BijouBlog

According to the holy haters, the coronavirus lockdown is turning an already sinful nation (its sins are reproductive rights and the fact that LGBTQ persons are allowed to exist, not robbing and cheating the widow and the orphan) in Masturbation Nation (and in their “minds,” that means Pornography Nation).

According to a report in LGBTQ Nation, some denizens at Liberty Counsel and the likes of gay sex-obsessed Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, (the ones who are defending those death cult astors who insist on holding in-person services, are claiming that many are now succumbing to such lustful cravings and are now so, so unhappy.

(Of course the above assume men, and especially gay men, are the “perpetrators,” because I doubt it would even cross their minds that a woman might masturbate or watch pornography, but that’s another blog.)

So, lockdown is making more guys pull their puds and watch porn (probably on their phones). Yeah, right, If you’re a hetero guy locked down in a house with a spouse and kids with Grandma quarantined in the basement, I’m sure you could easily find and a time and place to watch some porn and jerk off. You could escape as many have to the forest preserves, but I’m not certain shelter in place deems this pastoral journey to essential travel.

(Yet these “family men” are many times the politicians who get caught in hotel rooms with underage persons or in public bathrooms, of course.)

So, once again, it’s the gays. Yes, we are now using the pandemic lockdown to indulge even more in nonprocreative sexuality that their God so hates.

What’s so disturbing about this both irrational and psychologically harmful world view is that during the AIDS crisis, gay men actually embraced masturbation, including the director Michael Goodwin in The Goodjac Chronicles and the other movies in his Goodjac series, as a responsible, safe sex practice in order to stay alive and keep from potentially infecting others. Yes, in order to stay alive.

The current lockdown situation is caused by an impersonal virus which does not discriminate (and it isn’t transmitted, according to the haters, by only those who indulge in “dirty” sex or “dirty” drugs, and thus are easy targets for discrimination and scapegoating), because anyone can get it from something as mundane as a sneeze (itself something of a taboo act, which is why we say God bless you, because some believed it could cause the soul to be ejected from the body!).

But yes, even the Bible-toting Southern Baptist Meemaw known for her famous church basement hot dishes lauded by Perkins and his ilk for her virtues can become sick; she can get it, and she can also transmit it to others as well. So, to stay alive, everyone, yes, everyone, has to stay away from everyone else. Alone and yet alive.

But even in this scenario, the haters still need to somehow accuse, scapegoat LGBTQ persons, and in this case, especially gay men, of somehow “desecrating” the lockdown, but at the same time, these are the ones who are complaining about the fact they even have to lockdown, claiming they are forced to do so especially by tyrannical, godless Democrats.

All in all, as usual, these holy haters confuse what being holy really is, and it doesn’t mean hating the world or escaping from it. Some can lockdown voluntarily, in order to find that ineffable “more” than the “I” by becoming monks or nuns. Many are called, few are chosen.

But the majority of humans, everyone, not just specific Christian sects, are now being locked down involuntarily, in order to preserve life, and all that lives is holy, proclaimed the great poet and heretic William Blake. We have to separate now to stay whole in order to preserve life for ourselves as individuals and as parts of communities, now and for the future.

Masturbation may not be an ideal sexual activity on a psychosocial level for everyone, but the act keeps the sex drive alive. Your orgasm literally screams out that you are still alive. Your imagination is thus still creating and by doing so is able to transcend boundaries this non-living virus is both breaking and imposing on its victims.

And who knows, some imaginative person now might be doing some kind of Zoom virtual masturbation session. Just make sure you protect it from the holy haters who would love to bomb this sort of thing, not because they hate it, because they really want to participate in Masturbation Nation.

I've noticed lately there's almost a cult on youtube of people filming antisocial behavior on public transportation. The range of antisocial behavior is wide, but of course obvious brawls accompanied by foul language are almost sure to go viral, or at least get multitudinous views. 

Not surprising, this trend, in a world where senior citizen middle school bus monitors are brutally scapegoated (the Karen Klein incident) or where a girl is brutally attacked by her peers (not in public, but the video was disseminated on the Internet), and her attackers are even thrilled when they end up on the news after they get arrested (see the Lifetime movie, Girl Fight, based of course on a true story). Overall, these incidents (and many others) point to a disturbing pathology of voyeurism and narcissism. 
 

I do wonder how many fights occurred on buses in the 1950s. But then, one couldn't just immediately whip out a phone and film them for posterity. 

One takes the bus only when one is too poor to own a car, or disabled, or old, or very young, or non-white. And one only takes it when one's car breaks down. And it's almost like if you own a car, even in densely populated areas where you don't really need one, you've made it. And the high-end developments going up almost always contain garages. 

And in Chicago, certain bus lines are stigmatized in the stigmatized CTA system and those who take it. The number 36, Broadway, carries a reputation for being the bus “weirdos” take. Yet that bus goes through an area of Chicago, Uptown, an area especially hard hit by the lack of governmental funding for certain programs released mentally disturbed people onto the streets from shelters and other facilities. 

I'm not certain which other routes carry this stigma, and I don't want to overgeneralize that buses in underserved areas carry passengers who are necessarily more dangerous or “weird.” Well, there was the woman on one bus on the South Side who claimed to be a bike; see this photo. 
 

Anyway, I've been taking the CTA for a long time (for multiple reasons, and I fit some of the stereotypes of those who take it), and I've seen much, but an incident that occurred on the number 81, Lawrence bus, (which travels through one of the most ethnically diverse areas in Chicago) stood out. 
 

I was waiting for it with my friend from out of town. We had just returned from the casino. We saw a frowsy older woman (maybe sixtyish) with very short hair and very thick round coke-bottle glasses practically leap in front of the bus as it pulled into the terminal; yes, she leaped right in front of the yellow line. The sign tells you to not cross that yellow line. The bus driver, a heavyset African-American woman, yelled at her, harshly, claiming that she had almost hit her as the bus pulled in because she crossed the line. I got the sense this woman takes this bus regularly and always disobeys the sign, and may have been almost hit previous times as the bus pulled in. I heard her respond snarkily to the bus driver, “I have to be the first on the bus.” Uh, OK ... 

Yes, she was, and she sat down and pulled out what looked like some kind of Christian fundamentalist tract from one of her multiple bags (yes, a cliché, but watch for multiple bags, and I don't mean newly minted bags from a recent shopping trips to Macy's or Bloomingdales). My friend (we were sitting a couple of seat pairs behind her) saw she had made many notes on one of the pages. The theme of the tract was the usual societal decay apocalyptic doom end of the world scenario, and my friend later told me he was able to even decipher one of her notes on a section of the tract: It's the television, the source of evil. 

I must claim, though, based on what I said about these viral videos, she may not be that far off track, but I imagined her sitting in her tiny apartment wearing a tin foil hat monitoring the Satanic messages coming in from a test pattern. 

But then, and this is where her behavior became really bizarre and offensive, a young Hispanic woman got on with a baby in a stroller. The woman with the baby pulled down the disabled seats right in front of the weird woman so she could get the stroller out of everyone's way. The weird woman proceeded to hold her nose. She then retrieved from one of her multiple bags a small, sample-size container of Lysol and spray it around her. 
 

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. My mouth remained open. Shock. 

Weird woman exited at Pulaski and Lawrence, not exactly a high-class area. In fact, it looked rather overcrowded and depressed. Gentrification had not arrived. Many people were thus waiting for buses. 

And no, I did not film this incident. I'm not sure what conclusions I can draw, but I get the sense, other than that the woman was obviously disturbed, that perhaps she was one of the people who lived around Pulaski and Lawrence in the sixties or even the fifties when the area was white, and I think, predominately Jewish. And she was still living there. But the world changed around her. She couldn't embrace the change as positive and took refuge in a reality that could be safe only by through segregation and scapegoating. 

And this disturbing dynamic is still occurring as youtubers film and view videos that show “the other” as someone or, more accurately, something, to be mocked and dehumanized by not only physical strangers, but by millions, even billions of impersonal, invisible voyeurs. 

If you've been following the LGBT media in particular, you've undoubtedly heard for some time about the Fascist-style scapegoating of LGBT persons in Russia by forbidding “gay propaganda” that supports “non-traditional sexual relations,” pretty much an excuse for police state tactics ranging from censorship to house searching to arbitrary arrests of protestors beaten up by homophobic thugs. 

In the early stages of their power, the Nazis burned books and shut down museums that showed “decadent art” (like Picasso and the Bauhaus school). They left one modern art museum open on the third floor of ramshackle building, according to James Shirer in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, to show how offensive it was in comparison to the official state art; the lines were so long to get in that the Minister of Culture had to, much to his embarrassment, shut it down! 
 

The decadent art of Putin's Nazi-style Russia is exemplified by the now infamous “Putin in Women's Underwear” painting by artist Konstantin Altunin.

Altunin's painting was seized by the Russian police from the “Museum of Power” gallery in St Petersburg for breaking unspecified laws. 
 

The police also removed from the gallery, housed in two rooms of a flat in the city, a picture depicting the head of the Russian Orthodox Church with his torso covered in tattoos, and two artworks mocking anti-gay lawmakers Vitaly Milonov and Yelena Mizulina. 

St. Petersburg deputy mayor Vitaly Mironov, who features in a further painting where his face is merged with the rainbow flag of the gay rights movement, said that the pictures were inappropriate and “of a distinctly pornographic character." How is a rainbow pornographic? 

Gallery owner Alexander Donskoy said as well as seizing paintings, the police also shut down his gallery and offered no explanation for their acts. 

The parallels here to the Nazi regime are obvious, but what's even more disturbing is Altunin's fate. Like most exiled artists of the past, he found refuge in Paris.

But he's not lounging around in cafes sipping cafe au lait or hobnobbing with gallery owners by the Seine; according to his wife Elena (who still lives in Russia with their young daughter), he is living rough on the streets. 

There are so many issues of serious concern here, but I do wonder if boycotting vodka and the Winter Olympics or a presidential reprimand of the dictator's policies is going to ease up on the oppression. There's a strong contingent of Westerners (mostly those holy haters) who support Putin's policies.

And despite outcries from popular celebrities like Lady Gaga and others, the average fan may pay lip service to the endorsements, but he or she is more concerned with the latest song. Social media both aids and harms the cause (the antigay thugs in Russian are using the Internet to lure unsuspecting gay victims to beat and kill). 

Many people these days don't know about the St. Louis, a ship that carried 900 Jewish people ostensibly to asylum in Cuba in the 1930s as part of a Nazi propaganda campaign to show that the government was willing to take care of the “Jewish problem” in a humane way. The Nazis knew full well, however, that neither Cuba nor, if Cuba refused them, the United States would accept them. The ship had to turn back, but luckily France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the Britain took the exiles in. This incident has been called by many “The Voyage of the Damned.” 
 

Would the United States (or any Western country) be willing to do the same if Putin wanted to dispose of his current scapegoat en masse in the same way? That's the question all citizens of the West need to wrestle with.

The answer might not be a resounding yes, even in a time where all forms of pluralism, including sexual, are becoming the norm.