Weirdly, Google thinks I’m 25-34 when I visit from my laptop, and it thinks I’m 55-64 when I visit from my iPad, missing my actual age (46) on either side. I am guessing this is because the actual cookie they place (and track) is different on each device, regardless of the fact that I’m logged into the same Google account in both cases. I also am guessing that the way I use my iPad — I read longer pieces, often deep political essays and or literary analysis, which I pick up from longreads.org or Flipboard — is what’s making them think I’m older when I use it.

They correctly identify me as a male on both. I wonder if they know I’m gay? I’ll bet they do. I’m sure there’s a lot of information they’ve inferred about me based on my browsing habits which they don’t show on this page. I’d be interested in seeing it.

Weirdly, I didn’t start smoking in my teens. I started after I was in college. And it wasn’t peer pressure. Most of my friends didn’t smoke. Most of them thought it was stupid, that I had started. And I didn’t smoke cigarettes at first. I started with cigars: wooden tipped Hav-A-Tampas that I just randomly bought one day at a Transamerica Truck Stop outside Tuscaloosa, Alabama. I say, “randomly.” The reality was that I had always had a little bit of a fetish for guys who smoked cigars, probably because of how hot and hunky Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D looked when Jack Kirby drew him. I discovered those comics at about the same time that I discovered my penis. I’m so serious that it makes me want to cry.

Years later, Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada would famously forbid all Marvel superheroes from smoking, for precisely the reason that seeing their heroes puffing away might make kids want to take up the habit. He was roundly derided. But I think he had a point — at least in my case. Why else would a twenty-one year old kid in the late 1980s take up cigar smoking? This was well before the cigar craze of the 90s.

No. I blame it all on Jack Kirby.

This is the precise image that turned me into a gay cigar fetishist all at once, at the age of 11, when I saw it in Son of Origins of Marvel Comics.

I eventually worked my way up the cigar food chain, as it were, to “real cigars,” Punch Maduros and such. I thought they made me look special.

When my boyfriend and I got together, in the early 90s, I started smoking cigarettes, too, mainly at first because I thought he would think it was weird and uncool for his new boyfriend to smoke cigars (I guess I was in the closet about it — people still thought of cigars as something ugly old men and Marines in videogames did, and nobody else), and then later out of sheer addiction and convenience.

The 90s cigar craze screwed up my cigar fetish. When every fratboy asshole on the street is smoking a cigar, it’s hard to imagine that there’s something special about them.

I swerved to pipes in the late nineties — because it was still rare to see a young guy smoking a pipe, and my fetishes, apparently, need to be cultish — and also, again, I started smoking those as well. I built up quite a collection. That’s right: I said collection. If cigars were about the macho, pipes were about the geek.

I quit smoking a year and a half ago. I actually quit cigars, cigarettes, and pipes at the same time, though I consider those three to be completely separate addictions that each presented its own challenges.

I never crave cigars or cigarettes anymore, but, weirdly, I still crave smoking a pipe every now and then. Maybe it’s for the best that my fixation ended up on that particular mode of smoking, because, for one thing, seeing a forty-something doofus smoke a pipe doesn’t get anybody excited, not even me.

See what I mean?

Even more importantly, it’s a big deal to buy a pipe. You have to actually go through the process consciously. You can pick up a pack of cigarettes, or a Hav-A-Tampa single, at the gas station. But you have to drive to a special store to get a pipe. You can’t fool yourself that you’ll just smoke it once and be done with it, either, because, after all, there it will still be. You will own it now. You will use it again. And it’s not like you can only buy one bowl’s worth of tobacco, either. And so on and so on. Every time I think about smoking again, I have to think about buying a pipe, and every time I think about buying a pipe, my brain works through exactly those calculations, and it just feels like a lot of trouble. My laziness wins out, you might say, and keeps me from smoking. Pipe smoking is not a lazy man’s hobby. Maybe it and I were doomed from the beginning, for this very reason.

I find that when I travel (as I have been doing the past couple of days) is when I want to smoke the most. Part of this is leftover from when I used to travel a lot for my job, back when I was still a smoker, and the panicky, craving-so-bad-it-hurts hours I spent in smoke-free airplanes and airports are still imprinted on my brain. I’m supposed to be craving a cigarette right now because I’ve always craved a cigarette when I’m strapped to an airplane seat. Right? Fortunately, there’s nothing I can do about those cravings when they’re happening.

Even when I’m not traveling, though, I still get cravings, almost two years after I quit smoking. But those cravings are no stronger than the ordinary everyday cravings I used to get when I did smoke.

Here’s how it used to work:

1. Have mild urge to smoke.
2. Smoke.
3. Urge goes away.
4. Mild urge comes back.
5. Smoke.
6. Urge goes away.

Here’s how it works now:

1. Have mild urge to smoke.
2. Don’t smoke.
3. Urge goes away.
4. Mild urge comes back.
5. Don’t smoke.
6. Urge goes away.

It’s exactly the same, except the length of time between urges is growing farther and farther apart. I now go days without having an urge to smoke. Back when I was a smoker, I couldn’t go more than an hour or two, tops, without having an urge.

Smoking and not-smoking, when it comes right down to it, don’t really feel all that different, as ways of living — at least on a day to day basis. I hadn’t gotten to the inevitable COPD parts of the experience yet. So there’s that.  I’m so serious, it makes me want to laugh.

This marks the end of Chapter Two. It’s a great time to jump on board and catch up, before the beginning of Chapter Three (Snake-Boy Agonistes), coming this Friday.

Hello stud! Wanna swing?

I am not a fundamentalist Christian. I am not even a Christian. I was raised in a fundamentalist church, though (which, by the way, is a slightly different set of churches from the “evangelical,” ones, though the two sets often overlap), the Isbell Church of Christ, just south of Russellville, Alabama.

Please note that the Church of Christ is not to be confused with the United Churches of Christ. There are no two denominations of Protestant Christianity I can think of that are more different from one another.

So anyway. My friends who have no understanding of fundamentalist Christianity are incredulous that Newt Gingrich, serial adulterer, wannabe swinger, won the votes of fundamentalist and evangelical Christians in South Carolina.

Here’s what they don’t understand. For the fundamentalist Christian, the only thing that counts is what you say you believe, not what you actually do. Now, for most people, that is the very definition of hypocrisy, so let me unpack that statement a little bit.

It all boils down to confession and redemption. Fundamentalist churches handle this process, integral to every variation of the Christian faith, very differently from mainstream churches. I’m not exactly sure how it works in other fundamentalist denominations, but I can tell you how it worked at the particular branch of the Church of Christ (so conservative that they couldn’t see any Biblical justification for orphanages, organized missions, or instrumental music) that I grew up in.

In the Church of Christ, your sins are between you and God, until they become public knowledge. If nobody else ever finds out about your sins, you still need to seek redemption, but you can do so in private, by praying to God. If your sins become public knowledge, you have to wait until the end of church services. Before the last song of the services, the preacher will stand up and invite any who have sinned, and who wish to have the prayers of the congregation added to his own to help him achieve redemption, to come forward. There’s a particular set of songs that might get sung in this last, key, spot in the rotation, all of which are about coming forward, coming home, coming clean, standing up for Jesus, and so on. The sinner steps up to the front pew, talks to the preacher a minute, then the song ends. The preacher summarizes what the sinner has told him, then he leads the congregation in prayer, asking God to forgive the sinner.

Then the matter is finished.

“For we have all sinned and come short of the glory of God,” you see.

To bring it up again is to go against God. If the sinner has repented, then putting yourself into a position of judgement over him is seen as the height of hubris and folly — you might, yourself, have to go up to the front pew and confess that one at some point. The sinner has been forgiven, and the sin has been forgotten. Period, end of story. Ten years, or ten minutes, after the fact, you’re not to talk or even think about it anymore.

In saying that he’s sorry he did it, that he’s repented, and that he has found Christ, Newt has put himself in the position of confessed, redeemed sinner — the best position to be in, when it comes to fundamentalism, because that’s where all of us, according to their philosophy, should be standing. Anybody who criticizes a person in that position is, in fact, sinning by doing so.

This mechanism even works in the most extreme cases. For example, many years ago, the principal of the local junior high school, who was (according to scuttlebutt I heard from my family) busted trying to pick up an underage girl in the Wal-Mart parking lot, managed to hold onto his social standing, if not his actual job, by working the Church of Christ confession and redemption system. (“I thought she was a whore,” I have been told, was part of his confession, “I didn’t realize she was a good girl. I’m so sorry.”)

Yes, it is very, very convenient that you don’t have to confess until people already know about the sin. And, yes, it is kind of candy-ass and ridiculous, how easily forgiveness can be obtained (you don’t even have to play with beads or give money or anything). But that’s the way it works — at least, in my understanding, which was formed during my childhood, and which is undoubtedly missing some of the theological subtleties.

I want to emphasize that I’m talking about one church — one that even other fundamentalists think is kind of goofy sometimes, mainly because of the whole “no instrumental music” thing — but the process of confession and redemption, though different from denomination to denomination in its details, is still the key to their common understanding of the way the world works, as well as the key to understanding Newt’s position among them.

I know that you think I am making this up — unless you’re from where I’m from.

And if you’re from where I’m from, you know exactly the kind of people who are, earnestly and with full understanding of his flaws, embracing Newt Gingrich as a Christian candidate.

I want to repeat. I am not a fundamentalist Christian. I am not even a Christian. And I am certainly not a supporter of the odious Newt Gingrich. I just wanted to open your eyes to something I understand about his supporters, I think. It is good to know the enemy.

Meanwhile: Snake-Boy Loves Sky Prince 2.5: Sky Prince Sucks

FitzRoy (l), Darwin (r)

Highly-trained Creationist ninja assassin travels back in time to take out Charles Darwin before he publishes “The Origin of Species.”

Loses his faith. Finds himself entangled in a homosexual love triangle with Darwin and Captain Robert FitzRoy of the HMS Beagle.

The highly-evolved 21st century germs he carried back in time with him (not on purpose) wipe out all life on the Galapagos Islands, including the crew of the ship, but he smuggles his lovers back to the present, after dosing them with antibiotics.

Potential sequel: “Charles Darwin Must Live”

When they come back to the present, they find that nothing has changed, really.  Other Victorian scientists published the findings that, in our timeline, Darwin had been first to the post with.

The only change is that there’s an alternate version of the assassin himself, who never went back in time, and who is tasked with wiping out our main character and his lovers by the Creationist ninja leaders, who wish to cover up the botched plans of their other-timeline counterparts.

Hijinks ensue as the trio attempt to escape their pursuer while working through their own romantic complications.

In Russellville, Alabama during the early 1970s, the worst thing a kid could call another kid was “Jerry Moody.” As in, “Stop acting like a Jerry Moody.” Or, “Joey Manley is a Jerry Moody.” We didn’t know what it meant. We didn’t even realize, at first, that it was somebody’s name. “Jerrymoody,” all one word, was just a bad thing to be. Mood Rings came out about that time, and one of the colors they could turn was “Moody.” You wanted to avoid that color at all costs.

Later, I learned that what people meant when they said “Jerry Moody” was: queer.

Jerry Moody, in addition to being a curse word, was also an actual human being, about twenty years older than me. I only saw the real Jerry Moody once, walking his mother (I think) home from the library. He didn’t look at me. He looked at the ground. He held her arm.

I spoke to my own mom about him on my recent visit home. We had pulled out her old yearbook to find a photograph of Gustav Hasford (another famous outcast from mom’s generation in Russellville, albeit for completely different reasons) and, turning a random page, there he was: a geeky, scrawny kid with dark, thick glasses.

Under his photo: Jerry Moody.

For a kid of my generation, of my neighborhood, that’s like seeing a picture of somebody with the word “Faggot” under it. Seriously. His name was my first introduction to the very concept.

“How did people find out he was gay?” I asked her.

“I don’t know. I don’t even know if he was,” she said.

She told me that she had, weirdly enough, had a conversation with my cousin Shirley about Jerry Moody. Shirley, the oldest daughter of my mom’s oldest sister, is only three years younger than my mom, and has always seemed more like an Aunt to me than a cousin. “Kids used to throw rocks at him,” Shirley said. “When I think about that, it tears me up. He had a terrible life.”

I don’t know if Jerry Moody was really gay. I don’t know if he’s still alive. I don’t know how his name came to mean what it did. But I do know that I am one of him. I knew it the first time somebody called me it. Maybe because our initials were the same. Maybe because I just sensed that it meant: doesn’t belong here. And I knew that I didn’t belong there. (Note: I feel less strongly anti-Russellville, the farther it recedes into my past). I do know that, like Shirley told my mom, he had a terrible life — and you know what else I know? I know that I didn’t.

I expect that it is because people like him came before me (he didn’t leave, he didn’t kill himself, he walked his mother home from the library — these things are actually heroic, when you think about what he was up against) that I was able to live my life relatively peacefully, in Russellville, and then other places. He gave a name to what I was, and bore the brunt of that — whether he wanted to, or not.

Thank you, Jerry Moody, wherever you are, whatever you were.

Sex wasn’t the only thing he did with his life, though it was maybe the most consistent thing he did with it. He actually had several careers, each of which was accomplished enough to have satisfied most people, in its own way.

Steward’s first career, as a young novelist, earned him entree into the inner circle of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas (and through them, just about anybody else you’ve ever heard of during that era who was working in literature and/or the visual arts). He never lived up to the expectations of his literary set, though, fizzling out after a promising first book. Those expectations were very high, though, and most young novelists never even reach the heights that Steward managed to reach in the first flush of his promise. Who among us can lay claim to the friendship and patronage of a figure as important to the history of art and literature as Gertrude Stein?

Then he taught college for twenty years. At DePaul, he was a popular professor who (we learn later) had a profound effect on his students, causing many of them to choose lives as artists, thinkers, and creators. But Steward himself hated the gig, becoming addicted to “uppers” and alcohol during the course of his tenure there.

Next he became a tattoo artist, becoming the “official” tattoist of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang at the height of their notoriety, and eventually, under the nom de needle of “Phil Sparrow,” mentoring two of the most influential figures in the art-form, Cliff Raven and the ubiquitous Ed Hardy.

His sexual documentation became a major source for Alfred Kinsey‘s landmark studies on sexuality in America, and he developed a deep friendship with the man.

Late in his life, encouraged by the more-frank sexual discourse going on in the country, partially caused by Kinsey’s work, Steward wrote some of the most influential of the early gay “pulp” novels, the Phil Andros series.

Then [SPOILER ALERT] he died, cramped and alone in an apartment filled with his hoard of books, papers, letters from famous people, and sexual memorabilia. Most people, until now, have never heard of him. Strike that: most people still have never heard of him.

Spring’s prose is never sensationalistic, which, one imagines, was a difficult feat, given the subject matter. A little sensationalism might have helped a bit. Like the people Steward surrounded himself with, I found myself getting bored toward the end, after the sex ran out, and Steward turned into an old crank organizing his neighborhood into anti-prostitution watches while he let his lap dogs piss all over his belongings. That’s when the flatness of the prose became evident (it had been flat all along, but who cared — you know — given what it was describing). But I’m an evil bitch like that, like most gay men are, and am perhaps a bit too afraid of my own impending decline and fall, like, again, most gay men are, to read about Steward’s with anything other than mild, maybe guilty, disgust.

If, like me, you have an interest in pre-Stonewall gay male sexuality, or if you just want to read up on one of the most strangely well-connected figures in the 20th century (and either look forward to, or can handle, reading lots and lots of descriptions of anonymous and semi-anonymous sexual encounters), then, yes, you should pick this up.

On a personal note: thanks to Steward, I find myself (via Steward’s editor at St. Martin’s, who was also my editor) connected by only two degrees of separation to some of the most famous people of the 20th century — actors, artists, bikers, writers, Manson family murderers, etc. — many of whom he had sex with! Why does this make me happy? I do not know why it makes me happy.

I don’t know why I watched it. I watched it all. Long holiday weekend, I guess. The Internet makes us random.

This was the height of Hollywood glamour co-existing with the height of Senator Joe McCarthy’s communist witch hunt. I had forgotten about that until Elia Kazan stepped up to accept his award for Best Director (for “On the Waterfront“). Kazan famously ratted out all his old friends to the committee. But, to be fair, nobody involved in that mess escaped unscathed, except maybe America’s sweetheart.

That’s all subtext, though. None of that is talked about in the broadcast itself, of course. It just came into my mind when I saw that guy. I can’t see him without thinking of the McCarthy hearings.

What was noticeable from the broadcast itself — text rather than subtext — was that Bob Hope, the show’s host, telegraphed every punchline. He spoke the set-ups breezily, looking right and left, then slumped down, stared straight at the camera, lowered his lids to half-mast, and gave the punch-line, as though he were annoyed by having to do it. This served to inform the audience that they were supposed to laugh at that particular line — and, for the most part, they did.

Comedians don’t tend to do that anymore. In fact, it’s kind of considered the sign of a hack. Even Jerry Lewis — or, well, okay, the character he plays — in King of Comedy tells the young Robert DeNiro, “You don’t announce the punchline. You just say it.”

A lot of those old comedians used to deliver their punchlines that way, but Bob Hope seems to do it every single time, unlike, say, Jack Benny, who usually pretended not to know he was being funny.

These days, only Garfield and his ilk deliver their punchlines staring straight at the audience, half-lidded and weary, as far as I know. Live action comedians have moved on to other, more conversational, styles.

I guess what I wonder is if contemporary comedians still respect Bob Hope, despite his old-fashioned style of punchline delivery (the way that people still respect silent film actors despite their unnatural acting styles), or if they think he was a hack all along. Anybody know?