Could someone please send TBOGG this story:
A minor incident in a barber’s shop last week has helped me to realise that I may no longer be gay. Not a fully fledged homo, anyway; perhaps not even a part-timer who helps the team out when it’s busy. It appears I may be going straight.
I was in Tenterden, the Kentish village where I was brought up and to which I have lately returned, working at a nearby aerodrome as a helicopter pilot. I was waiting my turn for a chatty Latvian to apply the hot towels and razor.
A handsome young dad entered with a small, fair-haired boy at his side. The man took a seat and hoisted the wide-eyed child proudly on to his knee. The first haircut, I speculated inwardly, as an unfamiliar fatherly glow and feeling of mild envy swept over me. I could not tear my attention away from the mirrored reflections.
From time to time, the dad leant forward as they waited and whispered close to his son’s ear, tenderly kissing his fair head. Touching stuff.
But then my eyes lowered and I became transfixed by the sight of the boy’s tiny pink fingers gripping his father’s huge, workman-like fist. And I almost wanted to burst into song.
I feel gay after having read about his tender incident in a barbershop with a handsome young father with a huge, workman like-fist. You couldn’t fit more double entendres in that piece if you tried.
Alex S.
Um… what?
El Tiburon
Being anti-gay now is so, oh, I don’t know, so gay.
TooManyJens
@Alex S.: You too, huh?
skippy
man, reading that made me gay.
plus, where is it written (besides inside repubbb’s heads) that gays can’t be fatherly?
D-Chance.
Another for the Excuse-o-meter: The Republicans winning the special election is bad news for Republicans because it will cause Democrats to alter what would have been losing campaign strategies in November. (via the LOG)
MattR
@Alex S.: Did not (and will not) read the whole thing, but I am guessing the author believes that gay people can’t want to be parents.
Mnemosyne
And here I thought we were finally getting to the point where we could understand the the desire to parent and the desire to have hetero sex are, in fact, two completely different desires that sometimes go together.
But, nope, I guess we’re reverting back to the silliness of deciding that only straight people could possibly want to be parents, so gay people who want to be parents must be child molesters.
mr. whipple
If it was a musical, I’d say the dood has some way to go yet.
cmorenc
I’M A LUMBERJACK, AND I’M OK
I SLEEP ALL NIGHT AND I WORK ALL DAY…
tigrismus
I can’t be the only one who breathed a sigh of relief when I read “fist.”
SensesFail
@mr. whipple: LOL!
geg6
Andrew will be frothing at the mouth.
No double entendre intended.
Dave C
So, John, it seems that those painkillers are treating you well, eh?
Noonan
Know how I know this guy is gay? Because he wants to have sex to procreate.
jeffreyw
The UnPuppy Hater
Tonal Crow
Shhh! We’ve secretly replaced this unsuspecting blogger’s pain meds with magic mushroom powder. Let’s see whether he notices!
CT Voter
It’s gotta be parody, right?
From later on in the article:
I kid you not.
jibeaux
Doesn’t wanting to break into song make you even more gay? I’m kidding, no throw things at me. Just don’t care for musicals, that’s all.
Plus, tiny little kid fingers can’t “grip” huge fists anyway. They wrap THEIR fists around YOUR fingers.
Crusty Dem
Being “transfixed by the sight of the boy’s tiny pink fingers gripping his father’s huge, workman-like fist” doesn’t mean you should be straight, it means you should be a priest.
eastriver
@tigrismus:
I was waiting for the not-his-son reveal.
And I’m a little confused about JC’s motivation for posting this. Humor? Gay-friendly cred? A secret love of big, thick barber poles?
SpotWeld
… this is a gag right.
It’s going to be a sitcom staring Rowan Atkinson, right?
Mark
Sound bi-curious to me. Oh my.
Dreggas
@tigrismus:
no you weren’t.
BigSwami
Ehhh, nope. Still gay. Check back later, though.
ds
@CT Voter:
It seems like one. There’s probably some British humor I’m missing.
GReynoldsCT00
@TooManyJens:
me three
Osprey
Seriously, I was waiting for him to finish that piece with “and it didn’t even give me a stiffy”.
gypsy howell
I’m sorry – did a man write this? Teh ghey has not been cured, my friend. Teh ghey has not been cured.
(And wanting to burst into song should have been his second clue.)
Max
Sorry, but a women would have to be pretty desperate to hook up with this dude.
I see him heading back to the other side of the ballroom in short order.
Cat
It doesn’t count. He’s British. They have a bizarre tradition of diddling each other in their exclusive private single sex schools cause all kinds of sexual confusion.
jibeaux
Okay, now I have skimmed the actual article. How idiotic. I’m not looking for a mate, but if I were can I officially say “thanks but no thanks” to any and all gentlemen who have recently decided after 24 years that they are no longer gay and that they are pretty much ready to settle down with a woman although, sure, the temptation is always going to be there because yes, you still do like men also, but you’ve just really decided you want to be a dad. This is always my thought about the people who say they’ve prayed away the gay: “oh, so you’ve entered into an intensive course designed at fundamentally changing your attractions and you’re really going to work very hard at being attracted to me. Hrm. Lemme get back to you on that, I think I can probably find a straight alcoholic or kleptomaniac I might wanna check out first….”
Morbo
I hope that anti-gay activists grab this piece and plug it for all it’s worth. It would be really gratifying to watch it blow up in their faces.
Hob
It feels almost wrong to be as snarky about this as it deserves, because this guy clearly wrote this to try to express something or other in his heart, but WHAT THE FUCK? I’m honestly perplexed by how someone can get to the age of 41, having lived as a gay man with all of the challenges that still inevitably go with that — which usually include having had to look a little more closely at the wavery lines between sexual attraction, romance, gender & family roles, etc., than the average straight guy ever does — and still be so unclear on the concept that he thinks “straight” = “wanting to be a father” and “gay” = “being a miserable perv.”
Seriously, the rest of that piece is even worse than what John quoted. Apparently, his sexuality was forced upon him by peer pressure, because those people are everywhere now (at least at the BBC), and he never really enjoyed it, but still it provided so many “carnal and deliciously taboo temptations” that he never got around to giving the delicate flower of his authentic straightness “light to grow.” OK… you were a confused boy and now you are a confused man and you’re trying something new. That happens. But that’s not really a good reason for you to write a 5 billion word essay to enlighten the rest of the world about your self-revelation and to pass it off as the Real Meaning of Marriage, etc.
Fortunately it looks like the commenters on the Times page have pretty much said what there was to say about this. I just can’t fathom why it was printed, unless it was to show that it is possible for someone’s thinking to be as fucked up as this without any religious justification.
Citizen_X
Oh my chatty Latvians, is that serious? Got to be a parody.
I can’t help but hear it in a Michael-Palin-“Hello-sailor!” kind of voice. I know that’s pretty, erm, Kentish of me.
Shinobi
@tigrismus: You were not. EEK!
Also, this prose is disgusting in oh so many ways. I will admit that I occasionally get a little mushy when I see fathers playing with their kids, but this is beyond over the top. Daddy issues much?
Fwiffo
If striped pyjamas on a girl is confusing, you might be gay.
Blue Raven
Um. Right. So it’s also just gay or just straight, no bisexuality allowed in this guy’s world as well? Pa-thetic.
CT Voter
@Hob: It’s not just that “those people are everywhere”…it’s COMPULSORY at the BBC!
This is Monty Python’s fault.
Joshua Norton
Except on that side of the pond they call their private schools “public” for some reason.
Lisa
@#10:
No, you were not the only one.
Comrade Darkness
Um, all the gay guys I know ARE touchy feely dads. Does this guy live in a closet or something . . . oh, right.
Alex S.
Almost every sentence contains some double entendre or gay culture allusion. I almost can’t believe this is not a parody. If this is real, the point is probably to prove that being is a choice, but the article then goes on to prove it’s not.
P.S.: In this article of 2008 Patrick Muirhead is a local reporter, not a pilot.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article3803363.ece
P.P.S.: Now I’m pretty sure it’s a parody:
http://en.allexperts.com/e/p/pa/patrick_muirhead.htm
Quote: “writing humorous articles for The Times”
Tonybrown74
He fixates on the HANDSOMENESS of the father and the size of his hands, and that’s supposed to make him straight …
Bursting into song?
Oh, honey …
Comrade Darkness
@D-Chance.: I’m hoping Hopey’s consolation prize is abandoning congress to the pit of despair they deserve and spending the next year prosecuting the hell out of anything that has so much as touched a financial product on wall street, a torture memo, or a phone company database.
I can dream. Yeah, I’m dreaming, fuck it. But it makes me all warm inside, and I need it.
Screw looking forward. Time to cram down on the past, bitches.
Cat Lady
I don’t think that means what he thinks it means.
fraught
Sounds like latent-pedophilia happening there. The way he turned his own desire to be on both sides of the fantasy into a need to procreate is creepy. This is just another way to convince himself that he’s really, really not gay after all and is probably one in a long lifetime of epiphanies that relieve for a while the tortures of his internalized homophobia. He should acknowledge he was turned on by this hot pop and the kid.
very reverend crimson fire of compassion
Ummmmm. No. Just no.
Comrade Darkness
@Joshua Norton: “Some reason” being that plain old school is a tutor your aristo family hired for you and your sibs. “Public” school is where a teacher handles an entire classroom of kids from various places, at a privately funded tuition-driven institution.
State/taxpayer funded education is too anti-aristo to count toward the language. It’s probably just referred to as “prison”.
scav
definitely a need for warning labels on this guy. for either gender.
mr. whipple
Uh oh, that always confused me, too.
And now I’m singing Bali Hai.
I better go talk with my wife.
Tsulagi
@tigrismus: Umm, I’m thinking this new hetero may have previously enjoyed a “huge, workman-like fist.” Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Okay, there is.
Maybe to accessorize his transformation he could ask Ted Haggard for his gay exorcism recommendations.
maus
Nice that we’ve advanced as a society enough to have closeted straights as well.
General Winfield Stuck
That’s motherfucking deep man. Too bad I swim in the shallow end.
Colette
@Alex S.: Based on this article and this one, he is a former radio announcer turned TV anchorman turned menswear shop owner turned commercial helicopter pilot. But not turned due north yet, not by a long shot.
ruemara
I really should submit some parody articles to the times online. It looks like just about any crap will get published, so why not me?
freelancer
This has Mr. Show skit written all over it.
Hob
@Alex S.: No, it’s not a put-on. That mini-bio you linked to is a few years old. Muirhead had a BBC radio and TV career, quit, became a shopkeeper, then got a pilot’s license. He’s not a satirist, he’s just written little opinion/humor pieces here and there (eta: also some print reporting, which conveys a similar grandiose weirdness – see his Times article about the isle of Jersey). He also had a bizarre interaction with Wikipedia which seems sort of consistent with the personality on display in this piece.
Fwiffo
Heh, I should have caught on with his “love of piston engines”.
Comrade Darkness
@fraught:
I didn’t get any pedo vibe off it, personally, and I think jumping to that is a bit crude given that the guy, if honest, is already a victim of narrow minded assumptions.
He wants to have kids, pass on the legacy, re-experience life through someone else’s eyes, have some (brief, anyway) no strings attached human adoration and love. That’s great. Full Stop. It’s tragic (if not a hoax) that he doesn’t know himself well enough to realize that has zero to do with being anything but human.
(the author of this post has no children, never wanted them, so please, no flames along those lines.)
daryljfontaine
@Morbo:
I see what you did there.
D
Tim in SF
Michael Jackson tried all manner of things to change his appearance. He died more white than me, and I’m a ginger so pale I practically glow in the dark.
How would dark-skinned Americans react if newspapers held up Michael Jackson bleaching his skin as some shining example – a model to be followed for all people of color who are not so happy with being people of color? You don’t have to be black! You can be white!
I would think they would be justifiably outraged.
This guy is as sick as Michael Jackson. He’s lying to himself and definitely to his potential female partner and, eventually, to whatever children spawn from that ill-fated union.
I hope the guy gets ball cancer.
Balconesfault
Anyone else watch Three and a Half Men last night?
Dayv
LT
You know what they say about getting handjobs from eight-year-olds. In this case eight-year-old boys. In barbershops. I guess. Okay leaving now.
Quiddity
My “test for gay”:
I knew someone who for a brief time wondered if he was gay. I told him here’s how to tell what your orientation is. It probes your unconscious mind, or at least tries to.
While driving in town, we’ve all glanced at an attractive person walking next to the road. Sometimes to a degree where one’s ability to drive safely is compromised. And in some cases you almost hit another vehicle (or run a red light).
So, ask yourself this: If you were to drive your car into a tree while looking at an attractive pedestrian, what sex would that person be?
Alex S.
@Colette: @Hob:
From the article about Muirhead’s clothes shop:
“A holidaying Dutch family, comprising parents and two youths, came one afternoon and splurged a fortune. “Have you got this in my size?” asked the older child holding up a Hilditch & Key shirt. I measured the adolescent’s scrawny neck and barrel chest before declaring regretfully to the father that his son’s proportions were an obstacle to getting a good fit. “This is not my son,” said the Dutchman. “This is my daughter.” You might think that a year later, when the family called on me again, I would remember the strangely liberal Dutch tourists and their lumpen offspring. But no. I crashed into the same trap again, mistaking the older teen once more for a boy, irreparably damaging Anglo-Dutch relations and possibly forcing the kid into an eating disorder. They still spent a packet, even so.”
Also, the timeline of his life doesn’t add up. Apparently, he is a shopkeeper who occasionally writes for the Guardian and The Times and is a commercial pilot at the same time. Remember, he claims to have met “Olga” as a pilot in the summer of 2007 (“two summers ago”), but at the same time he already was a shopkeeper.
It’s a parody, or gonzo journalism, or whatever.
Mayken
@skippy: It gets worse. He goes on to say that adopting and other forms of alternative family-building are cheating and lazy.
Also, when the hell will both gays and straights acknowledge that there is a whole other category, bi-sexuals? And no, a bi-sexual is not just someone who can’t make up their mind! Yeesh!
LT
@Quiddity:
Does driving into the back of a pickup count? Cuz I can answer that one non-rhetorically.
slag
Damn. Now I know that never wanting to have kids means I have to turn gay. Why god? Why? (shakes unworkman-like fist in air)
Quiddity
@LT
Anything you drive into counts as a “test”. It can be a tree, car, truck, lake, shoulder of the road, snow bank, etc.
I hope for most of us that such a real-world test doesn’t take place, and instead, that one recalls the last instance (or the historical pattern) of being distracted-while-driving due to ogling someone not in your vehicle.
Citizen_X
@LT: Raises hand sheepishly…How about walking into a street sign? (Downhill, so there was some extra force.)
Balconesfault
@Quiddity:
My test for gay has always been – would you be more likely to be ready for action if you saw someone of the opposite gender who you considered a 2 … or someone of the same gender you would call a 10?
(This still pretty much works if your answer is “neither”, although that also leaves the option of you being asexual. It may not work if you’re a bisexual fetishist.)
Gozer
That story was gayer than RuPaul’s Drag Race.
Anne Laurie
There are plenty of men who just don’t like women very much. Unfortunately for us women, quite a few of them are straight. If this article isn’t actually a parody, at least its author will have plenty of company in the locker room whinging about the rapiciousness / neediness / alien mindset of their wives. Because, yeah, there are also women who will enter open-eyed into a marriage contract with a man who’s not really sexually attracted to women… and not just immigrants looking for a meal ticket, either.
LT
@Quiddity: Okay then – female. Does the fact that she was bending over in her front yard garden affect the test at all?
Best/worst part: I was driving a huge Ford van and really smashed up a poor young couples’ truck. And: it was my friend’s van. (Where I live liability goes to the owner, not the driver, so his insurance got hit. I paid him, of course, but still. Embarrassing)
scav
@Citizen_X: oh shit, I’ve walked into things from just thinking too hard. what the hell does that make me?!
Keith G
Straight folks sure are a strange lot.
LT
@Citizen_X: Did the sign say “Men at Work”?
Violet
@Comrade Darkness:
I did. His description of the kid creeped me out. As did his choosing to join some kind of organization that sounds like Big Brothers and Big Sisters so he can influence children and get into places for kids for free. Creepy.
Maybe it’s just how he wrote it, and he’s actually just going to do a good thing and mentor a kid, but it definitely left me feeling unsettled.
How’s that going straight thing going to work out for him – and his future wife – if for whatever reason one or both of them are unable to have kids? Seems to be the only reason he’s now interested in women. So much for love and marriage if the kids don’t show up as expected. Jerk.
The Moar You Know
Is it just me, or does this read like gay Thomas Friedman? Because I swear that’s who I think wrote it.
2th&nayle
This is a little out of my bailiwick I’ll admit, but this doesn’t sound like the kind of braggadocio that might come from a man who is prepared to “Just say no to blow.” He’s mighty right about one thing though, I really would not want to know!
tigrismus
@scav: Were you thinking about boobs or man-bits?
Quiddity
@LT
Yes, bending over is a relatively uncommon posture, which increases driver-distraction no matter what the sex of the person is. So it diminishes the reliability of the test (I’d estimate by 20%).
Hey, get on the road again and let us know what the situation is the next time you get distracted and drive over a big pothole. (I hope you never get into a smash/smashed situation again.)
tigrismus
@Mayken: He goes on to say that adopting and other forms of alternative family-building are cheating and lazy.
OK, that is disgusting. Adopting is cheating and lazy(seriously, WTF?), but viewing women as no more than walking wombs is not?
Hob
@Alex S.: I’m going to avoid straining my brain about it any further, but having read a half-dozen of this guy’s articles now and various biographical stuff out of morbid curiosity, it really doesn’t read as “humor” to me so much as just kind of crazy– gonzo journalism by someone who can’t help being gonzo, maybe. He wrote what was presented as a serious news piece about his home island of Jersey, where 50% of the piece was devoted to how the idiots at his stupid news job there didn’t appreciate him and didn’t let him do hard-hitting journalism, etc., and how people from Jersey have been trying to ruin his life ever since he exposed the secrets of their corrupt society. And if the guy who showed up on Wikipedia claiming to be him, to demand that they delete all mention of him while ranting about his past employers, was actually him… well then I’d say that the biographical details not adding up is a sign of something other than parody. Just seems like a UK variation on a very familiar kind of angry disorganized professional wingnut.
scav
@tigrismus: worse. something entirely abstract involving mathematical geography.
On the less disturbing side, my multi-region DVD player has arrived so you’ve all been definitively trumped by David Tennant / Pat Stewart’s Hamlet. HA! Interpret as you will.
Citizen_X
@The Moar You Know: I don’t know, but “gay Thomas Friedman” has to become a new category for something, doesn’t it?
Nethead Jay
@tigrismus: Indeed. I can’t tell from this whether this guy is gay or straight or bisexual, or just confused and/or a jerk. But he’s sure got some fucked-up attitudes about women and familyhood.
Lesley
I can only hope if this asshole does marry, all his offspring are female.
Sad_Dem
Someone hand this over to Jeff Foxworthy and a couple of Broadway songwriters.
Set to music:
Does a girl in her jammies confuse you?
You miiiiight be gaaaayyy…
Does a barbershop thrill you?
You miiiiight be gaaayyyy….
Clambone
To paraphrase The Comics Curmudgeon, was that ghostwritten by Tobias Fünke?
SiubhanDuinne
The comments on this thread had me laughing so hard I couldnt breathe, so I closed the window and decided to have a look at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and what headline immediately caught my eye?
Magazine ranks Atlanta as America’s gayest city
I haven’t read the entire article, so I don’t know whether it mentions that Elton John and his partner/spouse have owned a condo in the Buckhead neighbourhood of Atlanta for years.
http://www.advocate.com/Print_Issue/Travel/Gayest_Cities_in_America/
Wile E. Quixote
@The Moar You Know
What, are you saying that Thomas Friedman isn’t gay? I mean come on, that’s a gay porn mustache if I’ve ever seen one. And I own a copy of Can’t Stop the Music, so I know what I’m talking about here. With that mustache you could drop Friedman right into the Village People. I’m not sure where “bloviating, syndicated columnist who is consistenty wrong about everything” fits in with the gay archetypes of construction worker, police officer, cowboy, biker, etc, but I’m sure that if he found the right hat that he could make it work.
Wile E. Quixote
Why does this remind me of Roy Batty’s (Rutger Hauer) speech towards the end of Blade Runner?
Indeed you can merge the two to make a gay, Blade Runner/Times Columnist mashup
Wile E. Quixote
@John Cole
Yeah, as far as double-entendres go that guy could give the guys who wrote Top Gun a run for their money.
maus
@The Moar You Know: the ‘stache, tossing off columns at your local Eagle franchise.
@Nethead Jay: Yeah, assuming you’re straight because you want to procreate with a woman, but see her as nothing but a host for your seed/son is insincere, dishonest, and misogynistic as hell. Sure, some straight guys do that too, but they’re generally not still in love with the menfolk.
I don’t know whether i’d call him gay, straight or bi, but i’d definitely call him an asshole.
Colette
@maus: But he likes girls!
Translation: they have been socialized to pretend that they actually believe my dick is the axis on which the world rotates! And since I believe that too, what could go wrong?
jibeaux
@Balconesfault:
Wait, I’m asexual if I’m not ready for action when I see a guy who’s a 2? Is this a ten-point scale? Oh, I get it, this is a test for men, right?
maus
@Morbo: “I hope that anti-gay activists grab this piece and plug it for all it’s worth. It would be really gratifying to watch it blow up in their faces.”
The exgay movement is the most fun place to hear the evangelical phrase “backsliding”, no doubt about it.@Colette: Either this dude is some Tucker Max clone waiting to reverse-come out, or he’s going to have to come to terms with women being complicated creatures and it’s not going to be all slumber parties.
This whole thing is so strangely cartoonish-sounding and caricatured.
Cain
@General Winfield Stuck:
You should go deep sometime. It’ll change your life.
cain
Nethead Jay
@Colette:
Hah! Exactly on point. Amazing how easily seen-through some people are, innit?
Tax Analyst
@ #50 mr. whipple said:
I was thinking more “I feel pretty/Oh so pretty…”
Tax Analyst
I think it’s the “butt-crack exposed when he bends over” thing. I can see Friedman doing that. He’s got the right physique.
Tax Analyst
@Quiddity asks:
Does it matter if you hit a fire hydrant before or after you hit the tree?
Nylund
I didn’t realize that one of the side effects of having teh gay was that your semen lost the ability to fertilize an egg.
asiangrrlMN
I skimmed the actual piece, and the bit about gays having babies to accessorize slammed my brain shut in no time flat.
As for the gay test, feh. It’s an inherently-limited test. I look at anybody comely, which is probably why I’m bi.
If this isn’t parody, then it’s actually pretty sad and creepy.
@jibeaux: Right there with you, fake-wifey. “Hey, I want to impregnate you, and I can try to get it up by thinking about my gay escapades in order to accomplish the deed) is NOT a stellar pick-up line.
hamletta
@Wile E. Quixote: I love you, man.
RSR
I’m late to the party on this thread, but General JC Christian could not have writen this any better.