Guess we won’t be seeing Justin at the church Sunday coffee hour

They sound like three pieces of shit - hope they are prosecuted to the fullest extent possible. I also hope folks bring civil cases as well.

Burn

Hey Viv, maybe your friends at the NW Community Bail Fund can help out these kids, just like they did with Andre Karlow. You seem cool with that.

Very (gentlemanly?) of the boys for trying to take the heat from the 24 year old who drove them to the Big City

Nothing like committing a crime while in a very recognizable vehicle while simultaneously filming it yourself to make a case pretty open and shut. I'm sure they'll still just get a slap on the wrist. People who commit much worse crimes aren't even in jail for a week nowadays.

As Dan has said, the Bible was written by desert bigots 2,000 years ago. These hateful, dimwitted little Puyallup turds are their direct descendants. How can anyone be dumb enough to fall for Christianity — the biggest fraud in history. How about a nice timeout in a tiny cage for these bigoted dipshit dweebs?

It isn't common knowledge - yet - but roughly four decades of research have shown a pretty strong link between anti-gay bias and violence and...closeted bisexuality. (This is not just interview-based research, but involves that - asking subjects what they think of gay people - and then showing them both straight and gay erotica with a sensor attached to their...member. As it turns, people lie. Penises do not.)

And in a number of high profile anti-gay crimes - including the murder of Matt Shepard, where one of the killers has long been known to have been hooking up in the months before the murder - the perp has turned out to be a truly f*cked up closeted pos. (Same deal with the murder of that gay couple in Redding, CA in the late 90s. One of the two killers had a same sex affair with another young man while both were involved in the Idaho far right Christian Identity movement. The other young man left the movement and came out, ultimately giving an interview about it all to the Advocate.)

The only real question left is just how many closeted bisexual men are out there. The research on that over the past several decades has been to establish the existence of male bisexuality, which it has. What's needed now are large scale studies about just how many men are actually kind of queer.

When I was in college - in the 90s - the cw was that lgbt people were between 2 and 5% of the population (the famous Kinsey study was by then considered poorly designed, and therefore unreliable). Now, about a third of young adults identify as lgbt, and the number of bisexuals in particular may be higher - even much, much higher. If homosexuality and bisexuality evolved as thought to reduce conflict it follows that those genes may be pretty widely spread across the population. In the end, maybe it's the case that straight people are the actual 10%.

Sadly, far right violence of various kinds - look what just happened to Governor Shapiro and his family - is likely to get worse before it gets better. It will ultimately take not just the hard work of activists and law enforcement but a decisive sea change in our politics and culture - exactly what happened with the mostly acronymical far left of the 70s after the election of Ronald Reagan. But of course the far left never had a president of its own, because we're a center-right country. This is why it has been and will be so much worse with maga than it was with the BLA, SLA, FALN, and Weather Underground.

The tragedy of the closet - which is what I think we’re talking about here - contains multitudes.

I’m a second wave xer (70s born) who grew up the son of two undiagnosed and untreated narcissists. I’m also a former kid actor/model. Despite all the bad things that happened in the latter context, it - and later writing and painting too - probably saved my life. It was the one place I could go to actually connect with my fellow human beings.

In the home of narcissist co-parents (and really the entire country is finding out now what that is like: the chaos, most especially) vulnerability is shut down and often weaponized against you - it’s a cult, basically, and genuine connection is verboten. I found a whole lot of the same with most of my school-based friends - at least before I got to private school closer to LA (it was like, oh: it isn’t only other actor kids capable of actual connection - this is good to know).

I realize in retrospect that a lot of the kids I knew locally (in this one southern Ventura County suburb) were/are probably closeted bisexuals, and some of them I’ve learned since then were actually hooking up with their same sex best friend back in high school and things. It was never as toxic as my own parents and family, but their cynicism and repression influenced me…and not in a good way.

It was really for the most part though (at least among other boys) that the only ones I could truly relate to were other actor kids. These were the people you could work with and then go see a movie with and once you reached a certain age your sleepover might turn into…more than that. And you know it’s a magical thing because you’re not just hooking up: you have the whole soul connection. This would never have happened with literally any of my suburban public school male friends.

I’m about to start working in the business again, and with a whole bunch of other former child actors, some of whom I’ve long known, but most not. (I’m the main writer this time, but also am acting again, and producing, and eventually/probably directing.) And you know it’s the same thing all over again - that feeling of connection. All that warmth and funniness and vulnerability you saw in these people back then, up on the screen, was and is completely real: in that sense there’s no such thing as acting. They seemed like magic kids because they were, and they still are today.

Just the other day, I thought of this guy whose only credit (known to me) was appearing on the cover of this book when we were both fourteen. I had always been curious about this person because he was…my doppelganger (a friend of mine was like: hey was that you on the cover of that book, which obviously it wasn’t, but I went to the mall book store to find out). So I managed to find this person - what might it be like to meet your clone, basically: would we cancel each other out? Spontaneously combust? - and he’s all I just said in the previous paragraph: just an amazing and beautiful person. (He grew up on a pot farm with two hippie parents in far northern California.)

I mention all this because obviously in the worst and darkest cases the closet can lead to…actual violence. But far, far short of that closeted people - and yes this includes closeted bisexual people, who can obviously be authentically dating and married to people of the opposite sex - are living emotionally stunted and incomplete lives.

I long wondered what about coming out made people less shallow and more moral - which seemed to me based on personal experience and observation totally true (when I started coming out in high school I just completely lost my need for and interest in status, especially in a materialistic sense) - and I really didn’t understand it until recently, when I finally got into recovery. Coming out and recovery and connecting through acting or writing or other arts are all the same thing, and it has everything to do with…honesty. As Dr. Bob always said, anyone can do this - the Steps, I mean - if they’re honest with themselves. And as the cliche goes: the opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety, but connection. It’s honesty about the things you feel most vulnerable about that makes that connection…possible.

So many American men are just so...cowardly. I just don't have time for them/that anymore.

@7: If you say that for Christianity, you'd have to say it for Islam as well.

@9 a huge percentage of people on any gay hookup app identify as being straight... and many are married to women with kids and are out there barebacking with random gay men in the backs of bookstores and parks. It still happens quite often. I wouldn't even say most of them are "bi."... they're gay men who are stuck in a relationship with a house and kids and too scared to upend their entire lives and get out of it. Quite common still.

Is the f-word unprintable once again? I thought we reclaimed that in the '90s (with a major assist from the Stranger's own Dan Savage). As I recall there was less resistance to the f-word from the gay old guard than there was to the q-word.

Should have fired their water pellets at a redneck bar.
They wouldn’t even be arrested for that. The left would applaud that.

@10 Perhaps, but this country (very broadly speaking) has historically been a refuge for the most-tolerant Muslims and the least-tolerant Christians. This is why you very seldom see anti-LGBTQ hate from the U.S. Islamic community. For the most part Muslims and queer people in this country are allies.

@14: True, and for the most part, Christians and gay men and women are allies as well.

@14: But of course in both religions, homosexuality as a sin against God or Allah.

@15 I'm not sure the majority of gay people would agree with that at the moment.