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Kramer used the opportunity to rail at Yale's "conspiracy of silence" on gay history, criticizing an endowment offered to the school by his brother to set up the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies because it was misdirected, he says, and used for gender theory and 'queer 'studies (Kramer despises the word "queer", calling it adolescent and demeaning). Kramer wishes the school taught more about gay people in history and talks a bit about his new book, The American People.
These revelations about supposed gay historical figures is totally news to me. But it wasn't hard to find some fey looking artwork of our two most famous presidents. Hmm. That's a LOT reading between the lines, I hope some scholars can confirm some of his theories, and throwing down a challenge at Yale, no less, may spark some interest.
Here's what Larry Kramer said in his speech:
"Here are some of the things that I have uncovered about our history in writing my new book, The American People:
That Jamestown was America’s first community of homosexuals, men who came to not only live with each other as partners but to adopt and raise children bought from the Indians. Some even arranged wedding ceremonies for themselves.
That George Washington was gay, and that his relationships with Alexander Hamilton and the Marquis de Lafayette were homosexual. And that his feelings for Hamilton led to a government and a country that became Hamiltonian rather than Jeffersonian.
That Meriwether Lewis was in love with William Clark and committed suicide when their historic journey was over and he wouldn’t see Clark anymore.
That Abraham Lincoln was gay and had many, many gay interactions, that his nervous breakdown occurred when he and his lover, Joshua Speed, were forced to part, and that his sensitivity to the slaves came from his firsthand knowledge of what it meant to be so very different. And that the possibility exists that Lincoln was murdered because he was gay and John Wilkes Booth, who was gay, knew this.
That Franklin Pierce, who became one of America’s worst presidents, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who became one of our greatest writers, as roommates at Bowdoin College had interactions that changed them both forever and, indeed, served as the wellspring for what Hawthorne came to write about. Pierce was gay. And Hawthorne? Herman Melville certainly wanted him to be.
That most of the great actresses who endlessly toured America during the 19th century bringing theater to the masses were lesbians and occasionally dressed as men. Just like Katherine Hepburn.
That the plague of AIDS was allowed to happen because much of the world hates us and most of the world knows nothing about us. They don’t know we are related to Washington and Lincoln.
I needed no queer theories, no gender studies, to figure all this out.
Why can’t we accept that homosexuality has been pretty much the same since the beginning of human history, whether it was called homosexuality, sodomy, buggery, hushmarkedry, or hundreds of other things, or had no name at all? What we do now they pretty much did then. Period. Men have always had cocks and men have pretty much always known what to do with them. It is just stupidity and elite presumption of the highest and most preposterous order to theorize, in these regards, that then was different from now."








California prides itself as the home of the entertainment industry. In reality, costs have driven a lot of production out of the state, but people still look to California to work in music, television and film industries. In a further reality check, most of what comes out of the real Hollywood is exploitative crap in the T&A or teen slasher genre, or, dare I say it... hardcore porn.
The "quality" product you see around Oscar time puts a lot of money into the hands of very few people, but the vast numbers of regular people working in the entertainment business get paid about the same as every other industry. They also pay taxes to help keep the business of state government running.
However, due to some research done by a local journalist, one of San Francisco's largest film production companies may lose funding for employee training simply because of the content they produce. It's back to the days of Jesse Helms and the NEA hearings! Read on.
Whipped and Gagged
Is government spending obscene? Well, it paid to train S&M filmmakers.
By Matt Smith
published: April 22, 2009
Talk about an economic stimulus. California taxpayers have paid $46,791 so that employees of the San Francisco pornographer Kink.com might produce more perfect web-based depictions of motorized dildo impalements on FuckingMachines.com; do a better job displaying women as they're bound, gagged, and repeatedly electrically shocked on www.wiredpussy.com; and more effectively transmit images of, well, people doing pretty much what you'd imagine they'd be doing on www.whippedass.com.
That's right: California's government has been subsidizing torture-based pornography. The subsidy has been routed through the California Employment Training Panel (ETP), an agency set up to make state businesses more competitive with foreign and out-of-state ones by paying contractors who train in-state workers. Kink.com, famous to San Franciscans as the pornographer that not long ago bought the massive former Armory building in the Mission District, received its training through the Bay Area Video Coalition, a Mission nonprofit that provides classes in video and multimedia technology.
Kink.com is "legally recognized by California," says Video Coalition executive director Ken Ikeda. "They employ 100 Bay Area residents, and they also pay into payroll taxes. They're a valued community neighbor of ours. In training their employees, we're in complete alignment with the ETP's vision of keeping employees competitive in the international marketplace."
Sadly, this story doesn't have a happy ending, at least from a porn industry perspective.
After I submitted a state public records request to find out how much money Californians had been paying to train workers of Cybernet Entertainment LLC — Kink.com's formally registered business name — I received a letter from ETP general counsel Maureen Reilly, who said the government had been unaware that Cybernet was in the business of narrowcasting videos depicting sexualized torture.
"By long-standing policy, ETP does not fund training in the adult entertainment industry," she wrote, suggesting that the Bay Area Video Coalition might have done more to make the government aware that Cybernet was in the porn business. "Since learning about Kink.com through your Public Records Act request, ETP has informed BAVC that it will no longer reimburse the cost of training the employees of Cybernet."






