Gay Soup - Gay Blog

It's a beautiful morning in the country here. I bought a house in Orange County, New York last year, something I never thought I could accomplish, but here I am and the golden sunlight on my wild hillside is once more feeding my soul.

Of course, one is never satisfied, and I'm filled with anxiety as usual, about my summer Psychology and the Law course, the hundred emails I have to get through, my to do list unlooked at for a week, posting on Bilerico, and wondering when my friend Mallory will get here so we can get the kayaks over to the lake.

But the golden sunshine and the wild greenery push back the craziness of modern life. This hillside has been here on the Ramapo Mountains for a thousand years, and it's not worried about emails or to do lists or politics.

I sometimes wish I could be the same, but I'm not a hillside. Truth be told, I do care. I care about politics, I care about people, about my friends, my students. Perhaps too much, but if I didn't, I wouldn't be me. It would be good to remember that Gmail, to do lists and politics don't care about me. Perhaps I'm sort of a gardener of Gmail, to do lists and politics. I tend them, to the best of my ability, but sometimes the weeds get beyond me, and that's okay. There's too much information washing around these days to ever really keep on top of it.

There's always tomorrow.

Would you go to a naked therapist?

From a press release sent to the site:

SarahWhiteTherapy.com is pleased to announce that Randy Hastings, the world's first gay male Naked Therapist-in-Training, has joined her practice. Randy, who is based in Los Angeles, is now offering Naked Therapy sessions, both via webcam and in-person. Naked Therapy is a form of talk therapy that integrates client arousal into the therapeutic context in order to facilitate deeper insights and discussions. This arousal is facilitated by the Naked Therapist in a number of ways, though it usually involves the therapist getting naked.

As a Naked-Therapist-in-Training, Randy will undergo the same training process as other Naked Therapists in Ms. White's practice. This process includes a reading syllabus of core psychotherapeutic texts, response papers (done as blog posts), weekly update reports, consultations with Ms. White, and session transcript reviews. Once the training is completed - generally within a year - Randy will be licensed in Naked Therapy and join the practice as a Naked Therapist.

According to Randy, he became interested in studying and practicing Naked Therapy as a result of his past experiences: "I am very interested in psychology, and have been in therapy at a couple of different junctures in my own life. I always found therapy productive and insightful because I was willing to bare it all. Now, as a therapist, I hope to do the same thing in order to encourage my clients to feel more comfortable with themselves."
...
One of the core principles of Naked Therapy is based on the assertion that in our sex-saturated Internet world, traditional therapy methods are irrelevant. With so many sexual opportunities, people more and more need to learn to integrate their rational selves with their aroused selves so they don't engage in self-destructive and uncontrollable acts of "arousal frenzy."

But Naked Therapy is a form of therapy that is made to deal with any of the problems regular therapy deals with. "Just like in traditional therapy, we talk about the client, his issues, his worries, his concerns, and we work together to make him happier and more self-realized. Only difference is, there's nakedness involved, and this means arousal, and Naked Therapy sees that as a good thing. We need to be comfortable being aroused, and we need to practice make that arousal experience a valuable and insightful, not a banal and degrading, one."

I'm curious to know about the other ways "arousal is facilitated." At least you can go and expect a happy ending.

I'm not sure where this is but I dug up some info on Sewing Projects. According to North Dakota studies, the WPA (Works Projects Administration) created sewing projects where women produced clothing which was distributed to the poor.

Not sure where this photo was shot, but in North Dakota, Evert County hired 800 women. For more history on the WPA Sewing projects, check out Sewer/Sewist

My, Projectors, its been a while. How have you been?

Well I've been peachy. In May I received my Master's Degree from the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I also was named one of the Windy City Times' '30 Under 30' LGBT voices.

Oh yeah, and I moved to Washington D.C. and got a job at the Washington Blade.

Now I'm not only generating content for our Facebook and our Twitter, as well as honing our new iTunes and Android App, I'm writing articles for the oldest LGBT print publication in America, and the widest read and cited local LGBT newspaper in the country. I'm surrounded by the history of our community every day when I go to work: forty years of photographs, stories and lives.

Continue reading "My Whirlwind Evolution from Teacher to LGBT Journalist"...

Editors' Note: Max Pearson launched his blog Progressive Puppy from Bolivar Peninsula, prior to Hurricane Ike. He now lives at the edge of the Davy Crockett National Forest with his partner of 30 years, their two labs and three cats, and a close friend.

It was in the early '60s, and my mom was starting to suspect she had a little homosexual on her hands. I didn't play with paper dolls or dress up in Mama's clothing (not that there's anything wrong with that and even if I'd been so inclined, Wanda's taste in fashion was abysmal) but my interest in contact sports was casual and I had a pronounced aversion to hunting and killing wild animals. I enjoyed reading and painting pictures and writing stories and watching reruns of old movies on TV. I kept my room tidy. In the Texas Bible Belt, boys like me were viewed with suspicion. Wanda later told me that when I expressed an interest in piano lessons, her worst fears were realized. She resigned herself to giving birth to an artistic child, "artistic" being the traditional euphemism for Queer-As-A-Three-Dollar-Bill.

I was nine years old and Grandma had written to tell us her need for child slave labor would occur earlier than usual that summer. This meant I would be as free and restless as a hummingbird by the time August rolled around. My mom just couldn't abide having youngsters underfoot for long stretches, a fate as abhorrent to her as scrubbing the toilet or toiling over a hot stove.

Her hand-wringing ceased, however, when our pastor recommended Piney Woods Youth Bible Camp as the perfect vacation spot for a troublesome son. Phone calls were exchanged, forms filled out and signed, money set aside, reservations made ... for two. My cousin Darlene was enlisted to accompany me to the child indoctrination center, presumably to make sure I didn't besmirch the family's good name.

She certainly didn't need any supplemental salvation. My cousin had accepted Jesus Christ as her personal savior at a tender age - some say while she was still inside the womb. In matters of faith, I was rather more circumspect. I couldn't believe God expected me to cringe and grovel before our Baptist congregation, many of whom I knew to be hypocrites.

Continue reading "A Gay Youth at Texas Bible Camp"...

KABC got an interview with McInerney's older brother, James Bing, outside the courtroom on Tuesday where Brandon McInerney is on trial for the first degree murder of then-15 year old Larry King. Bing was kicked out of the courtroom by the judge after it was learned that he had spoken to jurors prior to the trial. Here he tells the Eyewitness News reporter that his brother - who was then 14 - was "an "A" student who made a terrible mistake."

"My brother isn't the monster that the district attorney's making him out to be. She calls him all these bad names, that he's such an evil kid, but he's really not. This is the first time he's ever been in trouble in his life in any way. He never had a detention," said Bing.

"Two kids are basically losing their lives. I'm sorry for Larry King's family as well. I feel so sorry for them, but at the same time I want to have my brother back," said Bing.

The case Ventura County Deputy Dist. Atty. Maeve Fox is presenting, however, indicates that Brandon was a budding white supremacist - not an innocent who just made a mistake.

Continue reading "Larry King Murder Trial Underway in Chatsworth"...

It’s tougher every year to keep up with all the cards and presents you have to buy - or at least it is for me - but there is one holiday that works for me really well: I always know what to get, I never have to worry about if it fits and on this occasion, regifting is actually a great thing.

Yep, yesterday was International Kissing Day - and this year our friends the Brits did it up right.

Continue reading "International Kissing Day: Kissing On The Pier"...

In case you missed it, Boing Boing hosted a sweet photo show of Naked Bike Ride Day as it was celebrated around the world.

(img src)

Obelisk, San Diego's LGBT bookstore, has been destroyed in a fire that gutted the building. The store's inventory sustained heavy water damage.

Several apartments are above the shop, but thankfully no one was injured. The fire was sparked by a worker's torch on a neighboring building's roof.

(Hat tip to Rex Wockner. Photo is his.)