. This statement will stick with me:

If only it were possible to mapquest equality. “When you get to democracy, turn LEFT.”